Just a quick hit here; but today's New York Times Magazine has an article that caused me instant uncontrollable nausea and vomiting. The article is all about Terry McAuliffe's latest adventure starting an electric car company, and the favors he's pulling in from Bill Clinton and Haley Barbour to get it off the ground.
No way to put lipstick on this pig: Terry McAuliffe embodies everything that's horribly wrong with American politics, business, and government in 2012.
To whit: McAuliffe was a young business hustler with a glad-handing, back-slapping, used car salesman style from the get-go. He got rich by investing $100,000 in Global Crossing, and cashing out millions. If the name Global Crossing doesn't ring a bell, here's the deal: it was a loathsome scam chartered in Bermuda that bought up a bunch of regional phone companies, forced employees to pack their retirement funds with company stock, squeezed every last nickel out of the companies, then froze employees' pension funds while the executives cashed out all their stock days ahead of the collapse. Just exactly like Enron. The CEO walked away with hundreds of millions. The employees were raped, left penniless with their pensions destroyed. That's how Terry got rich.
Now, Terry McAuliffe is running a start-up electric car company nominally based in Mississippi. But the signature product, the 'MyCar', is being manufactured in...wait for it...I'm sure you can't guess....China! Dingdingding! We have a winner: Terry is trying to get even richer by moving another American industry to China.
And to grease the skids for his excellent adventure, Terry is pulling in all his markers, everything he can glean from his famous 18,000 name Rolodex. That's why he has a beaming Bill Clinton and a grinning Haley Barbour photographed with him in the Mississippi Potemkin factory standing in for the actual Chinese manufacturer.
Everything that's wrong with America's smug leadership/plutocrat class: rich white guys yucking it up for the camera as they work on getting even richer via offshore'd production, while America's middle class slips ever deeper into poverty, Colorado burns, Midwest corn withers, and the ice caps melt.
