Our Changing Globe

Archive for the ‘bailout’ Category

Early Jobs Projections Could Haunt Obama in 2012 – NYTimes.com

thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com11/4/11

Friday's tepid jobs report brings a fresh reminder of the stubborn difficulty President Obama and his team face in overcoming the argument that his administration has failed to address unemployment.

Droves Of Democrats Balking On Obama 2012 | Politicons

politicons.net11/14/11

Radioactive Obama… Politico has a piece highlighting the droves of Democrats that are refusing to back Obama in 2012. …

Just one year from the 2012 election and President Obama is in an extremely perilous political situation.

The poor economy he inherited hasn’t recovered and has most likely worsened.

Published unemployment is stuck above 9% with real unemployment being around 18.5%

Long-term unemployment is at record post-war levels.

The housing sector, where most people’s personal wealth was and is concentrated, remains mired in deep recession.

The scandals surrounding Republican-led investigations into Solyndra and Operation Fast and Furious are deepening.

Obama Had Overwhelming Majorities In Both Houses Of Congress

Although the President had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress in his first two years, he has only two major legislative achievements to his credit:

The stimulus bill.

And Obamacare.

The stimulus bill is generally perceived as having been worse than a total failure, because it’s perceived as having been motivated more by politics than economics, and because much of the $800 billion was directed towards public service union members and liberal causes; i.e. "green energy", rather than real economic recovery.

Obamacare also remains deeply unpopular with the general public and is headed for the Supreme Court, which could well find its key provision unconstitutional next summer, just as the election gets into high gear.

The Economy And America’s Status

Budget deficits soared during the Obama years, with three trillion-dollar-plus deficits in a row.

And this has caused the national debt to swell to a level that, relative to GDP, has not been seen since the end of World War II and for the first time ever, the United States lost its AAA credit rating, which was a deep embarrassment for the country and also the administration.

Obama’s Ratings

So it shouldn’t be surprising that under these circumstances, that the President’s approval ratings have been in sharp decline, with some of his key supporting groups, including the youth and Hispanic voters to a greater or less degree abandoning him.

Obama’s Re-electability

No recent President was re-elected with unemployment above 7.8%, and that was in 1984, when unemployment was falling rapidly as a major economic boom accelerated.

So What Happened?

How did a man who three years ago won a higher percentage of both the popular and electoral vote than any Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide almost fifty years ago find himself fighting such uphill odds to keep the White House?

The answer to that seems to lie in the somewhat exceptional circumstances that existed during the 2008 election, and Barack Obama’s personality which fitted the times.

In 2008, the American electorate was thoroughly tired of both the Bush administration and the Republican Party, which had lost its majority in Congress in 2006 for the first time in twelve years.

The Republican field of presidential candidates in 2008 was a weak one, with the eventual winner, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, widely perceived as being too old for the job.

So Obama, who was only forty seven years old, seemed in contrast, like a breath of fresh air.

He seemed personable, articulate (nobody had yet focused on his TelePrompTer) and he was the first ever bi-racial candidate for a major-party nomination with any serious chance of winning.

His biggest opposition was Sen. Hillary Clinton, the first woman candidate who also had a serious chance of winning, but she was already well known to the American people, having been First Lady for eight years; and she carried a lot of baggage from her husband’s administration.

Obama, in contrast, was a blank slate and to some extent still is because of the main stream media which is still protecting him.

Obama Hid His Tracks

Obama only served a little over three years in the US Senate, where his record was thin, and he mostly voted "present” rather than take a stand on issues.

Which we can now see was because he didn’t want evidence that could later be used against him.

How Obama Won

The Obama campaign used his lack of Washington experience to the fullest, much like Herman Cain is using his now.

They cultivated an image of a new kind of president, one who would cut through the old Washington merry-go-round of partisan bickering and special-interest pandering.

He would be post-partisan, a President who would throw the special-interest moneychangers out of the temple of the nation’s capital.

Obama’s biggest advantage in the 2008 election however, was that the mainstream media, failed to reveal any of his major negatives, such as having been and active member of the New Party (communist) and promoted all of his seeming positives; simply because it so desperately wanted to see an extreme left-wing, bi-racial candidate elected.

So What Happened To Candidate Obama’s Promises?

Running for President and being President, are two entirely separate matters however, and once in the White House a new Obama emerged, one who was quite different from the post-partisan, special-interest-bashing one.

What metamorphosed, was a hyper-liberal ideologue who attended to his special interests, such as labor unions, as assiduously as any other Washington politician had ever done before.

And what’s more, an arrogance and a rigidity that had not been seen in the candidate before, became increasingly evident, and expressed itself in such things as his State of the Union speech in January 2010, wherein he publicly criticized the Supreme Court, many of whose members were sitting in front of him for one of its decisions, which was totally unprecedented behavior.

Soon Gone Was The Bi-Partisanship

"I won the election”, he bluntly told Rep. Paul Ryan when the latter tried to negotiate regarding Obamacare, and it resulted in his two major pieces of legislation passing with almost no Republican votes in either house.

The Tea Party

What happened next was a groundswell of opposition to the Obama administration’s big spending ways which quickly became known as the Tea Party, and it’s something that Obama naively or arrogantly ignored for too long.

Obama Vainly Ignored The Clear Writing On The Wall

Republican candidates did extremely well in the off-year elections of 2009, winning the governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia with control-the-spending campaigns, and even greater evidence of voters’ dissatisfaction was when Scott Brown, who was a little known Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of Democratic icon Ted Kennedy in deep-blue Massachusetts in January, 2010.

Obama Has Been Slow To Learn

Obama simply made a few token political adjustments, and in November, 2010, a tidal wave election gave decisive control of the House back to the Republicans and added seven Senate seats to their column, with Republicans also winning races for governor and state legislative seats across the width and breadth of the country.

Obama did admit that he had taken a shellacking, but he seems no more willing to change his ways than before because his latest plan to stimulate the economy is little different than his first one, and it has no chance of being enacted.

Can Obama Win Reelection?

Unlikely unless:

The economy turns around.

The Republicans nominate another weak candidate, which is possible.

The Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, or avoids making a decision before the election.

Obama’s biggest problem however seems to be that he’s totally egocentric and believes that his way is the only right way.

It’s highly unlikely that he’ll change, and increasingly likely that he’ll be a one term president, which is something that he said that he’d prefer.

"I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president".

And if that comes to be, then he’ll be able to say that he was right about that too!

Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending – Washington Post

Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending Washington Post The Washington Post reported earlier this month that e-mails showed that White House officials pushed federal reviewers for a decision on the Solyndra loan as they sought to schedule a press announcement with the company and Vice President Biden. … and more »

Obama's Solyndra Scandal Reeks of the Chicago Way | Just Piper

Those of us from Chicago know exactly what the Solyndra scandal smells like. And It doesn't smell fresh and green. Kudos to John Kass,. Chicago Tribune is a.

Publish Date: 09/18/2011 20:45

http://justpiper.com/2011/09/obamas-solyndra-scandal-reeks-of-the-chicago-way/

The ongoing probes into the collapse of Solyndra could spell a lot of trouble for Team Obama in 2012

Until now, and in spite of all the ongoing failures that can be attributed, at least in large part to the Obama administration, Obama until just a few weeks ago remained personally liked by a large swathe of the population.

Why Is Obama Still Personally Liked?

I personally believed Obama to be a charlatan back in October 2008 when I wrote a piece entitled, Obama And The Missing Paper Trail, but right now we’re talking about how people in general still feel about him, and not me personally, so let’s move on.

Obama has so far earned those high personal-quality ratings by avoiding any meaningful scandal, and his Cabinet and White House staff have similarly offered no reason to suspect any misdeeds.

It has in fact been one of the quietest White Houses on the scandal front in recent memory but that may be about to change.

It might have changed because of the implosion of a politically-connected green-tech firm in Northern California, called Solyndra, and the apparent disappearing act of more than $500 million in taxpayer funds.

And "Yes" Obama Was Very Much Personally Involved

In his 2009 stimulus plan, Obama both sought and received billions of dollars to subsidize a promised explosion in "green jobs" and the White House needed to demonstrate that the U.S. could quickly make use of alternative energy sources to replace the hydrocarbon-based energy that presently meets the needs of the massive U.S. economy, and Obama and his administration chose Solyndra as its poster child.

The White House fast-tracked approval for taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and the company received $535 million from the Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank to build a new manufacturing facility.

Obama later appeared at Solyndra touting his green-jobs initiative and Solyndra insisted, until at least late as this summer that their financial status was strong.

The Collapse

Suddenly and without warning Solyndra collapsed, and over one thousand employees showed up for work on August 31, only to discover that the company had shut its doors.

The company’s stock price had been falling almost continually over the previous two years because of questions about about Solyndra’s real competitiveness and financial strength.

The Money Trail And George Kaiser

When Solyndra initially applied for taxpayer subsidies, auditors at the Department of Energy were already questioning Solyndra’s viability, so why did the Obama administration fast-track Solyndra’s application?

One fairly obvious reason might be, that one of the chief investors in Solyndra was George Kaiser who was one of Obama’s campaign bundlers in 2008, and he raised between $50,000 and $1000,000 for Obama’s campaign.

The Very Low Interest Rates

Solyndra executives visited the White House more than twenty times between March 2009 and April 2011 and the company was give an interest rate from the feds at one-fourth the going rate for green-jobs projects.

And Who Got Repaid First?

The collapse of Solyndra also led to a somewhat strange arrangement for repayments to creditors.

Despite having put up $535 million in taxpayer loan guarantees, the Obama administration didn’t insist on putting taxpayers in the most senior position for creditors if Solyndra failed, but instead, Kaiser will get repaid first on a $75 million investment, before taxpayers see a dime.

Sounds Fishy?

Last week, in response to an investigation by the DOE’s Inspector General, the FBI raided Solyndra, seizing its business records, and federal agents also raided the homes of Solyndra executives and seized additional computers files.

What’s more, Congress, which had already opened an investigation into Solyndra’s loans, will undoubtedly press for access to this material for its own probe.

This Will Damage Obama Personally

ABC (a strong Obama supporter) just reported that DOE officials sat in on Solyndra’s board meetings for months before the collapse, and that despite having this unprecedented access, the Obama administration did nothing to alert Congress that Solyndra might fail, and in fact, failed to respond when Solyndra executives misrepresented the status of the company to members of Congress.

There have been several minor controversies and suggestions of impropriety in the Obama administration, such as Operation Fast and Furious in the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) office in Phoenix and the Department of Justice, but Solyndra is the first controversy that has the potential to directly stain Barack Obama himself.

The Dems lost a NY precinct today that had been in Dem hands for close to a century and yesterday it was announced that poverty is at it highest rate since the ’50s.

Update Septemeber15, 2011

* The Treasury Inspector General’s Office said Wednesday night that it too, is now investigating the loan, because it was processed by Federal Financing Bank, a government lending institution that falls under the Treasury’s control.

* “A half a billion dollars that was not supported in January under the Bush administration was then conditionally recommended in March". Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas

Rick Perry and Mitt Romney must be licking their chops right now!