Thoughts of Obama From Bama

Weeks 85: “Those who can – do. Those who can’t – teach” HL Menckenn

Fly down to Miami
Get yourself a boat
Fill it full of suntan oil
And rent yourself a goat

Ain't no registration
Ain't no student loan
You may not learn to read or write
But you will surely learn to roll dem bones

Get on back to school
Domino college, back to school
Boneyard full of knowledge
W-w-w-orking vacation in a third world nation
Back to school “Domino College”, Jimmy Buffett

Diverse backgrounds, experience, skill sets, and perspectives typically add value to any endeavor. Private sector businesses, nonprofits, academia and government agencies can all benefit from this approach when staffing their respective organization.

What’s also required to be great is a backward and forward knowledge of your core business. A combination of practical experience, education, core competency skills and a common/shared vision.

Our current Administration led by the most unqualified and inexperienced “CEO” to ever hold court in the Oval Office lacks any diversity or expertise and shares a common vision with the likes of Castro, Chavez, Mao and Islamic Arab despots throughout the Middle East. With few exceptions the entire West Wing is infested with pointy headed academics, (mostly with a Harvard connection) Socialist and tax cheats without a lick of executive leadership experience in government or the private sector.

All these academic geniuses, including our Harvard Scholar and Mr. Law Review-in-Chief, view governing, the economy and business as one big ole theoretical experiment or educational seminar. Having spent most of their careers in the pampered and sheltered confines of the world’s most elitist institutions of higher education meeting a payroll; negotiating a line of credit; creating wealth; developing strategies to infiltrate a new market; dominating the competition; leading through innovation; and maximizing productivity are literally foreign concepts to these folks.

So what we have at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a bunch of Ivey League yahoos with not much more than a frog’s hair of practical business or governing experience running the world’s largest economy and only super power. These academic egg heads with absolutely zero relevant experience are also in the process of nationalizing a big chunk of our private sector economy including the healthcare, financial, energy, and auto industries.

Certainly not the first Administration to staff up with a “those who can’t – teach” gang of tenured PhD types possessing more useless book smarts than white on rice while at the same time so deficient in street smarts/common sense a lot of these academic wizards would forget to put on their britches in the morning if somebody didn’t hang um up on the front door knob the night before.

True to form for the Harvard /Chicago /Socialist/ Hope /Change/ Believe/ Yes We Can Run the Government and Wall Street without any experience or qualifications for the job because it’s our fate, burden, and destiny to rule the world bunch their the first to take it to such extreme and unprecedented levels. A comparison with previous Administration’s staffing strategies sure enough reveals cause for great heartache, misery, consternation and alarm.

Following is the percentage of the past eighteen President's cabinet members who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet:

1. Eisenhower............57%
2. Reagan...................56%
3. W..............................55%
4. Nixon.......................53%
5. Wilson ....................52%
6. GH Bush.................51%
7. F. Roosevelt..........50%
8. Truman...................50%
9. Harding...................49%
10. Coolidge..................48%
11. Johnson..................47%
12. Hoover.................... 42%
13. Ford..........................42%
14. Taft............................40%
15. Clinton ...................39%
16. T Roosevelt………..38%
17. Carter........................32%
18. Kennedy...................30%
19. And the winner, winner, chicken dinner is the Obama Administration with a 22 point spread between 2cd to last and last and 49 points between first and last coming in at a truly astonishing 8%.

A whopping 92% of Obama’s senior leadership group wouldn’t recognize a private sector business enterprise if one crawled up behind them and bit um on the ass. This lack of real world business experience xplains a lot.

For instance:

• The President is not only anti-business but hostile towards the private sector. His remarks and actions towards oil companies, BP in particular; Insurance companies; Doctors; Wall Street banks and financial services firms; Auto industry management; open shop non union manufacturers; non green energy companies; and even news channels that question his policies have been irresponsible, in many cases unsubstantiated, and detrimental to stock values adversely impacting millions of middle class stockholders.
• Their bullheaded insistence the Fed can spend us out of a recession. To an egg headed academic it looks good in theory but it’s never worked before and it ain’t gonna work now.
• Their obsession with Marxist/Socialist Utopian theory.
• Their hankering towards the redistribution of wealth
• A propensity to over evaluate everything leading to indecision, uncertainty and inaction
• Total indifference and lack of knowledge of the importance of Returns on Investments and Cost/Benefit Analysis
• Inability to and no interest in balancing a budget
• Clueless about the adverse consequences of deficit spending and the accumulation of unsustainable debt

What are these academicians good at?

• Achieving tenure
• Advocating every extreme leftwing cause known to man
• Enjoying themselves on paid leave for every holiday and long breaks including summer vacations that folks in the private sector that actually work for a living would never be granted. With the exception of Union members, Federal and other government workers of course
• Conducting so called research funded by our hard earned tax dollars on such pressing issues including “Why college freshman tend to gain weight?” – Might be the beer and pizza but let’s spend a $100 grand to be sure; “Does sexual activity decline as we age?”; “Do video games contribute to child obesity?”
• For the sake of argument lets accept the Administration’s numbers that their One Trillion Stimulus/Spending Bill saved or created three million jobs. That equates to around $330,000 or there abouts per job. These pointy headed academics think that’s one hell of a good deal. A CEO in the private sector reporting these figures to their Board would be fired on the spot
• Publishing papers and articles on subjects nobody cares about, have no practical applications and that typically appeal to only fellow academic boneheads

President Obama has surrounded himself with a bunch of over educated anti-business academics whose abstract economic theories combined with the Administration’s Socialist program initiatives have led to an anemic, jobless and painfully slow recovery. It’s high time we sent these eggheads back to school before this slow recovery transforms into a double dip recession.

I am, “American by Birth and Southern by the Grace of God”

Ron W. Garikes

Alabama, (1-0) 48 – San Jose State, 3