Private Aviatioin (Corporate Jets), GE, and My Brother's Trucking Company

What I have tried to do in this blog is educate as to the perils and absurdities of central planning.


For example, there was that Congressional Inquisition of bank executives/CEOs. Organized crime bosses did not face questioning this insulting when dragged before Congress. That is merely an aside.


At one point, the top executive there from each financial institutioin present was asked to raise his hand if the corporaton owned one or more corporate jets. No, I could not make this up. It may be worse than hainv Presidential candidates at debates raise their hands. The only acceptble response to this idiocy is to refuse to play the game--as Fred Thompson did. If Thompson had been that good on everything, he wold be President now. I digress (sort of). All of the financial institutions but one had at least one corporate jet.


What was the idiot Congressman's (the one who asked this "raise your hand" fquestion) reaction? Oh, he was definitely a leftist Democrat. His reaction was to suggest to all of the financial instiutions that they immediately sell their corporate jets and use the money to at least partially pay back the taxpayers for their bailout money.


See my entries today and yesterday. The government is supposedly trying to keep troubled companies afloat (while actually only helping those favored by the central planners). Private aviation is in trouble. Las Vegas' economy is in trouble. Yet, these central planners have done their best to destroy both private aviation companies (which employ thousands of people) and Las Vegas in the past few days.


President Obama has suggested that corporate executives should not have those conventions/retreats/whatever in Las Vegas. Almost all of Congress is suggesting that corporations should not have private jets (although Al Gore and Obama both do). As I have stated, these are the kind of absolute contradictioins you get into when you first decide to centrally plan, and do "bailouts".


Then there is GE. Glenn Beck said that GE has received 139 billion (I think) in Federal guarantees. Whatever the numbers, GE has definitely asked for help, and has received pretty massive help. GE owns MSNBC. Keith Olbermann gets 7 millon dolllars to act as the most incompetent cable "news" ancor to ever exist. WHY should we bail out GE, and incidentally NBC? WHY should we not require these salaries be reduced? Okay. Keith Olbermann should have been fired long ago, but that is another story--since all of MSNBC should have been closed long ago. What does Brian Williams get (the main NBC anchor)?


There is a reason I mentioin GE. You have heard me refer to my brother--the co-owner of a trucking company--as one of the losers in the Age of Obama, where the central planners determine the winners and losers. The Pelosi mouse is a winner. GE and the banks are winners (albeit at the price of being humiliated by Congress). My brother is a chosen loser--partly because he is owner of an evil trucking company (from the leftist point of view), and partly because small businesses are generally losers here. Except for beekeepers, fish farms, and other faovorites of the central planners in charge, small businesses are not getting bailed out.


Two million dollars would have saved my brother. His company is now in a probably losing struggle to make it. The Pelosi mouse get 30 million. My brother gets nothing. It gets worse.


Your remember GE? See a few paragraphs above. GE is one of the winners. They are evidently getting bailed out. Guess what? You guessed it!!! It is GE that is directly responsible for my brother's business going under. A GE compnay (GE is a big conglomerate) leased my brother all of those trailers that trucking companies need to haul goods.


Theeconomy went sour. Last May, my brother told GE he needed to have the GE compnay work with him to keep my brother' scompany from facing major survival problems. My brother, because of the souring economy, no longer could use most of the GE trailers. My brother wanted to make a deal with the GE company to turn in a lot of the trailers--at a time when they could have been sold and GE come out pretty well---and arrange a restructering of the lease obligation (which was killing my brother's company). The GE compnay refused to work with my brother at all.


Now, GE faces possibly "foreclosing" (grabbing for default of the lease) their trailers back from my brother. Except now the GE compnay can't do anything with the trailers. There is no market. My brother may be facing bankruptcy, and GE is facing a major loss (which it could have avoided by working with my brother). And my brother's employees may be facing losing their jobs (not to mention my brother himself and his wife).


WHY does GE deserve to be bailed out more than my brother? And does my brother not have a right to be mad as Hell that the central planners are bailing out the company that my brother holds responsible for possibly killing my brother's company? And all my brother needs is 2 million dollars.. The Pelosi mouse got 30 millon.


Let me be clear here. My brother recognizes that the government simply cannot bail out everybody. But my brother (rightly) believes that the government should then be bailing out NOBODY. Otherwise, the central planners are deciding who lives and how dies (as they will eventually do with national health care). There is no rational basis upon which central planners can make these decisons. There is certainly no "fair" basis.


You should see by now that central planning does not even theoretically work. There is no way for it to work. In practice, history (thinik Soviet Union "Five Year Plans") has shown it does not work.


Yes, in the Age of Obama we are beig told that only a central planning Federal Government is capable of solving all of our problems. That is simply false, and the delusioin will destroy us.


P.S. The reference above to the "troubled" private aviation industry is not speculation. Cessna just announced the layoff of some 4600 workers. The industry is in real trouble (as is the trucking industry), and Congress is doing its best to kill off the industry.