Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20100110

process than the manufacture of steel or steel framed car. . . >> i call them the four laws of "obamanomics" but because george bush by doing the bailouts on wall street sort of a transformed our coverage and economy the relationship between them to say the government will probably businesses that we think are important and who is at hand being? of businesses that have access to the best lobbyist. obama is the current president but the relationship between corporation and government george bush bailout was the biggest blow in that direction we have never seen. but i went to tell you some facts of the 2008 elections you can think about perhaps all, in a different light than he has presented himself for the mainstream media. >> goldmanz.ói sachs exxonmobil and microsoft boeing and pfizer and general electric are the company's setter poster children for special interest. they are huge well-connected corporations and have something else in common, employees and executives gave more to barack obama they and john mccain in 2008. a caveat, obama raised overall much more than a decade about twice as much in the primary was longer, he did not do the matching funds were you limit fund-raising to get government money, he raised a lot more but for these companies the overall margin was two /1 over john mccain that should tell you something about the accuracy of his anti-corporate erratic. budget with corporations is ratio is much bigger than two /1. goldman sachs gave obama $997,095 per car no company seven sens -- since mccain-feingold which made it illegal to give big gaffes and no company has donated 1 million ever. goldman sachs came close, but the most, i should be careful these are the employees and executives committees. but that is the most any candidate has any raise from any single company in the history since a mccain-feingold approach john mccain had 230,000. if you look down the line at the wall street industry, all bomber raise more than any other candidate in history from microsoft 10 /1. google 10 /1. why did they all give this money to barack obama? were they buying him off? that is the accusation for a republican president. every time bush out raise somebody later it was said he was being bought off. maybe that happened maybe that didn't but i am a reporter per cry have clear opinions i put ron paul on my cover i am very clear i do not believe in government intervention in the economy in any situation by the report on things i cannot substantiate. i do not know his motives. i will not spend a lot of time guessing. i will assume he really is trying to help the country but the net effect of his policies is to end up helping thet( biggest businesses, a lobbyist, entrenched special interests and most importantly, the policies are hurting consumers, taxpayers, small businesses and consumers. it hurts them that much. i said consumer's choice. so i call it the four lots of obamanomics. number one the inside game. during the legislative debate whereas the most lobbyist will wind. #2 govett the overhead smash. regulation adds to overhead. the cost to do business. higher overhead crowds out smaller competitors, and prevents start-ups from entering the industry. number three, the bigger companies are settled by inner shut robust competition is a threat. is like raising the basketball hoop at 20 feet at halftime to protecting the lead of whichever team is ahead. number four is called a confidence game. government regulation has an air of legitimacy to businesses boosting consumer confidence often beyond what is warranted. i have examples of a lot of these. i will talk about the inside game. the best lobbyist when did you do not bring something into the realm of washington it does not help you. if washington is debating and all your belt-- your ability does help. a great example is the current health care debate on capitol hill. you have right now the democrats are trying to piece together 60 votes in different lawmakers are asking for this or that. i promise at this moment there are hundreds of lobbyists on capitol hill representingxd mostly industries that are directly affected by this including employers, a drug makers come hmo. if you listen to barack obama rhetoric, what is happening all the businesses are saying please don't pass nothing. that is not what is going on. drug makers has cut a deal and i talk about it, that they could deal where drug lobbyist sat dowõ with rahm emanuel the white house chief of staff and said we promise to support your reform effort on health care if he will make sure that the bill does not heard us into will not pursue these policies that will hurt us and sure enough it subsidizes them. watched happens in the last couple. the one thing the insurance companies really fear is the public option. the government is sure to compete. that will get stripped from this bill i put three /1 odds on that. you will have67h÷÷ a the abscess -- other subsidies there is the individual mandate so when students graduate and do go2heñ out there and you want to buy a health care plan at $5,000 deductible, i will pay for my insurance and if i get hit by a car insurance will pay my big expenses that will become illegal+vvñ because it will mandate the you buy a insurance at a certain level. if you only buy it for a catastrophe that is what could end up of violating the individual mandate you have to pay a fine. they might allow young people to buy catastrophic plans, that is good for you, but they are requiring everyboby to buy a product that the hmo is selling and ball they do that they claim they are the va crusade against the hmo. the rhetoric does not match the facts. whatever the initialfá proposal whenever he wanted to do whatever ends of coming out the other end in the keystone society in the rose garden it will benefit whoever has the best lobbyist. you also see this with global warming. my favorite example isq=ú monsanto. they are famous for making genetically modified organisms they also use -- me chemicals if you ever spray roundup they use that also the industrial roundup or they can spray and kill the weeds also roundup ready seeds you spray the food with chemicals and it is not heard. with this you do not have to go into the fields as much but it turns out doing that releases carbon dioxide into the air that causes global warming and sea levels rise six sadr at ixempra. under under the global warming bell, akãfarmer can earn greenhouse guest credits for not telling his feel so if you buy monsanto seeds and by their chemicals, the government will basically pay you for carbon offset. carbon offsets themselves are a bit of a farce in themselves. the idea that you get paid to plant a tree or something that socks carbon dioxide out of the air there is no way to audit this. sometimes if you pay for a carbon offset you pay for 72 plant a tree. of my question is what a factory happens to burn down? will they come back and say your tree burned down that you have to pay us back? that will not happen. they at what used to be called snake oil dealers. i am all for conservation but offsetting carbon emissions has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. it is a make you feel good game but you will get carbon offsets under the health care bill because the people who stand to profit from them have the best lobbyist and connection. the sec and lot is the overhead smash regulation makes it more costly to do business. two severs more? mom-and-pop or the big guy? it is obviously mom-and-pop. of my favorite story is wal-mart down the health care bill it comes out in the spring or summer saying we are joininght with the center for american progress a liberal activist group in washington. the service employees international union the labor union has been very close of three of us are joining together and we are supporting the employer mandate. every employer above some searches small size has to buy insurance of a certain level for their employer. why is wal-mart the biggest private-sector employer doing this? they sell fisher. they act as the insurance company. when you pay your premiums instead of going to blue cross it goes to wal-mart and win you use your health insurance to fix your broken leg it is wal-mart, not at men who pays it out. they are so big that self ensuring makes sense. many big employers find it good to selfish sure. they use economies of scale to get good deals. they get very goodñf very good deals. nobody else can do that to the degree compared to target who has a lower level of health insurance you raise target<  cost of wal-mart also lobbies for minimum-wage. they pay over $10 per hour everywhere and $12 per hour in any high-cost place of living. who pays that? i worked at a movie theater a single screen 100 year-old theater by a]yáuk who lived down the block i earned $4.50 per hour. minimum-wage by the high school kid after basketball practice home depot well i don't know that wal-mart does not pay minimum wage. if it goes up from $5.50 up at $7.15 that hurts smaller competitors and helps wal-mart and gets them good press and gets the unions to back off. mattel did another overhead smash where i don't know if you remember in 2007 there was unprecedented to recalls with lead in them from china and others may have had some but the lead to ways cangi0z make your kid sick. they were all recall. congress did what they always do and pass a law to fix it. barack obama got behind a law called the consumer product safety improvement act. in addition to changing the allowable levels of lead and chemicals of the choices that every toys sold in america has to be tested at a separate third-party testing facility and not every single ploy but every line of toys. what is that? you have to get a bar we tested if you make 1 million berbice but what if you work in your garage they do carr wrote children's stories for them to sit down? are you making identical methods? no. one of them i make for the eight year-old and one of them is a third stage three-year-old the note you have to have third-party testing. depending on how complex it could range from a couple hundred to a couple thousand and mattel said $2,000.2 test one barbie for a line of million is not a big deal.çó there is that handmade toys alliances is not the sort of group that i would normally run with as a free-market conservative suburban dad but i am not all of there this because i have written columns it criticized the consumer improvement act because mattel benefits as the icing on the cake there is a provision that said if you can prove to the government that you have set up within your own factory a testing facility which is accurate and independent from the parent ç,ráq'dy then you don't have party place come you can test it within your own factory. one waiver has been given to one company which is mattel who helped to write the bill in the first place to react to a scare they caused by putting lead in there toys over in china prepare it is a pattern of obama policies he backs the policies that has the intention to helpr consumers are help the smog it -- guy or curb excesses of big business. they have the opposite effect. the third block of obamanomics why is america the wealthiest country in the world? i am sure a lot of people have answers my is we have the freest economy in the world. but a more regulated the economy is less by bran and slower.[t@ if you are the top of business, you the around negative how much you can go from rags to riches or from the top to the bottom in a second. it is exciting if you're the entrepreneurht but scary if you are sitting at the top anything that slows down is good for you÷ the top. that is why cul-de-sacs may back the wall street regulations. they will not all end up as initially proposed but the idea of executive kappa pay goldman sachs has publicly expressed support and they are very close working with obama on that. they also had great access to obama west wing in the same with access to bush west wing and clinton in west wing and bush west wing and probably reagan. they are the quintessential special interest. barack obama it raised more money from them than any other corporation since finance laws were changed. they were the number one beneficiary of the wall the final is the confidence game. the idea that government can give people a false confidence in what people are selling. wall street is a great example why regulating the financial sector? we need to restore investor confidence. ever republican talks about in-store -- restoring confidence and half of the democrats talk about that parker happen to believe it should be the job of the company or the broker to restore your confidence. the government should not be using your money to convince you it is okay toc invest in the stock market. that is a huge part of what." government does and george bush ownerships society said it is much better to own stocks were own a home than not to. they set up the policies that drive people to own more stock than they would in a free market for zero and a house. we saw exactly what that created. it was a bubble. of on the continues the policy.kz the story i told was anothert( story of the confidence game. now toys are safe. they said that on the floor of the house. now you can be rest assured your toys are safe because the federal government is making sure your tories are safe. but my favorite story on a told here in the dining hall or the cafeteria or food place, a lot of talk of sustainable and local that is great.ó&o if i had more time or more money i would do if five bereday hippieñi girl i would be eating the organic fair trade stuff. i support that perfectly voluntarily and obama used to talk about the food writer who wrote the on the board teeeleven to talk about very important points how government and big business and up hurting÷)z local food and slow food is a term that they use now. but obama's of food safety director at the health and human services, there is a guy named mike -- michael who was a top lobbyist for monsanto who loves genetically modified foods. his top trade negotiatorko for agriculture who is a top lobbyist for the agrichemical lobbying group in washington. the pattern goes on about that. aba has backed the new food safety laws like the consumer product law for the toys it is for food safety to create more testing. one creates something called were regulates food production facilities which sounds like a kellogg's factory where they turned out corn chips from who knows what? but a food production facility includes a farm not like a giant big farms but if you have a former aide to prove something that you sold come under the bill, you were a food production facility and had some of the same regulations as a factory. one great article i read about this from the "san francisco chronicle" said its dazed testifying to congress from taylor farms which is the world's largest salad producer explained he supported uniform government and forced food safety standards this would elimd÷e the hassle of different customers insisting on their own safety audit which was you have the organic food co-opfá that we want you to certify it was organic and over hear the local food co-op. you make the salad where does the lettuce come from? and maybe don't kill any rabbits to grow our carrots co-op. a lot of people putting and our baby parents who are deathly afraid of any bacteria and they have their own regulations. there were groups setting up in the stores inside the grocery chains. one grocery chain may want or one local store might want something else. this is called private sector regulation. a bit of the they do not call that government regulation but eight have more diversity. barack obama said i don't think government can solve every problem but it can ensure that our food is save. he was pitching in the face of the private sector regulators the organic co-ops, and restores the take pride in their quality he spit in their face. but he also backed legislation that could help preempt all that and makec÷ it illegal sitting the federal government proposes standards no buyer is allowed to propose -- to impose three no group of buyer can have its own standardsc that is the salad king of san francisco was lobbying for. you have private sector buyers that obama's said its did not exist and he wipes them out. but he said if only government can ensure that your food is safe, it is a confidence game, nobody can ensure that your food is safe. take a step back and time.5a who might you have bought your meat from it back in the day? maybe a butcher and how did you trust he was giving you save food? probably because he sold to your father and he will sell to your son but when you have more regulation that make it harder for independent businessmen to succeed you drive business toward more centralized industry it in the food situation especially you have won a government report come out that says one processor needs to have foodborne illnesses separately. this is a pattern of obama's policies. they are big government and while he promised to battle with special interests it has not worked out that way because in washington businesses, they have the most say and get their businesses at the table both in congress and at the obama warehouse.7x -- white house. -- white house. but it ends up benefiting big business it is bad for the american economy but i do not like talking to much what is good for the economy because that is the abstract. it is bad for consumers and taxpayers and small businesses. it is bad for taxpayers obviously we have bush overspending on the bail-out. read all we'll be paying the!fz< bills on the bailouts that have just gone to wall street mostly. and the stimulus bill is all borrowed money. a couple months into the bill say% of the money goes to the top 2%. why? not because they like to pay out big companies because when the government gives out money who has the apparatus to go to the government to get the random small joe with the corner store or the guy selling fruitcakes does not have the ability to go get government money but the bigger corporations that already have the lobbying establishment said that can go get it and "cash for clunkers" common if a few benefited, you did that this is a program if you remember over the summer it required the automaker or the car&ñi-dee and and it added two days had to be traded that it could run so the idea was to take old cars off the road there are questions whether it is good for the environment but it drives up buying the price of the car if you destroy a perfectly good car. if he were a car dealer you might have been okay but if you traded it in and got this as the did okay. if youwñ make new cars are already had a big stock you profited but everybody else loses. you pay ford as a taxpayer because your car goes up. might be the way in which it hurts small business. small business is the heart of the american and economy. it is a little inaccurate when people say small business is the number one creator of new jobs because there is a more precise way to break it down. the last year for which we have these numbers two-thirds of new jobs were created by companies that were five years older younger. meaning new business is the most important thing to create the jobs that will eventually higher you when you get out. you need a new business is to be made. obamanomics gets and a way of new businesses being made for a few reasons. #1 regulation keeps you out with the overhead. number two it is increasingly obvious you need a lobbyist to get by. if you cannot afford one then setting up a business, but you will be