Barack Obama on the Ellen DeGenerous Show in 2008:
If mandating that everyone could buy healthcare would solve the healthcare problem, than government could just mandate that everyone should buy a house to solve homelessness. It isn’t that people don’t want healthcare, they can’t afford it.
It is the same story over and over and over… a contributor or bundler for Obama asks for a loan from the taxpayers. He gets the loan, starts or gets involved with a solar panel company, they pay themselves big money, give money to the Obama campaign or a campaign group – and then go out of business.
The story isn’t always exactly like this, but generally this is how it has worked.
On Monday, yet another Department of Energy funded solar energy company –the world’s largest solar power plant—filed for bankruptcy. Reuters reports:
Solar Trust of America LLC, which holds the development rights for the world’s largest solar power project, on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection after its majority owner began insolvency proceedings in Germany.
The Oakland-based company has held rights for the 1,000-megawatt Blythe Solar Power Project in the Southern California desert, which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project.
The Reuters story states that the company won the loan, but as the Washington Post reported that the company turned down the loan in late September of 2011. The CEO of Solar Trust, Uwe T. Schmidt thought that the loan was “too risky”. The Obama administration was willing to loan more than two billion taxpayer dollars to a company who was unwilling to take that kind of risk. The company’s bankruptcy filings indicate they employed only nine people.
This $2.1 billion loan guarantee would have been equivalent to more than three Solyndra sized loans. Solar Trust is one of the companies Peter Schweizer mentioned in his book Throw Them All Out who were offered or received large Department of Energy loans or grants and also have ties to President Obama. Schweizer notes in his book that Citigroup Global Partners and Deutsche Bank have invested $6 billion in this project.
Until recently, the vice chair of Citigroup Global Partners was Louis Susman who sat on the National Finance Committee for Obama’s campaign in 2008. In return, Susman left Citigroup to become President Obama’s ambassador to Britain.Another partner in this project is Chevron, who favored candidate Obamaover his 2008 rival Senator McCain in campaign donations.
In addition to the offer of financial benefits this politically tied company received, Solar Trust also received regulatory benefits. The Bylthe Solar Power Project is located on federal land. While the Obama administration is decreasing development of proven energy sources like oil on federal lands, they actually fast tracked thisproject’s permitting process:
Solar Trust partnered with Chevron (NYSE: CVX) to develop the Blythe project, which is located on federal land. It and eight other projects were selected by the Bureau of Land Management for a fast-track program that reduced the time it took to get land permits.
Read more HERE.
Lots of people watch RT online. It is very popular. But what most Americans do not understand is that the “hip and flashy” RT is actually “Russia Today” which is a mouth piece for chief oligarch Vladimir Putin.
You will see that every turn around, misdirection and myth about the laws and about the Trayvon shooting is employed by the “reporter”. When Crowder gets done deconstructing all of her BS at the end you can hear her contempt for him.
The Republicans are proposing real budgets and the Democrats, in violation of the Constitution, refuse to pass any budget and haven’t for three years.
This is a must see video at Real Clear Politics – LINK.
“Virtually none of the claims he makes about our budget are actually true,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tells CNBC’s Larry Kudlow. “He’s distorting the truth, he’s dividing the country, and he’s becoming more bitter and partisan by the day. Frankly, it’s kind of sad to see.”
“This is surreal. Really bizarre,” Ryan told CNBC’s Larry Kudlow.
See the video HERE.
Thousands of jobs lost and now we are more dependent on the Saudi King he likes to bow to so much.
Via Breitbart News:
Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:
The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision:
“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.
Read more HERE.
By our good friend Chuck DeVore:
Why would Occidental Petroleum, America’s fourth-largest oil company, donate $250,000 to a tax-hiking ballot initiative in California?
California’s expansive state government has found itself chronically short of funds as much due to a 31 percent boost in state spending from 2003-07 as to the economic slowdown. As a consequence, it may seem that tax-increase proposals have outnumbered jobs created in recent years.
Many big corporations backed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $24 billion tax increase in 2009, reasoning that the taxes proposed beat the alternative: hiking taxes on business or the state’s oil industry.
California has the third-largest proven U.S. oil reserves, with the highest gas tax and the fifth-highest overall tax on the oil industry. But, taking more from California’s oil producers is a perennial favorite as it satisfies two important constituencies: environmentalists and consumers of government services.
Squeezing tax revenue out of oil isn’t that simple, however. California crude is heavy and sulfur-laden, making it more costly to refine and thus discounting its value by about 10 percent. A California oil “extraction tax” would act to destroy oil reserves by making locally produced oil more costly to recover, inadvertently boosting foreign oil, which California can’t tax. As a result, the value of Occidental’s California oil reserves drop to the extent taxed.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. What you tax, you get less of.With this in mind, Occidental’s $250,000 contribution to Gov. Jerry Brown’s $9 billion tax hike initiative for the November ballot looks less like civic-minded corporate charity and more like a prudent investment. Especially since higher oil taxes would reduce the value of Occidental’s California oil reserves by hundreds of millions of dollars.
But there’s another rationale for Occidental’s assistance to the governor.Last October, Occidental Petroleum’s CEO cited the snail’s pace of drilling-permit approvals in California as the reason for a slowdown in Occidental’s oil and natural-gas production. California granted 14 drilling permits out of 199 applications received through October 2011, a 7 percent rate. In 2009, 37 of 52 were granted, 71 percent.
Read more HERE.
This is from the Democrats folks, unfortunately this add is reasonably honest.
Political Arena 