How much bailing out does one company need? (The correct answer is none, of course) After receiving some $50 billion in tax dollars from us courtesy of Obama’s “cash stash,” GM is claiming success with a “Obama claimed that GM was “back on top as the world’s number one automaker.” But true or not, if all is coming up roses for GM why is the company now lobbying the individual states for mini bailouts?

That is exactly what is happening. The new “big success” automaker is spending millions hiring lobbyists to squeeze more millions out of state legislatures. As Justin Owen notes, GM has “turned to another, smaller government teat,” by putting its hand out to the states. GM, Owen says, “has received another $1.7 billion in taxpayer-funded grants and tax abatements.”

This is no accident of timing, either. GM admitted to the Tennessee Watchdog that begging to the states for tax dollars is a concerted effort.

“We are increasing our activity with the states obviously, in the communities in which we operate. In doing this, we’ve invested more than $6 billion (throughout the states) during the last five years and brought 15,000 people back to work. So, the activity at the state level is important to us. Our lobbying is comparable to what our competitors are doing throughout the states,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin.

For the Watchdog, Christopher Butler found that GM has received more than $1.5 billion from Michigan, $7.5 million in tax incentives from Kentucky, over $10 million from Texas, and over $2 million from Indiana. Ohio and Maryland have given to the GM bailout fund, too, with tax incentives and other give aways.

Naturally, as these lobbying efforts grow, GM has paid lobbying firms millions for their work, millions that are coming right out of the pockets of American taxpayers both federal and state.

Apparently making cars is not a top priority for GM any more. Owen says that, “turning taxpayers on their heads and shaking every penny from their pockets is a profitable corporate strategy for a quasi-public car company. As of last summer, GM sat on roughly $40 billion in reserves. Yet the ribbon-cutting ceremonies with state officials across the country continue like clockwork, with taxpayers footing a lofty bill.”

The main question here is, once all the facilities are open and humming, once all the tax dollars are safely in GM’s pocket, will there be demand for the products that all these new plants are turning out? Is it a good idea in this bad economy to massively expand using the false benefit of government handouts? What will happen if after all this government aide runs out and GM finds that its sales still don’t justify all these new plants?

Are we taxpayers going to be expected to hand GM billions more because they are “too big to fail”?

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

First, if you’re quoting Andrew Sullivan as an actual conservative, get out the chest high hip waders. Second, Obama was always good at talking the talk, but, could never walk the walk, because he himself was intensely partisan to the far end of the progressive spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that, people have their own set of beliefs. It’s when one acts on beliefs, forcing them on people, that the problems start. And James Pethokoukis at The American Enterprise finds 11 stunning revelations from a confidential Larry Summers memo to Obama in December 2008 that was a key source for the New Yorker article. Here are a few of them (the bold is James’ writing, the italic is Larry Summers own writing

The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda. The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them). Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.

The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault. A significant cause of the current crisis lies in the failure of regulators to exercise vigorously the authority they already have.

The first one is the most significant, which highlights what we all inherently know, that the point of the stimulus was to give payback to campaign contributors and elected Democrats, as well as pushing Obama’s far left progressive agenda without regard for realities. Solyndra is the perfect example.

Oh, and then we see the “death panels” crop up even back then

IPAB was there at the very beginning. There are two possibilities for making tough decisions on the long-run budget, which could be done either separately or together: creating an executive-branch “health board” (which focuses on one part of the issue) and a Congressionally chartered commission (which could focus more broadly).

From the beginning, Team Obama wanted to implement the panel of 15 unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats to make decisions on our personal health care.

Doug Ross writes “The revelations in this document alone should be enough to bring down the Obama administration. The level of dishonesty laced throughout the Obama White House is both shocking and repellent.” Let’s add some fuel to that fire, looking at the very first paragraph in the Larry Summers memo

In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011.

That is Summers saying what would happen without the Stimulus, which is mostly what happened with the Stimulus. Except, with the Stimulus, jobs loss was greater, and the unemployment rate didn’t start to fall until late in 2011, partly due to people dropping out of the job market, essentially giving up.

Summers also concluded that a core package more than $300 billion was not “feasible to design sensible proposals along these
lines that go much beyond this total size.” And then they go on to propose hundreds of billions more.

There are all sorts of interesting tidbits in both Pethokoukis’ article along with the Summers meme, which provided a blueprint for spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money for political payback and pushing Obama’s extremist political agenda, which wasn’t even in the same landmass as his supposed “post-partisan” coming together speeches. Read them both.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(CBS News) Solar panel maker Solyndra received a $528 million Energy Department loan in 2009 – and went bankrupt last year. The government’s risky investment strategy didn’t stop there, as a CBS News investigation has uncovered a pattern of cases of the government pouring your tax dollars into clean energy.

Take Beacon Power — a green energy storage company. We were surprised to learn exactly what the Energy Department knew before committing $43 million of your tax dollars.

Documents obtained by CBS News show Standard and Poor’s had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook of “CCC-plus.”

Asked whether he’d put his personal money into Beacon, economist Peter Morici replied, “Not on purpose.”

“It’s, it is a junk bond,” Morici said. “But it’s not even a good junk bond. It’s well below investment grade.”

Was the Energy Department investing tax dollars in something that’s not even a good junk bond? Morici says yes.

“This level of bond has about a 70 percent chance of failing in the long term,” he said.

Here’s where it gets even better

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

In terms of the Central Government budget, $6.5 billion is chump change. For the 53% who do pay federal taxes, this is an obscene use of our hard earned money to prop up companies that are bound to fail in the name of making Obama’s politically motivated “green” energy initiative look good, at least in the short term, as well as hook up Democrat campaign donors and backers.

The long term shame here is that this type of malfeasance damages the future of clean energy. I believe that most of us can agree that these “alternative” energy sources are part of the future. They aren’t ready for prime time. Not yet. Not even close. Wasting taxpayer money on doomed and mostly worthless ventures will certainly erode any near term future investments in these types of companies, even ones that are probably going to be winners.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Wall Street is disdained in the court of public opinion — detested by the tea party on the right and the Occupy movement on the left. The public blames financial plutocrats for America’s economic plight more than either President Barack Obama or former President George W. Bush. Less than a quarter of all Americans, according to Gallup, have confidence in the banks, which vie for the lowest spot with Big Business and Congress.

But these angry voters are unlikely to get satisfaction in next year’s presidential election. In fact, things are looking up for the financial elite — which donated more to Washington politicians than almost any other sector of the economy over the past two decades. Wall Street can look forward to a bank-friendly administration if Obama is reelected — and perhaps even better conditions if either of the two leading GOP contenders, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, wins the White House.

Despite his occasional remarks that decry “fat cat”’ bankers, Obama has effectively serviced the financial bigwigs. Bank prosecutions have declined markedly under Obama — to levels not seen for more than 25 years. Obama has even tried to derail aggressive bank prosecutions pursued by state attorneys general, most of them liberal Democrats.

Got that, Occupiers? Obama hearts Wall Street. He voted for TARP as a Senator, then gave a ton of money and bailouts to these same “fat cats” while mostly ignoring Main Street when he became (NM)President. His Stimulus packages were political payback for the big wigs who supported his campaign.

Even while trying to exploit the Occupy Wall Street movement for political purposes, Obama still leads in financial sector donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He has secured more cash from the financial elite, at this point, than all the GOP candidates combined. He has even raised twice as much as they have from Bain Capital, the venture firm co-founded by Romney. Why not give up on the white working class when you can sew up the Harvard and Wharton business school constituency?

When are you going to move your protest to a park near the White House, as well as near the individual Obama 2012 campaign headquarters in States?

We know the Occupiers won’t. They are simply an organ of the Left, out there with the same old gripes, with some sexual assault thrown in. 99% of them will be out in the streets advocating for the re-election of Obama. 99% of them will vote the straight Democrat ticket in November 2012, and cheer if Obama is re-elected. And, if a Republican wins, 99% of them will suddenly appear in front of the White House to protest, something they won’t do to Obama.

If none of the big banks and other financial institutions had been bailed out and gone broke instead, most of those big incomes would have vanished too. Capitalism was not allowed to do its work of creative destruction. It is a turning back to real capitalism that is needed — JR

A review of Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business

Three professors from the world’s pre-eminent business school have co-written a study that at first blush seems to fall more in the genre of horror tale than business text.

Professor Bower and his colleagues note in their study the broad concerns of the 46 business thinkers that they brought together in forums on three continents, but by far the most widely held was “the tendency of capitalism, as it currently functions, to produce extreme disparities of income and wealth”.

It took little to conclude that the vast accumulation of wealth by individuals compared with the stagnating fortunes of low- and middle-income workers is fuelling the backlash worldwide.

“Some leaders pointed to what they regard as excessive compensation earned by CEOs [that] strike many people as intrinsically unjustified,” the authors write. The reality of growing disparities – one that is the crux of political debate within Western democracies – poses questions about capitalism’s very raison d’etre.

One unidentified Asian business leader told the authors: “Herein lies a major challenge, because the world has become very much more prosperous as a result of market capitalism.

“The rich have become richer. The poor in most cases have become richer. But the gap between the rich and the poor has also grown wider … There is the growing sense of being left out, even as people are getting better off.”

A European executive said: “What was the good of capitalism? Was it the fact that we were building a very large, very well-off … middle class? We are not doing this any more.”

And in the US, a chief executive told the authors: “It’s undeniable that in a country like ours, unfettered capitalist impulse on a global basis does seem to exacerbate the problem.”

Joining the discussions were executives such as Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, John Elkann of Fiat and Bertrand Collomb of the French group Lafarge. They included bankers and financiers, as well as the heads of conglomerates and the former US labour secretary, Elaine Chao.

That capitalism has delivered for billions is not at issue: in the last decades of the 20th century, 97per cent of countries enjoyed increased wealth, according to the World Bank. More than 450 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty.

But the executives also cited as potential threats the powerful forces within financial markets, environmental degradation, political populism, terrorism and war, fundamentalism, mass migration and pandemics.

They are quoted anonymously throughout the work.

“History tells us that when an awful lot of people are disenfranchised, they have no incentive to play by the rules, and given today’s communications availability, weaponry … that’s an issue we have to really think about, probably over a very long period of time,” one executive said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that many were the beneficiaries of fabulous remuneration, the business leaders do not appear to offer easy solutions to bridging inequalities. But they back business, not government, largely to ameliorate strains on the system.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Government Motors has finally found its hottest car and the Chevy Volt is it. Unfortunately for Chevy, it isn’t because it is popular. It’s because the car seems to catch on fire a lot. Industry watchers are preparing for the Volt to undergo a recall to fix whatever problem the car’s lithium-ion battery pack has that seems to be causing the vehicles to spontaneously burst into flames.

Of course, this little catching on fire problem seems emblematic with everything about Government Motors. After President Barack “Lee IaJokka” Obama pumped $53 billion of our tax dollars into bailing out GM all we’ve gotten out of the deal so far is a stock tumble from $53 a share to under $25 (a $15 billion loss) and a badly selling “green” car that catches on fire every time you turn around. Such a deal.

As to the burning issue of the day, the Associated Press notes that an “investigation” has begun by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to determine why the cars are catching fire.

One Volt battery pack that was being closely monitored following a government crash test caught fire Thursday, the safety administration said in a statement. Another recently crash-tested battery emitted smoke and sparks, the statement said.

For its part, GM claims the cars are perfectly “safe.” Well, except for that whole catching on fire business, I suppose.

It shouldn’t be a big deal, though. It seems that only half a dozen people or so bought the thing anyway! The sales for the Volt have been dismal with only just over 5,000 units being sold during the first 11 months of the year. So the good news is that if there is a recall, GM can go to the individual home of every owner rather easily to inform them of the recall!

Friend Don Surber has the idea of the Chevy Volt just right, though. Calling the model the “electric Edsel,” Surber notes that the car nobody wants is a bad idea all the way around.

The Volt seems to be a farce of the highest order, Surber notes.

• Even Thomas Edison couldn’t figure out how to make a useful electric car.
• The problem the Volt is aimed at “fixing” is problematic because global warming is a farce.
• Even if global warming did exist, this “fix” is bad because it uses electricity that is generated by fossil fuels anyway.
• Worse, it takes tax money from us all to give it to the rich in a $7,500 tax credit. Apparently Most buyers of the Volt make $175,000 a year.

Spot on points, for sure. I’ll add one more to the list. It turns out the Chevy Volt gets the same number of hours on a charge that an electric car created in 1896 used to get! Now THAT is progress.

If you are interested in how much the bailout of GM is costing you, check out www.Bailoutcost.com.

(See also: All American Blogger)

The anti-western, anti-capitalist group whose advertisement started the Occupy Wall Street movement has told its adherents to go home. The first phase of Occupy is over they said. Time to regroup, network, and try to finally come up with some sort of message besides an amorphous we-hate-whatever chant. Time to finally figure out an agenda to go on to the next step.

Only there isn’t one. OWS is now SOL.

It isn’t surprising. After all there was really never any there there. Sure there was some legitimate ire at its heart, but, quite unlike the Tea Party movement, there was never a scintilla of coherence to the Occupy… I hesitate to even call it a movement. To be a movement there has to be something moving.

The Occupy-Whatevers had trouble appealing to the average American from its inception. After all, nearly every major group sponsoring it — and those claiming partisanship with it — are the antitheses of Americana.

A look at just some of those that claimed a love for, expressed support for, or actually helped plan and execute the OWSers is a veritable who’s who of America-haters.

The list includes the Communist Party USA; the American Nazi Party; the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei; the oppressive government of North Korea; racist Louis Farrakhan; racist from the other end David Duke; Dictator Hugo Chavez; The Black Panthers; Socialist Party USA; CAIR; Anonymous; the Marxist Student Union, not to mention every major member of Big Labor. With friends like this…, you know? There’s a lot more than these few unsavory friends of the OWS but these haters of the USA serve as a perfect example of why OWS never evolved into anything other than a mostly white group of angry young men filled with hatred for their own country and its system of government.

Additionally — and again very unlike the Tea Party — the OWSers were never able to field very many people at any given time. While the Tea Party turned out well over a million participants and commonly had thousands at its rallies (even close to a million at the Glen Beck rally, for instance) these OWS sit-ins never amounted to more than a hundred at a time if they were lucky to get that many.

It is clear from the lack of growth, the fact that the events have so far just devolved into lawlessness, rapine, destruction, and pointlessness, and now just petering out, that this “movement” is the movement that never was.

I don’t just lambaste these OWSers because I have contempt for them — which I assuredly do — but because there has been nothing coming out of their efforts. It is impossible to take them seriously not because their ideas are necessarily risible — which they are — but because nothing consequential has come of it all.

Again, using the Tea Partiers as a measuring stick, it was only a matter of months after the first Tea Party event that Tea Party groups began forming all across the country. It wasn’t long before they formed committees that began to assess their local political scene. It wasn’t long before they’d created websites, began writing newsletters, began advocating for particular candidates and then offering their own candidates for election. It wasn’t long before some actual meat was built out of the exercise of Tea Party protest.

On the other hand, OWS has been localized mostly to big cities, and big cities the left already controls. Very few OWS groups have formed “back home,” in the heartland. Further, no coherent agenda has come from any OWS group. No logical agenda built for action has emerged. These goofs are too busy with their “up twinkle” fingers to actually get anything done.

What is the outcome of this whole exercise in futility? A few desultory attempts to drive a narrative, a lot of property damage, a few women raped, a couple of deaths and little to nothing else. OWS is now ungracefully fading into history as the tantrum that did what most tantrums do. Produce much sound and fury but is ultimately ignored as a childish action by immature people.

So goodnight Occupy-Whatever. It wasn’t nice knowing you, but it’s great to see you go.

General Motors was too big to fail. This is why President Obama had to ride in on his white steed with billions of taxpayers dollars in hand to bailout GM rechristening it Government Motors. Besides, we were told it would be a great deal, a money maker, right? Well, not so much. The Administration has reported a dramatic increase in the money We The People have lost on the GM bailout.

This week the Treasury Dept. has announced that the estimates of our loss has gone from $14.33 billion tax dollars to $26.6 billion.

To put it in terms easier to understand, for the American people to just break even on the bailout deal the more than 500 million shares owned by the U.S. Treasury must sell at $53 a share. Unfortunately for all of us, GM stock has tumbled to just $22.99 (as of closing on Nov.14). We are waaay off from the break even point, folks!

So, what is Obama going to do about this failed bailout program? How is he going to rectify it all? He intends to make it worse by changing fuel standards to the point where new cars will cost another $2,000 per car.

Obama has decreed through his powers to regulate that the auto industry must raise fuel efficiency standards by five percent by 2025. There is only one little problem with these demands. Current technological development and science cannot yet reach those goals. Obama has set standards just because he feels like it, not standards based on realistic goals.

These requirements will make cars harder to afford for folks in the middle class and lower middle class not to mention the additional burdens it will place on small businesses trying to purchase cars for their businesses.

Worse, with the costs of new cars skyrocketing, the costs of used cars will go up commensurately. And none of this will help GM’s stock prices go up high enough for the American people to break even on the billions our president gave away to the auto giant.

Sadly, Obama’s polices don’t appear to be too big to fail.

After pointing out that elected Democrats are making a big mistake in backing these far left kids, Douglass Schoen at the Wall Street Journal points out

Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

I know, I know, kinda shocking that they are radical left wingers. Some basic polling data is provided about the protesters, followed by

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Schoen isn’t exactly a rightwingnut hell bent on everything the left accuses the right of doing: he was a former pollster for Bill Clinton. And it is very interesting that we see the typical Leftist idea that taxes need to be raised on That Guy, but Not Me. They want someone else to pay their fair share, do their part, but, refuse to do it themselves. And they should all be given free, well, everything, because they are entitled. Someone owes them simply because they were born, not because of any hard work.

My prediction is that the longer this protest goes on, the worse it’s going to get for Democrats, as mainstream America gets a good eyeful of the way Democrats act. The media, despite fawning coverage now and certainly in the future, will not be able to hide the far left ideologies of the Occupiers, and people will start equating the Occupiers more with whiny teenagers who want something for nothing. Or, more than likely, 5 year olds who enjoy pooping their diapers in public, and scream and cry when mommy won’t buy them a toy.

As the saying (sorta) goes: standing around filthy, smelly and unkempt, living in squalor, and demanding someone else’s money is no way to go through life, son.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Please sign the drill now petition.

(Washington Post) President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.

The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.

And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.

In recent days, Obama has ramped up his rhetoric. He took the unusual step of targeting an individual company when he attacked Bank of America for its new $5 monthly debit-card fee, calling it “exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.” And his campaign and the White House have distributed messages blasting GOP candidates and lawmakers for wanting to repeal Wall Street regulations pushed by Obama and opposing the confirmation of a leader for the consumer protection bureau created as part of the overhaul.

“We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said in an interview. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it.”

“I’m pretty confident 12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’?” Plouffe added.

I say Obama should go for it. The GOP can then highlight all the money Obama received in 2008 and for the 2012 election from Wall Street, banks, etc….oh, look, Obama has received $24k from Bank of America in this cycle. The GOP will also be able to highlight the violence in the streets of the Occupy movement, all the arrests, all the trash and unsanitary conditions. They can also highlight that “Obama’s” financial reform legislation caused the $5 fee (and other fees at other banks).

Co-opting the Occupy movement carries other risks: the longer the movement goes on, the higher the chance for serious violence, and the movement being unmasked for the far left dominated protest it is. Independents and other middle ground voters who crossed over to vote for Obama in 2008 will get an eyeful and earful of what these people want, namely, more government and the same old same old leftist gripes, which have mostly not worked so far. And when all is said and done, the economy will still be garbage, because Democrats are clueless and Obama will not sign legislation that comes from the GOP controlled House.

But, go for it, Obama: you can be part of the movement that rioted in Rome, destroying property and torching cars. Oh, and trashing private small businesses. All the new arrests in NYC and other places. Police being injured. But, they are amusing

As police cleared the street, protesters chanted, “We are peaceful” and “The whole world is watching.”

That last one is so absurd, it reminds me of those “First World Problems” pictures

Close enough for government work…..oh, look, people being shot in Syria for their freedom.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Please sign the drill now petition.