Killing Capitalism

The stock market keeps going down hardly without a pause (see Market Plunge) … pretty much since it was clear that Obama was to be elected President. The nagging question is -- why? I have finally and reluctantly come up with my answer and it is not pretty – President Obama seems bent on killing capitalism. (Gasp!) What better way to slay the bourgeois notion of private ownership of the factors of production than to eliminate the shining symbol of this private ownership -- the stock market? Given what we learned about Obama’s friends and mentors during his campaign, I seriously doubt if this result would be inadvertent.

As a child in the 1940’s and 1950’s I remember that the Soviet Union would often use “Wall Street” as their bete noire representing the United States in their crusade to vilify and defeat us. So, someone who wants to “change” forever the fundamental character of this country might well first attack and eliminate this symbol. And Barack Obama seems to be performing creditably in his job one. For example, he has:

- continually talked down the economy and the stock market with his drum-beat doomsday pronouncements.

- systematically attacked U.S. industry groups with his plans for fundamental “change” – the pharmaceutical industry by planned drastic reductions in the government’s Medicare drug reimbursements; the coal industry by his threat to eliminate coal-powered electrical plants within ten years; the utility industry by his call for alternative energy sources without ever focusing on nuclear power and by his call for carbon “cap and trade” taxing; the health care industry by his thinly-disguised plans for the government eventually to be the sole health care insurer; the banking industry by his Treasury Secretary’s reluctance to spell out a workable rescue stratagem; the petroleum industry by backtracking on his party’s pre-election promise to begin more offshore drilling and by his eliminating tax incentives for new oil discoveries; the defense industry by his easy willingness to abandon our missile shield initiative and his implied coming draconian reductions in defense spending; the auto industry by making them effective wards of the state; and all industries in general by the crowding-out of future financing opportunities by the massive government borrowing that will be required to fund his stimulus bill (and other pork spending).

- shown little or no concern that trillions of dollars of wealth that has been destroyed by this stock market slide (reference Jim Cramer’s rants: Cramer Rants).

And apparently Jim Cramer and I are not the only people who think so. See also: Power Line and The Wall Street Journal

If this speculation of mine turns out to be true (and, believe me, we will know soon enough), it will be considerably ironic since it was many fat-cat Wall-Street capitalists who financed much of Obama’s campaign. (Sorry, no take-backs.)