More Faux Centrism - Obama Appoints Immelt To Head "Jobs" Council

What we need to create jobs in this country is more free market economic policies and a halt to the regulatory tsunami that we face. Yet on Friday, Obama announced that he was naming General Electric's CEO, Jeffery Immelt, to head the newly formed President's Council On Jobs & Competitiveness. This isn't a move to the center, regardless of how its spun. To the contrary, it's yet one more move towards ever greater crony capitalism.

True free-market capitalism is, for the consumer and the economic health of a nation, the best possible economic system. The polar opposite is the wholly failed communist system, where the government has complete control over the economy. Far along on the road to that polar opposite is crony capitalism, where the government significantly involves itself in the economy and, as a part thereof, picks winners and losers. It is deeply distorts markets to the detriment of consumers and workers.

We see crony capitalism in its most pure form in banana republics, where government favortism allows wealth to be concentrated at the top among the politically favored. Those countries are marked by corruption, a non-existent or declining middle class, and problematic unemployment. As Powerline describes some of the noxious aspects of crony capitalism:

[A big business that embraces crony capitalism] can sell products to big government. It can bulk up on direct and indirect subsidies derived from the labor of ordinary citizens. It can take pressure off pricing by creating barriers to entry for potential competitors. It can mitigate the difficulty of persuading ordinary citizens to buy what they are selling at a price that reflects market value.

We have been on a path towards crony capitalism since, in 1887, the ICC was established and became a tool to protect the profits of the railroad barons. But probably no President has moved us so far along the path to crony capitalism than has Obama, with his picking of winners and losers in the energy sector, his outrageous favortism towards unions, and his takeover of vast swaths of our economy from which he can reward political favorites.

No person or entity has been more embracing of this expansion of crony captialism than GE under the guidance of CEO, Jeffery Immelt. This from Immelt within days of Obama's inaguration, telling shareholders:

The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.

And Immelt has attempted to make GE the prime beneficiary of Obama's "reset economy." As Matt Kibbe observed two years ago in an essay at Town Hall:

. . . Few corporations better represent the crony capitalism business model than GE. Hardly described as a bank, GE became a major recipient of the bailout, issuing some $74 billion in debt backed by taxpayers under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program-a program that GE persuaded the government to expand so it qualified as a recipient. At the same time, GE managed to avoid new federal restrictions on executive compensation required under the TARP program.

Elsewhere, GE has joined forces with a number of other companies under the banner of USCAP to endorse a costly cap and trade energy program that would drive up the costs of fossil fuels while promoting new forms of energy.

That such companies are interested in alternative energy is admirable; however, forcing American consumers and businesses to subsidize their forays into green energy may not be. Estimates from a number of sources suggest costs could be as much as $1,700 per year per family, and that up to 2.5 million jobs could be lost. . . ..

Consumers and the U.S. economy would bear the burden of this energy policy, but GE and other companies view the bill as an opportunity legislate profits. Senior Fellow with the Free Enterprise Project Tom Borelli notes, "By promoting cap-and-trade, Wall Street is once again betting it can profit from embracing left-wing politics. CEOs see an opportunity to garner praise for themselves as "socially responsible" businessmen while they profit from the sale of renewable energy products, such as wind turbines, and from the trading of carbon dioxide emission credits." . . .

GE typifies the large rent seeking companies that wage battle not in the marketplace, but in the halls of Congress. Taxpayers and consumers cannot afford to fund the pet projects of politicians and corporations, especially in an economic downturn. Unfortunately, the consumer's voice has been lost in the din of corporations scrambling for government handouts.

Having Jeffery Immelt advising on government economic policy is not a move to the center, it is a move towards greater crony capitalism. This is nothing more than smoke and mirrors from Obama as he tries to portray himself as a newly minted centrist.

Update: Hot Air adds:

Obama wants to expand his authority through regulatory adventurism, from which Obama imagines that a “fair” economy will then grow. That strategy has been repeatedly confirmed through actions at the EPA and FCC, as well as the entire ambiguous approach of the ObamaCare law that all buts sets up the HHS Secretary as the Health Care Czar.

Entrepreneurs would resist that approach and would use the platform created by Obama to push against it. However, large stakeholders in markets like regulation for the precise reason that their economies of scale allow them a competitive edge on compliance over entrepreneurs and start-ups. A CEO like Immelt might talk about reducing some regulation, but GE and other massive conglomerates will usually end up backing government interventions in order to secure their own market share.

Either way, though, Schoen is right that Immelt and GE aren’t the solution for what ails the nation. If we are to get the economy restarted, we need to do so by untying the hands of innovators and preventing the punishment of their investors. One has to wonder how the populist Left that got Obama nominated and elected can sit so quietly while he links himself to a company that pushed so many jobs overseas during the last few years, too.

NRO weighs in similarly:

. . . GE, you will not be surprised to know, spent $32 million on lobbying in the last year and is a big political donor. Like its colleagues in most Big Business sectors, it heavily favors Democrats: It was a large contributor to Barack Obama’s senatorial and presidential campaigns, and the single largest recipient of GE money in 2009–10 was, you will not be surprised to learn, one Barack Obama.

Many in President Obama’s union-goon constituency are disappointed with the decision: Mr. Immelt, they complain, is an “outsourcer,” sending their jobs (“their” jobs) to China. Case in point: GE is shutting down two U.S. factories that made incandescent lightbulbs; the replacements will be made in China.

But hold on: Those incandescent lightbulbs are going the way of the dodo and the pro-life Democrat not because of nefarious plotting by the infernal Chicomms, but because the United States is banning them. Who banned them? The Democrats did, as part of their first-100-hours push upon assuming the majority in Congress. (And who lobbied the Democrats to ban them? GE, of course, for its own Machiavellian reasons.)

Having been the target of a Teamsters picket, I can attest that organized labor is not full of the brightest bulbs in the great American light show. But: How do you give your money and your votes to the party that plans to ban your product and then turn around and whine when they ban your product? Keep up with the news, geniuses.

Speaking of Chicomms, GE was in the process of signing a bunch of deals with them even as Mr. Immelt’s appointment was percolating. Which must have put him in a sweet negotiating position.

GE is the poster child for corporate welfare, having encouraged the supersizing of Obama’s stimulus lard-loaf as a prelude to chasing after its green-tech and energy giveaways. Immelt tagged along with Obama to India, where the president acted as vice president of marketing for the gaggle of CEOs he had in tow.

GE’s cozy relationship with government is paying off: The company has been given a multibillion-dollar contract to build an engine for the Joint Strike Fighter — which already has an engine, built by another company. Having two companies building redundant engines for the same plane was enough to get defense secretary Robert Gates’s attention; he called it a “wasteful boondoggle.” The Pentagon doesn’t want it. But GE got the deal, all the same.

In truth, I can’t think of a more appropriate adviser for an overreaching, arrogant, big-government administration than the head of GE, an overreaching, arrogant, big-government corporation. If we can have a tax cheat overseeing the IRS, why can’t we have a corporate-welfare case telling us how to get productive

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Meteorologists Attack Global Warming, NYT Recommends Reeducation Camps

Meteorologist Joe Bistrardi, a vocal and articulate critic of antrhopogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW), has done a recent video (see here - unfortunately cannot embed it) wherein he points to a fundamental disconnect between Goddard's map showing massive warming in the polar regions this past winter while other measurments show a significant rise in polar sea ice. As Bastardi points out, those two events are mutually exclusive and, thus, the people at Goddard are making adjustments to the polar temperature data that logically cannot be true.

That leads in to a NYT article today, Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming. The NYT admits that there may not be quite a consensus on anthropogenic global warming [AGW], particularly among meteorologists, a very significant number of whom openly describe AGW as a "scam." That said, the NYT does nothing to hide its own bias, and in the end, quotes from several anthropogenic global warming [AGW] proponents who assure us that it is all a simple case of misunderstanding, nothing that a few months in reeducation camps for dissident meteorologists won't solve.

This from the NYT:

The debate over global warming has created . . . tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters.

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

That last paragraph is incredibly misleading. One, as to a generalized warming trend over the past two centuries, not a single meteorologist would contest that. We have been slowly warming up since the last Little Ice Age. The seminal issue is whether the warming is part of a natural cycle and, if not, then to what extent it is being driven by man. Two, meteorologists looking at the unadjusted temperatures over the last decade can clearly see that temperatures have gotten a bit cooler. They are in good company. Some of the top members of the AGW community happen to have admitted to the same thing. Three, this grossly overstates the "consensus" in AGW among climate scientists. To continue from the NYT:

. . . Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site.

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology.

A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The NYT fails to note an important fact. Unlike academics competing for grants or the vast enviro-industrial complex - i.e., all of those from Al Gore to GE to Goldman Sachs and others who stand to reap a windfall from government mandates concerning AGW - meteorologists are unique in having no vested interest in either proving or disproving AGW theory.

. . . climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

But the cynicism, said Dr. Cullen, who now works for Climate Central, a nonprofit group that works to bring the science of climate change to the public, is in her opinion unwarranted.

“They are not trying to predict the weather for 2050, just generally say that it will be hotter,” Dr. Cullen said of climatologists. “And just like I can predict August will be warmer than January, I can predict that.”

To the NYT credit, they do point out later in the article that Cullen is the radical who advocated that the Meteorological Society withhold accreditation from any meteorologist who did not first swear fealty to AGW theory. But the NYT quoted Cullen without challenging any of her ridiculous assertions. The Times authors fail to note that all of the "complex models" that the AGW theorists relied upon to show catastrophe in 50 to 100 years predict that temperatures will rise in concert with and because of increases in carbon dioxide. Not a single one of these "complex models" predicted the last decade of cooling, even as humans pumped ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, the computer models are fatally flawed and of no predictive value. And for the NYT to let Cullen get away with saying she can predict that it will be hotter in 2050 than today with the same assurance that she can predict warmer weather in August than January is just jaw dropping. That is utterly ridiulous.

Resentment may also play a role in the divide. Climatologists are almost always affiliated with universities or research institutions where a doctoral degree is required. Most meteorologists, however, can get jobs as weather forecasters with a college degree.

Ahhh, here we go. The problem is one of [a] degree, so to speak. Climatoligists should be believed because they, as a group, are smarter than meteorologists, who as a group are also driven by jealousy and envy.

The problem with that theory is you do not have to have a PhD in climatology to be able to evaluate the work produced by the AGW proponents. There are many intelligent people from other walks of life who can look at the work of climate scientists and say, whoa, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. There are more that can understand that there is a problem when the IPCC substitutes peer review in place of the scientific method as the gold standard for reliability. And all people should be able to understand that there is a problem when the IPCC does not even live up to that standard - relying on non-peer reviewed sources for claims of oncomoing and inevitable doom from global warming.

As to meteorologist angst with global warming, a classic example is the link at the top of this post, with Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi pointing out the disconnect between adjusted temperature data showing torid temperatures in the poles while other data shows the growth in polar sea ice. Sceptical meteorologists like Bastardi and Anthony Watts key on unjustifiable adjustments being made to raw data and an even more fundamental concern about how the raw data is collected.

For Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer, his problems with AGW theory have come from looking at the methodology and statistics used by Climatologists - when he could get the data. Much of the stonewalling of climate scientists over the past decade has been their refusal to provide their raw data and methodology to Mr. McIntyre. For example, it was only recently that McIntyre finally got a hold of Kevin Briffa's dataset for Yamal - after a decade of stone-walling - and pointed out that Briffa manipulated his findings by using tree rings from a single outlier.

For historians, their problems are with the AGW alarmists who claim that the earth today is the hottest in history. We know that it was hotter at other times, including most recently during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Parts of Greenland today frozen over were being farmed during the MWP, and the British had a thriving wine industry as far north as Hadrian's Wall. In other words, claims that we are in an unprecedented cycle of warming simply because we are in a general warming trend do not flow from the historical record. That coupled with ridiculous efforts of Michael Mann and the IPCC to wipe the MWP and the Little Ice Age from the historical record have left many of us with the firm conviction that climate scientists are advocates, not scientists, and indeed, the worst sort of scam artists.

And then of course there are numerous other scientists who are agnostic as to AGW, but who, in the wake of Climategate, look at how the scientific method has been bastardized by AGW proponents to produce a "consensus." These scientists recoil in disgust of their own.

The NYT blithely ignores all of that, expounding ever more on their hypothesis that the only reason for the split between climate scientists and meteorologists is because the latter simply don't understand. Thus, the NYT tells us, meteorologists themselves need to be reeducated. This is arrogance unbound. It is of an ilk displayed by Obama and the left when telling us that the only reason we don't support Obamacare is because we don't understand it. It is rather breath-taking - but not surprising.

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Beware the Climate Change-Industrial Complex

Other than politicians who would use regulation of carbon as a means to vastly expand the reach of government and use it to reshape the U.S., the most vocal proponents of climate change and the need to immediately act are people and entities that stand to make a windfall from such programs. For example (starting at 2:46):



And let's not forget Al Gore, who has parlayed his position as a global warming shill to increase his net worth by five thousand percent in the past nine years. It gives a whole new meaning to "going green." To all of this, the WSJ warns, beware the Climate Change Industrial Complex:

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups.

. . . The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Read the entire article. Also, Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye has a similar take on this problem, discussing it in his post that I highly recommend, The Doomsday Industry.

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