Barb’s Blog

I have always been on the side that government should stay out of business. They can’t run themselves, why on earth would we trust them to run a business.

Obama buys up the car industry, and according to Ralph Nader, not necessary:

The proximate cause of the bankruptcy was supposed to be the inability of GM and the government’s auto task force to reach an accommodation with GM’s bondholders. But late last week, the bondholder problem was moving toward rapid resolution, and was clearly resolvable. Why then are GM and its multibillion government financier proceeding with bankruptcy?

The bankruptcy and the GM restructuring plan are the product of a secretive, unaccountable, Wall Street-minded government task force that assumed power because of a Congressional abdication of historic magnitude. By all rights, the restructuring plan should have been submitted to Congress for deliberative review and decision.

According to others, the bankruptcy judge was under pressure from the White House to rule.

Banks: another place I think they have no business being there, I can’t help but wonder if they are going to put their political noses in business, one place that might be beneficial is the price of oil.

As Memorial Day now winds down, we saw an immediate price hike. Not because of not enough oil or too much demand. The reason given? Speculators. Wall Street speculators — some of them recipients of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ bailout money — may be to blame.

During a visit to McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, hedge-fund manager Masters also said that big institutional investors were sucking the air out of the fragile economic recovery, in part because their Wall Street partners were exempt from federal limits on how much they could bet on commodity prices.

A stream of financial deregulation under the Clinton administration, culminating in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, led to a global race away from regulation.

“The Modernization Act specifically said we were not going to look at those; we weren’t going to regulate them. Times have changed, and now we think it is time for us to look at them.”

So how about it Obama?
While he campaigned, he was quoted as saying:

“Gas prices are killing folks,” Obama said. “I got an email from a friend of mine; it says, just in case you’re not living in the real world, being driven around by Secret Service, it just cost me $85 to fill up my tank.”

That doesn’t mean he actually CARES about gas prices as at another time, he was quoted as saying he’d like HIGHER gas prices.

I guess that answers why he doesn’t have government’s nose in that business, he doesn’t want to.