Federal labor board seeks to ground Boeing

Can federal bureaucrats tell a private company where to build a factory?

Members of President Obama's National Labor Relations Board think they can. In a decision that even the New York Times is describing as "highly unusual for the federal government," Lafe Solomon, who was appointed to the board by Obama, filed a complaint on behalf of the NLRB on Wednesday seeking to force the Boeing Co. to build an assembly line in Washington state instead of South Carolina. The NLRB action stems from Boeing's October 2009 decision to build a new factory for its new 787 Dreamliner airplane near Charleston, S.C. Boeing first sought to build the new plant near its existing facility in Puget Sound, but negotiations with the International Association of Machinists broke down when the union refused to agree to a long-term no-strike clause. The IAM had struck four times since 1989, costing Boeing at least $1.8 billion in revenue.

That's when Boeing chose South Carolina, a right-to-work state where, unlike Washington, workers are not forced to join unions. As a result of this policy, only 6.2 percent of South Carolinians belong to unions. Construction of Boeing's new Charleston factory is nearly complete, and the company has already hired more than 1,000 new employees, drawn mostly from within the immediate region. And back in Washington, Boeing has actually increased employment at its Puget Sound plant by 2,000 workers. But that isn't good enough for the IAM or the Obama White House. After suffering major defeats in Wisconsin and Ohio, the labor movement is looking for a scalp. Obama's NLRB is trying to turn Boeing into one.

The NLRB is hanging its case on a senior Boeing official's statement to the Seattle Times that "The overriding factor [in transferring the line] ... was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years." The NLRB absurdly claims this is "unlawful employer speech" that infringes on "a worker's fundamental" right to strike. But the Supreme Court has long held that firms may consider the economic effect of strikes when making business decisions. Also, Boeing's existing collective bargaining agreement with the IAM allows Boeing to build facilities at other locations. An administrative law judge will hear Boeing's objection to the NLRB's complaint June 14, so there still is hope sanity will prevail. But a decision in favor of the IAM would be a disaster not just for Boeing, but for American workers everywhere. A ruling in favor of Obama's NLRB would make it presumptively illegal for any unionized firm to invest in a right-to-work state.

At first, this would mainly hurt right-to-work states, as they would no longer be able to lure new businesses from existing unionized firms. But over the long run, this policy would hurt unions and all Americans. Why would any domestic company choose to build a factory in a forced-union state if it knew that meant it could never expand to a right-to-work state? Why would any international firm invest anywhere in this country if it knew the White House would favor political allies?

The NLRB isn't protecting workers, it is setting them up for eventual unemployment.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/04/federal-labor-board-seeks-ground-boeing#ixzz1KLoatSWm

Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts

As technical problems interrupted computer services provided by Amazon for a second day on Friday, industry analysts said the troubles would prompt many companies to reconsider relying on remote computers beyond their control.

The Foursquare Web site, as well as some other sites using Amazon Web Services, have had problems in the last two days.

“This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst for the research firm IDC, using the term for accessing services and information in big data centers remotely over the Internet from anywhere, as if the services were in a cloud. “It will force a conversation in the industry.”

That discussion, he said, will most likely center on what data and computer operations to send off to the cloud and what to keep inside the corporate walls.

But another issue, Mr. Eastwood said, will be a re-examination of the contracts that cover cloud services — how much to pay for backup and recovery services, including paying extra for data centers in different locations. That is because the companies that were apparently hit hardest by the Amazon interruption were start-ups that, analysts said, are focused on moving fast in pursuit of growth, and less apt to pay for extensive backup and recovery services.

Amazon set up a side business five years ago offering computing resources to businesses from its network of sophisticated data centers. Today, the company is the early leader in the fast-growing business of cloud computing.

In business, the cloud model is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for companies to outsource computing chores to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software.

Amazon has thousands of corporate customers, from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included Foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers.

The problems companies reported varied, but included being unable to access data, service interruptions and sites being shut down.

Amazon has data centers around the world, but the current problems have come from its big center in Northern Virginia, near Dulles airport. Amazon’s Web page on the status of its cloud services said on Friday that matters were improving but were still not resolved. A company spokeswoman said the updates would be Amazon’s only comment for now.

Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.

Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman.

BigDoor, a 20-employee start-up in Seattle, was knocked down by Amazon’s travails. It had backup and recovery services with Amazon, said Keith Smith, the chief executive, but only at Amazon’s data center in Virginia. “There’s always a trade-off,” Mr. Smith said, noting the expenses and developer time that would have been required to do more.

By Friday evening, most services at BigDoor, which makes game and rewards features for online publishers, were back up, but its Web site was still down.

The long-term toll to cloud computing, if any, is uncertain. Corporate cloud computing is expected to grow rapidly, by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014, IDC estimates.

Major technology suppliers are aggressively promoting different cloud offerings — some emphasizing a utility-style service, like Amazon, and others focusing more on selling big companies the hardware and software to more efficiently juggle computing workloads. The latter use the cloud technology, but companies own and control them — so-called private clouds.

The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data center services, was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel, he noted, is still safer than traveling in a car — analogous to cloud computing being safer than data centers run by individual companies.

“Every day, inside companies all over the world, there are technology outages,” Mr. Moorman said. “Each episode is smaller, but they add up to far more lost time, money and business.”

The Amazon setback, he said, should prove to be a learning experience. “We all have an interest in Amazon handling this well,” said Mr. Moorman, whose company is a competitor in the cloud business.

Labor Board Case Against Boeing Points to Fights to Come

Lafe Solomon, the acting general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, has filed a labor case against Boeing. “I can’t not issue a complaint in the face of such evidence,” he said.

For businesses, it was the type of action they have feared from a National Labor Relations Board dominated by Democrats. For labor unions, it was the type of action they have hoped for. And for both, it may be a sign of things to come.

These fears and hopes were stirred this week when the labor board’s top lawyer filed a case against Boeing, seeking to force it to move airplane production from a nonunion plant in South Carolina to a unionized one in Washington State. Boeing executives had publicly said they were making the move to avoid the kind of strikes the airplane maker had repeatedly faced in Washington; Lafe Solomon, the labor board’s acting general counsel, said the company’s motive constituted illegal retaliation against workers for exercising their right to strike.

The agency’s unusually bold action angered business groups and some politicians, who said it was an unwarranted attempt by the government to interfere with a fundamental corporate decision.

But under President Obama’s appointees, the agency, including Mr. Solomon and his staff, has sought to reinterpret and more vigorously enforce the rules governing employers and employees, from what workers can say about their bosses on Twitter to the use of Internet and phone voting in union elections.

How much ultimately changes will depend in large part on the decisions made by the five-member board, led by Wilma Liebman, that sits atop the agency. That panel hears cases brought by the board’s regional offices — overseen by Mr. Solomon — after employers, workers or unions file complaints.

Democratic-dominated boards often tilt toward unions and reverse the decisions of Republican-leaning boards, which usually tilt toward management, and vice versa. The current board — made up of three Democrats and one Republican, with one vacancy — is expected to reverse a Bush-era decision that stripped graduate teaching assistants at private universities of their right to bargain collectively. Labor experts also predict that the board will adopt a policy that makes it easier to organize nursing home workers by allowing unions to go after smaller units of workers inside those homes.

The biggest surprise has been the activist stance taken by Mr. Solomon, a career civil servant at the board for 39 years. He became acting general counsel in June 2010, and President Obama nominated him to be the permanent general counsel last January. The Senate has not yet confirmed him to the post.

In the Boeing case, Mr. Solomon charged that the company had illegally moved some production work of the 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina to punish workers for past strikes and to avoid future ones. The remedy proposed by Mr. Solomon has been denounced as extreme by many business leaders: that Boeing move the work back to its unionized Puget Sound facilities, after it made a $2 billion investment and hired 1,000 nonunion workers in South Carolina.

Outraged, the National Association of Manufacturers warned that if the agency won this case, “no company will be safe from the N.L.R.B. stepping in to second-guess its business decisions on where to expand.”

Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, complained, “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign.”

The Boeing case was not the first time that Mr. Solomon has riled the business community and its Republican allies. Saying it is the domain of the federal government, he recently threatened to sue four Republican-heavy states — Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah — in an effort to invalidate recent constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector workers from choosing a union by signing cards, a process known as card check.

He has also sought to extend the labor board’s reach into the world of the Internet. He approved requests from regional labor board officials to bring complaints against businesses that punished employees for Facebook and Twitter posts, including one case against Reuters. Mr. Solomon has also proposed that electronic voting be used when workers decide whether they want to unionize their workplace — a proposal that business groups maintain will make it easier for unions to coerce workers.

In an interview, Mr. Solomon, a 61-year-old Arkansas native, insisted that he was no radical.

“My goal is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act,” he said. That law, enacted in 1935, governs private sector workers’ right to unionize as well as relations between tens of thousands of companies and employees.

Mr. Solomon, who has worked for board members of both parties, said this case was straightforward: Boeing had retaliated against workers for exercising their federally protected right to strike. “They had a consistent message that they were doing this to punish their employees for having struck and having the power to strike in the future,” he said. “I can’t not issue a complaint in the face of such evidence.”

While the spotlight is on Mr. Solomon at the moment, people inside the agency and out expect that attention will soon move to the five-member board, whose decisions often have broad effect, much like court precedents.

Marshall Babson, a Republican member of the board under President Reagan, said the board had “teed up a lot of important issues for consideration.” He said its behavior had been more moderate than the Reagan board, which, he recalls, reversed about two dozen pro-union decisions in one year.

The Obama board is expected to reverse a Bush-era decision that lets workers petition to decertify a union within days of a company’s recognizing a union through card check. That new ruling would most likely restore the old requirement that workers had to wait a year before trying to oust their union.

“The current majority views its role as promoting unionization in the private sector,” said Peter Schaumber, a Bush appointee who stepped down from the board in August.

Lynn Rhinehart, the general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., applauds many of the board’s recent moves and wishes it would do far more. “A lot of what they’ve done is pretty routine,” she said. “I think the allegations of activism are pretty overblown.”

Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president for labor affairs at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said employers were expecting a series of unfavorable rulings. “Many decisions are still in the pipeline, and we think where those are going to wind up is clear,” he said.

The chamber opposes a proposal that would require all private sector employers to post notices explaining workers’ rights to unionize. It also faulted the board for being more aggressive about reinstating pro-union workers who are illegally fired during unionization drives.

Samuel Estreicher, a labor law professor at New York University, said that, so far, the Obama board’s actions had not been out of line. “I don’t buy into the accusations that they’re doing something crazy,” he said.

Nonetheless, he criticized Mr. Solomon’s complaint against Boeing, saying that companies vulnerable to strikes — like the 56-day walkout against Boeing in 2008 — should be able to move operations while explaining to employees that strikes hurt profits and production.

Boeing has called the case “legally frivolous” and “a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent.”

Mr. Solomon dismissed accusations that he was following President Obama’s wishes in bringing the Boeing case, saying he had had no conversations with the White House about it.

Mr. Solomon said he was just a “career person” enforcing the law. “I feel that I really had no choice,” he said.

Camouflaging Price Creep

American Eagle Outfitters in Times Square. The chain raised the price of striped polo shirts about a week ago to $34.50, up from $29.50.

A sale at a J. Crew store in Los Gatos, Calif. In contrast to the sign, the price of a women’s gingham oxford at the retail chain rose nearly 4 percent in the last year, to $72, up from $69.50.

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A Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt is $88, up from $79.50.

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Pac Sun

Bullhead girl’s jeans are two for $59, up from two for $55.

As retailers have been warning, their costs are rising as cotton and other materials get more expensive, laborers in China demand higher wages and fuel prices go up. By this fall, many have said, they must charge customers more. Because retailers pay for items about six months in advance, spring merchandise on the shelves for a few months was ordered and paid for in late summer, before costs soared. And when costs first started creeping up, clothing makers used an array of tactics to keep prices flat, whether by moving production to lower-cost countries like Bangladesh, using cheaper fabrics or ordering early to lock in prices.

By this time, though, retailers are running out of ways to avoid passing on the higher expenses. An uptick has quietly begun.

Companies are “raising prices, but are trying not to broadcast it for competitive reasons, and it also doesn’t look good for public relations reasons,” said John D. Morris, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets.

“They’re doing it before they’re actually incurring some of the higher costs,” Mr. Morris said, adding that steeper increases will mainly occur in the fall and winter.

Several stores have couched recent increases inside promotions, or nudged price tags up by a little under 10 percent, the point at which many shoppers’ radar picks up on the move. For example, at American Eagle Outfitters, the price of striped polo shirts was raised about a week ago to $34.50, up from $29.50. At Brooks Brothers, a wrinkle-free shirt is $88, up from $79.50 in January.

The increases have not been imposed from rack to rack. Retailers and analysts say stores are testing to see where customers will accept higher prices. Will shoppers accept more expensive jeans, but revolt if the price of T-shirts rises? Will they stop buying socks if the price goes up by 50 cents? What about $3?

Gauging customers’ reactions could help retailers avoid errors in pricing when they make widespread changes in the autumn. At American Eagle, “there are areas within the categories that we do believe that we can take prices up,” said Roger S. Markfield, vice chairman and executive creative director, in the company’s March conference call. “In the right items, the customer responds as though there was no price increase.”

“In the areas where we have tested and it is not possible, we will not do that,” he said.

Aéropostale, too, has begun increasing prices selectively, executives said on its fourth-quarter conference call.

“Like us, some of our peers are testing different things and testing higher prices, and primarily in preparation for the back half of the year,” Thomas P. Johnson, the chief executive of Aéropostale, said. “However, there is still uncertainty surrounding the macroeconomic environment and the consumers’ response to higher prices.” Right now, a long-sleeved Ralph Lauren men’s shirt costs $95, up from $89, an increase of about 7 percent, while a women’s gingham oxford at J. Crew costs $72, up from $69.50 a year ago, an increase of nearly 4 percent.

Janney Capital Markets follows prices and promotions at a group of specialty retailers. In mid-April of last year, it noted that Charlotte Russe was selling swimwear at $14.50 and up. Now, swimsuits sell for $16.50 and up.

Flip-flops at The Children’s Place had been two for $5, and now are two for $6.

Bullhead-brand jeans for girls at Pacific Sunwear were two for $55 last year, Janney said. Now, they are two for $59.

And cotton underwear at Soma Intimates, once five for $25, now sell for five for $25.50.

Like Soma, other retailers are hiding higher prices in complicated promotions. The teenage retailer Zumiez, for instance, went from an offer of three T-shirts and two pairs of jeans for $85, to two T-shirts and two pairs of jeans for $80. (Hopefully its customers have already taken algebra.)

While virtually all retailers have said that prices will climb in 2011, across-the-board price increases have not yet been reflected in the Consumer Price Index. In March, apparel and jewelry prices were 0.5 percent below where they had been in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

Though retailers were expecting more outrage, shoppers so far do not seem put off by the increases.

“A number of them seemed encouraged that customers weren’t backing away as of yet,” said John Long, a retail strategist at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates. “They hadn’t encountered much in the way of resistance, which they found surprising.”

At The Children’s Place, which recently changed the standard ending on its items from X.50 to X.95, customers “didn’t really even notice in these early rounds,” Mr. Morris of BMO Capital Markets said.

Although shoppers are taking the hit on the higher prices for now, Mr. Morris said the tactic could be smart for the retailers.

“In a way, that’s not a bad strategy because their customer is less likely to have sticker shock when they really have to ratchet up come the third quarter,” he said.

Two US drones for Misratah vs Russian arms, Chinese intel for Qaddafi

Both of Libya's fighting camps are taking delivery of a surging influx of weapons shipments and military personnel – each hoping to use the extra aid for breaking the military standoff in its own favor, debkafile's military sources report. Thursday, April 21, President Barack Obama authorized a pair of armed Predator drones to help the rebels break breaking the siege of Misratah, while British, French and Italian military officers headed for rebel headquarters in Benghazi, part of a package of arms and military equipment from the US, Britain, France, Italy and Qatar.

On the other side of the Libyan divide, China, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia are keeping the pro-Qaddafi camp's arsenals stocked with new hardware along with combat personnel from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia.
Building up in Libya is a confrontation that recalls the 1999 war in Yugoslavia (Serbia today) when NATO's four-month Operation Noble Anvil hammered Yugoslav forces to force their retreat from Kosovo. The Serbs too were backed then by clandestine Chinese-Russian support in tactical advice, intelligence, fighting men and arms.
Just like 12 years ago, our military sources report that from mid-March, hundreds of "volunteers" - professional soldiers ranking from colonel down to corporal - have joined the army loyal to Qaddafi. Calling themselves "nationalists" operating in paramilitary organizations without the knowledge of their governments, these foreigners claim they have come "to repulse the Western-Muslim onslaught on Qaddafi's regime."
Of course, they are handsomely paid from Muammar Qaddafi's plentiful war chest.
One group says it is in Libya for unfinished business with the West, especially the United States, for their role in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts.
China is helping the Libyan ruler with arms, mostly through African neighbors, and intelligence on NATO strikes in order to limit the damage they inflict (a service like that performed for Serbia in the 1990s). Beijing has a stake in helping the Libyan ruler after being informed that the Obama administration seeks to sever Chinese-Libyan oil ties before Beijing sinks tens of billions of dollars in Libya's transformation into its primary oil and gas supplier on the African continent.
Hence the pair of armed drones which the US president decided Thursday to contribute to rebel strength in Misratah, the only town the rebels are clinging to in western Libya. The Predators are intended doubly to break Qaddafi's siege of the town and destroy the Chinese electronic intelligence and weapons systems deployed around it. The NATO bombardment of a large ammunition dump near Tripoli on April 14 aimed at destroying the latest Chinese arms arrivals.

Echoes of the Balkan Wars were also resurrected by the rebels' determination to hang on in Misratah and replicate the long Sarajevo siege which eventually drew the United States into the conflict.

debkafile's military sources point to four major difficulties still confronting the next, intensified, round of Western coalition operations in Libya:

1. Pushing Qaddafi too hard could split NATO between is West and East European members;
2. The alliance is short of fighter-bombers for blasting the arms convoys destined for government forces in western Libya and lacks the precision bombs and missiles for these attacks. These shortages have forced NATO to limit its air strikes for now. A larger number of US Predators than the two authorized might have altered the balance. However, these armed pilotless aerial vehicles are in short supply owing to their essential role in US operations in the Afghan, Yemeni and Somali war arenas.
3. It is not clear that the UN Security Council resolution mandate extends to this kind of attack. The Russians criticize the Western alliance almost daily for exceeding its mandate.
4. In view of this criticism, Washington, London, Paris and Rome are careful to label their war assistance to Libyan rebels as "non-lethal military aid" and the military personnel helping them as "military advisers" – raising memories of the euphemisms used in previous wars.
The trouble is that all the additional military assistance the West is laying on is barely enough, say debkafile's military experts, to maintain the current stalemate against the Qaddafi regime's boosted capabilities - certainly not sufficient to tip the scales of the war.
Qaddafi holds one major advantage: His army can absorb foreign assistance without delay and almost seamlessly, whereas Western aid drops into a pit of uncertainty with regard to the rebel groups and their chiefs. The military advisers arriving in Benghazi first need to guide the opposition's steps in fighting Qaddafi's forces, then form the rebels into military units and teach them how to use the weapons they are receiving.

It could take months for regular units to take shape under the direction of British, French and Italian military personnel who, too, are not necessarily working in harness.

Your Pick, Ben, But One Goes Off The Cliff

Your Pick, Ben, But One Goes Off the Cliff

It's one or the other, Ben: you either push the real economy over the edge or you push stocks and the risk trade off the cliff.

Now that you've pushed the dollar down, Ben, it's your pick on what to push off the cliff: your beloved risk trade or the real economy. Here's a chart of the U.S. dollar and crude oil. Notice they're on a see-saw: when the dollar tanks, oil skyrockets. When the dollar recovers a bit, oil declines.

Ben Bernanke and the Fed are replaying their 2008 game plan: drive the dollar down to goose the risk trade in stocks. But a funny thing happened on the way to blowing another equity bubble: oil bubbled up, too, and that killed the real economy.

For the past three years, Ben has been trying to resuscitate the real economy via "the wealth effect": if your portfolio of stocks is rising, then you'll feel richer and your "animal spirits" of borrowing and spending will be aroused. The only proven way to goose stocks is to crush the dollar so overseas corporate earnings will be boosted by the currency depreciation (when transferred back into dollars, even flat profits look like they're rising), and U.S. exports will be cheaper to our trading partners.

Flooding the U.S. market with liquidity and keeping interest rates at zero had another consequence, one adamantly denied by the Ministry of Truth: it sparked a carry trade in which cheap dollars could be borrowed for next to nothing and exported around the world to seek higher returns.

Unsurprisingly, much of this free money flowed into commodities, which retained their value as the Fed pushed the dollar down. Also unsurprisingly, oil exporters raised the price of their oil in dollars as the dollar tanked.

Ben and his motley crew at the Fed reckoned that the financialized U.S. economy would respond positively to the lower dollar and the goosing of the risk trade in stocks. But the guys and gals seem to have forgotten that the real economy is dependent on oil. All the folks at the cocktail parties attended by Yellen et al. may be gushing over their hefty stock gains, but in the kitchen and carpark the workers are grousing about the rising prices of food and gasoline.

Now the cost of oil--the lifeblood of the real economy--is close to the point that it will push the real economy into recession. This sets up a difficult choice for Ben: if he pushes the dollar down to new lows, then oil leaps up and pushes the real economy off the cliff.

Alternatively, Ben renounces QE3 and "surprises" the markets with a rate increase, thus rescuing the dollar from freefall and pushing oil down. But that will send his precious risk trade and equity Bull off the cliff.

The politicos won't like either choice, but sacrificing the real economy will cost them their seat. All the fatcats who've raked in tens of billions from the risk trade Bull will be demanding that Ben "save" the financialized economy, but the politicos will see their political obituaries being written. Yes, the fatcats will shower them with millions in campaign contributions, but even those millions won't change the fact that Americans reliably vote their pocketbooks.

If rising oil pushes the real economy over the cliff, voters will not be re-electing incumbents in 2012.

Welcome to reality, Ben. Your "let's pretend the recovery is real" game is nearing an end. If you push the dollar down any more, then oil will go up and tip the real economy into a recession that QE3 will only make worse as you send the dollar into freefall. If the dollar rises, then your beloved "wealth effect" dies a horrible death on the rocks below.

Take your pick, but choose wisely.

Allen West: Tired of Obama’s ‘Marxist Rhetoric’

Florida GOP Rep. Allen West says he stands by his statement that President Barack Obama exhibited “Third World dictator-like arrogance” in his speech last week on the budget and America’s skyrocketing debt, and he is sick and tired of the president’s “Marxist demagogic rhetoric.”

“I do stand by those words — and perhaps one of the things that many people need to understand is that the truth needs to be said,” West Thursday said on Fox News, referring to a comment he made Tuesday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. “When I go around and I talk to people down here in my district, and we get phone calls, that speech that was given last week Wednesday was absolutely beneath the statesmanship, or the atmosphere, or the aura of the personality that the president should show.

“I am sick and tired of this class warfare — this Marxist demagogic rhetoric that is coming from the president of the United States of America,” he told Greta Van Susteren. “It is not helpful for this country, and it’s not going to move the ball forward as far as rectifying the economic situation in our country — and I’m not going to back away from telling what the truth is.”

West said it is time to “stop playing games” when it comes to discussing America’s deteriorating fiscal situation.

“I don't think it's very presidential when Barack Hussein Obama refers to my colleague, [House Budget Committee Chairman] Paul Ryan, as a simple little accountant, either,” he said. “So I think that when you look at what a community organizer [Obama] is turning out to be, it does seem to be like a low-level socialist agitator.

“When you look at the economic situation that we have, to have a gentleman in the White House that really has never run any type of business or organization — I myself, as a company commander, as a battalion executive officer, and as a battalion commander — have many times had to balance budgets, and take care of units, and operate a budget,” West continued.

“So I think it does come back to experience,” he said. “And when I talk about the chickens coming home to roost — when we continue to play this election cycle ‘American Idol’ in the United States of America — this is what we end up with, with someone that really is not in tune with the American people.”

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