Crony Capitalist John Kerry

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Failed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry’s (D., Mass.) long history of ethically dubious investments could invite controversy as he takes on a new role as a “top surrogate” for President Obama’s reelection campaign.
Kerry’s net worth as listed on his 2011 financial disclosure form is at least $193 million and likely much higher, making him the wealthiest member of the Senate. He is also a prolific investor, maintaining an array of stocks and other holdings through a mix of family trusts, marital trusts, and commingled fund accounts with his wife, Big Ketchup baroness Teresa Heinz.
The five-term Senator has a well-documented history of investing in companies that would benefit from policies he supports, as well as making conveniently timed and highly profitable trades coinciding with the passage of major legislation and, in some cases, the dissemination of privileged information.
For years, Kerry has invested millions in a number of green energy companies that have benefitted from the president’s efforts to aggressively subsidize the industry with taxpayer dollars.
These companies include Exelon, which received a $646 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2011 to build a solar facility in California and created only 20 permanent jobs, as well as Fisker Automotive, the fledgling electric car company that offshored its manufacturing operation to Finland after receiving a $529 million federal loan guarantee in 2010.
The loan guarantees, approved by the Department of Energy, were made possible by funding allocated in the 2009 stimulus bill, which Kerry supported. According to Kerry’s own office, the Senator “played a key role” in crafting the portions of the legislation designed to offer federal support for green energy projects.

This is what you get when Washington gets to pick the winners and losers instead of the free markets,corruption.

'Repo Men'

Kevin D. Williams:

On and on and on it goes: Sen. John Kerry invested aggressively in health-care companies while shaping health-care legislation. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.) was a remarkably apt options trader during the days when he had a front-row seat to Congress’s deliberations on the unfolding financial crisis. The Obama administration poured billions of dollars into solar companies, of which the failed Solyndra is the most infamous. But a lot of that money went to other firms, including First Solar, which is owned by billionaire Obama supporter Ted Turner and by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is omnipresent. And during the financial crisis, a big piece of Goldman Sachs was bought by Warren Buffett, who stacked up a lot of cash when the government poured money into that struggling investment bank with the support of Barack Obama. When the federal government bought into Goldman Sachs, it negotiated for itself a 5 percent dividend. Warren Buffett got 10 percent — on top of the benefit of having Washington inundate his investment with great rippling streams of taxpayers’ money. Republicans are no saints, either, but Democrats were running the congressional show during such crucial episodes as the implementation of the bailouts and the health-care debate — which were big investment opportunities for political insiders with access to market-moving information. Congress has effectively exempted itself from insider-trading rules, not that the SEC would have the guts to go after a Senator Schumer or a Speaker Pelosi for these exploits. And that — not campaign contributions, not lobbying — is the really stinky petri dish of festering corruption at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. You want a case for limited government? That’s it. And Wall Street is on the wrong side of the argument, which is one reason free-market conservatives should not romanticize the lords of finance.

These 'lords of finance' and there hench men in Washington are doing nothing less than raping their country.

Everyone is looking for another Reagan to set things straight.Maybe we should be looking for another Andrew Jackson to end the corruption that prevails in Washington and on Wall Street.

The Solar Fraud

From The Market Ticker:  

Look folks, solar is an interesting idea but it's not economically viable. It requires ridiculous amounts of land to be dedicated to it and it only works when the sun is shining (obviously), which isn't all of the time. Industry and personal users, on the other hand, would like electricity to be available any time the switch is thrown. This sets up a rather serious problem, and that's before we start talking about money, which is also an issue.

Solar has never been viable without government subsidy, and that is unlikely to change at any time in the near future. If and when it does it will rise all on its own without a need for anyone to hand out "free money."
But the numbers do not support any sort of mass-investment on this technology. Among other things manufacturing is energy intensive and creates a pollution problem. We've "solved" that by shoving it in the corner (in China), just like we have with so many other things, but in fact that's a public fraud as well.
I'll be interested in solar when it is cost-effective standing alone as a peaking source. There it might indeed, some day, be worthwhile. But the competition for peaking plants today is natural gas, which today is also quite cheap. It may not be tomorrow, but today it is.
As a base load source solar is next-to-worthless as it simply is unable to provide energy on a 24x7 basis, and that's what's required in that role. Whether or not we like it solar simply doesn't pass the economics test as a prime energy source -- and there's nothing that indicates that in the reasonably near future it will.

Solar,like all other "green" energy sources,is a confidence scheme perpetrated on us by Flim-Flam men,both in Big Business and Big Government,to raid the public till.

'GM Inflates Chevy Volt Stats With Fleet Sales'

'Why Obama's Stimulus Failed'

This was theft,plain and simple.Obama used the stimulus as a slush fund to pay off his friends in big business,the unions,state governments,and so-called non-profits like ACORN.

'Statist Delusions'

Mark Steyn:

It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics — the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game “Pass the Parcel,” in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.
The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama’s Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Biden described as the fellow who’s always “the smartest guy in the room” explained his affairs thus: “I simply do not know where the money is.” Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?

'Slick Willism?'

Victor Davis Hanson:

There are some preliminary reports about Bill Clinton’s purported $50,000-a-month retainer — paid out to Teneo, a firm where he is chairman of the board — from his friend Jon Corzine’s now broke MF Global. It reminds of Newt Gingrich’s getting $30,000 a month for his work as a “historian” for Freddie Mac up until the eve of its crack-up. One comes away with a sort of despair that our most prominent politicians, who have already done quite well in private and public life, still cannot refrain from cashing in on their contacts for even more cash.

The symptoms are depressingly the same: the big retainer fee, the financial insolvency of the clients, the lack of financial expertise on the part of the consultant, the apparent lack of any quantifiable value in the service rendered, the euphemisms employed to disguise the lobbying efforts (Clinton was supposed to improve the “image” of CEO Corzine, rather than be an historian of the company). 
One can think up all sorts of new rules and regulations to stop this sort of insider influence peddling (the various ways of making millions are endless, as the Freddie and Fannie vets attest — cf. Emanuel (Freddie), Gorelick (Fannie), Johnson (Fannie), Raines (Fannie), etc. — but there would no doubt be ways of circumventing them. In the end, the only antidote we are left with is shame, and a general public weariness with affluent and pensioned figures maximizing profit in ways made possible by their past public office.

I have to disagree with Professor Hanson here.It is not shame that will stop the Newt's and Clinton's from cashing in on their postitions and influence.Lets face it,these men have no shame.What will stop all of this is reducing the size of the Federal government and limiting its in influence in the private sector.When you do this the political in-crowd have nothing to peddle.

'Sarah Palin Nails OWS Hypocrisy'

Via Free North Carolina:

At a Republican meeting not far from here, Sarah Palin nailed the difference between the Tea Party and the Occupy Whatever crowds. While we all may agree that the bailouts were wrong, and we should end the fed, as some occupiers seem to protest, my answer is make the government so small and impotent they can't give bailouts. OWS says "give me the money instead of them".



"They say 'Wall Street fat cats got a bailout so now I want one too.' And the correct answer is no one is entitled to a bailout," Palin told the crowd of about 1,000 at the Republican Party of Florida dinner. "The American dream, our foundation, is about work ethic and empowerment, not entitlement."


She compared the protesters and President Barack Obama to the "crony capitalists" they say they oppose.


"Barack Obama is owned by Wall Street [see here - Graybeard]. The fat cats, as he calls them, they're his friends. They're his pals. That's where he gets his campaign donations. And he's very generous about giving these cats their cat nip — bigger returns on their investments in bailouts," Palin said.


She went on to try and convince OWS that they need to be protesting Washington, where the policies they claim to oppose come from. Fat chance.

She is spot on as usual.It would have been nice if candidate Sarah Palin had made those remarks,but alas it was not to be.

'When The Government Passes Out Money They Tend To Pass It Out To Their Friends And Cronies'

The problem isn't whether the government favors its friends and supporters,that is human nature and we all do it.No the problem is that the government shouldn't be making these loans to begin with,that's what banks are for,and it needs to stop now.

hat tip to Say Anything Blog.

"Crony Capitalism"

An excerpt from Sarah Palin's speech at Indianola,Iowa:

We sent a new class of leaders to D.C., but immediately the permanent political class tried to co-opt them – because the reality is we are governed by a permanent political class, until we change that. They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their own backs, and they claim that they faced and “solved” the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country’s first credit downgrade, they promptly went on vacation.

No, they don’t feel the same urgency that we do. But why should they? For them business is good; business is very good. Seven of the ten wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Polls there actually – and usually I say polls, eh, they’re for strippers and cross country skiers – but polls in those parts show that some people there believe that the economy has actually improved. See, there may not be a recession in Georgetown, but there is in the rest of America.

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed – a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.

Read the whole speech or listen to it,its spot on.