The Left is acting as if its political dominance — super majorities in both houses of Congress and, of course, the Presidency — eliminates the need for thoughtful debate. Over the past eight months, politicians in Washington have pushed an ambitious agenda highlighted by several trillion dollar proposals (stimulus, health care and climate), all of which deserved substantive debate and cautious consideration.

Unfortunately, all these proposals were rushed, diminishing debate even as dissenters were summarily dismissed. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused boisterous dissenters of being “un-American,” while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) characterized efforts to engage in a substantive debate as “obstructionist tactics.” Similarly, President Obama often notes that “doing nothing” is not an option. Critics and opponents of liberal reform are now in the crosshairs.

All this rhetoric obscures one simple fact: Americans are genuinely concerned with the direction of our country. Recent events at town hall meetings across the country are evidence the American people want to engage in a genuine debate about our country’s future. Unfortunately, the Left would rather ignore or demagogue the existence of alternative points of view. And while you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, there are plenty of alternatives.

Let’s take a look.

Stimulus

During the “stimulus” debate, President Obama said “the strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate.” But, he added, Congress needed to “pass this plan” “without delay.” Such a formulation, while eloquent, was intended to dismiss the very thoughtful options proposed by others. Republicans in the House and Senate offered a comprehensive alternative. Senator Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) American Option emphasized international competitiveness and aimed to reward entrepreneurship. Senator John Ensign’s (R-Nev.) Fix Housing First Act, while flawed, was another good-faith alternative. There were plenty of good ideas to stimulate the economy. What was lacking was our political leaders’ willingness to engage in real debate.

Health Care Reform

Senator Reid’s fond of saying that those who oppose liberal health care reform support the “status quo.” Yet a quick glance at The Patients’ Choice Act of 2009 demonstrates that no one has a monopoly on reform.

The legislation, introduced by Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) along with Representatives Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), is equally as ambitious in its attempts to transform America’s health care system, though it does so through very different mechanisms. The aforementioned Senators repeatedly offered to discuss their proposal with Senator Reid. According to well-placed sources, the invitation has gone unacknowledged.

Senator DeMint also has his Health Care Freedom Plan, which is far from the status quo. Again, ideas are abundant and, in this case, actually preceded the hodgepodge of liberal ideas being discussed.

“Clean Energy”

In case you haven’t noticed, the President and many of his allies have abandoned their climate-change rhetoric, instead opting for code words like “clean energy incentives,” “all of the above” and “jobs.” The new verbiage is based on poll-tested language that was necessitated when the public rejected a cap-and-trade scheme. If liberals want to talk about energy production and jobs, conservatives have ideas and actual legislative proposals that would really work.

The American Energy Act, introduced by House Republicans, and the energy-focused No Cost Stimulus Act introduced by Senator David Vitter (R-La.) and Representative Rob Bishop (R-Utah) are just two examples. This isn’t the debate the House of Representatives had this year, but it’s the debate the American people deserve.

Small Ticket Alternatives

The existence of alternatives is readily apparent to any intellectually honest observer. And alternatives were offered on other contentious laws enacted this year. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered a conservative alternative to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program expansion. Senator Burr offered an alternative, along with Senator Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), on tobacco regulation reform. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) offered a thoughtful and workable alternative to the wage discrimination legislation. This is hardly a “just say no” philosophy.

New, Innovative Ideas

Conservatives have also offered some innovative ideas of their own. Representative Joe Pitts (R-Penn.) introduced legislation that would bring a new approach to nuclear power, jettisoning subsidies in favor of regulatory certainty. Representative Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and Senator Vitter introduced the RAISE Act, which would remove the “seniority ceiling” on wages paid to unionized workers. Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) introduced the Government Ownership Exit Plan Act to set a date certain for ending government ownership of banks, auto companies and various other private entities.

It is disingenuous to say conservatives are without ideas. If the media, Congress and the President are interested in real reform, real dialogue and a real American-style debate, they should recognize that they don’t hold a monopoly on ideas, community organizing or the passion of the American people.

When President Obama warned physicians this week in a speech before the American Medical Association (AMA) that the U.S. could go the way of General Motors without healthcare reform, you could practically hear Republicans laughing. Obama’s description of how, without fixing healthcare, we will soon be “paying more, getting less and going broke” sounds precisely like the GOP’s description of the Democrats’ public healthcare plan.

Republicans may have little to offer on healthcare reform save opposition, but they have settled on a potent message to target a nervous public newly resistant to increased debt and deficits and growing scared of the government running anything. Indeed, the very bailouts, bankruptcies and government takeovers that have marked the young Obama administration have not only given weary Republicans a rallying cry but may have paved the way for the ultimate defeat of healthcare reform this summer.

The long-awaited and widely feared analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which this week concluded Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) healthcare plan would still leave 36 million Americans uninsured but drive the deficit up another $1.6 trillion, scattered Democrats and united Republicans. The White House responded by finding distance from Kennedy’s bill, with spokesman Robert Gibbs stating that “this is not the administration’s bill, and it’s not even the final Senate committee bill.” Of course, the president doesn’t have a bill, and doesn’t want to have one, since placing anything detailed on the table now would guarantee not only another brutal CBO score but the opportunity for Republicans to beat it to death.

With moderate and conservative Democrats reeling from the cost estimates and dug in against a public plan, Obama then announced in a television interview Tuesday that he could compromise on a public option.

Just how open a mind Obama has on healthcare is open to question. This week his administration teased the AMA with a trial balloon about the possibility of capping malpractice awards. Physicians awoke Monday to read in The New York Times that Obama has been making the case in private meetings that reducing malpractice lawsuit awards would drive down healthcare costs and should be part of healthcare reform. “ It is a position that could hurt Mr. Obama with the left wing of his party and with trial lawyers who are major donors to Democratic campaigns,” said the Times article. “But one Democrat close to the president said Mr. Obama, who wants health legislation to have broad support, views addressing medical liability issues as a ‘credibility-builder’ — in effect, a bargaining chip that might keep doctors and, more important, Republicans, at the negotiating table.”

Yet when members of the AMA gathered for the speech later that day in Chicago, President Obama told them not to get too excited, that he didn’t support capping malpractice suits. Instead, he told them not to fall for “fear-mongering” because the public option is their “friend.” In what might be a first since taking office, President Obama was booed.

As Democrats search for savings to fund a healthcare overhaul, it isn’t Republican fear-mongering that stands in the way. Their own members have objected to capping malpractice lawsuits, cutting Medicare payments to hospitals that treat the uninsured, taxing employer-provided healthcare benefits, enacting a public plan, enacting a public plan with a trigger, compromising on insurance cooperatives and limiting tax deductions for the wealthy. And the CBO has told them that preventive care and expanded use of electronic medical records won’t produce enough savings to cover reform. In other words, trying to pass an expensive new program without finding real savings just leaves us “paying more, getting less and going broke.”

by Lisa Benson

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Oppose the criminal enterprise of organized labor unions.

In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, bondholders stand first in line to receive payment on the debt they are owed. This is not because they are greedy, or uncaring, or more deserving, or possessed of more compelling personal histories than other stakeholders. It is because the primacy of their claim was explicit in the terms by which they agreed to lend the money they are now owed. It is a matter of contract law. Civilized, free societies respect contracts. Civilized, free societies respect the rule of law. By this simple, irreducible definition, the United States, under the rule of Barack Obama and his “Democratic” Party, has ceased to be a civilized, free society. Under pressure from the Obama Treasury Department, federal courts negated the legal rights of bondholders and shareholders by illegitimately applying a segment of the Chapter 11 code known as section 363.

To be clear, used as intended by its authors, section 363 is a perfectly honorable legal option for firms in bankruptcy, and is sometimes crucial in protecting the rights of stakeholders. It allows managers to negotiate in good faith with other firms interested in acquiring some or all of the bankrupt firm’s assets, and can produce outcomes more favorable than those obtainable through open auction liquidation. The terms of any such agreement must be approved by the presiding judge in the bankruptcy proceeding. Under section 363, the judge’s sole legitimate responsibility in approving the transaction is to ensure that the bankrupt firm’s stakeholders would be better served by the sale of the assets in question than they would be by liquidation of those assets and dissolution of the firm. By “stakeholders”, we are referring to bondholders and shareholders, in that order.

It seems sad to have to stop here and offer a civics lesson on corporate bankruptcy, but since recent studies have shown the average American unable to place even a major historical event, such as the Civil War, within the right century, let us invest a few words. The only stakeholders who have a legitimate legal interest in the outcome of a corporate bankruptcy are the creditors, the bondholders and the shareholders (i.e. the people to whom the company owes money, and the people who will own whatever is left over after all of those debts are paid). Under the system of capital finance and corporate governance that has served the United States well for over 200 years, there are no other organizations or individuals who can claim consideration in this process. Not the customers who purchase the company’s products or services; not the employees who look to the company for future compensation; not the unions who rely on the dues from those employees to purchase political power and influence; and not the politicians whose own personal status and wealth is built on such union largesse. U.S. bankruptcy laws adhere to the same basic premise that animates and sustains all modern liberal democracies: the premise that individuals who voluntarily place their personal property at risk in the furtherance of a commercial enterprise, have a right to expect their claims to supersede all others, should that enterprise fail. This is not arcane legal minutia, but a bedrock moral principle, recognized and supported by federal law. Consider the following passage from the SEC’s own web site:

How Does Chapter 11 Work?

The U.S. Trustee, the bankruptcy arm of the Justice Department, will appoint one or more committees to represent the interests of creditors and stockholders in working with the company to develop a plan of reorganization to get out of debt. The plan must be accepted by the creditors, bondholders, and stockholders, and confirmed by the court. However, even if creditors or stockholders vote to reject the plan, the court can disregard the vote and still confirm the plan if it finds that the plan treats creditors and stockholders fairly. Once the plan is confirmed, another more detailed report must be filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. This report must contain a summary of the plan, but sometimes a copy of the complete plan is attached.

Pay special attention to the following phrase in the above excerpt “The court can disregard the vote [of the creditors, bondholders, and stockholders] and still confirm the plan if it finds that the plan treats creditors and stockholders fairly.” So how well was that principle applied in the section 363 sale of Chrysler Motors to Italian auto manufacturer Fiat? The Chrysler sale to Fiat was approved, over the objection of bondholders, after the President of the United States openly berated those bondholders as greedy “speculators”, who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else”. Not content to publicly attack these fund managers for fulfilling an ethical obligation to defend their investors’ property, the Obama White House privately assured them that any further resistance to the administration’s wishes would invite an all out propaganda assault from the White House press office, intent on destroying their public reputations and crippling their professional credibility. Had this threat originated from any other source, “main stream” media personalities would have clamored for an FBI blackmail investigation (given the prima facie criminality of the threats). Since they emanated from the Obama White House, they were not considered particularly newsworthy.

And just exactly who are these greedy speculators, who refuse to share the sacrifice our president insists we all experience in equal measure? According to the the Governor, Treasurer and legislators from the State of Indiana, they are retired police officers, school teachers and their families. These retirees, and the honest fund managers who invested responsibly on their behalf, placed their trust in a very simple idea. They trusted that any man or woman elected to be President of the United States – who ascended to that office by swearing an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States – would fulfill that oath by actively supporting, rather than subverting, laws written to protect their constitutionally affirmed rights to life and property. They trusted that, should they find themselves challenged by forces and circumstances beyond their control, their ability to assert their own legal rights would be bolstered and championed by judicial and executive servants of the people, still committed to the ageless American principle of equal protection under the law. Instead, they found themselves subject to a new and radically different judicial and political philosophy – the philosophy of empathetic justice. Sadly for these retirees and their families, despite the validity of their legal claims, their own personal stories just weren’t compelling enough to win the hearts and minds of those who have determined their fate. Forgive these families for finding no consolation in the fact that they did not lose a legal argument on its merits – that they were simply voted off the island. Still, we must all acquaint ourselves with this reality TV philosophy of justice, since adherence to its tenets has become the new litmus test for Supreme Court nominees.

So if these families from Indiana, and millions more like them in communities all over America, were tested and found unworthy of the empathy with which the Obama Justice Department swept aside the legal principle of equal protection, who was the target of all this newfound judicial affection? The answer is nauseatingly simple. One almost hates to have to say it out loud, because the analysis is not a complex exercise.

• A pre-bankruptcy equity stake in Chrysler is essentially worthless today, so we can put to rest the question of what shareholders get – the answer is nothing.
• Under threats and intimidation from Obama’s Treasury Department, most bondholders accepted $0.29 for every dollar they were owed – not exactly a winning proposition for retirees on fixed incomes.
• Contrary to these financially catastrophic outcomes for the only two groups with legitimate claims against Chrysler assets, the United Auto Workers union will be handed a controlling 55% equity stake in the newly restructured company. Why?

At the risk of reaching a cynical conclusion, consider the following facts submitted by the Washington Examiner:

UAW’s political action committee spent $13.1 million last election cycle, a slow year for the union’s political arm. Of the PAC’s $2.3 million in direct contributions to candidates and candidate PACs, more than 99 percent went to Democrats. Of 42 Senate candidates to get UAW money, only one was Republican, and that was Arlen Specter.

The union’s PAC also reported $4.5 million in independent expenditures supporting Obama, plus an additional $423,000 opposing John McCain.

The truth the Democrats and their lapdogs in the media refuse to trumpet is that the United Auto Workers, their political puppets in the Democratic Party and decades of politically timid corporate managers actively destroyed the American automobile industry and squandered the personal retirement assets of millions of Americans in the process. The only sensible response a consumer can offer to such monumentally pathological conduct is to boycott union made automobiles. Honda, Toyota and Nissan all employ American workers to produce better products than Ford, Chrysler or General Motors. They do this not in spite of their refusal to bend over for labor unions, but because of it. Labor unions in America have systematically destroyed the quality and competitiveness of American industries, service organizations and educational institutions. Continuing to support these criminally irresponsible labor gangs is not patriotic. It is idiotic.

Libertarians rightly believe that each consumer should make purchase decisions primarily on the price, quality and perceived net benefits of the product or service in question. In a perfectly free society, governed by justly enforced laws, designed and implemented to secure the rights and responsibilities of free labor and free capital (i.e. a society of the kind the framers of our Constitution envisioned), this sort of contextually agnostic consumerism would not only be practical, it would comprise the most moral form of commerce. Sadly, we do not live in such a society. While we each may wish to act with enlightened self-interest in the commercial sphere, rarely scrutinizing the provenance of the products or services we buy, few of us would knowingly use our economic freedoms to secure the product of slave labor or the proceeds of theft. For better or worse, we each find ourselves examining the purchases we make from both economic and moral perspectives.

From this point forward, an American who purchases an automobile manufactured under a UAW contract is materially supporting that organization in its theft of billions of dollars rightfully belonging to their fellow citizens. Anyone who traffics in the purchase and sale of stolen goods actively, knowingly and morally participates in the theft itself. This message is not intended to appeal to those Americans who cannot correctly identify the century in which the Civil War was waged. Nor is there any hope that it will resonate with those whose conception of political enlightenment involves a tingly feeling in the extremities. But in this vast sea of expanding idiocracy, there remains hope that some Americans still possess both an active mind and a moral compass. The federal government will spend millions of taxpayer dollars to convince American car buyers that purchasing a union-made automobile is both prudent and patriotic. Given the likelihood that these products will benefit from tax incentives, regulatory imbalances and incessant propaganda, all designed to tilt the playing field in their favor, many Americans will convince themselves to move with the herd, give in to short-term self-interest and soothe their troubled consciences with the balm of Big Brother’s absolution. But for those in whom a free mind and an honest soul remain, the path could not be more clear…

…Save America’s future! Boycott America’s labor unions.

by Steve Breen

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By Victor Davis Hanson

We are in a weird age.

Do the smart thing, we were told, and invest in a 401(k) retirement account. Buy into the American dream and own your own home. But lately it seems that those who put their money in low-earning passbook savings accounts or rented rather than buying may have been better off.

Indeed, almost all the old familiar benchmarks of modern American life seem to be going by the wayside.

The blue-chip corporations that were long the brand names of world manufacturing and finance — American International Group, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Chrysler, Citigroup, General Motors, and Lehman Brothers — are either gone or teetering on insolvency.

The old-guard newspaper industry is fading — the Tribune Company is in bankruptcy court, Hearst at one point threatened to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, the Rocky Mountain News is already gone. The stock price of the New York Times is worth about the same as its Sunday paper.

Washington is more confusing. Bill Clinton balanced his last budgets but raised taxes. George Bush increased deficits but cut taxes. But now taxes, spending, and deficits soar all at once. We are lectured that prior reckless federal spending and borrowing got us into this mess — but now are told that even more federal spending and borrowing will get us out of it.

We’ve seen housing sales slump when home prices were high but interest rates low. Or when prices were low but interest high. Or when prices and interest were alike high. But we never have seen a bad housing market in which both home prices and mortgage interest rates were low.

Nonsense is passed off as wisdom. Those who caused the financial meltdown walked away with millions in bonuses while taxpayers covered the debts they ran up. The big-spending government claims it may cut our annual $1.7 trillion deficit in half by 2012 — but only after piling up trillions more in national debt.

In our Orwellian world, borrowing to spend what we don’t have has been renamed “stimulus.” Those who pay no federal income taxes — almost half of Americans — can somehow be promised an income tax “cut.” In the new borrowing of trillions of dollars here and trillions there, billions of dollars now sounds like pocket change.

When Americans turn to their political parties for answers, they are even more confused. Populist Democrats such as Sen. Chris Dodd and Pres. Barack Obama took more AIG campaign cash than did pro-business Republicans.

And the list of big-tax liberals who cheated or avoided taxes they want to raise on others is astounding — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who oversees the Internal Revenue Service; failed Obama Cabinet nominee Tom Daschle; and Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Yet conservative Republicans during the Bush administration ran up the debt and increased federal spending far more than did liberals under Bill Clinton. A Republican president has not balanced a budget since Dwight Eisenhower did it over a half-century ago.

Abroad, we thought piracy ended with the age of sail — only to learn that the world’s 21st-century navies either will not or cannot sink a few brigands in speedboats. Meanwhile, a U.N. conference against racism showcased Iranian president — and Holocaust-denier — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spouting anti-Semitic hatred.

The old “bad” unilateral war in Iraq is now quiet; the once “good” multilateral effort in Afghanistan is not. We are warned that we must be careful not to explicitly associate the radical Islam that fueled the September 11 attacks with terrorism; yet, we are advised that we should worry about returning American veterans as potential terrorists.

When our president references the 19th and 20th centuries, he apologizes for American sins but stays silent about the United States’s defeat of the Nazis, fascists, Japanese militarists, and Soviet Communists. The world hears contrition about Americans dropping the bomb to end World War II but never remorse from those responsible for Darfur, Grozny, or Tibet.

There have been a few crazy years like 2009 in American history — 1860, 1929, 1941, and 1968. And given what followed all of them, it might be wise to prepare for even crazier times for us ahead.