Gang Boss Barack Obama Sweet Talks British Petroleum

“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

“Public service is my motto. Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements. My booze has been good and my games on the square.”

“I got nothing against the honest cop on the beat. You can just have them transferred someplace where they can’t do any harm. But don’t ever talk to me about the honor of police captains or judges. If they couldn’t be bought they wouldn’t have the job.”

“A crook is a crook, and there’s something healthy about his frankness in this matter. But any guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake.  The worst type of these punks is the big politician. You can only get a little of his time because he spends so much time covering up that no one will know that he is a thief.”

Al Capone –  public servant and tribune of the people

“the conduct of President Obama over the great oil spill is explicable, even if despicable.  The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill – so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political petulance against a multinational company?”

Lord Tebbit of Chingford ( Secretary of State for Industry and Trade under Margaret Thatcher).

Well, Barack Obama  learned his profession well, on the same mean Chicago streets once patrolled by America’s most infamous gang boss, deploying the same geniality to those who offer him subservience, and the same harsh medicine to those who fail so to do. Unfortunately for America at this time, the Feds are under the control of the Gang Boss and there is nowhere for the innocent to hide as Obama threatens to unleash fear and retribution against British Petroleum for an accident that successive American governments, including his own, did so much to bring about and intensify.

The federal agency that regulates offshore drilling and inspects offshore oil rigs is the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau that reports to the United States Department of the Interior. A recent Report by the Inspector General of the Interior Department fingers MMS  for serious ethical violations in its relationships with the oil and gas industry. Specifically, the Report charges MMS staffers with accepting financial and other side-payments, including sexual services and access to pornography,  from the oil and gas industries in return for the loosening of drilling regulations. ‘Drill, baby, drill’, in both dimensions, it would seem.

 Earlier reports had signaled similar kinds of corruption, leading to limited disciplinary action, but no serious agency-cleansing reforms. This climate of corruption was an important factor behind the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The sub-contractor company directly responsible for the drilling operations was American, not British.  British Petroleum, as it happens, is also 40 per cent American owned.

If one listens to President Obama, however, one would think that the company was completely owned by British shareholders and had been actively involved in putting down the Kikuyu-dominated Mau-Mau rebellion against the British Empire in Kenya during the 1950s. If one listens to Obama’s language, one might be forgiven for believing that he was brought up and educated in the Chicago projects, rather than at Columbia and Harvard. Certainly, Barack Obama’s expressed intentions on the derriere of  the CEO of British Petroleum could never have emanated from the mouth of  Thomas Jefferson.

Rhetoric, of course, is rhetoric, and potty-mouthed politicians are a dime a dozen. So as long as we keep the newspapers away from the children, we can ride out the present descent into the vocabulary of the gutter. Much more dangerous, is the nature of the threats leveled at BP from the White House and Capitol Hill. For these threats constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. Ultimately, they constitute a direct assault on individual liberty in the United States.

The rule of law requires that laws should never discriminate among individuals, that all laws should be prospective and never retrospective, and that laws should apply equally to every person, including those who govern.  The rule of law is important because these requirements minimize the risk of any person or group in power wielding such power against those who oppose their wishes. The United States, in the fullest sense, has never been a country blessed by the rule of law. Those who govern have always been protected from laws that apply to others. But the degree of departure from the rule of law, save in times of war, has usually been modest by international standards.

If Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have their way with BP, such no longer will be the case, as the above-outlined wrath of Lord Tebbit of Chingford clearly indicates. Let me illustrate the ways.

White House officials are mulling a request to Congress to legislate retrospectively to force BP to compensate a broad range of people, well beyond proximate cause, who have been  affected by the oil spill, including those idled by the Government through its own moratorium on oil drilling. This would constitute a clear breach of the rule of law. 

 John Conyers (D. Michigan) has already introduced a bill into the House of Representatives designed to expand sharply (and retrospectively) the liability of oil companies for spills. This bill also breaches the rule of law. It is retrospective and it is discriminatory.  There is nothing in this bill, for example, to expand the liability of Government Motors for past auto-accidents! 

Thomas Perrilli, Associate Attorney General,  has indicated that the Justice Department is preparing to bar BP from paying out a dividend to its shareholders. Such action would clearly breach the due process clause of the United States Constitution. But as I mentioned earlier, there is no vestige of Thomas Jefferson in the current occupant of the White House. Once one has looted the Chrysler bondholders in favor of the UAW, why not dip one’s bloodied hands into other corporate pockets, perhaps to fund pro- card check lobbyists?

If certain federal judges might baulk at such tyranny, well one can always direct the case to a federal court in Louisiana and stoke up local rage to the point where an honest judgment would invoke death threats from local interest groups. If all else fails, why not place BP into receivership and loot its assets.  The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is well-trained in endorsing just this kind of government-sponsored theft.

What about international relations?  Should one be concerned that the United Kingdom might retaliate in kind, perhaps by sequestrating the assets of the Ford Motor Corporation?  Well, this President evidently believes that Might is Right, and that international law is the law of the Chicago streets. Break a few kneecaps and rub out a few opponents, and Obama-rule will surely prevail:

“I don’t want to die. Especially I don’t want to die in the street, punctured by machine-gun fire.  That’s the reason I’ve asked for peace.  I’ve begged those fellows to put away their pistols and talk sense.  They’ve all got families, too.  I know I’ve tried since the first pistol was drawn in this fight to show them that there’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street. Competition needn’t be a matter of murder, anyway.  But they don’t see it.”

Al Capone

June 10, 2009: Barack Obama Loots Chrysler Bondholders

“June 10 will be a silent anniversary, but one worth noting by those alarmed at the past year’s assault on free institutions.  It was last June 10 when the federal government tossed aside the option of proven workable bankrupcty procedures in order to nationalize Chrysler on behalf of its union allies.” Mitch Daniels, ‘Hoosiers vs. Crony Capitalism’ The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2010

The Chrysler intervention by Barack Obama breached the rule of law and categorized his administration as yet another Third World despotism that despises the rule of law and forces discriminatory practices down the throat of a weak and cowardly judiciary. It provides an almost perfect example of state (crony) capitalism at its worst in the hands of an unscrupulous would-be tyrant.

Well-established bankruptcy laws in the United States provide for a clearly articulated preference in favor of secured over unsecured creditors. Chrysler’s secured bondholders had confidently anticipated that their prior status would protect them from the worst implications of the impending bankruptcy of the Chrysler Corporation. Obama and his UAW cronies moved to cut off these law-abiding bondholders at the pass and shake them down for as much as they could carry away.

Naturally, the secured bondholders started out by defending their legal rights. Obama’s apparatchiks  (notably Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner)  attacked them mercilessly, warning of the serious consequences that would surely  follow from their continued resistance. Large numbers of secured bondholders chose safety over liberty and acquiesced to federal pressure.

A number of brave souls, however, refused to buckle. The one legal effort to block the Obama cramdown was launched by three Indiana pension funds that had invested in Chrysler bonds in part as a supportive gesture for a longtime state employer. Predictably, they were swept aside by the would-be tyrant in the White House.

The bankruptcy came in a new illegal form run by a corrupt federal government. The United Auto Workers Group, who owned no interest whatsoever in Chrysler, was gifted a 55 per cent interest valued at $4.5 billion. This gift was all the more remarkable because the UAW had been largely responsible for bankrupting the corporation in the first place.  When no company came forward to purchase the corporation, after a minute passage of time, the Obama administration gave a 20 per cent interest away for free to Fiat, a third-rate Italian auto producer. It then took a sizeable slice of the corporation for itself,  before tossing the remnants back to the secured bondholders.

For Indiana’s retired teachers and state policemen, the remnants amounted to 29 cents on the dollar, a loss of $6 million versus the purchase price and millions more below the expected payout from a standard Chapter 11 bankrupcty proceeding. When the Hoosiers appealed the verdict, they confronted the full reality of cowardice from the appellate court.

The Second District U.S. Court of Appeals – where the appeal was heard – is a progressive socialist outpost that retains little respect for the rule of law.  Predictably, that Court declined to overturn the cramdown, though its judges, no doubt for shame, refused to explicate precedential reasons for this decision. The Supreme Court of the United States, to which the Hoosiers made their final appeal, has no Horseman of the Apocalypse on its benches. In a singular act of  craven cowardice, the Justice Roberts Court refused to hear the appeal.

The Hoosiers refused to cave, even in the face of  this almighty rebuff. Aided by pro-bono counsel, they returned yet again to the Supreme Court. This time, the Court, now  less in awe of the would-be tyrant, granted certiorari.  The Court ruled from the bench to strike down the decision of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, thus removing that decision as a potential precedent for bankrupcty proceedings.

As Mitch Daniels, Governor of the State of Indiana,  notes in his column, ‘Our retirees are still out the $6 million but enjoyed the small vindication of being awarded the court clerk’s costs at Chrysler’s expense.’

I doubt that you read about that December 14, 2009 court decision in any of the left-leaning media newspapers. For it is a sharp slap in the face for a would-be tyrant, on whose Third World coat-tails most of the media are riding as long as they possibly can.