November, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Obama Phone Fraud, Alternative Energy Fraud, Outhouse Fraud, and More

This is our fourth post this month in our continuing series on political class insanity. Our first post this month can be viewed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/11/november-2013-poliical-class-insanity.html

Wasteful spending, delusional and unreal views of the world, failing government programs and departments, the list seems endless, especially for the trillions and trillions of dollars taxpayers entrust to the political class every year for very little in return. And the insanity we are talking about does not even touch on the biggest insanity of the year, the unfolding disaster that is Obama care.

1) A recent poll by Pew Research indicates that the public’s trust of the Federal government continues to be very low and trending lower:

• Only 19% of those Americans surveyed recently by Pew say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time.
• This low rating is down a whopping down seven points since January. 
• The current measure matches the level reached in August 2011, following the last battle over the debt ceiling. 
• The share of the public saying they are angry at the federal government, which equaled an all-time high in late September (26%), has ticked up to 30%. 
• Another 55% say they are frustrated with the government. 
• Just 12% say they are basically content with the federal government.

A pathetic showing for the Washington political class but a low showing that is certainly justified just based on the nonsense we report in this blog. This evidence alone is a reason for term limits because as the citizenry gather less and less faith and trust in the ability of the government to do the right thing, the ability of the government to do the right thing goes down also. And there is no one in the political spectrum that seems to know how to fix the paranoia.

2) The following insanity is a real doozy. It was documented by Americans for Limited government and their website post came with an extensive set of sources to prove that they were not making this wasteful spending up because without those sources, you would naturally think this spending escapade had to be a joke.

This waste involves the construction of a public restroom facility at the Manassas National Park in Virginia, the sight of Civil War battles:

• The Federal government has spent over $578,000 to erect a “comfort station,” I.e. restroom, at the Manassas National Park.
• Yes, $578,00, for a bathroom… in a park.
• For that amount of money, one would have expected an extensive and comfortable rest room facility with lots of bells and whistles.
• You could expect that but you would be wrong, as this picture of the meager restroom illustrates your disappointment (click on the photo for a larger view):

• Not only is it meager and small, it was modular, constructed elsewhere and snapped together on site, certainly less stable than if it had actually been constructed from the ground up on site.
• By the way, that stone siding is fake stone.
• The post wonders how far would $578,000 get you toward buying other toilet-rendering facilities in Manassas, VA. The resultant research finds that for $575,0000 you could purchase a large modern house, complete with 4 full bathroom installations, right down the street from the park in Manassas.
• In traditional and incompetent government fashion, the Federal government paid for a 449-page report on the proposed park restrooms.
• That effort included an additional 90-page “Environmental Assessment for a Comfort Station at the Brawner Farm.”
• While the expenditure of over half a million dollars on a prefabricated rest room building is obnoxious and pathetic in itself, the original proposal called for the restroom building to be installed in time to  accommodate the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Bull Run to be celebrated in August 2012. 
• However, the restrooms were not opened to the public until September of 2013, missing its installation date by a mere 13 months. 

Unnecessarily expensive and too late to serve its intended purpose, sounds about right for a Federal government program. And Harry Reid says every American wants to spend more in taxes to the Federal government. Delusional, especially in light of half a million dollars for a common restroom prefab building. 

3) Remember how Obama was going to shut down the terrorist prison at Guantanamo right after he got elected since it was an embarrassment and terrorist recruiting tool? Well, five years after he was elected this is another campaign promise that went unfulfilled. And according to a Washington Examiner article from November 1, 2013, the continued use of that prison costs the American taxpayer almost half a billion dollars, $481 million, just to watch over the remaining 160 prisoners. This comes out to a whopping $3 million a year per prisoner. Unbelievable.

How many more teachers, drug counselors, meals for the homeless, etc. could have been bought for $481 million a year if Obama had actually kept a promise for once?

4) Many times we have reviewed the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars Obama gave out to mostly political allies and cronies in the alternative energy businesses, none of which returned any benefit back to society. Solyndra, Fisker, A123, Abound, Ecotality, Evergreen, Spectra, and many others served only as a sewer drain for taxpayer wealth

Well to add two insults to injury, one of those failure may still cost the American taxpayer a lot of money even though they have gone out of business. Two years after Abound Solar got a large loan guarantee from the American taxpayer via the Federal government, it had to lay off its hundreds of workers and went into bankruptcy proceedings.

The eventual financial damage to the taxpayer was a total of $70 million for backing the failed company. Unsold inventory from the company operations, which should have been used to offset those taxpayer losses, including 2,000 solar panels, mysteriously disappeared, according to the National Legal Policy Center. Thus, even after the company died, its bones could not be picked to help pay back the taxpayers.

Second insult to injury: the company left behind, at its  Longmont, Colo. Facility, 37,000 square feet that is covered with hazardous waste such as cancer causing cadmium, broken glass and contaminated water. The Northern Colorado Business Report  estimated it will cost up to $3.7 million to clean and repair the building so it can again be used. Want to bet the American taxpayer somehow gets stuck with that clean up bill also?

All because this administration thought it was fine to reward political backers with hard earned taxpayer wealth. Despicable.

5) Another day, another Federal agency that is overrun with waste and criminal fraud:

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently released findings where they admit that many people who have received  Obama Phones have misused or defrauded the program. 
• The numbers that the FCC admitted to are staggering: more than two million recipients are believed to have improperly received a phone under the Lifeline program.
• As a measure of government incompetence, this estimate is almost twice as many as the FCC estimated just last month! Who knows how much more fraud they will admit to next month?
• In the years between Obama’s first term and second term elections, spending within the program nearly tripled from $819 million to $2.2 billion.
• While the FCC has implemented a few fraud-fighting tactics, the resultant fines of more than $32 million against mobile providers who knowingly violated the program’s rules is less than 1,5% of the program’s overall cost and certainly not close to the fraud incurred by the two million fraudulent users of the program.
• $32 million recovered via fines against two million fraudulent phones comes out to only $6 dollars per fraudulent phone identified.
• More than 40% of those receiving such Obama Phone assistance were unable or unwilling to provide documentation supporting their eligibility, according to an investigation into the largest facilitators of Obama phones. 40% of the total just strolled into the program without any proof of need and walked out with free cellular phones and free cellular service. Disgusting, and just another reason why no American, rich or poor, should pay another penny in taxes while this type of fraud and ineptness exists in Washington.

Expensive phones, expensive outhouses, expensive crony infested alternative energy companies, all failures. And the insanity is not done, more to follow tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Two More Failing Taxpayer Aided Alternative Energy Companies Bound To The Forefront

Just when you think that the financial carnage is done relative to the Obama administration's disastrous waste of taxpayer wealth on failed alternative energy companies, two more fiascoes pop up. We have extensively covered these other failures in previous posts, most recently:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/obama-energy-disasters-still-abound.html

which used Abound Solar as the lead story on that post. That write-up also included a list of what companies had failed up to that date in time.

But according to a recent Heritage Foundation report, two more taxpayer funded/aided companies are now also facing difficult markets and financial times:

• A pair of foreign-owned solar companies, both of whom received a combined $84 million in Energy Department tax credits, have announced they will lay off U.S. employees.
• Why foreign owned companies were granted U.S. taxpayer money is a question and scandal for another day’s discussion.
• Both companies got their funding under the Energy Department’s Advanced Energy Manufacturing (48C) Tax Credit, a credit which is worth up to 30% of the cost of manufacturing qualifying green energy projects.
• Solar World received an $82 million credit and SunTech received a $2.1 million credit.
• Solar World announced a 47% revenue decline in the third quarter and will potentially execute 37 layoffs at its Oregon plant.
• SunTech said it will likely layoff 50 employees at its Arizona production facilities.

The ironic thing about both companies is that Solar World claimed it had to lay off its employees because the Chinese government is subsidizing the sale of cheap solar panels in the U.S., which the U.S. International Trade Commission is fighting by imposing a 35.95% tariff on each imported Chinese solar panel. Meanwhile, SunTech is claiming it is laying off people because of the 35.95% tariff that is being imposed by the Commission.

Thus, the Federal government’s priorities are so screwed up that is funding two U.S. companies that have diametrically opposed business models relative to Chinese subsidies and U.S. tariffs, one gets hurt and the other gets helped depending on what the Federal government does.

More wasted taxpayer dollars for little benefit in return, in this case fewer jobs despite millions of dollars in aid. But this should not surprise anyone, given that the Federal government has thrown billions of dollars away on alternative energy companies that are either bankrupt and out of business, going bankrupt and will soon be out of business, have laid off a significant number of workers, and businesses that still exist but have failed miserably to attain their business and financial goals (the company names with an asterisk next to them indicate they have filed for or have completed bankruptcy proceedings):

1. Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
2. SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
3. Solyndra ($535 million)*
4. Beacon Power ($43 million)*
5. Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
6. SunPower ($1.2 billion)
7. First Solar ($1.46 billion)
8. Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
9. EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
10. Amonix ($5.9 million)
11. Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
12. Abound Solar ($400 million)*
13. A123 Systems ($279 million)*
14. Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
15. Johnson Controls ($299 million)
16. Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
17. ECOtality ($126.2 million)
18. Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
19. Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
20. Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
21. Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
22. Range Fuels ($80 million)*
23. Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
24. Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
25. Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
26. GreenVolts ($500,000)
27. Vestas ($50 million)
28. LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
29. Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
30. Navistar ($39 million)
31. Satcon ($3 million)*
32. Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
33. Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

I have never found a list of an Obama-backed alternative energy companies that have been successful. If that list exists, I would be more than happy to publish it.

Billions of dollars down the drain with no discernible taxpayer benefit in return. As we have discussed many times in this blog, the only Americans who made out on these deals are the many Obama administration political cronies who bankrolled many of these companies to begin with and received taxpayer money from this administration and political class in exchange for political financial support. Disgracefully wasteful spending.

As a side note, these billions do no include the additional wasted billions given to other alternative transportation companies and options such as Tesla Motors and the Chevy Volt, both of which either make cars that an average American taxpayer will never be able to afford or who make cars that have proven mostly uncompetitive in the marketplace.

But it gets worse. Not only do we have SunTech and Solar World laying off employees despite burning through government and taxpayer funds, not only to we have these 33 listed companies above providing no benefit back to taxpayers, we also have found out from the Washington Guardian,

http://www.washingtonguardian.com/stimulating-investigation

that there almost 2,000 investigations underway into fraud and criminal activity relative to the huge and fruitless economic stimulus program that was passed in 2009.

These nearly 2,000 investigations and the resultant 600 arrests include many Department of Energy programs that are related to the stimulus funds that were apportioned out to many of the above listed, failed companies. Thus, not only were these bad companies given taxpayer money for no benefit, that money may have also been taken under criminal circumstances.

The Federal government 1) does very, very few things well and 2) it does not employ trained venture capitalists. Both of these facts should have prevented the Federal government bureaucracy from handing out taxpayer money to almost three dozen failed companies, it does not know how to it well. If any of these listed companies had valid market and business plans, trained bankers and venture capitalists would have been more than happy to fund their business endeavors. The Federal government never should have been involved.

An old rule business goes something like the following: If a new product or service fills a market need (right price, right features, right style, right sales channels, etc.), no government support is needed. If a new product or service does not fit a market need, no amount of government support and financing will make it successful.

At least 33 companies had alternative energy products and services that did not fill a current market need. But the Federal government went and funded them anyway, much to the expense and chagrin of the American taxpayer. The only question left is if 33 is the end of the waste or there is more to come. Given that a week ago I had never heard of Solar World and SunTech, I doubt we have heard the end of the “Abounding” number alternative energy failures from the Obama administration.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Corpse of Solyndra, SolarCity, and A123 - Three More Crony Riddled Alternative Energy Failures, Courtesy Of The Obama Administration

Over the past two days we have reviewed the many, many failed attempts by the Obama administration to promote alternative energy projects. Two days ago we reviewed the collapse of Abound Solar and Compact Power. Yesterday, we reviewed the disgraceful waste of taxpayer wealth that went to First Solar, NGR, and Congentrix. All of these companies, and many, many more, are either already bankrupt, going through bankruptcy, or in stall mode, having returned nothing beneficial back to America but enriched the political cronies of this administration.

Unfortunately, the disasters keep on coming faster than we can review them. Today, we will review the three latest collapsed efforts, starting with A123:

1) According to an October 16, 2012 Bloomberg news article, A123 Systems Inc. an electric car battery maker, has filed for bankruptcy and said it would sell its automotive business assets to another company. A123 just happens to be a company that received a $249.1 million Federal grant, not a loan or loan guarantee, so that the potential of recovering any of that taxpayer wealth is quite small.

In the bankruptcy filing, the company said that it will sell off its remaining assets for $125 million. Thus, the market value of the company is only about half of what the government gave it to operate. It is not a good investment when the initial value of your investment is down about 50% in just three years, during the time period that the stock market experienced significant positive gains.

Additionally, the company listed assets of $459.8 million and debt of $376 million as of Aug. 31 in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy documents, a difference of $83.8 million, one third the value of the taxpayer investment. Terrible, terrible waste and investment of taxpayer money for nothing in return.

How terrible? According to Bloomberg, the company has had 14 consecutive quarters of negative financial results and its stock has fallen about 85% in just the past year. That terrible. But just another “bump in the road" as the Obama administration likes to categorize its failings.

2) Recent news reports indicate that the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department's inspector general are investigating and auditing SolarCity, another solar energy company that has received taxpayer wealth from the Energy Department’s many corporate welfare programs. The issue being investigated is whether or not Treasury Department inappropriately give stimulus money to the company.

President Obama's economic stimulus program converted a long-standing tax credit for renewable energy investment into a direct grant from the Treasury Department worth 30% of a company's investment in a renewable energy project. SolarCity has applied for approximately $325 million in these stimulus grants, according to the SEC filing.

The specific potential criminal or ethical act is whether or not SolarCity repeatedly overstated the value of its renewable energy investments, according to the SEC filings indicate. The Treasury department had awarded smaller grants than SolarCity had tried to claim. Now the department's inspector general and the IRS are doing a broader audit of all the projects for which SolarCity and other large solar companies got stimulus cash. Investigators want to know if the companies regularly overstated the value of their investments and thus received overly generous taxpayer grants.

By the way, SolarCity is owned and operated by Elon Musk, a California businessman. You may recognize the name from previous posts in this blog. Mr. Musk is also the primary owner of Tesla Motors, the electric car company that has already received nearly a half a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth to help finance the Tesla operation, the purpose of which is to make all electric cars that will be out of the financial reach for except the richest Americans. Mr. Musk, no unexpectedly, has been an often and generous campaign contributor to President Obama in the past.

3) And what would a review of solar energy wasteful spending be without the latest insult form the Solyndra mess? According to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial:

• The Solyndra Federal loan guarantee has already cost the American taxpayer about $530 million. Is that the end of the misery?
• According to the Journal piece: “No such luck. In the latest twist, Solyndra's investors could be rewarded for their failure, thanks to a tax benefit the Administration handed out in a bid to evade political accountability.”
• It turns out that the Internal Revenue Service recently objected to Solyndra's Chapter 11 reorganization, claiming its "principal purpose is tax avoidance."
• How can a bankrupt company with no sales or revenue avoid taxes? According to the IRS analysis, the only real assets Solyndra still has left are what the IRS calls "tax attributes."
• These tax attributes are estimated to be between $875 million to $975 million in net operating losses that can reduce future taxable income by as much as $350 million.
• Since tax-loss carry-forwards are worthless if a company doesn’t have profit’s, the IRS is challenging the position held by Solyndra's owners who are requesting the bankruptcy court to liquidate the rest of the business and contribute a net $6.7 million to pay off creditors for pennies on the dollar.
• And then magically, out of the Solyndra corpse, a holding company would then arise of the bankruptcy that would not make any products, but would receive the tax benefit.
• Thus, the owners and operators of the new shell company could use the tax losses against other tax gains. Out of a business failure comes tax advantages, only in America.

And guess what? One of the owners and stakeholders in the new shell company with the hefty tax break owner would likely be Argonaut Ventures I. Argonaut is Solyndra's largest shareholder and the primary investment arm of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Who is George Kaiser: according to the article: “Mr. Kaiser is a Tulsa oil billionaire who bundled campaign checks for Mr. Obama in 2008.”

Thus, even when an Obama backed company fails and dies, political cronies of this President still seem to come out ahead at the expense of the American taxpayer.

More waste of taxpayer wealth, more political cronies of the President that get enriched for failures, and nothing back to society of any worth in the alternative energy field. Unfortunately, just another business as usual day in Washington D.C., the home of wannabe, but failed, venture capitalists.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of our times.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedomfor both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

Obama Energy Disasters Still "Abound" - Abound Energy, Compact Power, and Another $220 Million Destroyed

Throughout the past year or so we have reviewed the many failed programs from the Obama administration’s Energy Department and their vain, expensive, wasteful, and usually failed attempts to have any kind of positive impact in the alternative energy field. Their efforts have left behind a string of failed companies that have gobbled up billions of taxpayer dollars for no reason or benefit:

• Solyndra
• Beacon
• Ecotality
• Ener1
• A123
• Chevy Volt
• SpectraWatt
• Fisker Motors
• Abound Solar
• Others

Our most recent review of their unnecessary and failed efforts was a detailed review of Abound Solar which had recently went bankrupt, taking tens of millions of taxpayer dollars with it. The details of that business, cronyism, and financial failure can be read at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/more-losing-solar-bets-abound-as-abound.html

Today we will review some of the latest news from the government’s failed attempts to be a venture capitalist entity in the private market, starting with the latest from Abound Solar.

According to an article from The Hill and other sources:

• Abound Solar, a manufacturer of solar panels, received approval from the Energy Department for a $400 million loan guarantee last September, about the same time that Solyndra, the poster child for failed alternative energy loan guarantees, went belly up financially.
• In Congressional testimony this week, the chairman of Abound, Craig Witsoe testified how cheap Chinese solar panels had made it impossible to compete and thus, Abound also went bankrupt just 12 months or so after it received the loan guarantee from the Obama administration.
• Fortunately, for the American taxpayer, Abound had only wasted $70 million of the $400 million loan guarantee since the Energy Department had cut them off for not meeting performance guidelines that were outlined in the loan guarantee agreement.
• Unfortunately, those performance guidelines were the very reason why Abound went bankrupt and the American taxpayer is out $70 million.
• Apparently, the Abound solar panels were seriously flawed from a design aspect. So flawed that one news report quoted an unidentified Abound employee that the Abound solar panels were really good unless you put them out in the sun.
• Once displayed out in the real world, Abound solar panels had a tendency to catch fire as a result of the design flaw, causing fire damage not only to the panels but to whatever structure they were attached to.
• This design flaw was also probably the source of the panels underperforming in the real world relative to their performance in the lab. However, rather than shut down production and fix the design and engineering issues like a real company would do, Abound could not do that. The Federal government required Abound to hit sales and performance targets in order to get access to the remaining part of the $400 million loan guarantee.
• Thus, they continued to push known faulty product out the door to be installed at customer locations to meet the Energy Department’s performance guidelines.

The really sad part of this problem, from a taxpayer perspective, is that the company knew about the problem with the fire hazard and underperformance prior to receiving the loan guarantee, indicating 1) that the company was possibly not entirely truthful on their loan application or 2) the Energy Department did not do their due diligence before sacrificing taxpayer wealth on defective panels.

In 2012, the company had its hands busy replacing defective and under performing panels it had already installed. Two of these replacements included a prominent Democratic Party fund raiser, Pat Stryker, who had to have the Abound panels replaced on his home and BP Solar, which had to have 14,700 out of its 15,000 installed Abound panels replaced, at a cost of $1 million.

Thus, the shipping of known faulty panels both prior to and after the loan guarantee eventually caught up with Abound who insisted on selling and installing faulty panels to meet Federal government faulty guidelines.

So much blame to go around on this fiasco and loss of $70 million dollars. The government obviously did not do its job before approving the loan, not knowing that cheap Chinese solar panels would undercut domestic manufacturers, did not know there was a major design flaw that would weigh heavily on Abound’s ability to succeed and recover, and did not work with Abound on a recovery plan to fix the design and replace the dangerous panels in order to save the investment.

Abound may have also been dishonest by possibly not disclosing all of the problems it knew it had prior to submitting the loan application and not leveling with the government about the need to go into recovery mode and get some relief from its performance parameters.

But, as we have seen numerous times over the past year, 1) the Federal government is usually never successful when it hands out taxpayer money to their political cronies and 2) the government makes a lousy venture capitalist. In fact, most venture capitialists make lousy venture capitalists. According to a a graphic from the May 21, 2012 issue of Business Week, the track record of venture capitalists is not pretty:

• The Kauffman Foundation looked at the investment results of 99 venture capital firms.
• Almost half of them, 47, lost some or all of the initial investments that were made.
• More than 62% of the firms had investment returns that were lower than the Russell 2000 Index returns.
• Less than 18% of the venture capital firms generated a significant investment return with their investments.

Why we would ever think that the Federal government, who cannot operate any program or project inefficiently or effectively, could do any better is a mystery, especially when one of the major criteria for having a an application approved is whether or not you contributed to the Obama and the Democratic Party in the past. Disgraceful and unnecessary waste of taxpayer wealth.

But the alternative energy waste parade does not end today with Abound. A Michigan subsidiary of a South Korean company, Compact Power, was the recipient of $150 million taxpayer grant and millions more in tax deferments and credits from the Federal government in 2010. The overriding purpose of Compact Power was going to be the manufacturing of thousands of batteries for the Chevy Volt here in America.

President Obama was at the Compact Power ground breaking ceremony in 2010 and had the following words:

“The workers at this plant are already slated to produce batteries for the new Chevy Volt, learned the other day that they’re also going to be supplying batteries for the new electric Ford Focus as soon as this operation gears up. And that means, by 2012, the batteries that will be manufactured here in Holland, Michigan. So when you buy one of these vehicles, the battery could be stamped — Made in America.”

The initial production estimates for the completed factory called for about 15,000 Chevy Volt batteries a year being made at the Compact location. Unfortunately, two years after the taxpayer wealth was committed to the project and the President spoke, the South Korean parent company announced that employees were going to be laid off via a rotating furlough process BEFORE producing a single battery.

Now, the company spokesman claimed that once the Chevy Volt sales start to take off the factory would be ready to provide the necessary batteries. Until then, layoffs were necessary. However, given that Reuters reported in a September 10, 2012 article that General Motors loses about $49,000 on every Chevy Volt it sells, I find it doubtful that both the Volt and the battery Compact would make for those Volts are going to see a sales surge anytime soon.

Thus, another $70 million and $150 million down the taxpayer wealth drain without any appreciable benefit seen coming back to the taxpayer. Government’s make lousy venture capitalists. Unfortunately, they do this lousy job with our money.

An old marketing saying goes something like the following: “If a product or service fulfills a need in the marketplace, it does not need any government subsidies and support to be successful. If a product or service does not fill a need in the marketplace, than no amount of government subsidies and support can make it successful.”

It is basic marketing 101, basic reality 101, something that the political class never seems to understand.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of our times.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedomfor both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment