Obama’s public-equity record is the real scandal

[sirjohn]

Forget Bain — Obama’s public-equity  record is the real scandal

By Marc A. Thiessen,

Washington Post May 24 2012



Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats,  President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain  Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama did not anticipate. After all, if Romney’s record in private equity is fair game, then so is  Obama’s record in public equity — and that record is not  pretty.

Since taking office, Obama has  invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part  of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be  unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal  investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions. Consider just a few  examples of Obama’s public equity failures:

● Raser Technologies. In 2010, the Obama administration gave  Raser a $33 million taxpayer-funded grant to build a power plant in Beaver  Creek, Utah. According to WSJ, after burning through our tax dollars, the  company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. The plant now has fewer than 10  employees, and Raser owes $1.5 million in back taxes.

● ECOtality. The Obama administration gave ECOtality $126.2  million in taxpayer money in 2009 for, among other things, the installation of  14,000 electric car chargers in five states. Obama even hosted the company’s  president, Don Karner, in the first lady's box during the 2010 State of the  Union address as an example of a stimulus success story. According to ECOtality’s own SEC filings, the company has  since incurred more than $45 million in losses and has told the federal  government, “We may not achieve or sustain profitability on a quarterly or  annual basis in the future.”

Worse, according to CBS News the company is “under investigation for insider trading,” and  Karner has been subpoenaed “for any and all documentation surrounding the public  announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company.”

● Nevada Geothermal Power (NGP). The Obama administration gave  NGP a $98.s5 million taxpayer loan guarantee in 2010.  NYT reported last October that the company is in “financial turmoil” and that “[a]fter a series of technical missteps that are draining Nevada  Geothermal’s cash reserves, its own auditor concluded in a filing released last  week that there was ‘significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue  as a going concern.’ ”

● First Solar. The Obama administration provided First Solar  with more than$3 billion in loan guarantees for power plants in Arizona and  California. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report  last week, the  company “fell to a record low in Nasdaq Stock Market trading May 4 after  reporting $401 million in restructuring costs tied to firing 30 percent of its  workforce.”

[sirjohn]

PART 2



● Abound Solar, Inc. The Obama administration gave Abound Solar a $400 million loan guarantee to  build photovoltaic panel factories. According to Forbes, in February the company  halted production and laid off 180 employees.

● Beacon Power. The Obama administration gave Beacon — a  green-energy storage company — a $43 million loan guarantee. According to CBS News, at the time of the  loan, “Standard and Poor’s had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook  of ‘CCC-plus.’ ” In the fall of 2011, Beacon received a delisting notice from Nasdaq and  filed for bankruptcy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A company called SunPower got a $1.2 billion loan guarantee  from the Obama administration, and as of January, the company owed more than it  was worth. Brightsource got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee and posted a  string of net losses totaling $177 million. And, of course, let’s not forget  Solyndra — the solar panel manufacturer that received $535 million in  taxpayer-funded loan guarantees and went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers on the  hook.

Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received  funding “based solely on their merits.” But as Hoover  Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, “Throw Them All Out,” fully 71 percent of the  Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to “individuals who were  bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the  Democratic Party.” Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his  campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35  billion. Obama said this week it’s not the president’s job “to make a lot of  money for investors.” Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money  for investors in his political machine.

All that cronyism and corruption is catching up with  the administration. According to Politico, “The Energy  Department’s inspector general has launched more than 100 criminal  investigations” related to the department’s green-energy  programs.

Now the man who made Solyndra a  household name says Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital “is what this campaign  is going to be about.” Good luck with that, Mr. President. If Obama wants to  attack Romney’s alleged private equity failures as chief executive of Bain, he’d  better be ready to defend his own massive public equity failures as chief  executive of the United States.

[siboneyes]

Gingrich's Defense of Bain Capital Far   Superior to Anything You Ever Hear Coming from Romney

May 28, 2012 | Reaganite Republican

"How can you be the president with the worst

unemployment record since the Great  Depression

-and pick a fight over job creation?

There's a point where this  becomes ludicrous..."

__________________________________________________​

"Bain as an issue doesn't  work, because people look at it on balance... and  they  say  'wait a second -yeah- you can pick a couple  companies that  lost. You can pick  a  lot of companies that  succeeded.' And  as even as the  governor of Massachusetts said last week, it is  a good   company." "This  is going  to fall flat on its face...  Obama picking a fight on the economy  is probably the worst  possible strategy for  his campaign."

"(Cory Booker) described what I think is a  big reality for him as the Mayor of Newark: that that free   enterprise system has been  creating jobs, paying  taxes, improving his city."

"In effect, what Obama is saying is that government investment is smarter than private equity -and if   you   look  at their track record of losing billions  on  various  solar  companies -$2.1B on one company  alone- you'd  have to say  Obama's a pretty bad   venture capitalist.

And remember, he's doing it with your money... for  better or worse, Romney was taking a risk as a private person, with  private money, in the private sector... Obama's been throwing  our money  as taxpayers away, and our children's and  grandchildren's in  the national  debt" "I  think  private equity  on  balance creates far more jobs that  it  kills... I think  private equity creates a  far better  future... look at  the rise of Google, of Apple." "Private equity in general has been a force  that has overwhelmingly been more effective at creating  jobs than any socialist government in history.  So if  I had to choose between private equity and socialism,  I'd  choose private equity every time.

Countries that use private equity get  richer, and countries that follow socialism get poorer.... Obama's  frankly a pretty  good case study in that: his examples of public  equity -investing in  Solyndra, investing in other failing companies  -I mean he's  thrown-away billions of dollars of    taxpayers' money-  because it turns-out that  bureaucrats don't make very good venture  capitalists."

CON 100 MILLONES DE  DESEMPLEADOS (57% ENTRE LOS JOVENES DE D.C.) GRACIAS A OBAMA, EN LAS  PRIMARIAS  DEMOCRATAS MAS DEL 40% EN W. VIRGINIA, KANSAS Y KENCTUKY  REPUDIARON  OBAMA LLEGANDO A PREFERIR  VOTAR HASTA POR UN DELINCUENTE  PRESO EN TEXAS

[siboneyes]

Osama bin Laden's goal to bankrupt America is  working

Dearborn Press and Guide ^ | May 23, 2012 | Albert  Foster

One year ago American forces killed Osama bin Laden the  mastermind behind the 9/11 attack against the United States. Obama took a  victory lap. It was a triumph of symbolism over substance. As George Bush said, “It was just a matter of time.”

It is widely believed that Osama’s aim was just terrorism, but  terrorism is only a tactic. What was he really trying to do?

Michael Scheuer who was the head of the CIA get bin Laden team  under Bill Clinton said bin Laden’s goal was to bankrupt America and thus  destroy its influence in the world. With the help of Washington politicians he  is well on the way to having met his goal.

The national debt was $5.8 trillion on 9/10/2001. Today it is  $15.7+ trillion and rapidly rising…almost $10 trillion in just 10 1/2 years. Not  a bad start toward bankruptcy if you ask me.

The escalation of our debt was totally irresponsible, is  unsustainable, and will lead to the downfall of the United States if we do not  get it under control very soon. It was not bin Laden who ran up this debt. He  just accelerated the process.

Americans should be really agitated about this, but they are  either ignorant or apathetic.

There are 83 million families in the United States and each  family’s share of the total U.S. debt is about $700 thousand. The  administration’s answer to this problem is smoke and mirrors. They want you to  believe the upper 1 percent will pay it. Don’t be fooled.

Officially there are 113.5 million taxpayers in a workforce of  141.6 million. One percent of taxpayers would be 1.14 million, or they would  each need to pay $51 million to eliminate the total debt. All we need to do is  wipe out most of the upper 1 percent and their assets and only God knows how  many jobs will also be wiped out.

Lord Kelvin, famous physicist and mathematician, said, “I  often say . . . that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and  express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure  it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and  unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have  scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the  matter may be.”

Lord Kelvin was right. Without reliable numbers we are all  fooled by silver tongued devils. My hope is that looking at just a few numbers  will help you understand why Osama bin Laden may have won even if we did kill  him. In his view, he is now in paradise while we are headed for  hell.

[siboneyes]

Our Nation’s Future

Walter Williams 5, 29, 2012

Our nation is rapidly approaching a point from which there’s  little chance to avoid a financial collapse. The heart of our problem can be  seen as a tragedy of the commons. That’s a set of circumstances when something  is commonly owned and individuals acting rationally in their own self-interest  produce a set of results that’s inimical to everyone’s long-term interest. Let’s  look at an example of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon and then apply it to  our national problem.

Imagine there are 100 cattlemen all having an equal right to  graze their herds on 1,000 acres of commonly owned grassland. The rational  self-interested response of each cattleman is to have the largest herd that he  can afford. Each cattleman pursing similar self-interests will produce results not in any of the cattlemen’s long-term interest — overgrazing, soil erosion and  destruction of the land’s usefulness. Even if they all recognize the dangers,  does it pay for any one cattleman to cut the size of his herd? The short answer  is no because he would bear the cost of having a smaller herd while the other  cattlemen gain at his expense. In the long term, they all lose because the land  will be overgrazed and made useless.

We can think of the federal budget as a commons to which each  of our 535 congressmen and the president have access. Like the cattlemen, each  congressman and the president want to get as much out of the federal budget as possible for their constituents. Political success depends upon “bringing home the bacon.” Spending is popular, but taxes to finance the spending are not. The  tendency is for spending to rise and its financing to be concealed through  borrowing and inflation.

Does it pay for an individual congressman to say, “This  spending is unconstitutional and ruining our nation, and I’ll have no part of  it; I will refuse a $500 million federal grant to my congressional district”? The answer is no because he would gain little or nothing, plus the federal  budget wouldn’t be reduced by $500 million.

Other congressmen would benefit by having $500 million more for their districts.

What about the constituents of a principled congressman? If  their congressman refuses unconstitutional spending, it doesn’t mean that they  pay lower federal income taxes. All that it means is constituents of some other  congressmen get the money while the nation spirals toward financial ruin, and  they wouldn’t be spared from that ruin because their congressman refused to  participate in unconstitutional spending.

What we’re witnessing in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other parts of Europe is a direct result of their massive spending to accommodate the welfare state. A greater number of people are living off government welfare programs than are paying taxes. Government debt in Greece is 160 percent of gross domestic product. The other percentages of GDP are 120 in  Italy,104 in Ireland and 106 in Portugal. As a result of this debt and the  improbability of their ever paying it, their credit ratings either have reached  or are close to reaching junk bond status.

Here’s the question for us: Is the U.S. moving in a direction toward or away from the troubled EU nations?

It turns out that our national debt, which was 35  percent of GDP during the 1970s, is now 106 percent of GDP, a level not seen  since World War II’s 122 percent. That debt, plus our more than $100 trillion in  unfunded liabilities, has led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade our credit rating from AAA to AA+, and the agency is keeping the outlook at “negative” as a result of its having little confidence that Congress will take on the  politically sensitive job of tackling the same type of  entitlement that has turned Europe into a basket case.

I am all too afraid that Benjamin Franklin correctly saw our nation’s destiny when he said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”