Will an Independent candidate please step into the 2012 Presidential campaign?
On November 6, 2012 a good number of citizens who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 will realize that they are faced with the choice of voting for either Black Romney or White Romney. As a result, those former Obama supporters won’t bother to vote at all. Barack Obama won’t be seen as a significantly dissimilar alternative to Romney. The indiscernible difference between those candidates would not justify the effort of standing in line at the polls.
Voter disappointment with the President is now being overshadowed by the rising pile of dirty laundry he has accumulated during his tenure in the White House. The burgeoning Solyndra scandal is being mishandled by the President himself. You would think he had learned a lesson from Weinergate, to the effect that fallacious denials about scandal allegations can create more trouble for a politician than the scandal itself. FactCheck.org recently caught Obama in a lie about the loan guarantee program exploited by Solyndra:
Obama referred to Solyndra’s loan at an Oct. 6 press conference as “a loan guarantee program that predates me.” That’s not accurate. It’s true that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a loan guarantee program for clean-energy companies developing “innovative technologies.” But Solyndra’s loan guarantee came under another program created by the president’s 2009 stimulus for companies developing “commercially available technologies.”
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In a March 2009 press release announcing a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, the Energy Department said: “This loan guarantee will be supported through the President’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provides tens of billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority to build a new green energy economy.” Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman, confirmed that Solyndra’s funding came solely from section 1705.
That revelation is simply the first layer of frosting on a cake with some noxious ingredients baked into the recipe. ABC News provided this report:
An elite Obama fundraiser hired to help oversee the administration’s energy loan program pushed and prodded career Department of Energy officials to move faster in approving a loan guarantee for Solyndra, even as his wife’s law firm was representing the California solar company, according to internal emails made public late Friday.
“How hard is this? What is he waiting for?” wrote Steven J. Spinner, a high-tech consultant and energy investor who raised at least $500,000 for the candidate before being appointed to a key job helping oversee the energy loan guarantee program. “I have OVP [the Office of the Vice President] and WH [the White House] breathing down my neck on this.”
Many of the emails were written just days after Spinner accepted a three-page ethics agreement in which he pledged he would “not participate in any discussion regarding any application involving [his wife’s law firm] Wilson [Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati].”
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Recovery Act records show Allison Spinner’s law firm, Wilson Sonsini, received $2.4 million in federal funds for legal fees related to the $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee to Solyndra. That ethics agreement said his wife would forgo pay “earned as a result of its representation of applicants in programs within your official duties.”
Although many Obama apologists have characterized the Solyndra scandal a nothing more than a “Republican smear campaign”, Ryan Reilly of the non-Republican Talking Points Memo offered this analysis of the allegations:
Solyndra was raided by the FBI earlier this month. The Government Accountability Office had raised concerns that the Energy Department agreed to back five companies — including Solyndra — with loans without properly assessing their risk of failure. All this from a company that Obama described as a company with a “true engine of economic growth.”
And the details that are emerging from the investigators at the Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee are making things look worse for the administration.
Nine days before the administration formally announced the loan, a White House budget analyst wrote an email calling the deal “NOT ready for prime time,” according to documents given to ABC News by the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigators.
Despite the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest, President Obama has seen fit to launch an assault on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was created after the Enron scandal. Sarbanes-Oxley most notably assigned responsibility to corporate officers for the accuracy and validity of corporate financial reports and established criminal penalties for destruction or alteration of financial records, interference with investigations, as well as providing protection for whistle-blowers. The Business Insider reports that President Obama is advancing the recommendations of his jobs council which call for attenuating the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, in order to make it easier for small companies to go public, by way of initial public offerings (IPOs):
The jobs council, headed by GE CEO Jeff Immelt and including Sheryl Sandberg and Steve Case, found that the Sarbanes-Oxley was a key factor in reducing the number of IPOs smaller than $50 million from 80 percent of all IPOs in the 1990s to 20 percent in the 2000s.
Obama also said the “Spitzer Decree,” which bans investment banks from using banking revenues to pay for research and expert analysis of publicly-traded companies, deserves reconsideration as well. The council said the rule shares the blame for the decline in IPOs among small companies.
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism reacted to the news with this remark:
This is ridiculous. Do you know what happens with small stocks? Pump and dump (and I’ve seen this at closer range than I would like. I had a former client get involved by having his private company merged into a public company controlled by small stock low lifes. They ran it from $1 to about $12 twice, and then it went back to under $2 and stayed there).
We were reminded of Obama’s hypocrisy on the subject of financial reform by a fantastic article written by Suzanna Andrews for Vanity Fair, which detailed how Elizabeth Warren was thrown under the bus by Obama, who shocked his supporters with his refusal to nominate Warren as chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which she created).
Another disillusioned 2008 Obama supporter, Bill McKibben, wrote an essay for Tom’s Dispatch about how the President has sold out to Big Oil:
Here’s an example: by year’s end the president has said he will make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. The nation’s top climate scientists sent the administration a letter indicating that such a development would be disastrous for the climate. NASA’s James Hansen, the government’s top climate researcher, said heavily tapping tar-sands oil, a particularly “dirty” form of fossil fuel, would mean “game over for the climate.” Ten of the president’s fellow recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates pointed out in a letter that blocking the prospective pipeline would offer him a real leadership moment, a “tremendous opportunity to begin transition away from our dependence on oil, coal, and gas.”
But every indication from this administration suggests that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for a project that has the enthusiastic backing of the Chamber of Commerce, and in which the Koch Brothers have a “direct and substantial interest.” And not just backing. To use the words of a recent New York Times story, they are willing to “flout the intent of federal law” to get it done. Check this out as well: the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review. That company already considered itself a “major client” of TransCanada. This is simply corrupt, potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years. And here’s the thing: it’s a crime still in progress. Watching the president do nothing to stop it is endlessly depressing.
We shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that Obama’s dirty laundry has a few oil stains. The BIG surprise would be Obama’s reelection.