Governor Malloy’s legislative agenda appears to be right out of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid “every day another stunning bill” play book. And much of the legislation seems, in one way or another, connected to Mr. Malloy’s close relationship with the public sector unions which worked hard to elect him.

The legislature passed the largest tax hike in the history of the state, and then secured a deal, though still “tentative,” with union leaders for $1.6 billion of the $2 billion in concessions needed to close the state’s budget gap. Many are skeptical of the “concessions,” since it appears little was really given up, from the private sector perspective, and the package relies heavily upon retirements. In addition, the governor said he would make up the difference primarily with spending cuts. However, in true Pelosi-Reid “let’s pass the bill on Christmas Eve” fashion, Mr. Malloy gave the news to lawmakers, Friday night before Memorial Day weekend, that he would, instead, make up the remaining hole in the budget with none other than projected “surplus” monies. Thus, the “surplus” is only to help the unions, who apparently couldn’t reach their $2 billion goal, not the taxpayers, who are bearing the brunt of the “shared sacrifice.”

According to a media blog of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, the General Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which Governor Malloy said he would implement for his state, would erase 2012 projected surpluses which he and the state legislature are now relying upon to balance their two-year budget.

Sheila Weinberg, Founder and CEO of the Institute for Truth in Accounting (IFTA), which recently presented a report on Connecticut’s finances, has said that the state’s use of  “political math” and “manipulation of the numbers” is “the worst in the nation.” These comments are in response to the legislature’s recent passage of the largest tax hike in the history of the state, which not only includes increases in current taxes as well as new taxes, but also an income tax increase which is retroactive to January 1, 2011. Mr. Malloy’s budget assigns that retroactive revenue to the 2012 budget year, whereas under GAAP, the revenue would have been put toward the 2011 fiscal year.

Among the plethora of legislation passed, the Constitution state is the first in the nation to enact mandatory paid sick leave for employees of some private businesses with 50 or more employees. Although the Democrats have been touting their bill primarily as a public health benefit for restaurant customers, who otherwise could be exposed to sick restaurant workers who won’t take a day off because they won’t get paid, the bill never originated in, nor even was reviewed by, the legislature’s Public Health committee. The Labor and Public Employees committee, led by Democratic and Working Families Party state senator, Edith Prague, initiated the bill which, according to her, “allows people to take a paid sick day if they’re sick, if their child is sick, if their spouse is sick.”

The Connecticut state legislature has also passed its version of the “Dream Act,” which gives illegal aliens the same tuition discounts, to state colleges and universities, that are given to legal state residents.

A “transgender rights” bill includes “gender identity or expression” as a protected characteristic along with race, national origin, sex and other attributes under current state law. Republican lawmakers were alarmed that Democrats dismissed their amendment that would have exempted separate bathrooms and locker rooms, based on gender- a concern for parents who worry about sexual predators who might cross-dress simply to gain access to young children in public bathrooms.

Another controversial “Early Release for Prisoners” bill allows prison inmates to be set free early for good behavior behind bars. The new policy states that inmates, even those convicted of rape, kidnapping, arson, first-degree manslaughter, assault of a pregnant woman, having sex with someone under the age of 13, and assault of a blind or disabled person, can earn 60 days a year and could eventually cut about three years off a 20-year sentence.

Dozens of online retailers are now following through with their threat to cut ties with Connecticut after its passage of an “Amazon tax” bill. The retailers, which have no physical presence in the state but do enter advertising relationships with about 2,800 Connecticut-based websites and affiliate marketers, would be required to collect a 6.35 percent sales tax from customers, according to the new law.

Then, there is the new legislation that will merge the Freedom of Information (FOI) commission with other state “watchdog agencies” under a newly created super-agency. Mitchell Pearlman, a retired executive director and general counsel of the state’s Freedom of Information Commission, charged that the merger will be disastrous for freedom of information in the state, preventing the independence of the FOI that is necessary to allow individual citizens the ability to enforce their legal right to transparency of public documents.

At a recent Democratic fundraiser, Mr. Malloy was hailed by Democratic and union leaders for his open solidarity with organized labor. “In Connecticut,” he said, “we are pursuing a road in a different direction than 49 other states.” The governor, who refers to himself as the “Anti-Christie,” the polar opposite of New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, asserted, “Individuals in this country who would tear down labor in Wisconsin and Ohio … or are unfriendly to labor, who are unfriendly to the middle class, they’re un-American.”

Note the governor’s apparent belief that only organized labor is “the middle class.” The private sector “middle class” is just… chopped liver?

‘Atlas Shrugged” — Ayn Rand’s fourth and last novel, published in 1957 — may be second to the Bible as the most influential book read in America, according to a Library of Congress survey. It is required reading in management training at BB&T, the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. and one that resisted taking TARP bailout funds.

Since the Obama administration took office, “Atlas Shrugged” has been enjoying a renaissance with rising sales and library waiting lists, partly because it explains our current economic woes more straightforwardly than most of what we hear from today’s experts.

What happened in Rand’s narrative is coming to pass today, with an anti-business administration reviling private industry and capitalizing on crisis to expand and redirect investment within and between sectors of the economy — setting quotas, prices and compensation.

Businesses responded by retrenching — ceasing to invest, innovate and expand. Whole industries contracted, closed down or moved offshore, much like the U.S. gas and oil drilling industry is doing today. Then, just as now, management became frustrated, discouraged and reluctant to create jobs in an environment of excessive government meddling.

A record $2 trillion now sits on corporate balance sheets waiting to be invested amid reasonably cheap asset prices. What holds back investment is uncertainty and fear stemming from an overbearing and free-spending government. Businessmen and investors would never attempt spending and borrowing their way back to prosperity.

The debt-financed Obama stimulus plan is not only failing to create jobs. It ratchets up systemic risk, inviting a currency crisis and bond-market collapse — from which recovery might be impossible.

President Obama recently took credit for a 0.2 -percentage-point drop in the nation’s unemployment rate to 9.5% and the creation of 71,000 private-sector jobs, claiming his policies were working. In fact, many of those jobs were in the socialized automotive sector. The supposed decrease in unemployment resulted from 611,000 Americans giving up on finding work and dropping off the official rolls of the unemployed.

Official statistics mask the underlying truth of a private-sector economy that is failing to create jobs. In fact, when all those who have given up looking for work are accounted for since the recession began, the real unemployment rate may be closer to 18% — almost double the official numbers.

Read the whole thing here.

Of course President Obama will deny this.   He told Businessweek magazine in a recent interview that he is not anti-business and that he believes in the private sector.  But the evidence is overwhelming,  and it helps explain why he is pursuing kamakazi-like economic policies that will damage the private sector in America.

Obama has demonized just about every business sector in America.  Through the 2008 campaign to the present,  he has gone after credit card companies, the coal industry, mortgage companies, real estate companies, steelmakers, utilities, drug companies, doctors, oil companies, Wall Street, defense contractors, and health insurance companies, just to name a few.  In each case he has dinged them for greed, taking excessive profits, and failing to put people first.  His criticisms have not been over minor matters but over their basic core functions, and their values or lack of them.

Obama demonstrates almost complete ignorance about the private sector and it’s no wonder:  he has so little experience in it.  He has spent his adult life in college, teaching college, and organizing communities.  The one private sector job he has held, for a consulting firm in New York, he recounts as a terrible experience.  In his memoirs he describes the experience as working for a private business “like a spy behind enemy lines.”  He also recounts in his memoirs that the multinational corporations in the Indonesia of his youth were propelling the average worker “into deeper despair.”  He likened the presence of corporations in his native Africa to a form of “neocolonialism.”  Michelle Obama has beseeched young people, “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we are asking young people to do.  Don’t go into corporate America.  You know, become teachers, work for the community,  be a social worker, be a nurse….move out of the money-making industry, into the helping industry.”

This is, of course, the Obama Cosmology.  The private sector is largely populated by devils, who are self-oriented, concerned about personal gain,  and unconcerned about others.  The government, on the other hand, is made up of people bathed in altruism, whose only concern is you.  Thus it is quite easy for Obama to recall the divide between the private and public sector as “enemy lines”  even though he would never call the Iranian Mullahs, Hugo Chavez, or Vladimir Putin an “enemy.”

All of this begs the question:  does Obama’s demonizing of business simply reflect his lack of experience in the private sector or is it based on a well-thought out analysis?  In short, is it based on ignorance or ideology? While we can’t know what Obama’s deeper thoughts actually are, it does seem pretty clear that Obama has at least some sense that the free market is people voluntarily exchanging money for a good or service they want.  After all, this is a man who has made millions selling books.  Surely he has to understand basic economics? The darker interpretation of this is the Obama knows that the private sector creates wealth and prosperity and that it wages war on it anyway because his ideologically driven agenda is more important to him that the economic health of the country he is supposed to be protecting.   Say it isn’t so….