President Obama’s has taken steps that are not usually seen in American businesses;e is interfering with their decisions in running a company. He is basically telling 2 of the big 3 car companies that received the TARP money to ship up or else…

President Obama has forced out the Chief Executing Officer of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, and six other top officials based on the advice of his “auto czar” Steve Rattner. He has also issued an ultimatum to Chrysler, warning them to merge with Fiat or not get anymore government aid.

Wall Street did not respond well to this. It fell about 3.7% on fears of government interfering with other sections of businesses. Many fear that there would be more warnings for people like the CEOs of Banks who have received TARP money, that they better ship up or shape out.

Yet this is not seen by the netizens as a fair move at all. Words such as Communism and Fascism are screaming out of blogs. Isn’t this weird ? Weren’t this the same people who were so angry when the government were giving out the TARP money? So now when the Government say “Improve or go bankrupt to pay back debt with interest…” People are so pist. Why? I really do not understand that.

I am one that was completely against the bailing out of the banks but supported the bailing out of the auto industry. I felt that there were too many jobs at stake in the auto industry, not only by the car companies, but the car suppliers who also sell these parts to the foreign companies in America and the dealers. But I always felt that like banks, government should only loan out the money with conditions.

Banks would always ask for a good business plan before they loan you the money. That was how companies start all over the world. Now, GM and Chrysler want more loans from the US government. So the US government is now saying, you want this money, I give you a month or two to improve before I give you the funds. This happens all the time in the business world.

Secondly, should GM and Chrysler not be able to improve according to the terms set by the “car czar”, they would be forced to declare bankruptcy with the taxpayers getting back the money that was loaned to the car companies with interest (though it is very close to 0%)!

I am in full support of this. I think this is what the Bush administration should have done last October. They should have been the ones that make the terms and conditions when they were lending the money to the institutions.

That was what President Obama should have done the moment he stepped into power. He should have gone through line by line the contract given to the banks when they were loaned the money and learn lessons from it.

I do not know why people are against this. I really do not get it. Maybe it is because they fear government intervention in how business is being run. Some say that this is what Socialists and Fascists do. If these people really think that this is really socialist or fascist, then by their standards the entire business world is socialist or fascist.

The person that many people do not talk about is Steve Rattner. This is the guy calling the shots. This is the Czar, yet all attention is being put on the President. I do not absolve the President from blame or glory but I feel that Steve Rattner is the person that should have the spotlight on this issue. He is the man for the auto industry. And for now, I think he is doing an excellent job.

To end off, I urge President Obama to go on further and extend this form of ultimatums to the banks. Lets bankrupt AIG and this idea that companies are too big to fail. If they do not have a good plan, bankrupt them. That is what the banks themselves would do.

I know that I am very much against the tide in the net, so please leave your comments down below to air your views.

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• Obama: We Cannot Let Auto Industry Vanish (cbsnews.com)
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Loyal readers on this site would be very much surprised by this headline. They would know that I am a person that has a tremendous amount of respect for President Obama even though I am an Independent. I am with the President on a lot of issues.

This does not mean that I did sit back and not criticize the President. Unlike many lawmakers in America, I read line by line of the stimulus package and told which aspects of the stimulus package I agree with the President and which aspect I did not.

What might shock readers here is the fact that I am going to seem extremely harsh on the President Obama in this article. To these readers, I have to say that even though I am a supporter of the President and was the best candidate in the election, he is not God. He is not untouchable and if he does something that I think is not right, I think it is my job to slam it. Here why President Obama would fail.

President Obama is taking the United States of America in a direction that would doom the country. While he scores a 50% on the way he is handled the stimulus package and did do a better job that the Republicans in writing one, it is the debt that I feel that President Obama is failing to control miserably.

Unlike most Republicans who seem to follow the lead of their Avatar Rush and want the President to fail on every other issue and Democrats who would make a statue of the President for worshipping if they could, I on the other hand would like to hammer on the facts. I am not going to use figures that are from the President and his administration himself.

Based on the figures given to the American public on http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/fy2010_new_era/Summary_Tables2.pdf President Obama is projecting a total deficit of nearly 10 trillion dollars in the next 10 years. In other words the national debt is going to double by the time the President finishes his first term in office in 2013. The President would only be cutting down the deficit to the national debt in 2011. In the own words written down by the President and his staff, the debt would be more than 60% by 2018. That is huge.

A second aspect that is worrying me is that the President is banking on the deficit to go down by having the rate of growth in the receipts being faster that the rate of outlays. In simple terms, America is going to lose less money in the future because she is going to earn more more quickly than she is going to spend. The President is banking on America’s net income to double by 2018 while he expects spending to go up by less than a trillion. That to me is very dangerous for the President to predict something like this.

Lastly, the President is even honest enough to tell the people that interest from the debt that cannot be controlled would be eating to his deficit margin and would peak at 2013. After 2013, the interest would cause the deficit to rise higher and higher.

The problem I feel with President Obama is that he is a person that is looking at things at a micro level. He is looking at the average American today and is wondering, “What is this person’s problem?” I feel that at many instances President Obama is not exercising the concern about long term debt control enough.

I think he seriously needs to be looking on how to cut spending in the future. Okay, should America have an extraordinarily high deficit this year and maybe the next, I can understand. But after that, President Obama needs to lead the country in thinking of how to lower this debt.

While ideal Republicans go about solving the crisis by cutting spending and ideal Democrats do it by raising taxes on the rich, the actual way to go about doing this is to ensure that people themselves become richer. Wages for the middle class since the President Reagan era has been about stagnant while the top became richer and richer. That itself is already a problem.

America needs to go back making things. They need to make cars that work, unlike the high consumption cars that we see today. They need to make solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear power plants. America needs a new aviation strategy. America may not be the leading place to make stuff, but it should be the best place for research to be carried out.

I really feel that President Obama needs to look at his figures once again and think of what should not be in his budget right now. When the budget moves to the house and when there is more details, I would give a step by step account of what should be in and what should not be in.

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This entire thing is something that I really find rather frustrating about the Internet. It generates a lot of BS or nonsense that would be spread well and there would be people that would believe it. Another example would be of those idiots that say that George Bush caused 9/11 and that the world would end by the time the Mayan calender runs out in 2012!

First lets see the reason that Russia and China are unhappy with the US dollar. In the case of Russia, Russia is not happy that she is being affected when she does not have much of a trade relation with the US at all. Most of her raw materials and services are sold to Europe. But since the US economy collapse, the deflation that has happened caused the tremendous effect of the price of the raw materials and services in Russia making her extraordinarily badly affected by the current global crisis. E.g. America sells 35% less cars than she should, Russia is selling half what she should.

Having a global currency, should the US economy collapse there would still be a very much limited effect on Russia. Europe would still need Russian resources and Russia would not see the value of her oil drop 70% in a year.

This is similar to the case with China. Russia sells natural resources to Europe, China sells everything else to every other place on Earth. China therefore needs her currency to be “small” so that her goods are cheap. She does this by using her trade surplus to buy American debt. Now that her trade surplus is virtually eradicated, she can no longer keep her currency down, and thus her goods be deemed more expensive to Americans.

So what would a global currency do for China? For one, a global currency would not allow trade deficits or surpluses to automatically correct themselves. In other words, the Americans can keep on buying Chinese goods and China would not need to buy risky American Treasuries aka debt. That is the reason why these 2 countries are so against the dollar being the de-facto currency of the world.

Let me make this clear to anybody reading this article : The US dollar is not dying! Representative Ron Paul is wrong on this issue as he is on so many other issues. If you have traveled around the world, you would know that the American dollar is the currency that the world trust. Executives all around the world still want to be paid in the $US. For example a CEO of a Thai company would rather be paid in $US rather than Thai Baht.

The dollar has got nothing to do with the current economic crisis that is happening all around the world. It is not being impacted much at all. If the dollar is dying, there would be a lot of inflation going on, not deflation. Deflation is happening now because there is not enough demand for the goods in the country. It has got nothing to do with the dollar at all.

What this speaks to in the broader sense is the sense of how people make things up and how easily the world can follow suit with it. I really urge people to study these things from credible sources such as books and articles and not from people like Representative Ron Paul or people that demand the Gold standard back. You can bet that any topic given here is genuine and not made up by the “mainstream media” or by people that are trying to take over your world.

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In the first instance, China has banned one of the most visited site in the world, YouTube. The reasons cited for this is that there were videos about Tibetan monks being beaten up and shot at and this was deemed as propaganda that the Chinese government did not want the world to see.

What troubles me most about this is how quiet the world is about this issue. Remember how the world was so angry with the Pakistani cable network that pulled the plug on Google because of the Prophet Muhammad pictures being shown there? Where is the outrage now? Is it just because it is China therefore everybody shuts up about it?

It is fantastic the way the Chinese people are being brainwashed. Just look at the comments in YouTube and other videos of Chinese citizens. Look at how they are thinking. Many of think that the Dalai Lama has a vendetta against the Chinese people and is a political animal. Many claim that he want an area that is extremely large, some going as far as sayng that he wants half of China! They also claim that monks were living lavishly before 1949!

E.g. One of the most popular lines being used is “The majority of China’s more than 1 billion want to see that Tibet be part of China. Therefore it should.” Really? So if majority of Americans want Canada to be part of America, Canada belongs to America?

The next news that should trouble all is that China has coerced the South Africans to ban the Dalai Lama from visiting their country. This is a very big victory for the Chinese government. The South African government has denied a visa to the Dalai Lama as they fear a backlash from China with regards to her World Cup 2010 tournament.

What is so sad is that a small country like South Africa is virtually having her hands tied up by the Chinese and there is nobody around the world to counter this. All the Chinese government has to do is to ban the Chinese from visiting South Africa and there go lots of the income over there. Another way that the Chinese can hold the South Africans hostage on the fact that China buys a lot of goods from South Africa and controls a lot of mines over there.

Where is the world going berserk over this? What next? Would the world be banned from having the Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou as a guest in their country to talk about the economy of these two countries? We have already seen China’s refusal blame the Sudanese government for atrocities committed in Darfur as the Chinese lust for the resources that Sudan provides. The power that China is showing is really getting unnerving recently.

I wonder how long more would it take for President Obama and his administration to lose patience with the Chinese. President Obama may be a person that believes in soft power but for how long can he be soft when China is behaving like a hard behind?

Just weeks ago there was an incident of Chinese military ships surrounding an American mapping ship in international waters. They got the cheek to tell the Americans that they are not welcomed in the South China sea and some can even claim that the entire South China Sea belongs to China! What did President Obama and his administration do then? Just give a formal protest.

I think that it is high time that the US deal with China as the UN is so pathetic in dealing with China. China has veto power in the UN after all. The first thing that the Americans must do is to pay back the debt she owe China. I would rather get the 1.5 trillion printed recently to have gone paying China her debt and leaving the debt behind for future generation Americans.

I believe that though this is different from the dynamics of the Cold War in the past, there are some similarities in the way that China be handled. She is getting extremely powerful and flexing her muscle in different ways.

Lastly, I would like to end this article with the fact that the best way to beat China in the future is to win her citizen’s hearts today! I think that needs to be done by a President Obama like figure for the Chinese. What I write here would not really sell well with the Chinese.

They would think that I am the enemy and that I just want China to fail. That is not true, I just want China to behave like the rest of the world though.

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This comes after an Israeli group gave accounts of Israel students on what happened in Gaza when they were serving as soldiers. The International Red Cross has also said earlier that The Israelis did not treat wounded Gazan as they were supposed to do so in international law.

I am a person that is very much against the abuse of human rights. I believe all human beings are equal and should not be tortured for any reason what so ever. I think that soldiers should not be mistreating civilians in war and I fully support the Geneva Convention and think that every country should abide by it.

I think that the should individual Israeli soldiers commit a crime, they should be punished. Should they have vandalized a home, the least that the Israeli government should do is to fine that individual soldier to pay to restore that home. People that kill people for no reasons should be put to jail. All this I do agree.

The point that I very much disagree with is the sentiment that Israel herself should be punished because of this. Israel waged war because her people were dying everyday from rocket attacks. The reason was a very legitimate one. There was no order from the top that there be vandalism of home, destruction of property and theft. This was just the action of individual soldiers.

It would not be fair to punish the whole country for what some of their people did. Would it be fair that the world press ex-President Bush and ex-Vice President Cheney for the torture that was happening at Abu Ghraib in 2003? In fact, until today Vice President Cheney thinks that enhanced interrogational techniques aka torture is necessary to “keep America sage”.

I believe that this is just the United Nations bowing down to pressure from Muslim nations to go after Israel. This is very much so after they issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bahsir. Almost immediately after that there were claims from Muslim countries then. Many of them, including President al-Bashir himself, point to the fact that Israel were not punished for atrocities that happened to Palestine in the Gaza war then.

Why didn’t the UN talk about the rockets that were raining down on Israel before the war? Why didn’t they issue an arrest warrant for the Hamas leadership for murdering helpless Israeli people then? Why the outrage over the destruction that the fire cause and hush about the flame that started the fire?

And when are people going to understand that all this unnecessary death would go on as long as the Middle East problem would not be solved? The situation is getting worse there politically right now. The Israelis have shifted further to the right than they ever had before. The reason is that they are very unhappy over their homes and citizens being attacked.

Benjamin Netanyahu was just given more time by the Israeli President to form a government in Israel. The reason: He and the Kadima Party led by Tzipi Livni cannot agree whether Israel should support a two states solution or not be bothered about Palestine at all. For the sake of peace, I really hope that Ms Livni wins that argument. Anything less would make the problem worse than what it is right now.

I really think that the world should not employ a double standard when it comes to human rights. I stress that the individual Israeli soldiers should be punished, but not Israel as a whole.