Posted on 01/24/2010 9:21:30 AM PST by Borges
Houston oilman Robert Adam Mosbacher, perhaps the Republican Party's greatest-ever fundraiser and a member of the cabinet of longtime friend President George H.W. Bush, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. He was 82.
Mosbacher, founder of the company that bore his name, served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1989 to 1992, where he was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Although the formal position placed him toward the bottom of the cabinet hierarchy, no one doubted Mosbacher's influence with and access to the president, whom he had known since the early 1960s. He raised money for Bush's House and Senate races, directed his successful presidential bid and included him in lucrative business deals.
A native of New York, Mosbacher moved to Texas after finishing college, jumped headlong into the energy business and over time became a fixture in the national Republican Party. He was the key fund raiser for the GOP in a number of presidential races and a member of an elite group of pragmatic conservatives who made their mark under the first president Bush, before social conservatives gained the upper hand in the party's electoral apparatus.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
RIP
Pancreatic Cancer strikes again. rip.
The power behind the "compassionate conservatism" RINO fad?
Hard to believe old Bob was 82....how did I get to be 52..lol..so quick.
His ex wife....Georgette...is quite the business woman.
Bingo.
Gave us NAFTA? Well rest in peace.
No not Bingo, rabscuttle385. You don’t know that. In fact probably all you know about this man is what you read in this article. But any time there’s a republican, you’ll make the assumption huh.
RIP.
The results of our 20 year experiment with “free trade”:
Decimation of America’s manufacturing infrastructure
Loss of millions of blue collar middle class jobs
Lower standard of living for working class Americans as they shifted from manufacturing to service economy jobs with limited benefits
High trade deficits
Financial dependence on China.
Equity markets became a vehicle for short term financial speculation instead of a source of capital for long term investment in productive assets
Long term structural unemployment.
I got news for you my friend, the "blue collar middle class unskilled job" was a product of a short period in American history, which lasted from the end of WWII until the first oil crisis of the early 1970s. During this period, Europe was destroyed (not fully recovering until well into the 1960s), while the Asian nations were only just beginning to industrialize. As a result, the US had little competition from abroad, and a tight labor market meant that organized labor effectively had the whip over business. This lasted for but 25 years, but because so many boomers are walking the earth, and that 25 year period coincided with their childhood, they viewed such a state of affairs as "normal."
A key difference between Southerner and Yankees is that anyone outside of the south who talks about the "oppressed working class" is considered a communist/socialist. You are not, but it says alot about the differing world views of the south and other parts of the US.
That and considering that the South didn’t truly industrialize in my opinion until the 1980s really lends to a different view down there. It was a unique time for the blue-collar North, but a time that was doomed to end.
Pre-WWII the world was very competitive, and there was a global market that had been around for centuries and here since things started industrializing in the North after the Civil War. The U.S. and Europe and even a good deal of Asia were trading if not competitors in production. Friedman’s Monetary History is a good testament to the economic effects of that trade.
I know lots of guys of his generation like him. Yeah he’s a dealmaker. But when you make deals in politics, the liberals are happy to let you make money while they sit back and let the economic and political effects of that deal reach their conclusion, because they are on the other side of the equation, positioning govt power. In the end the liberals end up in control, then they cut you off, unless you keep contributing to their campaigns.
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