There are parts of Steve Wynn’s anti-Obama “rant” which have received more attention, but this is the part that is key to me.
It’s been something I’ve been writing about since before the election, the Obama effect. It’s why Obama owns the job losses in the late fall of 2008 and winter of 2009 even before he became president. The Obama effect since the moment it became clear he would become president has forced investors and businesses to the sidelines. Would the layoffs in November 2008 through January 2009 — which reqularly are blamed on Bush — have been as bad except for the business fear of what was to come under Obama? I think not, businesses prepared for the worst, which is exactly what they got.
Here’s the passage:
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.
Update: Should have linked also to Obama’s Catch-2012.
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This guy is one of the “Evil Rich” who got us into this mess – he supports Democrats, like Reid. I am sure he donated to and voted for Obama in 2008.
Sounds like Wynn has some regrets, but still wants to keep supporting Democrats. Is that delusional? Fear? Or just outright insanity?
I heard this yesterday; I am glad someone said it. I am also certain the Obama administration will make him pay for it. That he admitted that businesses are afraid of the government…..that is what the ideologues want. He is testifying that the Obama socialist agenda is working.
They will now just double down. Strap on your seat belt. This is going to be one heckuva year.
I’ve also felt Obama owns the job losses in late 2008 when it became likely he would win the Presidency and the months before inauguration. I don’t know why the pundits don’t discuss the point at least.
When a hurricane is barreling down on you, you take action before it hits (unless you are dependent on government to do everything for you, but that is another story). Business owners took action when the economy destroying hurricane threat formed and continued to grown.
No one who campaigned for an office he won can ever say, “I inherited this mess from someone else.” No, you ran for it; it’s yours. Hock, stocks and 4trillion.
Exactly! and thank you! He claimed in the Dem primary that it was he, and not divisive-lperiodically-down Hillary who could fix this mess. Hillary won more votes. The crooked DNC broke the rules gave the nomination to him anyway.
Just one more punch-puller who wants to have it both ways. The Harry Reids and Steve Wynns of world are who made Obama possible, you cannot be for one and against the other. He’s for Democrats and for Republicans, knows Democrat businessmen and Republican businessmen who are afraid of the government but not one word (at least in what’s been quoted on Legal Insurrection) about honest, clean, efficient, responsible government. He needs access, Reid gets it for him, he’s for Reid. End of discussion. Buffet, Gates, Immelt, Wynn, and a list way to long to reproduce here – as businessmen they may be successful, as citizens they are abject failures.
Dittos to everything you said.
On Nov. 4, 2008, before the polls closed, the DJIA closed at 9,319.83. On Jan. 16, the last day before the inauguration of Obama, the DJIA closed at 8,281.22, almost 1,100 points lower than on election day. On Jan. 20, with Obama being sworn in, the DJIA dropped 232.12 points.
It has been clear from the minute Obama was elected that the markets did not have faith in him.
Also look at the unemployment rate. It did not hit 8% until a couple of months after Obama took office. Employers are not going to hire, they are going to pare down to bare bones until he is gone. It is just that simple. Obama has instilled such uncertainty in the market that employment is now projected to stay at least 8% until well after 2012. Yes, good profits are being shown, but that is because companies are scaling down expenses due to the uncertainty. They don’t know what the true cost of Obamacare is going to be, how Dodd-Frank is going to affect their ability to borrow operating capital, and they are hedging against future expenses.
What Wynn says is true, but how do you convince the electorate that it’s true and important? So far, no one has been able to. The best person I have seen explain this is Marco Rubio. He says he won’t be a candidate for President or VP; maybe someone can get him to change his mind. In any event, he will be President one day.
In Obama World, when companies are not plotting to steal money, they are only preoccupied with spending money and hiring people… unless the POTUS is black. All he sees are piles of other people’s money.
The concept that there is a business model designed to create profits by being the best, most efficient business in one’s industry does not exist in Obama World.
The idea that when you take away opportunity or make pursuing opportunities so prohibitively expensive that they are not worth pursuing, companies hold on to their cash and jobs are not created is just the kind of thing greedy evil people say to steal more money in Obama World.
How do you do business in a world run by a 5-year-old?
Wynn has become one of the new TEA PARTY DEMOCRATS!
As we look forward to 2012 election and speculate what the rhetoric will be, I hope there will be some looking backwards to what the rhetoric was in 2008. This caught my attention today: Paul Ryan: Obama has been “fundamentally un-presidential”
Some quotes from Ryan:
“I was pretty new when Clinton was president,” Ryan says. “But I learned then that presidents serve themselves well when they say the same thing in public as they do in private, dealing with congressional leaders earnestly and honestly.”
“[Obama] has made it harder to establish trust, which will make it harder to find compromise,” Ryan says. “As much as he wants to come off as a leader, every time he talks about Republicans holding out to save fat-cat corporate-jet loopholes — which he knows is false — or leaks alleged spending cuts to the press, he reduces his leadership. He knows how that damages his credibility up here. Yet he continues to spin.”
The blogger then pulls this from 2008:
“I’m reminded of this post back in 2008 where I quote prominent Religious Leftist Brian McClaren:
I am voting for Barack Obama because I value personal integrity in leaders. Personal integrity requires a leader to repudiate falsehood, hate hypocrisy, and pursue fidelity to justice and truth, in private and in public. A person shows a pattern of integrity through fidelity to his or her spouse, through his or her refusal to employ falsehood for personal advantage, and through his or her willingness to admit mistakes and forgo excuses or blame-shifting whenever lapses occur. It seems clear to me that Senator Obama surpasses his counterpart on all counts.
That was originally posted on a blog called ClergyForObama, a site no longer viewable by the public which I consider telling.”
The Obamapocalypse Borders on Catastrophe…
It beats sitting on your thumbs, waiting for Godot….
I’m surprised this Bloomberg story didn’t get more attention. It’s pretty important that Goldman Sachs employees, who went heavily for Obama in 2008, in the last three months donated $240K to Romney vs only $10K to Obama. Great sign:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-16/goldman-favors-romney-over-obama-in-race-for-wall-street-funds.html
And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States.
As a lefty ex-Dem, I can tell you we are all freaked the heck out by his weird political philosophy.
[…] Professor William Jacobson comments at Legal Insurrection. Robot Recommends :President Svengali? Valour IT: Have You Made Your Donation Yet? -… Rush […]
A little off topic here (but related to ousting Obama in 2012): Daily Caller reports that Michele Bachmann suffers from debilitating headaches at least once a week that incapacitate her. The obvious implication is that she cannot be president with this health problem. (Drudge links the article as well at his website). Looks like she’s being knee-capped early on.
Exactly. One of the people in the story says something like “she has headaches every week, and is sometimes incapacitated for several days” (or something, I’m paraphrasing.) I guess it’s amazing that we see her at all, much less almost every day. So much for Reagan’s 11th Commandment.
Here’s the Bachmann headache story link:
http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/18/stress-related-condition-incapacitates-bachmann-heavy-pill-use-alleged/
Right now at Daily Caller it seems to warrant a huge, red, screaming headline.
OK, someone’s gotta say it: thumbs down to the expression “sitting on one’s thumbs.” It’s not only unnatural, it’s difficult to do.
Even so, here’s hoping Wynn and other mega successful Democratic businesspeople thumb a ride to the TEA Party, arriving ever so fashionably late.
I note that Steve Wynn is no fool. Before he started speaking out against the “regime”; he shifted his financial weight outside the country. The majority of his wealth is tied up in China, with his casinos in the Macau Special Administrative Region. He has been shifting assets for over a year, and only public criticism has kept him from formally moving his financial HQ to China.
The Left is not going to let his heresy to go unpunished, and he knew that. So he has somewhere to run, and assets safely out of the reach of the US government.
It is perhaps telling that China, intensely corrupt China where literally nothing happens without Guanxi payoffs; is both a safer haven for US capital and investment than the US, and for US financial dissidents/Kulaks.
A major part of what he was talking about can be summarized by two technical terms: “regime risk” and “capital flight”.
Subotai Bahadur
If what you say is true, sounds like Wynn is expecting some really bad things to happen in the U.S. Really bad.
I got laid off on Nov. 18, 2008 (exactly 2 weeks after the election) and I recall Rush saying soon thereafter that those were the Obama layoffs, and I believe it. I think companies who were already struggling realized that things would not get better for a long time, and acted accordingly. BTW, I was out of work for 15 months, but have been gainfully employed for these last 15 months.
I understand the layoffs. Immediately after the election 4 businesses in my rural county liquidated and shut down on the assumption that with a Democrat Congress and Obama as president, that there would be open season on the “Capitalist Exploiters of the Working Class”. They shut down and were totally closed out by January 1 in order to avoid future confiscatory taxes. One was only a couple of years old [ironically, a recycling business], but the other three were multi-generational family businesses. One was a trucking company which was able to lease all of its trucks to another company. I assume that they all took steps to preserve what wealth that they could. It cost between 50-100 jobs.
Subotai Bahadur