Big money special interests (corporations, wealthy individuals) and their lobbyists actually rule Washington, and in some sense, the world. Oil is one of the more powerful interests, but it is not the only one. The mass media are largely controlled by 5 major conglomerates, so the mass opinion is shaped accordingly.

Bush, and every other politician, owes his allegiance to the special interests who gave him the campaign financing to get elected. Bush has done a fantastic job of paying them back. Particularly wall street, oil and military industrial. The law allows this because it works for the people in power.

There is really only a thin veneer covering rampant corruption, right under our noses. The elephant in the room that hardly gets notice.

Conclusion — yes, Bush is stupid. But that sort of misses the point. He’s just the front man.

William

Well, this is confusing. It would seem we agree about the quite separate question of what is causing problems for the US auto industry. But that was not the discussion point.

You state outright that your only concern was that I was not being objective in assessing Bush, but I think, in fact, that I have given first-rate predictions about his administration, what it would do, and what the effects would be, starting on the day of the election.

In this case, one had to ask: when the car companies were failing because they had failed to make their own investments in more advanced energy vehicles, why would the President suggest taking money from a fund intended for advanced (or alternative) energy? To most people, this would appear to be either stupid (using monies for a good thing to reward bad behavior), or retro in some way (continued thoughtless behavior favoring car giants).

But the most objective view, I think, is that Bush has always favored himself, his own family’s interests, and those of his friends. He has always favored oil, which means big cars, no CAFE standards, dirty air, and so on.

If you have difficulty understanding how a president could, for instance, create not just a bad car funding decision, but a complete war, not out of necessity, but because it served his own family’s benefit, I’d be happy to recommend a number of books to you for reference. The first would be Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud.”

I’ll say it once more, and then I will leave this thread: today, I believe that the MOST objective view which best describes the Bush administration’s actions is not that the president was stupid, or overly partisan, or even militaristic; it was that, from the very beginning, he understood the office as a platform for self-dealing, including his friends.

When people come to understand the depth of this perfidy, they will be truly horrified. And their dismay will be based on an objective review of this administration’s self-deals and self-interested actions.

Yes, it is possible for me to be objective, to be right, and to say that Bush has acted all along as a self-dealer.

You will notice I didn’t slide along sideways into the question of analysing the US car industry, but I have written extensively about it in SNS. Unfortunately, as a lapsed member, you are probably not aware of that writing.

Finally, nothing you have written addresses the key question of this thread: is and was Bush a self-dealer? The answer, history will show, is a resounding Yes.

What I objected to in this post was the conclusion that was drawn based on a clear political bias rather than a factual analysis of what’s really going on. For example, you state: “Today, as Congress fished around for money to save the U.S. auto companies, in a pickle because they had not invested earlier in alternative – energy projects”

OK, so let’s do an SNS pop quiz: are the U.S. auto companies in trouble because:
1. They have a $2,500 per car cost disadvantage relative to foreign car companies due to labor costs they have been saddled with over decades of UAW negotiations, which were the consequence of the laws in the U.S. that have empowered unions relative to that of foreign automakers (Toyota, Honda, etc. don’t have near the labor costs or restrictions that the domestic suppliers face).
2. The credit and equity markets collapsed, limiting the ability of the U.S. auto makers to borrow the funds necessary to continue to fund their operations. This was the result of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market which resulted from the government over the decades requiring looser underwriting rules from FreddieMac and FannieMae in an effort to expand home ownership (not necessarily a bad thing, but it had serious consequences).
3. High environmental regulations in the U.S. relative to that of foreign markets which add about an additional $1,500 cost per car.
4. The failure of the U.S. auto companies to invest in alternative-energy projects, when hybrid cars account for 2.2% of the U.S. market?

Which one *really* is the cause of the problems in the U.S. auto market right now? If you answered #1-3 you are right. If you answered #4, you are wrong because the financial contribution of hybrid cars is so small relative to the market right now. There is no economic basis to argue that the failure to invest in alternative-energy projects is the root cause of the problem.

That’s not to say the U.S. auto makers are blameless – they certainly are not, but let’s at least be clear about the cause of the turmoil right now. Certainly Citibank, AIG, Lehman, WaMu, etc. didn’t collapse because they failed to invest in alternative-energy projects and that’s not why the U.S. auto makers are in trouble today.

I could go on and address your other arguments, but my point is that one needs to take a balanced approach to analyzing the root cause of problems if they want to be a successful analyst of economic and technology trends. Automatically blaming “Bush’s Stupidity”, “Cheney”, “Bush’s Saudi Friends”, etc. for everything that’s wrong I believe shows a shallow depth of understanding of what’s really happening in the markets and the U.S. auto industry in general.

Exactly what kind of objective review of the Bush administration, if it were negative (as almost all currently are), would he embrace?

In other words, it is unfortunate that Bryan cannot appreciate what actually is an objective review of Bush et. al, because it is negative, and he can’t tolerate a negative outcome.

Let’s propose: Bush did a poor job, and there will be many negative reviews. Are negative reviews not objective? Of course they are.

Bryan, I’m sorry, but you are the one who has lost perspective, and frankly, losing perspective in this way has to be embarrassing.

I want to add a more useful note for those readers who remain, themselves, objective on this, even if they think Bush has done a bad job.

I did not write this blog piece as a slam on Bush, which is clearly how Bryan seems to have taken the piece. So, Bryan, please ignore the next sentence.

I wrote the piece because I think I really came to a new level of understanding the Bush administration, and I wanted to share that with blog readers. While many have criticized Bush for other problems (stupidity, partisanship, anti-government behavior, etc.), I think I’ve come to a new, and perhaps deeper, understanding of the entire history of the administration.

The problem, of course, is that it seems so “surface.” It is. At the moment, my best understanding of Bush is what I wrote in this piece: Bush has been dealing to himself and his friends. I don’t think there is more to it. It will take decades to figure out where the trillions went, who got the money, when, by which action. But this, I think, best defines all of the actions of a man whose actions have been, under any other lens, almost impossible to understand.

Bryan, you need to realize that an objective review of Bush can lead to a negative outcome. There will be many, many more of them, both objective and negative. Get used to it.

What happened to SNS being an *objective* source of news analysis and commentary? All the conspiracy theories, political tirades and blatant agenda-based journalism this past year has made SNS into nothing more than another version of the Daily KOS of the Huffington Post.

2008 will be remembered as the year that objective journalism and analysis died in this country. It’s unfortunate SNS (which was once an outstanding technology/economics newsletter) has contributed to this.