George Rebane

NEVER confuse effort with achievement.

Watching Obama’s Axelrod on Sunday TV was a real downer.  That guy comes across as a double dummy who is not even a good liar for all the ones he’s been tasked to tell.  On the flood of illegal entrants and Arizona’s new law, all he could come up with is how hard the government is working to secure our borders, which turns out is not very hard at all.  His performance on the recess appointment of Dr Berwick must have been a real disappointment to those in the White House glued to the tube.  That a man would debase himself so freely in public is testimony to the corruption that rules our capitol.  He stammered through a defense of the Chief Rationer’s recess appointment with the argument that it was the Republican’s fault, even though the Dems neither scheduled any hearing for him nor completed the necessary paperwork for the regular nomination.  A sad performance that is now the administration’s norm – for fun and entertainment just catch any press conference presided over by the press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Moving on to Meg Whitman for California’s next governor.  That woman is abrogating principle for political gain even before she gets into office.  She has gone for the state’s Hispanic vote by supporting the lawsuit against Arizona, and added in opposition to the implementation of the venerable Prop 187.  In that now forgotten proposition California voted to deny public services to illegal entrant fugitives from the law.  And knowing that English deficient illegals also vote, she has paid for appropriately translated billboards to curry their favor.  She’s betting a lot that we won’t toss her for former Governor Moonbeam.

I’m not sure that I would vote for a pre-packaged sleazebag or, if you prefer, ‘political realist’ who throws in the towel before election day.  At least our Governator got elected, kept his promise, and floated the four propositions to implement what he ran on before becoming a RINO.  Maybe, if Jerry Brown is the only principled candidate, with admittedly goofy principles, we should vote for him and not delay the descent of California into the mud.  But then again, voting for Meg will maybe, just maybe, give us time to get our caboodle together and blow this hole for greener parts.  It’s a tough choice.  In the interval I’m going to yell at her to straighten out and fly right.

To the extent that Republicans are wooing big corporations, they are screwing up bigtime.  One of Rebane’s Reality Rules is that big corporations suffer from all the same ills of any big bureaucracy.  They start making decisions by delayed consensus of politically motivated people looking to grab theirs and get out before it hits the fan.  Big corporations can be bought and sold by politicians of any stripe as long as they are in power.  A politician can tell when a corporation is willing to kiss him on all four cheeks.

Democrats are much better at understanding this and playing the game – ‘they will gladly sell us the rope with which we will hang them’.  Republicans can’t tell when a corporation becomes the size of a lumbering behemoth that needs the guns of government to guarantee its markets and/or its position as an oligarch or worse.  A proper strategy for Republicans would be to fight tooth and nail for an open field for ALL corporations below a certain threshold of revenues – no picking winners and losers.  And a corollary is that once you exceed a certain size and market share you are strictly on your own.  The political environment should be such that divestiture should occur naturally to behemoths of that size.

This applies also to strategic industries like aircraft manufacturing.  We don’t need to have one company that makes all types of aircraft for all markets, and is therefore one of the two in the land that needs special government protection.  A solution to all such problems is to use  technology to vertically disintegrate.  Have design companies that do nothing but pop out designs, airframe manufacturing companies, engine manufacturing companies (we have these already), systems integrations companies, and marketing companies.  Computer aided design (CAD) standards already allow efficient communication of component and subsystem designs between companies so that the whole thing will fly in tight formation when all the parts are strapped together.  We don’t need to prop up the Boeing or Lockheed/Martin with tax dollars.  And this principle applies across industries – never too many eggs in one basket that is in the embrace of big(ger) government.

Yes, yes I know.  Big corporations, in their own right, can and do buy politicians.