Obama the Luddite

This article from Israpundit on June 17, 2008, commenting on a Wall Street Journal interview with Obama caught out attention. In the summer of 2008 when Obama was running for President, he gave this interview which should have set off all kinds of red flags but didn't. How many other interviews are out there on various topics showing this man should have never been elected US Senator not to mention President.

Read this article and ask yourself if Israpundit didn't have Obama nailed on his total ignorance on even basic Economics 101 back in June 2008. Where did Obama really get his education? We have a hard time believing that he went to Columbia University majoring in political science and didn't even take a basic economics course. Columbia today has economic course at the 3000 level which we would suspect has been a course for years. It makes sense to take an economics course in political science, but did he? What courses did he take at Columbia? If he was a political science major as he claims (no one remembers Obama in any political science course), the courses he took should be public knowledge -- why are his records sealed for his undergraduate degree? The media found President Bush's GPA but they cannot find what courses Obama took at Columbia?

Once again we ask, "Where are the members of the media in following up on Obama's background?"

Obama the Luddite

Wall Street Journal interview demonstrates Obama’s total ignorance of basic economic forcesby Bill Levinson

The following speaks pretty much for itself, and we have provided the entire statement so there is no chance of taking words out of context. The thought that someone who is so ignorant as to believe that automation and technology harms workers–the exact position of the Luddites two centuries ago–could even conceivably become a Senator, let alone President, is truly frightening.

Barack Obama on Economics: ‘We’re Going Through a Big Shift’June 17, 2008

…WSJ: You talked about the last eight years and the question of redistribution goes way back …

Sen. Obama: Oh, there’s no doubt about it.

That’s why I say that the combination of globalization and technology and automation all weaken the position of workers. I would add an anti-union climate to that list. But all weakens the position of workers, particularly blue-collar workers, in the economy, and some of it is just historical. You know after World War II, we were in this unique position where Europe was decimated, Japan was decimated. China was off the grid because of Mao. And so we didn’t have a lot of competition out there, and now other countries are rising and automation has supplanted a lot of work that used to be done by middle-class workers.

This is what we might expect from a political science major who experimented with Black Nationalism (per his own book, “Dreams From My Father”) and who may still subscribe to it. He believes that technology and automation “weaken the position of workers” and supplant “a lot of work that used to be done by middle-class workers.” The idea that automation supplants workers is the foundation of abject poverty, and indeed actual slavery, as shown by a brief history of the evolution of labor.

The next step up from slavery was the laborer who worked for slave wages, e.g. as a 19th century coal miner or cotten harvester. He was free to change employers but, because all he could offer was his physical labor, he could earn barely more than a subsistence wage. The Luddites were willing to accept this as the price of “job security,” even though a machine that did the work of ten men might allow one man to earn the former (low) pay of five or ten workers. Technology and automation as deployed by the Ford Motor Company created the American middle class by empowering the blue-collar worker, the “bitter” small town person who “clings to guns and religion” who is now the backbone of the Democratic Party, to earn more than a subsistance wage. Automation and technology provided the laborer with discretionary income while bringing the cost of what were formerly luxury goods to everyday status. While it took fewer workers to produce a given amount of goods, the goods became less expensive while more people could afford them. This was not merely Henry Ford’s theory, it was how he sold millions of automobiles to autoworkers who could at last afford the product they made. This, in turn, created more as opposed to fewer high-paying jobs.

In short, Barack Obama lacks even the basic competence (in addition to the basic personal character as shown by his long membership in a racist church while surrounding himself with anti-Semites and racists) necessary to hold any decision making role in any government, whether local, state, or federal.

http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=1325