FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘White House’ Category

Just to make sure everyone understands, diverting funds isn’t just a city and state sport.  Why no, we do it for those who make political donations too — especially those who bundle together really big political donations….

A new book by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer details the startling extent of the cronyism that has pervaded President Obama’s “green jobs” push. According to Schweizer, 4 out of every 5 renewable energy companies backed by the Energy Department was “run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.”

Those companies’ “political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy,” Schweizer explains. “It brought them returns many times over.”

80% eh?  That’s a pretty impressive number.  And while I can argue that renewable energy companies are probably more likely to be run by Democrats than Republicans you can be a Democrat and not give a lot of money to a Presidential campaign, can’t you?

Why yes you can…. but in this case the “yes we can” appears to be directly related to Obama’s political donations — give him a lot of money and the federal spigot will open and shower you with taxpayer funds!

This might be defensible if these companies actually turned out to be good investments.  But then we have Solyndra, which it appears was on the verge of failure just before it was bailed out, and it appears the firm re-wrote loan covenants to effectively pay off prior private party loans with the nice taxpayer milk that came from you and I even as the firm was on the verge of failure!

Only in government, my friends.  No private lender would ever allow such a thing to happen.

In private business when you try to screw someone like this the attempt is almost-certain to draw a lawsuit in response and might draw a criminal charge.

When it comes to government handouts?

Not so much.

Here is your crook in chief, making sure that your hard-earned tax money is siphoned off to his cronies that in turn “donate” money to his re-election campaign….

The White House is clamoring to shoot down claims made in a new book by Pulitzer  Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, which offers stinging insight into the Obama  administration’s dysfunctional handling of the economic crisis.

Confidence Men, released Tuesday, is an exposé on the bitter  rivalries that divided and, at times, paralyzed Obama’s economic team. It paints  an unflattering portrait of an inexperienced president who lacks the leadership  skills to get his staff in line.

The criticism couldn’t have come at a worse time for Obama. Already under  increased scrutiny about the administration’s economic policies and the  president’s ability to lead, White House officials are pushing back hard against  Suskind’s book. In a media blitz this week, administration officials have listed  over a half-dozen minor inconsistencies, factual errors, and spelling  mistakes.

Treasury Secretary Tim  Geithner even provided an on-camera denial to one of the book’s more  shocking claims, and Press Secretary Jay Carney went so far as to accuse Suskind  of “lifting” a passage in his book from Wikipedia.

Suskind is standing by his book, telling talk show hosts and reporters that  the administration is getting defensive because they are worried by some of his  revelations.

After reading the book, it’s easy to see why. There are a more than a few  allegations in the book that should have the White House nervous.

Obama is a terrible manager

Image: The  White House

Suskind makes the case that Obama picked the wrong  people to guide his administration’s economic policy. The team, anchored by  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council director Larry  Summers, was rife with acrimony and divisions.

At one point, Obama’s friend U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D) warned the  president-elect: “You’ve picked the wrong people. I don’t understand how you  could do this! You’ve picked the wrong people!”

But as the team broke down after a series of bad decisions, Obama failed to  nip the problem in the bud. Instead, he let himself be lectured and dictated to,  particularly by Summers, who formed an early alliance with Chief of Staff Rahm  Emanuel. In this leadership void, members of his economic staff — including  Council of Economic Advisors chair Cristina Romer and budget director Peter  Orzag — quickly became more concerned with one-upping one another than with  guiding the country out of the financial crisis.

The whole economic team knew the stimulus was doomed to  fail

Image: Wayne  National Forest / flickr

Passed within a month of Obama’s  inauguration, the stimulus bill was not a grand policy proposal, but a  “hodgepodge,” of competing and unresolved ideas being bounced around by the  President’s new economic team. The administration saw a hole in the economy and  wanted to fill it as quickly as possible, without much thought as to how the  money was being spent.Conventional wisdom now holds that the stimulus wasn’t big enough — states  used the money to plug holes in their budgets and tax breaks went to pay down  debt. Obama admitted as much in 2010, but economists were sounding the alarm  long before the bill passed.

Suskind’s revelations are particularly salient because not  much has changed in the Obama administration on this point. The White House  is still yielding to deficit hawks while struggling to make a case for stimulus  spending.

But Paul Krugman was the voice inside Obama’s head

New  York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and  Summers’ rival, was an early and vocal critic of Obama’s stimulus plan.Although he was shunned from the president’s economic policy staff, Suskind  writes that Krugman occupied an important place in Obama’s deliberations about  the recovery.

“Each morning at the economic briefing it was like we were debating Krugman,”  an aide told Suskind. “Clearly Obama was reading Paul’s columns and related on  materials…and it made sense to him as both analysis and a guide for  action.”

Larry Summers hijacked the administration’s economic  policy — and the White House let him

According  to Suskind’s account, Summers sweet-talked his way into the President’s inner  economic circle, but considered the NEC job beneath him. So he added conditions:  He would be the gatekeeper for all economic matters that went to the Oval  Office. Obama accepted, against the counsel of some of his closest advisors.The system drove Obama’s other economic advisors crazy — they found that when  Summers disagreed with their view it somehow never made it to the president. In  one account, after Orzag submitted a report directly to the president — at  Obama’s request — Summers stormed into Orzag’s office yelling “What you’ve done  is IMMORAL!”

By the end of 2009, Summers was trying to exercise control over even broader  areas of domestic policy, demanding “content control” for all information on  environmental/energy, tax policy, and healthcare.

But when Orzag complained to Emanuel, Rahm asked him to “help him out” and  understand how difficult it was to manage Summers.

And then totally lost it after Obama reappointed Ben  Bernanke

Another  condition of Summers accepting the NEC job was that he would be first in line to  replace Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.So when Obama decided to reappoint Bernanke, Summers was outraged. He made a  list of demands, including a round of golf with Obama, the right to walk with  the Cabinet at major events like the State of the Union, and a car and driver.  The White House acquiesced to everything except the car and driver, but Summers  insisted so Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina was forced to try and track one  down — evidence of how far the administration was willing to go to appease  Summers.

It wasn’t until Obama’s even-keeled senior advisor Pete Rouse wrote a memo in  January 2010 arguing for Summers’ removal that the White House even considered  replacing its NEC chair.

Tim Geithner went behind everybody’s back to save the  banks

Image: The  White House

The major rift within the economic team developed over  whether the federal government should restructure the major investment banks,  which Summers and Romer supported. Geithner, Wall Street’s “Man in Washington,”  however, opposed a restructuring and favored bank “stress tests.”Obama ultimately settled for a compromise, authorizing the stress tests and  ordering Geithner to come up with a plan to restructure Citi. According to  Suskind, Geithner simply ignored that order and never came up with a plan.

As the last guy standing from Obama’s original economic team, Geithner is the  only one whose job is potentially threatened by Confidence Men (by Suskind’s  account, it’s a miracle he still has his job in the first place). But the White  House has vehemently denied the claims, and paraded Geithner in front of the  press corps this week to disavow them in person.

The White House has a SERIOUS women problem

According  to the book, top female staffers were marginalized by the boy’s club mentality  of the Obama White House. “Looking back, this place would be in court for a  hostile workplace,” former communications director Anita Dunn told Suskind.  “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely  hostile workplace to women.”As the only woman on the economic team, Romer disproportionately bore the  brunt of this hostility. Staffers said Summers often tried to humiliate Romer in  morning briefings — it got so bad that Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett had  to call meetings for female staffers to air their grievances.

The President was not only complicit, but also responsible for the problem,  Suskind notes. During one meeting with a group of economists, Romer wrote a note  to Summers: “Either he acknowledges me, or I’m leaving.”

It took Obama seven months to realize he needed to fire  Rahm

A  year into Obama’s presidency, Pete Rouse, his senior advisor, drafted the first  of several memos asserting that then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was ineffective  at his job.Legendary for his temper, but also for his disorganization, Emanuel was often  the one instigating the fights that dominated the West Wing and distracted Obama  from governing.

That February, Emanuel made headlines in a column by Dana Milbank asserting  that Obama should have paid more attention to his Chief of Staff — an article  that had Obama livid.

But even so, it took Obama until September to finally show Emanuel the door — and even then it was on Emanuel’s own terms.

In short, Obama is a REALLY terrible manager

Obama  allowed himself to be pushed around by his subordinates — Summers and Geithner  in particular — and drawn into long policy debates instead of focusing on policy  questions.”The decision he had made in November to  choose Geithner and Summers, and his penchant for wanting to convince his  advisers of his rightness prior to making a major decision, all but guaranteed  that any such market intervention would place him in a position of having to  out-debate much of his senior staff,” Suskind writes.

Summers put it best, telling Peter Orzag: “You know  Peter, we’re really home alone. I mean it…We’re home alone. There’s no adult in  charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”

Obama all-but-admitted to Suskind that he didn’t focus  on the big picture for much of his first year, saying: “Carter, Clinton, and I  all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks… I think that if you get  too consumed with that you lose sight of the larger issue.”

Not much has changed — Obama hasn’t had a message since  2008

Image: The White House

After Democrats lost Sen. Ted  Kennedy’s seat to Scott Brown in January 2010, Obama asked his senior staff  “What is my narrative? I don’t have a narrative.”As one staffer in the room told Suskind, “He was right. He had no narrative.  No story. For someone like Obama, that’s like saying I don’t know who I am. That  I’ve lost my way.”

Throughout the book Obama is seen searching to fulfill — and failing to meet — many of the promises and expectations of his presidential campaign. Buried in  policy debates, internal discord, and partisan squabbles with Congress, Obama  lost the inspirational quality that defined his ascendance to the White House — a challenge that continues to this day.

Now meet the author

The Business Insider

“It’s the DEBT, Stupid!”
We’re Doing Something About it! Come Join the Swarm!

Oh joy.  Is this a case of do what I say, not as I do?  Is it now generally accepted that those in government do not have to follow the laws that apply to the rest of us?  Welcome to the Oligarchy of the United States.

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don’t labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They’re correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it’s always seemed to those Americans who don’t feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class …

… Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along — unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

The Post’s T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.

Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president’s top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G’s here or there. So he dropped out.

And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he’d be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who’s supposed to know about handling everyone else’s money. In the end this was excused by Washington’s bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.

And under Geithner’s expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents’ names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama’s very own White House owe the government they’re allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.

In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892. In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836. In the IRS’ parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814. At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis’ husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463. Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors owe $1,076,733.

Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.

Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts “man-caused disasters.” Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.

Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.

And they’re checking our pockets for metal and coins?

– Andrew Malcolm

LATimesBlog

The giant banks are treating the American Citizen like we work for them, are holding the economy hostage, and are taking our deposits and using them to speculate in casino style gambling.

They’ve bought and paid for Congress and the White House. See this, this and this.

Will Americans exercise our power, or become serfs to a permanent banking royalty?

An economist says the healthcare bill “is just another bailout of the financial system”, and lawyers say that it is unconstitutional.

Will we defeat this giveaway to the insurance giants, or become permanent slaves to mandatory insurance requirements?

Top scientists, economists and environmentalists all say
that cap and trade is a scam which won’t significantly reduce C02
emissions, and will only help in making the financial players who
crashed the economy even more wealthy.

Will we defeat this
worthless scam, or allow the failed banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
and Citigroup – who have already taken many billions of taxpayer
dollars – to make a fortune off of this con game at our expense?

Will
Americans reclaim our nation in 2010 from the thugs and con artists, or
put our heads down and stay subservient while the little we have left
in the way of money, resources and dignity is stolen by the giant
banks, insurance companies and carbon trading players?

Submitted by Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan of Scope Labs

Are financial markets a direct reflection of the overall health of a nation? I wish they were not, but I fear they are.

I wonder at times if our nation has entered a state of purgatory –
all of us mulling around in the waiting room to Hell, anxiously
counting the minutes until the grim reaper saunters through the door
sickle in hand his mission to send us off to eternal damnation.
Unfortunately, there is little time to close this door so that we may
stave off this potential fate that looms so near. What we need to alter
this course is a procession of men who possess moral fortitude and
common sense, men of rationality and reason. Men of action who will set
in motion the dismantling of institutions that bleed this nation dry.

Hope is not a strategy. This present state of manufactured optimism
emanating from the White House and our news outlets is contemptible. We
are in dire need of new reformist leadership and of new voices that
will speak the truth. A national purification is long overdue. Time is
not on our side. Look at the track record this nation has racked up
over the last few decades and this economic and moral purgatory in
which we find ourselves might very well mark the beginning of our walk
of death down the long road to Hell.

I make this analogy of a national state of purgatory not in jest,
but rather in practical terms. This nation has gone the way of an
absolute meltdown of morality and ethics. We’ve reverted to a sort of
Wild West where anything goes. From the halls of congress to our
corporate boardrooms our collective morality bar has sunk so low we
cannot go any lower without disconnecting from the great past this
nation is starved to regain. We stand dangerously close to the point
where immorality begets our undoing.

Personally, I am father to a daughter of fourteen years. Brett, my
co-author, is father to a twenty-month old daughter and an
eighteen-year old son. We desperately want to create for our children a
better world. But we are fallible men, and certainly not saints. The
paragraphs you are about to read are not written from some moral high
ground, or a Holier-than-thou pulpit, but rather from saddened hearts
when we see that by walking our own moral tightrope, if we were to
allow ourselves to slip below the bar, however slightly, we would be
just as guilty as the worst perpetrators of our nation’s moral
destruction. Also, when witness to greater moral transgressions, by our
own inaction, we become part of the problem. And we are just two men.
Amplify this by fifty million, one hundred million, or three hundred
million fold and it is no wonder immorality permeates our society.

This article is our personal effort to call people’s attention to
the truth. The brevity of our circumstance is immeasurable by past
reference. Economically, we have never been so challenged. Over the
past few decades a gullible US population cheered the halls of congress
and the Oval Office alike as the incestuous bedfellows of money and
politics ushered in a financial Coup d’état – co-opting our public
trusts with the greed and excess of Wall Street. Profits are now had at
any cost – damn the long-term consequences. Instead of being exposed as
the obvious fraud he was, Bernie Maddoff was coddled by the SEC – an
institution whose role as regulator is a complete failure. As Wall
Street and Washington raped an entire nation, employees of the SEC were
too busy surfing porn on the Internet and running private businesses
instead of doing the jobs taxpayers pay them to do. All the while,
young girls were selling their virginity to the highest bidder in
public cyber-forums where grown men (not hormonally charged teenage
boys) seek out their sexual fantasies in the netherworld of Internet
pornography. What of the wives, children, and even parents of these
men? Do they approve of such questionable actions?

Think of our children turning on the television to see people eating
bile, cow blood, and live bugs for money on game shows like Fear
Factor, or Flavor Flav and his hit reality show where he maintains a
stable of women all of whom physically fight each other to have sex
with him because he’s a celebrity – and a damn ugly one at that. And
finally, there’s always Survivor, the ultimate demonstration of all
things wrong with modern human interaction. A reality show that pits
person against person in a deceitful game of moral destruction where
lack of ethics are rewarded, instead of punished. Survivor, this is
what our nation’s leadership has become. Win at any cost. Damn the
future of anyone but myself.

Morality is in great part the measure of a nation. Have we unlearned
morality? Is this why we find ourselves staring down the abyss?

We are allowing ourselves to become more corrupt by the minute. We
stare into the face of our future being raped, but we do nothing. We
are as corrupt as the corrupters. We accept the unacceptable. We fail
to understand that absolute power, corrupts absolutely. In what will go
down as the greatest financial heist in history our leaders have chosen
to reward corrupt individuals and their hollow corporations for what
are arguably criminal levels of risk behavior by the moneyed elite of
this country. What message does that send to our children, or to anyone
for that matter? Be as corrupt as possible in the US and you will be
rewarded? Be the biggest failure jeopardizing the fate of others then
stand in the corporate welfare line with all the other wealthiest
institutions of the world, your greedy hand extended for a government
bailout check while you simultaneously foreclose on an entire nation?
Talk about the rich corralling the masses. It’s no wonder someone
coined the term “The Sheeple.”

The path we traveled to this purgatorial limbo is both easily
understood and misunderstood. The answers to understanding are
sometimes right in front of us. What are seemingly benign things or
actions, those everyday judgments or decisions we make to do one thing
or another, are not always benign. Tell a little white lie to make that
one sale that will put us into our bonus. Rig the game in our favor so
that we might enjoy a little more opulence for the few decades we have
remaining on this planet. Look the other way while the Federal Reserve
and Wall Street blow economic bubble after economic bubble and in the
process create a six-hundred trillion dollar shadow banking system that
plays by no one’s rules but its own. In the case of Goldman Sachs, and
Wall Street in general, lie, cheat, and steal their way to
profitability at the expense of three hundred million taxpayers. The
fact is that we have become an uncooperative nation willing to take
advantage of anyone for the sake of profit. The idea of building a
cooperative future where everyone wins has been sacrificed at the altar
of short-mindedness.

It might be this purgatorial limbo I speak of is simpler than it
appears. It could be that we are collectively suffering the
consequences of the “Peter Principle”, or getting to the job of
failure. This principle supposes that an individual rises in a
corporate hierarchy to their first level of incompetence. An assembly
worker gets promoted to supervisor then to assistant manager, then
manager, until he next gets promoted to an upper management job for
which he is ill equipped and subsequently gets promoted no further as
he can no longer demonstrate the competence required for the task at
hand. He rather relies on subordinates who are then stuck with an upper
manager who cannot carry out his own duties. Could this be the state of
our nation? Have we been promoted as far as our competence allows? Are
we in fact incompetent to handle our future? Have we now elected a man
just incompetent enough for the Presidency who is being manipulated by
Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and a circle of (previous) Wall
Street insiders now on the government payroll as cabinet members and
high-ranking advisors? The saddest thing is that we sit idly by whilst
our virtue is being stolen. We do nothing.

A view of the world through rose-colored glasses does no one, any
good. We are not as resilient as we think we are. Instead, we exist in
a world of synthetic productivity where multi-tasking renders us
incapable of doing anything effectively or with any level of
competence. Multi-tasking, that art of simultaneous ineffectiveness is
a counter productive weapon that to a large degree has contributed to
the potential failure of this nation. If you were to listen to Alan
Greenspan however, you would believe that multi-tasking through
technological gains by way of the “new paradigm” was the gold at the
end of the Information Superhighway and that exotic mortgages and the
burgeoning spending class paved the road to riches. We now know these
premises to be empirically wrong.

It can now be argued that what would seemingly be advancements in
productivity are proving to be setbacks. The Information Superhighway
has led us to an era of technological arrogance. In reality all we have
accomplished is to dilute our ability to carry out simple tasks as we
click from a quarterly sales report due in an hour, to Facebook, to
on-line solitaire, to writing an email explaining to our boss why the
quarterly report will be delayed this day. We are a nation of excuse
makers. We look for someone else to keep us one step ahead of our
accumulating debt that smothers the potential of what could have been
an equitable future. Ironically, it is our technological arrogance that
impedes our ability to produce and manufacture our way to prosperity.

Craftsmen who used to flock to this country to fulfill the needs of
a manufacturing base flock here no more. “Made in the USA” used to mean
something. It meant quality. It was the definition of industrial
capitalism. But now through the wonders of globalization we have
exported our craftsmanship through an outflow of jobs to China and
India as we turned everyone in the USA into real estate agents,
mortgage brokers, and web designers – a perfect playground for bankers
to ply their craft, lending money in every creative manner both
thinkable, and unthinkable. “Made in the USA” has been reduced to the
status of punch-line – synonymous only with “Mortgage Backed
Securities” and other “Toxic Derivatives.”

Is it any wonder we have evolved into the ‘entitled society’? If we
weren’t on the government payroll, or subsidized by the US taxpayer
through social welfare then we were borrowing our way to prosperity.
Enter the God-fearing middle class. Just dumb enough to buy into the
scam a couple hundred million people began signing over their
paychecks, selling their future for the enjoyment of having things now.
We were transformed into non-productive Sheeple, selling our souls for
an easier life in lieu of a better future for our children. At our
current rate of productive attrition we will soon be a nation of
declawed housecats, possessing no skill-set whatsoever to survive in a
world where the ability to produce real goods still reins supreme. Yet
we remain the ‘entitled society’, when we are entitled to nothing.

We forget (through economic amnesia) that throughout history all
societies fail. Nicolaus Copernicus maintained that civilizations
failed when bad money, controlled and understood by an elite few, drove
out good money. The same can be said for morality. Bad, drives out
good. This is a reality of which we should all be acutely aware but
rather are immune to its possibility. We dangerously believe we cannot
fail. That, in fact, is the greatest gamble of all. A roll of the dice
against history, a bet against all natural laws of the universe, all
things are in a state of entropy. All things eventually wither away to
nothing. To possess longevity is to be ahead of the universe. Sadly, we
have constructed a fragile world that produces material things that do
not last. The fiat money we use as the currency of our production is by
design, destructive itself. The Federal Reserve prints greed, nothing
more. But still we covet it. We pursue it as if it had value. And in
this pursuit we destroy earth’s resources as if the laws of nature have
no relevance. We believe there is only now.

We, the entitled society, morally and fiscally bankrupt have borrowed,
spent, and bailed our way into a historical corner. Nero should be so
proud. Our public trusts are nothing more than government sanctioned
check-kiting operations shifting liabilities from one credit card to
another faster than our creditors can say “Federal Reserve.” The
Ponzi-scheme that is our fiat currency system is about to go the way of
what was for a time the symbol of American superiority, General Motors.
It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for
our nation. As I claimed in 2005 that GM would go bankrupt I will now
guarantee that the US government is soon to follow. How our ultimate
entropy will take form I cannot say, but form it will. We will default.
We will restructure. It will be at this point our arrogance will end.