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Commissar GM

By John Batchelor on June 2, 2009 at 10:00 PM in Current Affairs

Loves the Red Sox.

Brian Deese, 31 year-old policy flack for the Obama administration, is freshly named as the car czar’s point man on dismantling and rearranging the fallen GM.

There is no sensible explanation for this decision except that the Obama administration does not want to own or run GM, it just happens to be true, so Larry Summers and Steve Rattner have approved in some off-handed fashion the assignment of a worthy young man who apparently has no knowledge of the auto industry and may never have spent time inside an auto plant.

The long possibility for this bizarre turn, on the eve of the casting off of GM from the Dow 30, is that Brian Deese is a Gen X version of a commissar — a political officer in charge of maintaining the aura and discipline of a Leninist cult at any particular enterprise.

This seems a wildly inappropriate comparison, so I shall look elsewhere for an analogy. Thaddeus McCotter mentioned to me on Sunday 31 that the White House had constructed an auto task force that lacked experience in the auto industry. I see that Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter was his customary droll and understated self.

In the meantime, above find a video on the Recovery.org site of the suddenly potent Brian Deese. He is personable, soft spoken, earnest and without gravity. His dad is a Boston College political science professor, his mom is a renewable energy engineer. You could have guessed this? How about the fact that he dropped out of Yale Law, worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign, then switched to the winning Obama campaign after it won? Or that he lives with his dog?

This may be a new kind of passive punishment for GM. Bought by POTUS to be handed over to a boldly ignorant and unskilled apparatchik who thinks of himself as dog-lover. We can assume that he also loves the Red Sox, the Patriots and slow walks in the moonlight with a Blackberry, in that order. (It is presumptuous to mention, but it would help a deal if he can bear false witness and claim that he goes the Bruins games when they play good teams like the Red Wings.)

Is this Harry Hopkins, 2009? Soon, after resolving Detroit, he may be off to London to network with Churchill’s inheritors. This is change.

http://www.sonicninjakitty.wordpress.com Sonic Ninja Kitty

NO formal business education, NO for-profit business experience, NO auto industry experience, Yale drop-out.

Bizarre!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What is going on?!?!?
HARP

Another Obama boy toy ???
bureedrop

Well, he did stay at a Holiday Inn last night…
HARP

Hey….cheer up. It`s only taken 4 months and we are already number 1:

Six hours ago, Le Monde quoted Barack Obama as saying that the US is one of the largest Muslim countries on the planet:

The United States and the Western world must learn about Islam, and indeed if we count the number of American Muslims, we see that the United States is one of the largest Muslim country the planet.

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/06/02/americathedutiful/
Brodie

WTF???Oh shit! I cannot believe this nonsense…please- wake me when its over!
Docelder

I think they need somebody who has actually ran a car dealership. The problem is I think, these guys don’t have their ear to the ground to know anything about what car buyers want, what it takes to make them buy and finance new cars, and why people don’t want the cars they now have that aren’t salable.
TeakWoodKite

When one plays Jumanji…

Peter Shepherd: “His fangs are sharp. He likes your taste. Your party better move poste haste.”
Judy Shepherd: I don’t like the sound of that.
John

I hate to break up this post with some background, but people do realize that he didn’t just “work” on Hillary’s campaign, he was her economic policy director. Now with this site and a vast amount of readers who claimed to find Hillary’s judgement to be top notch, why are all these comments coming across as odd to me?
John

Right after he was Hillary’s “boy toy” as her Economic policy director…But he didn’t drop out of Yale, he took a leave from Yale Law School, big difference, he already holds a degree from Middlebury, a very reputable school.
SJ

Nothing is going on have you noticed the article from Jake Tapper now says we can all now say Obama has Muslim roots.

It is really unbelievable what is going on now guess a lot of people were asleep during this election.
lorac

This is the first I’ve heard of this guy, but what occurs to me, in response, is that Hillary didn’t have him in charge of auto industry rebuilding, she had him in charge of economic policy. As I said, I don’t know much about this guy, but maybe he knows something about economic policy, and nothing about the auto industry.
hokma

“NO formal business education, NO for-profit business experience, NO auto industry experience”

Perfect experience to be an Obama economic advisor.
hokma

It is worth noting that there were immediate buyers for Hummer and Saturn, which means that there would have been immediate buyers of all the viable GM car brands had the company not been saved and been forced to sell off the components.

Would jobs have been lost? Yes. But no more, and maybe less, than havebeen/are being lost now.

The difference would have been that taxpayers would not have been on the hook for all that bailout money.

When Henry Ford first came out with the Model T it became an overnight success and quickly placed the leading manufacturer of horse-drawn buggies at the brink of insolvency. The owner of that company was William Durant who didn’t go to the government for a bail-out. He recognized that his company had no future and decided to join the future and started an automobile company named General Motors.
HC123

You miss the point. Allowing GM to sink or swim would not hand taxpayer dollars to the UAW. Paying the UAW just about guarantees Obama a victory in 2012.

Men like Durant no longer live in America, we have become a welfare state. He would probably be in Dubai right now.
listing starboard

Bingo, this was all about guaranteeing that the UAW leeches get funded by the taxpayer and vote Democrat for life. NOW Obama is bragging about his Muslim roots and middle name.
pm317

The usual 0bama and 0bots cover — Hillary did it too! Why don’t you and he stop doing that? Does he always have to be in Hillary’s shadow?
Ginger

The vast difference is that Ford was a citizen of this country. Those vehicles give/gave our people jobs.

The “company” who bought Hummer…? China!

http://dakiniland.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/a-deadly-unwind/
hokma

Henry Ford may never have been successful with the Model T is there was a UAW back then, so who knows where the American automotive business would have been had the UAW been around from the beginning.

The point I was making was that these bailouts will not prove to be beneficial to UAW workers. The bailouts and government intervention is like bailing water out of a sinking Titanic because it has all your riches versus jumping onto another ship that does not. Government intervention into GM will certainly end that company.

I am sitting here as a Jew and you don’t want to know what I am thinking concerning Obama and what has been transpiring over the past week and now.
xax

Of course, GE is on his team.

This is officially the PUNT Presidency.
xax

And I think there’s a HUGE difference between theoretical economic policy and practical. And let’s face it, the campaigns were all theory. Now he has to put it into practice.

Economic policy director, or economic policy staff? Where is he listed as director? No doubt he was in the top because Clinton graduated from where and where did he just come from?

Yale is the answer.
xax

By the way it’s common practice of the Obama administration to try and give legitimacy to the illegitimate by saying such things as:

(Insert name here) was picked by a Republican president.

or

(Insert name here) worked under (Clinton, Bush I/II)

or

(Insert name here)is just like (Clinton, JFK, Reagan, FDR, Lincoln, Washington, Filmore, Confucius uhhhh, Xuanzang, and yes, Jesus Christ)
http://www.sonicninjakitty.wordpress.com Sonic Ninja Kitty

Operating a huge complex business and being familiar with economic theories are about as different as performing critical brain surgery and being familiar with all the medical dramas on TV.
http://patriotparty1 patriotparty1

Hillary’s campaign was out of money and he was her finance manager? Her campaign manager was a fraud for Obama and now apparently so was this guy. They left her and went to work for him after they trashed her campaign.
Why ask why? Why is he sending people to our doors to get a GPS location on the front door? Does China want the exact address of the property they own?
Retired

Deese has driven a car. Therefore, he is qualified by Obama administration standards. We elected Obama without vetting him and now we have to live with his shit. The Germans chose National Socialism, we chose Idiocracy. Get over it and tuck in for the next four years.
Stray

So this means a U.S.A. military vehicle is now going to be made by a foreign government?
trixta

Brian Deese — does this appointment really surprise anyone? Isn’t Geithner who is sorely under staffed as Treasury Sec virtually running the whole economic show?

Also, LOL, Harp! I think you’re right on the mark. Let’s add another to the OBoyToy list — RIchard Wolffe. Read this from Ben Smith’s article on the new Wolffe book:

Among his press plane colleagues, Wolffe’s access to the candidate was no secret. After a campaign event at a restaurant in Reno last August, Wolffe and Obama shared a heaping piece of frosted carrot cake as the Secret Service ushered the rest of the press corps to a waiting bus, according to a pool report. Reporters also knew that Wolffe was regularly playing basketball with the candidate – games that were off limits to everyone else.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23252_Page2.html#ixzz0HUedJqZd&B