The 2012 Presidential election: a corporate viewpoint

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Lots of stuff has happened since last week’s election – almost more than I can keep track of. But here are two wonderful stories:

 

 

The day after Barack Obama won his re-election bid, the chief executive of Murray Energy, Robert E. Murray, gathered his staff and began to read a prayer. He asked God to forgive America for its choice of president, and he prayed for “guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.” He closed with a heartfelt “amen.”

 

Then he fired 156 people.

 

Murray explained that the layoffs were inevitable in light of Obama’s re-election. He’s not the only coal baron to cite the president as the cause of the industry’s supposed death knell. CONSOL Energy Inc. President Nicholas Deluliis blamed Obama for 145 planned layoffs, while Alpha Natural Resources CEO Kevin Crutchfield cited the Obama-created “regulatory environment” as the basis for 1,200 job cuts this fall. (See the full story on Slate.)

 

 

 

Isn’t that nice?

 

 

Here’s another story:

 

 

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter, who previously said that President Obama’s health care program would force the company to raise the price of pizza, now says the health care law could cause franchises to slice full-time employees’ hours.

Schnatter, who supported Republican Mitt Romney, made the comments Wednesday night to students at Edison State College in Naples, Fla., where Schnatter has a vacation home.

The Anchorage resident’s initial comment came in August when hetold stock analysts during a conference call that the cost of the Affordable Care Act will lead the company to raise its prices 11 to 14 cents per pizza. (From the Louisville Courier-Journal.)

 

 

Some thoughts:

 

 

-      I’m sorry to get all Marxist on you, but I need to remind you that owners will always exploit workers, and owners will always howl when government tries to make them treat workers better. This is why regulation is necessary.

-      Unions are vital to uphold the interests of labor. This ain’t just my philosophy – it’s in my bones. My mother (who grew up in a coal-mining area near Seattle) told me that, when she was a little girl, she used to go down to the mines during strikes and throw lumps of coal at the scabs.

-      Is Schnatter serious? Fourteen cents a pizza? That’s horrendous. Imagine! Just to make sure his employees have health care!

-      The coal industry is horribly corrupt as it is. It’s sweetly evil to see that the coal CEO quoted in the first piece began with a prayer for the salvation of America. I imagine a lot of his employees are praying for something quite different.

 

 

Now the good news: a majority of American voters backed Obama. Republicans are losing seats – not enough to make a huge difference, but the tide is turning.

 

 

So remember not to buy Papa John’s pizza.

 

 

(Not that you would anyway. It tastes like cardboard with pepperoni on top.)

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The Supreme Court’s health care decision

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Yesterday morning I was at the office, crawling under a desk to connect a telephone wire, when Partner called me. “The Supreme Court upheld health care!” he crowed. “Roberts voted with the liberals!”

 

 

I was so excited that I got up too quickly and bumped my head.

 

 

Seriously: I’m delighted. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a landmark piece of legislation, which finally put health care into the same category as education: everyone should have access to it, in the same way. No more marching poor people off to emergency rooms, where they can wait patiently like the paupers they are. No more hospitals amortizing the money they lose on emergency-room care by charging more for standard services. No more insurance companies charging inflated premiums because hospitals charge inflated rates.

 

 

Well, maybe not all at once. But a huge step in the right direction: the biggest step since Medicare.

 

 

The Right’s attempt to overturn the health care act was, for me, sick-making. They couched it as a moral and political issue: how dare the government tell us what to do?

 

 

Honey, they do it all the time: law enforcement, income tax. Get used to it. And this is for something good and well-intentioned.

 

I have seen, just last evening online, images of Obama burning the Constution. I also read online that a number of angry conservatives are Tweeting about moving to Canada, to escape the communist tyrant Obama. (Canada, get it? That place with free health care?) When it was pointed out to them that this made no sense, they claimed it was a joke. Really?  “I’m moving to Canada” means, to me, “I like the idea of free health care.” One said: “At least in Canada they’re openly socialist, unlike Obama who pretends to be a democratic leader.”

 

 

Yikes yikes yikes.

 

 

And here’s the best part: even if the Mayans are right and Romney becomes President, he will have a hell of a time overturning Obama’s legislation; he will never have a supermajority in either house, and Democrats will filibuster him to death on the issue.

 

 

And the American people, in the meantime, will discover that it’s nice to have health care, and the polls will turn in favor of health care.

 

 

And you know how Mitt Romney feels about polls, and about agreeing with the majority.

 

 

I got up yesterday morning thinking it was going to be a sucky day. And it turned out to be a great day for America.

 

 

Who knew?

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