I caught a little bit of Obama advisor Austin Goolsbee this morning on Fox News Sunday. He said flat out that the Obama administration will have input on operations at GM. I didn’t see the whole show, but Andy McCarthy did and Goolsbee was far less candid, to put it mildly, during the rest of the show. One would have had to suspend disbelief to listen to Goolsbee’s BS when it comes to the economy.
Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administrations’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?
Goolsbee then laughably intimated that the steep jump in the jobless rate could be attributable to hopeful signs that the economy is improving. Huh? See if you can follow this: he says flashes of hope that we are on the verge of a revival have purportedly caused previously uncounted jobless people to seek (but not find) work – that is, they waited out prosperous times, deciding to leap into the job hunt only when hundreds of thousands of heretofore gainfully employed people got pink-slipped and began competing for a declining pool of jobs. Of course, why shouldn’t Goolsbee think he can get away with these fables when the Obamedia has taken to repeating them verbatim? Witness the headline on page one of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: “Slower Job Losses Lift Hopes” – I’m sure that’s exactly the headline Bush would have gotten after a half-point jump in an already sky-rocketing jobless rate.
If that weren’t enough to make your head spin, Goolsbee also blamed Obama’s handling (i.e., nationalizing) of the auto industry on … President Bush. Obama, you see, was saddled with this mess because Bush – over the objections of his own party – decided back in December to raid billions in public money intended for bailing out the financial sector in order to bail out the automakers.
What a load of crap. What’s worse is that the media let’s them get away with it. Speaking of the media, The Hollywood Reporter published a report about how GE stock holders accused GE/NBC of media bias at a meeting. GE had the gall to cut someone’s mike for asking a question. GE wasn’t happy about THR reporting the story so they punished THR’s parent company, Nielson.
It’s a very dangerous situation when any huge multinational corporation wages war against media companies. Especially when that huge multinational corporation is General Electric, which itself owns a media company, NBC Universal, and it’s using all its power and influence and money to try to harm another media company, Nielsen, and Nielsen Business Media, and its trade publication The Hollywood Reporter. This certainly sounds like a situation which the FCC, and the FTC, and the U.S. Justice Department should be investigating. Just one problem: the controversy stems from GE/NBCU’s coverage of President Obama.
You should read the whole thing, it’s despicable. I certainly will avoid any future purchases of any GE products and I won’t be watching NBC any time soon.
Update: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino ripped Goolsbee’s outrageous claims.
“If the Obama transition team had not wanted us to provide breathing space for the automakers – with an express condition of future proven viability – they should have said so at the time, and those concerns would have been given considerable weight and may have changed the outcome,” she wrote, in an entry beginning, “Whoaaa, Nellie – I can’t let this go unanswered.”
