Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, May 15, 2009 12:47:44 PM
Barack Obama won an extraordinary amount of support from the business
world in his presidential campaign, helping to tamp down accusations of
redistributionist aims, at least until Joe the Plumber caught Obama
off-guard. They campaigned for him, raised money to get him elected,
and celebrated when Obama won. Now they’re in a much less celebratory mood after seeing him in action, the AP reports (via The Corner)
That changed with TARP, however, and the credit companies now have
reason to fear the imposition of wide-reaching regulation. But that’s
not what worries businessmen, at least not for the most part. The big
worry comes from the Obama administration’s disregard for contract law
via the TARP leverage they bought with taxpayer money. Chrysler’s
senior creditors and their attorneys — many of whom voted for Obama and
supported his candidacy with cash — discovered this the hard way when
the administration started threatening them with bad publicity via the
White House press corps and the “madman theory of the presidency”.
George Will called this a “tincture of lawlessness,” which is kind of
like saying that Mafia policy rackets are a “tincture of extortion”.