Obama’s manufacturing czars: Crony Capitalists

When President Obama thinks of businessmen, naturally, he thinks of those of who make their money by partnering with government and eschewing the free enterprise thing.

That’s why Obama’s jobs czar is Jeff Immelt, who heralded government’s role as an “industry champion,” and whose company, GE, spends more on lobbying than any other company while profiting from subsidies, bailouts, mandates, and regulations in industries ranging from embryos, to trains, to methane, to windmills.

These aren’t what I would call exemplars of the productive class. They are people that make money without necessarily creating value. If these are the liberals’ ideas of capitalists, I can’t blame them for distrusting capitalism.

That’s why Obama’s export czar is from a company, Boeing, that has a whole government agency dedicating a majority of its spending to subsidizing its jet sales.

And now Obama named two manufacturing czars: John Bryson and Gene Sperling.

Here’s what I wrote of Bryson when Obama nominated him for Commerce Secretary:

President Obama’s choice to lead the Commerce Department is a revolving-door former regulator who has spent his private-sector career earning millions from government-granted monopolies that depend on subsidies for their profits.
John Bryson was CEO of Southern California Edison; he’s a director at Boeing, Disney, and electric-car maker Coda Automotive; and he’s chairman of the board at solar energy giant BrightSource. All of these businesses rely heavily on government subsidies and government protection.

And on Sperling, I’ll let liberal Huffington Post blogger Dan Froomkin take it away:

Sperling, who has held a series of senior economic policy jobs in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, is a lawyer by training. In between the two Democratic administrations, he did lucrative consulting work that in 2008 alone netted him $2.2 million, including $887,727 from Goldman Sachs for a part-time job advising it on its charitable giving and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies.

 

These aren’t what I would call exemplars of the productive class. They are people that make money without necessarily creating value. If these are the liberals’ ideas of capitalists, I can’t blame them for distrusting capitalism.

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