WASHINGTON (AP) -- The midterm elections may be over, but for President Barack Obama, the fundraising hasn't stopped.
Obama is headlining a fundraiser at a ritzy hotel near the White House to benefit the Democratic National Committee. The DNC says roughly 30 donors paid up to $32,400 each to attend.
Also lost in all the hype is that the Dutch subsidies greatly favour corporations and private business. Private purchasers are, according to Peter Monk and Zifei Yang, authors of the ICCT’s Driving Electrification white paper, eligible for much less (1,800 euros for a privately bought Renault Zoe versus 6,100 euros for a company car, and 20,900 euros for a privately owned plug-in Volvo V60 versus 38,300 euros — out of a purchase price of 51,571 euros — for the company-leased alternative). Small wonder that, depending on the exact nature of your vehicle, up to three quarters of Dutch plug-in sales are to corporations and private businesses. Yes, Holland’s green car revolution is really just a corporate tax dodge.
And the Dutch really have been following the money. As of Jan. 1, the government has reduced its corporate welfare program, and sales of anything that requires an electrical umbilical cord have plummeted. EV and PHEV sales in December were 9,309; in January they were 404. Sales of best-selling models were particularly hard hit; Mitsubishi’s hybrid Outlander dropped to 83 in January compared with 4,988 just the month before. This drop was made all the more calamitous for Mitsu’s electrification prospects since, of the 8,197 Outlander PHEVs sold in Europe last year, 8,009 were to Holland. Other marques saw equally precipitous losses; BMW’s i3 from 225 to 15 units, Tesla’s Model S from 578 to seven and Nissan’s Leaf from … well, you get the idea.Is there any question why environmentalists back crony capitalism so consistently? It's a way to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the obscenely rich, contributing to the divide between rich and poor...and environmentalists are almost always rich. Who else can afford these policies?
In a San Francisco office shared with other tech start-ups, three 20-year-olds saw HealthCare.gov as a challenge.
With a few late nights, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser built "thehealthsherpa.com," a two-week-old website that solves one of the biggest problems with the government's site.
"They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front," said Liang. He added: "They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision."
Liang showed CBS News how it worked. "You come to our website and you put in your zip code -- in this case a California zip code. You hit 'find plans,' and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code."It makes you wonder what might have happened if the federal government hadn't awarded the contract to a company with a vice president who just happened to be a classmate of Michelle Obama.
A Brookings Institution study found the $2.85 billion program “provided a short-term boost in vehicle sales, which were pulled forward from sales that would have occurred in subsequent months. There was a small increase in employment but the implied cost per job created ($1.4 million) was far higher than other fiscal stimulus programs.”
The study — from researchers Ted Gayer and Emily Parker — said the “Car Allowance Rebate System,” or CARS did little to boost employment. This is at least the fourth major study since 2012 that has raised questions about the value of the program.
The study said far more jobs could have been created using other government stimulus programs — increasing unemployment benefits (at $95,000 per job); $80,000-$133,000 per job created for cutting employers’ payroll taxes; $222,000 per job created for reducing employees’ payroll taxes; $200,000 per job created for providing additional Social Security benefits; or $222,000 per job created for allowing the expensing of investment costs.Even the promised environmental benefits were pretty tiny.
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131030/AUTO01/310300106#ixzz2jEzCgFO0
Townes-Whitley joined CGI in May 2010, less than two months after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. She serves as the lead of the company's Civilian Agency Programs Business Unit for the Federal Group, according to a bio published on the CGI website. The unit serves 22 federal civilian agencies in the United States and 34 other countries.Hmmm. What do you think the chances are that someone approached CGI (or vice versa) and said, "By wild coincidence, you attended Princeton at the same time as the First Lady. If we hire you at a very high salary, do you think your expertise might get us a no-bid contract for really big bucks?"
A year later, in April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin, after a two-year inquiry, issued a fat report detailing several transactions, including Goldman's Abacus deal, that Levin and his staff believed should be investigated by Justice as possible crimes. The subcommittee made a formal referral to the department (as did the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chaired by Phil Angelides), and Levin publicly stated his view that criminal inquiry was warranted. Goldman executives, including the firm's chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.It is well worth reading in full. Even Democrats are disturbed by how corrupt this appears.
Meanwhile, Obama's political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year's scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama's Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.
Justice insists that political operations such as fundraising are kept strictly distanced from the department, in order to avoid even the appearance of political influence. But the attorney general and his team are not unfamiliar with the process; Holder was himself an Obama bundler--a fundraiser who collected large sums from various donors--in 2008, as were several other lawyers who joined him at Justice.
It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made--or received--as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a "bad set of facts."
Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Merck & Co. (MRK) are being pulled into an expanding congressional investigation into the agreement drugmakers reached with the Obama administration to support the Democrats’ overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, according to three people familiar with the talks.
The probe began last year, with Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee seeking documents from an industry trade group, said the people, who aren’t authorized to speak publicly. When that group didn’t cooperate, the panel decided to target Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, along with Merck, Amgen Inc. (AMGN), Abbott Laboratories (ABT) andAstraZeneca Plc (AZN), said one of the people.
The Republicans last month began negotiating directly with the companies in e-mails, calls and meetings demanding documents and information outlining what the industry agreed to with President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, when the law was being worked on in Congress. Michael Burgess, a Representative from Texas, said he’s been frustrated by a lack of cooperation.
“This has been like pulling teeth, trying to get information,” said Burgess, a Republican working on the panel’s investigation, in a telephone interview.Not surprisingly, Big Pharma (who used to be the villain for Democrats) are splitting their contributions almost evenly between the parties this time. I understand why Big Pharma decided to make a deal with the White House; they figured out that they would be better off if they had some influence on how Obamacare treated them. Big Business often does the corrupting of Big Government, but the knowledge that Big Government has the power sometimes does the corrupting of Big Business. We need to know what the deal was--not just the open, publicly stated part of the deal that Big Pharma got from Obamacare, but what was said behind closed doors.
Under Corzine, MF Global lost well over $1 billion, and I don’t mean in the profit/loss sense. I mean it was physically misplaced and Corzine cannot account for where it went. The Justice Department is investigating, and news-media accounts suggest a criminal prosecution is likely.So what is Corzine doing these days, since, of course, he isn't in jail? As this article at Real Clear Politics explains, he is doing something very important:
Jon Corzine -- under federal and congressional investigation following accusations that the securities firm he headed illegally took clients' funds before collapsing -- is among President Obama's top re-election campaign bundlers, raising at least $500,000, according to the campaign’s filing Friday with the Federal Election Commission.
Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, and former head of Goldman Sachs, is among 127 individuals (dubbed “volunteer fundraisers” in the parlance used by Obama’s Chicago campaign) credited with raising more than $500,000 through the first quarter of 2012.'You would think the President who screeches about how rich people aren't playing by the same rules as the rest of us would be embarrassed by this. But why would he be? Who is going to make a fuss of it? I found this interesting piece over at Democratic Underground, where Democrats write who are so far left that they actually believe Obama's rhetoric:
After all, I learned all about MF Global and Corzine right here on DU. Obama gave money back but now he's taking the money from him? Democrats talk about this everywhere. Who's money is this? It's workers! Why is this going on? There are several sources for this, but dems are getting attacked for asking about this. One dem I know wrote this back after being attacked for sending out "right wing" news sources!
...
Democrats were told in the Fall Obama was going to return the bundled money from Corzine..it is obvious by Obama's own "current " financial report..the money was not returned!
This ABC story is the first I have seen from any MSM !
And yet anyone can go to Obama's web site..and look at the campaign finances..and scroll down to the highest bundlers...and see Corzines name on the 1/2 a million dollar bundler list!
When one has an open investigation for fraud and lying to congress..and having lost 6.3 Billion Dollars of investors money..there damn well should be questions about this!!
Money lost was pensioner's money..farmers money..and it was illegally gambled!
There are new emails produced ..and under investigation..of Corzine lying to congress!
I think this guy was deluding himself thinking that there used to be a big difference there.The Reason I have always been a democrat..is because we "USED to be different " than Republicans..we didn't steal pensioner's money..we protected it!
President Obama's Department of Energy helped finance several green energy companies that later fell into bankruptcy -- but not before the firms doled out six-figure bonuses and payouts to top executives, a Center for Public Integrity and ABC News investigation found.
Take, for instance, Beacon Power Corp., the second recipient of an Energy Department loan guarantee in 2009. In March 2010, the Massachusetts energy storage company paid cash bonuses of $259,285 to three executives in part due to progress made on the $43 million energy loan, Securities and Exchange Commission records show. Last October, Beacon Power filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.And they give a bunch of other examples of this sort of behavior. It would be disgusting if they were doing this entirely from private funds. But with our tax dollars as part of the process? Completely unacceptable. Not surprisingly, progressive Obama has been presiding over this sliminess.
Every few days now there are stories like this, and I always have to double check to make sure it’s not a repeat of previous stories we’ve alreadydiscussed. Unfortunately, they don’t usually turn out to be reruns.A year and a half ago:
Obama announces Abound Solar to get $400M federal loan guaranteeThe February 28, 2012 Denver Post reports that they are laying off "280 workers and delaying a new factory in Indiana." As usual, the complaint is that China is subsidizing the solar panel industry there, and American companies can't compete. This leads to two possible solutions:
WILMINGTON, Del. — Several of the nearly two dozen employees at bankrupt solar panel makerSolyndra LLC who were approved for bonuses Wednesday had months earlier received pay raises as high as 70 percent, a fact the company never disclosed in its request for bonus cash.
The company’s bankruptcy attorneys sought permission for the bonuses in a court hearing, arguing that the extra cash is needed to keep key employees from fleeing only to be replaced by more expensive outside consultants.
With little chance of stable employment and officials moving to liquidate assets, the workers needed to wind down the company have little incentive to stay, the Solyndra attorneys argued.Uh, where, exactly, are they going to flee to? Another bankrupt "green" company?
The Daily Caller has obtained documents, emails and communications showing how President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission demolished wireless broadband company LightSquared’s competition through a pattern of regulatory decisions apparently aimed at establishing an “open-access” Internet in the United States.
The FCC successfully green-lighted LightSquared’s corporate formation in 2009 by allowing Wall Street hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners to purchase majority ownership in satellite company SkyTerra. A major obstacle that still remained in LightSquared’s way was competitor GlobalStar.
GlobalStar had a similar operation to the one LightSquared was building at the time. A major difference, though, was GlobalStar’s already-orbiting satellites, and the broadband Internet access it was already providing to Americans in rural areas of the country.There are a series of regulatory actions that the FCC took which, while they are individually understandable examples of bureaucratic inefficiency and decision making, collectively turned into a huge advantage for LightSquared--a company with significant ties to Obama and the Democratic Party. What a surprise!
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/22/documents-show-obamas-fcc-used-regulatory-muscle-to-destroy-lightsquareds-competition/#ixzz1n9SIYYHM
After subtracting the partial repayment made by both companies, the governments’ sale of some shares obtained via the bailout, and the present value of GM stock still held by the two governments, taxpayers are still out $810-million on the Chrysler bailout and $4.74-billion on the GM loan. That’s an estimated $5.5-billion loss, which will fluctuate only slightly, depending on the final GM share price when governments relinquish their remaining shares.
On jobs, three years later, the current employee count in Canada is 10,000 at GM (down from 12,000 in early 2009) and 9,000 at Chrysler (down from 9,800 in 2009). Using present employee counts, that means taxpayers offered up a $90,000 subsidy per Chrysler employee and a $474,000 subsidy per GM employee. (The company-only estimates are fair calculations; in the absence of GM or Chrysler, lost spinoff jobs at auto-parts manufacturers and dealerships would have been at least partly restored by either the two post-bankruptcy companies or by other automotive companies.)As the author points out, what would have happened if both companies had gone bankrupt, and the employees had fallen into the Canadian safety net? How many years would it have taken for Chrysler's Canadian workers to have been found new jobs? Ditto for GM's Canadian workers? (Especially because Canada, unlike the U.S., is doing okay on job creation.) You could argue about whether those Chrysler workers would have been out of work long enough to consume $90,000 worth of unemployment and government assistance on health insurance. But the GM workers? Even if you threw $50,000 a year into those workers (which sounds generous), it would have taken almost ten years to burn through that subsidy--by the end of which, nearly all of these workers would have found new jobs, reached retirement age, or died.
Soon after President Barack Obama touted Westport Innovation’s liquefied natural gas-powered engines April 1 at a Maryland UPS facility, the company’s top individual investor made large contributions to Democrats.Yeah, that's it! A "lucky confluence of events"! Oh, and who owns three million shares of Westport stock? Why, Soros Fund Management (you know, George Soros). Another "lucky confluence of events," don't you think?
Kevin G. Douglas, Westport’s largest individual shareholder, April 8 gave more than $30,000 to Obama and the Democratic National Committee, according to federal campaign filings.
In a lucky confluence of events, a bill, supported by the president, New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act, designed to subsidize the migration of American vehicles from gasoline and diesel to LNG-powered engines was filed April 6 in the House of Representatives. The bill is also known by the shorthand: Natural Gas Act.
NEW YORK — Federal officials plan to kill a private company’s plans to start a national high-speed wireless broadband network after concluding it would in some cases jam personal-navigation and other GPS devices.
The Federal Communications Commission said it will seek public comment as early as Wednesday on revoking LightSquared’s permit after a federal agency that coordinates wireless signals, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, concluded that there’s no way to mitigate potential interference.And for those who want to believe that the stories about influence peddling and the Obama Administration are just right-wing lies, take a look at this item from the Labour Party paper, The Guardian in Britain:
For LightSquared the critical issue was receiving regulatory approval for its plans for spectrum use, rather than financial support. And for that the company made frequent approaches to the White House, according to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity under freedom of information legislation.
Emails published by the body's iWatch News show LightSquared mentioning fundraising efforts by its executives in contacts with the White House.
According to iWatch News, LightSquared staff appealed to the White House for meetings with top technology aides after the company's chief executive, Sanjiv Ahuja, made a $30,400 contribution to the Democratic party:
Clear enough? The Obama Administration pressured General Shelton to change his testimony concerning interference. See this September 16, 2011 Daily Telegraph story:"Hi Aneesh!" LightSquared representative Dave Kumar wrote to Aneesh Chopra, the president's chief technology adviser on Sept. 23, 2010. "I touched base with my client Sanjiv Ahuja and he expressed an interest in meeting with you … He is going to be in DC next week for a fundraising dinner with the President."LightSquared's major backer is Philip Falcone, a high-level Democratic party donor and owner of Harbinger Capital, the venture fund with a $3bn majority stake in LightSquared.
According to Republicans on Capitol Hill, General William Shelton, head of Air Force Space Command, told them in a closed session the White House urged him to alter his testimony about the Pentagon's concerns about a new wireless project by a satellite broadband company.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) President Barack Obama will call for cutting the top 35 percent corporate tax rate as early as this month, according to two sources close to the administration.The president is likely to propose a rate closer to an average of that seen in peer nations, the sources said.
This would jibe with remarks made last year by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who suggested the United States should be moving to a rate more in line with its major trading partners in the high 20-percent range.I actually agree that lowering corporate income tax rates is a good idea to encourage multinational corporations to make their money in America, instead of in lower tax rates countries. I used to work for a German company that bought office supplies from Germany at a ridiculous price as a way to move net profit from a high tax rate country to a low rate country--and this was strictly penny-ante stuff. I am sure that many corporations do stunts far more outrageous for this exact reason.
Fisker Automotive, the maker of an exotic electric sports car that is being built with help from a $529 million federal government loan guarantee, has announced layoffs at its Delaware plant as it tries to persuade the Department of Energy to send it more public funds.
The company says 26 Fisker employees have been let go from the Delaware factory where renowned automotive engineer Henrik Fiskerpromised to one day begin producing affordable electric sedans. A Delaware newspaper also reported that subcontractors working on the car venture have been let go.Looting the public trough for the benefit of the super-rich is part of what democracies do, but the Obama Administration seems to have gone completely off the deep end on this.
State Of The Union, Jan 24, 2012;
"In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries."
State Of The Battery, Jan 26, 2012;
Obama-backed electric car battery-maker files for bankruptcyA bit more detail from CNS News:
Ener1--a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars, and that received $118.5 million in federal stimulus money, and that Vice President Joe Biden visited last year the day after President Obama’s State of the Union Address—announced today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In last year’s State of the Union Address, delivered Jan. 25, 2011, President Obama set a national goal of having a million electric vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015—a goal that would be achieved, Obama said, by taking money out of the oil industry and “investing” it in new technology.
“With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” said Obama.
Ener1 Inc., which owns a company that received a $118 million U.S. Energy Department grant to make electric-car batteries, filed for bankruptcy protection after defaulting on bond debt amid Asian competition.
The company listed assets of $73.9 million and debt of $90.5 million as of Dec. 31 in Chapter 11 papers filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Ener1 has been affected by competing battery developers in China and South Korea, “which generally have a lower cost manufacturing base” and lower labor and raw material costs, interim Chief Executive Officer Alex Sorokin said in the petition.At least if a private investor makes a mistake, the rest of us don't get stuck with the bills.
