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November 21, 2005
Senator Kennedy's Bad Timing
Ted Kennedy's column today over at Huffington Post was typically flaccid rhetoric from the Senator, attacking Wal Mart's "shameful tactics to boost profits at the expense of the families of hard-working men and women." Kennedy complains that the 1990s' "Main Street Merchant of Doom" subjugates women, minorities and hard working Americans and it puts vintage t-shirt companies out of business, and the Senator's had enough. The resulting edict was the "Ten Commandments of Good Corporate Citizenship," which functionally speaking is the domestic policy talking points memo for the post-Moynihan left.
But Kennedy's were at their core purely economic complaints, and one consequence of that and the Senator's poor sense of timing was the laughably ironic coincidence of Kennedy's column and General Motors' announcement, just in time for Thanksgiving, that it would be letting go 30,000 workers. GM's problems represent the nasty truth of the union-enforced welfare system Kennedy espouses. It was in May, and in the midst of GM's decline, that George Will described GM's problems as largely resembling what Kennedy seeks to impose on Wal Mart, ones that transformed GM from a car-maker into a welfare state, hence its Herb Stein moment today.
Posted by bill at November 21, 2005 08:41 PM
