The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 6: Missing the Opportunity to Fix Government Functions

Over the past five days we have discussed the various failures of the Obama administration across various components:

1. The many lies and deceptions that he has thrown in our faces over the past six plus years.
2. The abusive and illegal use of private email account across his administration despite his promise to have the most transparent Presidential administration ever.
3. And his abuse of the Constitution, existing laws, and the general concept of the rule of law.

Although these acts that we have documented are despicable, illegals, and un-Constitutional, one might have been able to make the case that some successes have come out of the Obama administration if he had just cleaned up government functions. We are currently paying more taxes to government entities in this country then we have ever paid but the returning government services have been ineffective, inefficient, wasteful, and often counterproductive to problem resolution and freedom itself.

If Obama had streamlined and made government more efficient, than at least some good would have come out of his White House years. But….

• According to independent and government sources, Medicaid still loses $30-40 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud, a number that is likely to increase substantially as Obama Care dumps more and more Americans onto a failing and wasteful government program. (Culprit: Health and Human Services)
• According to independent and government sources, Medicare still loses $40-60 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud, a number that is likely to grow substantially as more and more Baby Boomers enter the Medicare arena. (Culprit: Health and Human Services)
• Social Security loses at least $100 billion a year across its various components due to waste and outright criminal fraud. The extent of the fraud was recently and uniquely identified by an inspector general report that showed an whopping 6.5 million Americans, who are officially all over the age of 112, are still on the Social Security records, indicating that they are still alive. Obviously, many millions of people are using the Social Security numbers of dead Americans to defraud the American taxpayer. (Culprit: Social Security Administration)
• The Defense Department, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year, has an accounting process that is so screwed up that even trained, professional auditors have given up trying to make sense of the spending, spending that most likely involves billions and billions of fraudulent and wasteful spending. (Culprit: Defense Department)
• The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect upwards of $400 billion a year from taxpayers that are evading their tax responsibilities while at the same time using resources to deny First Amendment freedom of speech rights to Americans who have a different opinion from this administration.
• The National Science Foundation, a Federal government entity, wastes millions, if not billions, of dollars every year on stupid projects and research including estimating when dogs became man’s best friend, do moms love their dogs more than their kids, developing a computer program to simulate prlm week, and other nonsensical studies. (Culprit: National Science Foundation with a special shout out to the National Institutes of Health which also conducts inane and useless research)
• The Energy Department gave away billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to political connected alternative energy companies, most, if not all, of which took the money, went bankrupt, and returned no societal benefit in return. Additionally, even though the Department has been in existence for decades, spending tens of billions of dollars every year, it still has never come up with a coherent and effective national energy strategy. (Culprit: Energy Department)
• The Education Department, despite spending tens of billions of dollars every year for decades, has failed to come up with any kind of coherent and effective strategies or tactics to help the nation stop under educating American kids. (Culprit: Education Department)
• The war on drugs has been a losing proposition since the Nixon administration and continues to be a losing proposition under the Obama administration, with billions and billions of dollars having been spent over the past six years with no discernible drop in drug usage, continued drug cartel growth, and no drop in prison enrollment for drug usage, making the U.S. the most imprisoned population in the world. (Culprit: DEA among others)
• Our borders still leak, opening us up to the infiltration of terrorist-related individuals into the country with the ability to inflict serious terrorist violence on American citizens. (Culprit: Department of Homeland Security)
• Despite recent news reports that found many Federal employees pass their days mostly viewing pornography on their government issued computers, it is still almost impossible to fire such employees, or others who commit similar acts of wasting taxpayer wealth. (Culprit: Most, if not all, Federal entities)
• Despite many promises to take care of our veterans’ medical needs, those veterans are still poorly served by the Federal government relative to medical treatment despite large annual Veterans Administration budgets. (Culprit: Veterans Administration)
• The State Department still appoints political cronies vs. seasoned, experienced international State Department veterans to high profile foreign ambassadorships, insulting the host country and minimizing the success of American interests in those countries. (Culprit: State Department)
• Top executives across many Federal entities apparently routinely break existing laws by using private email accounts, and in one case a private email server, to conduct official government business. (Culprit: State Department, Health and Human Services, EPA, Justice Department and probably others)
• Health care costs continue to rise much quicker than inflation in this country despite billions and billions of dollars spent on the failed Obama Care legislation. (Culprit: Congress, the President, and Health and Human Services)
• Billions of dollars are wasted every year across the many Federal government welfare programs including housing subsidies, food stamps, farm subsidies, and others. (Culprit: Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture Department and others)

There are probably many other examples but you get the idea. Despite his other failures that we have documented over the past week, if the President had just fixed what is broken across every Federal department and organization, cleaned up the fraud, the waste, and the inefficiencies, he could have made a positive name for his administration. If he had resolved some long standing issues, if he had cut unnecessary spending, if he had focused the Federal bureaucracy on a few hardcore issues, vs. spending money on when dogs became man’s best friend, he would have left a positive legacy.

But like most of his predecessors, he did none of that. He allowed the Federal government to continue to devolve into a Jabba The Hutt caricature, a sad character from the Star Wars movies, that was a huge blob that burned resources without returning any benefit to anyone. In this case, another failed component of 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:

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

Failing Our Kids Again - The Massive Fraud That Is Head Start

A week or so ago we pointed out that the Pentagon has the Defense Department to look after its needs, companies have the Commerce Department to look after their needs, labor unions have the Labor Department to look after their needs and energy companies have the deep pockets of the cronyism infested Energy Department to look after their needs. But there is no Department to look after our kids’ needs. Consider the abuse our kids are constantly subjected to:

• In the very worse possible scenario, they are killed be an insane lunatic that shoots and kills over two dozen people in a school. Rather than immediately secure our schools and our kids inside them, politicians grandstand their own positions on gun control, leaving the other 132,000 schools no safer than before (even though we have already shown how easy it is to secure them: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-about-more-hate-control-before-more_18.html)

Our public schools continue to under educate our kids, with the kids in dozens of other countries constantly outperforming U.S. kids on standardized tests.

We continue to subsidize tobacco growers and farmers that grow far too much corn than is needed, resulting in cheaper than needed tobacco products and cheap corn fructose. This in turn results in kids that smoke and kids that are obese because it is so inexpensive for it to happen via government subsidies.

Millions of kids are physically and sexually abused every year and thousands die as a result of this abuse.

With a $16.4 TRILLION national debt, we have subjected our kids and our grandkids to lives burdened with paying off the wasteful and sinful overspending of our generation.

Yes, we have not and are currently not taking care of our kids. And the latest government analyses and reports on the famous, or now infamous, Federal government Head Start program prove that we are not taking care of our pre school kids in particular, relative to what the political class and the Federal government it operates are supposed to be doing.

Before we discuss this latest scandal, let’s review a little history of the Head Start program:

• Officially, the Head Start program “promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development.”
• Furthermore, “Head Start programs provide comprehensive services to enrolled children and their families, which include health, nutrition, social services and other services determined to be necessary by family needs assessments, in addition to education and cognitive development services. Head Start services are designed to be responsive to each child and family’s ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage.”
• The program began as a small summer program under LBJ in 1965.
• Since then, the American taxpayer has spent about $180 billion on the program.
• The just released study of Head Start’s effectiveness involved the rigorous tracking and testing of over 5,000 kids over time, from their Head Start preschool days through third and fourth grades, and across over a hundred measures of success/failure.

And what have we gotten for this $180 billion? Apparently not much, according to the latest government analyses:

• The Health And Human Services study concluded that “by third grade, the $8 billion Head Start program had little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of participants.”
• Additionally on a few measures, access to Head Start had HARMFUL effects on the children enrolled in the program.
• For example, one subset of kids that were tracked had lower math skills than their peers who did not attend Head Start, all other factors controlled for.
• But it was not only book learning where Head Start failed since researchers found Head Start also had little to no effect on the other socio-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes of children participating in the program.
• In other words, we have paid $180 billion to provide a Federal babysitting service.

But all of this should not be surprising since in 2010, the Health and Human Services Department did another extensive tracking study and found that Head Start provided no positive impacts for kids once they entered first grade. Given those results, it should not be a surprise that there were no positive results or takeaways from Head Start by the third and fourth grades.

So, we have another Federal government program that has failed miserably in delivering on its goals. But the failure in the class room is not the only atrocity of this program. In 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) did an undercover audit of the program and found there is massive fraud and abuse of the program by those people benefiting from taxpayer wealth in funding the local operations:

• The GAO conducted thirteen undercover eligibility tests based on fictitious families to determine the practice of Head Start grantees, those operating Head Start centers with taxpayer funding, were enrolling children not qualified to attend the program.
• The fictitious families were all above the income limits and had other disqualifying characteristics, as established by the Office of Head Start.
• The GAO found that in eight of the thirteen eligibility tests, the fictitious families were told by Head Start staff that they were eligible for the program and encouraged to attend class.
• In each of these eight cases, Head Start staff directly told the fictitious families to misrepresent their eligibility for the program.
• In seven cases, Head Start staff deliberately overlooked some families’ income to make these families eligible for participation.
• In at least four of the cases, the GAO was sent phony eligibility documents that excluded income information, originally provided to the Head Start staff;
• In two cases, Head Start staff designated on application forms that one parent was unemployed, even though the GAO presented documentation of both parents’ income.
• In one case, Head Start staff promised the fictitious family that no one would validate the income information submitted was correct.
• The GAO concluded that their undercover investigations “highlight the ease with which unscrupulous parents could fabricate documentation designed to make it appear as though their children were under-income or otherwise eligible for the program. At no point during our registrations was any of the information contained in fictitious documentation submitted by our parents verified, which indicates that the program is vulnerable to beneficiary fraud in addition to grantee fraud.”

Now, this was obviously not as rigorous a test and analysis as the 5,000 kid tracking study. But it is probably indicative of the overall operations of the program, ineffective in teaching and improving the lives of our kids and fraudulent, criminal, and wasteful in its execution.

Just as an aside, let’s think about what we could have done with that $180 billion, in light of the Newtown school shooting tragedy. In previous posts we documented how there are about 132,000 schools in the country and that the average salary for a trained police officer is about $55,000.


If we take these three numbers, number of schools, cost to put on police officer in each school to protect our kids, and use the wasted $180 billion to fund the process, we could have secured every one of our schools for 25 years, more than half the life of the Head Start program. In other words, every school could have had a trained police officer on sight to deter violence against our kids since about 1988.

Instead, we have spent our taxpayer dollars on a massive government bureaucracy that does not come close to fulfilling its relatively simple goal and is laced with fraud to boot. Disgraceful.

But not unexpected. The Federal government never does a “spring cleaning” of its programs to determine if they are worthy of taxpayer wealth. For over four decades we have been funding this program for no benefit in return. I am sure that there are many other dead end programs that are on autopilot, receiving funding year after year with no review on whether it is a worthwhile expense. And this is one of the many major reasons why we have a $16.4 TRILLION national debt, unnecessary Federal spending.

That is why some steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” are so important if we are ever to inject sanity into Federal spending:

1. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending 10% a year for five years into order to squeeze unnecessary programs and projects out of existence since the funding to support them would no longer be available.
2. Step 34 proposes a process that would hold Congressional members accountable for their actions, removing them from committee posts for dereliction of duty. Spending $180 billion and getting nothing in return would certainly count as dereliction of duty.
3. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians since the current set of politicians have proven they are incapable of doing a “spring cleaning” of unnecessary federal spending items which in turn results in a $16.4 TRILLION national debt with nothing to show for it in return.

But expecting the Washington political class to fix itself is probably not going to happen. In fact, it is pretty obvious than many politicians in Washington cannot even identify these types of problems and their root causes.

Consider a statement from an official White House publication from 2011, the year after the Obama administration’s own Health And Human Services Department proved that Head Start program is a failure in actually giving American kids a “head start:”

“Studies show that children in early childhood education programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, more likely to hold a job, and more likely to earn more in that job. For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime.” – President Barack Obama, March 10, 2011, President

If you cannot even recognize the problem, e.g. Head Start is a complete failure in preparing kids for life and DOES NOT pay the American taxpayer back in a 10-to-1 ratio, the chances of terminating or fixing the failed effort or program is next to nil. That is why Obama Care is shaping up as an epic failure, an inability to define the true problem and the true underlying root causes. That is why the 40 year “War On Drugs” is a lost cause, an inability to understand the root causes of addiction and the need to use drugs. The list of failure to understand the resultant wasted taxpayer wealth goes on and on.

Which is why the three steps above are needed to stop the insanity that is Washington’s cult and heritage of failure.

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 Transparent Failure Of Obama's Transparency Promise

One of President Obama’s greatest assets is that he makes grandiose, bold commitments of what his administration is going to do for the American people and the nation. When he came into office, he promised to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public.

One of President Obama’s greatest liabilities is that he rarely, if ever, fulfills those promises. Consider his track record:

• One of the first acts he was going to do when elected in 2008 was to shut down the prison facility at Guantanamo since it was a symbol of U.S. repression. As of today, nearly four years later, the prison is still open with no sign it will be shut down any time soon.
• He promised, that unlike George Bush, he would not go around Congress and appoint any high ranking government bureaucrat without Congressional approval and hearings, a promise that he has broken numerous times.
• He promised that his economic stimulus program would get unemployment well below 6% and prevent it from ever going over 8%. Unfortunately, his administration oversaw an all time record for consecutive months having an unemployment rate over 8%.
• He promised that he would slash the annual Federal government spending deficit in half by the end of his first term but ended up setting sky high record deficits every year of his first term, incurring a total national debt of over $5 TRILLION in just four short years.
• He promised that he would never raise taxes in a weak economy on any American, something he canot wait to do now.
• He promised he would quickly disengage U.S. forces in Iraq and ended up taking three years to do it and using the existing Bush exit plan.
• He promised to slash earmarks, thinly disguised misuses of taxpayer wealth by incumbent politicians to finance their reelection campaigns, but was unable or unwilling to do so.
• At his swearing in ceremony, he swore to uphold the Constitution and laws of the land and then ignored both during his first four years in office by engaging our military in the Libyan civil war without Congressional approval, ignoring court orders by a Federal judge relative to the Gulf oil drilling moratorium, unilaterally declining to enforce the tenets of the DOMA law (a law that should have never been passed but was the law of the land, requiring the administration to enforce it), and sanctioned the first official government assassination of an American citizen without due process of law.

We could go on with other broken promises but you get the idea. Great at promising, pitiful in delivering on those promises. But probably his biggest lie/disappointment has been the promise to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever. No secrets, open government, high transparency. Not surprising, this is also a failed promise, a very large failure across all Federal entities:

1) Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, is involved in the latest Obama administration embarrassment over transparency when it came to light that she has been conducting EPA business using two email accounts. One account is a publicly known and used, official email account.
Another email account that she has been reportedly using for private EPA business is listed under the Richard Windsor, a moniker that very few people knew was actually Ms. Jackson. Richard Windsor is a family dog from Ms. Jackson’s childhood. Obviously, at least on the surface, this appears to be a way for a top Obama administration official to bypass those nasty laws on transparency, freedom of information requests, and Congress.

According to a recent article on the same topic from the Washington Times on November 17, 2012, government open-records laws are supposed to make information available to the public now and for posterity at the National Archives, the government agency that gathers official correspondence. There are strict rules on the use of email addresses, and the rules prohibit using private emails to try to bypass open-records laws.

The EPA claims nothing was amiss here, just an EPA official doing business like many of her predecessors that also may have had alternative, secretive emails. Obviously, there are two problems with this excuse. First, just because previous people had secret email accounts does not make it right, legal, or transparent, as promised by Obama.

And second, experts in this area of governance are not buying this somewhat lame excuse, quoting from a recent article from Politico:

• “I don’t know any other agency that does this,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which asked EPA’s inspector general on Tuesday to investigate the matter. Even if Jackson needs a separate email account, Weismann asked, “why would you pick a fictitious name of someone of different gender? To me it smacks of ... trying to hide.”
• Another expert, Bradley Blakeman, a former senior Bush aide who later Freedom's Watch, stated in a broadcast interview that the EPA arrangement “smells.”
• “What good reason, if we use common sense, would there be for a high government official to have a fictitious email account?” he asked.

Good question, Mr. Blakeman. Congress is investigating, as are some government inspector generals, to see if this was an actually attempt to undermine and undercut government transparency rules, regulations, and promises.

2) But the intrigue of hidden emails to possibly avoid transparency does not stop at the EPA. The Washington Times article cited above reported on similar hanky-panky at the Department of Energy. According to the article, a Congressional committee, the Science committee, investigating this hidden email scandal found that Jonathan Silver, the Energy Department’s loan officer, “explicitly directed others to keep loan guarantee communications secret by not linking public and private email accounts, and sent emails detailing official government business using his private email account.”

One instance of using hidden emails to conduct secret business might be an accident. However, two departments using hidden emails to conduct secret business is a trend. If we find another department doing the same shenanigans, we have a scandal and a confirmed broken promise of the Obama administration.

3) A November 21, 2012 article on the Info Wars website cited a Washington Post story which reported the Obama administration had secretly signed off on a secret cyber security Presidential directive that would allow intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency (NSA), to secretly operate on the networks of private companies, such as Google and Facebook.

This directive would greatly expand the NSA’s authority and ability to spy on citizens and companies. In response to this obvious direct hit on freedom and privacy, lawyers from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding that the Obama administration release the text of the directive for review.

Unfortunately, for liberty and transparency, the NSA denied the FOIA request. The NSA contends that it does not have to release the directive since it is a confidential Presidential communication and it is classified. So much for transparency.

The EPIC plans to continue the legal battle for transparency on this issue, which we wish them luck on. However, this is not the first time that the EPIC and this not-so-transparent administration have clashed over the release of government information:

• In testimony to Congress earlier this year, EPIC explained that the NSA has been a “black hole for public information about cybersecurity.”
• EPIC is also currently involved in an ongoing lawsuits involving the secret nature of the NSA’s secretive relationship with Google
• Another EPIC lawsuit, this one four years old dating back to in 2008, is also being pursued relative the NSA’s cybersecurity authority.

Again, so much for transparency, a concept that is critically important when it comes to freedom and the authority of government to spy on its own citizens without debate, without judicial overview, and without consent.

4) If you are like most Americans, you are probably not aware of what the government calls “fusion centers. These “centers” are regional government centers that collect information on American citizens. Quite simply, they are domestic spying operations, as defined by Wikipedia: “A fusion center is an information sharing center, many of which were created under a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justice‘s Office of Justice Programs between 2003 and 2007."

They are designed to promote information sharing at the Federal level between agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Justice, US Military, and state and local level government. As of July 2009, the Department of Homeland Security recognized at least seventy-two fusion centers.
In other words, fusion centers are domestic spying and analysis centers located around the country. Now, I understand there are reasons for secrecy and security when it comes to protecting citizens. However, not unexpected, given what we have already discussed, earlier this year the Department of Homeland Security has more or less unilaterally decided that fusion centers will be exempt from Freedom Of Information request and other inquiries.

Thus, most, if not all, Americans will never know if they are under investigation or if their names and personal information have somehow gotten identified and stored by one of these fusion centers, making them a perennial suspect in the government’s eyes. The concept of freedom of information was to ensure that these types of domestic spying activities were open to the air and sunshine of disclosure and discussion in our democracy.

To unilaterally decide not to share the processes and information that the government is collecting on innocent Americans (remember the quaint concept of “innocent until proven guilty”) is not consistent with the concept of liberty. It is certainly not consistent with the concept of government transparency.

  5) But apparently this lack of transparency in the Obama administration is not related to just national security and spying. Bloomberg ran an investigation that they ran in an article in late September regarding the utter failure of the Obama administration of fulfill a simple FOIA request:

• Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the simple disclosure of public information unrelated to national security.
• The request was the travel cost of top government officials.
• Bloomberg found that just eight of the 57 Federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.
• Nineteen of the twenty Cabinet level requests were not fulfilled in time to be in compliance with Federal disclosure laws.
• In an ironic twist of government incompetence and secrecy, the Department of Justice, which is charged with monitoring how well Federal entities react to FOIA requests, also failed to release the travel details of top officials at three of its affiliated agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in according to the legal requirements and law.
• Some agencies tried to minimize FOIA compliance by illegally trying to charging requestors of information thousands of dollars for the information.
• According to the article, the Obama administration claimed almost half a million exemptions to the FOIA laws and guidelines in 2009, about 50% more exemptions claimed than in the final year of the Bush administration.

According to experts on government disclosure compliance:

• “When it comes to implementation of Obama’s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more ‘talk the talk’ rather than ‘walk the walk,’” said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of Justice’s office monitoring the government’s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981 to 2007.
• “I don’t think the administration has been very good at all on open-government issues,” said Katherine Meyer, a Washington attorney who has been filing open records requests since the late 1970s. “The Obama administration is as bad as any of them, and to some extent worse.”
• “In a 24/7 world, it should take two days, it should take two hours. If it’s public, it should be just there,” according to Eric Newton, senior adviser at the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based group that promotes citizen engagement, said agencies have no excuse not to rapidly disclose travel costs.

So it is not just national security that the Obama administration officials think should be shielded form the daylight of disclosure. Hardly the behavior you could have expected form a Presidential administration that claimed it would be the most transparent ever. Given these five sets of examples, it is clear that this group of politicians and bureaucrats, from Obama on down to most government agencies, will never receive an award for their transparency.

But wait...the Obama administration did get recognized for his transparency back in March of 2011:

(http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0311/not_a_secret_anymore_a00ccd98-0d9e-4822-8936-168f3a51b959.html).

But we do not know anything about the transparency award since the ceremony was closed to the press and the public, totally consistent with Obama‘s transparency failures. Another promise broken, to the detriment of freedom and liberty.

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

Alternative Energy Projects - A Teenager Accomplishes More With $200 Than The Obama Administration Does With Billions Of Dollars

Despite claiming that he was going to be the most green President of all time, bringing alternative energy technologies to the world, the record in alternative energy of the Obama administration is pretty abysmal and definitely very expensive.

The following list of failed ventures/lost "bets" that this administration placed with our tax money includes companies and Obama's political cronies that received Federal government loans, Federal government loan guarantees, and Federal government outright (free) grants of taxpayer money:

• Solyndra - $535,000,000
• Ecotality - $141,400,000
• Beacon Power - $43,000,000
• Spectrawatt - $500,000
• Evergreen Solar - $5,300,000
• A123 - $250,000,000
• Fisker - $529,000,000
• Tesla - $465,000,000
• Chevy Volt - $1,500,000,000
• Total taxpayer wealth lost from just this partial list of alternative energy efforts - $3,469,200,000

In addition to the above wasted uses of taxpayer money, the annual Department Of Energy budget of $39 billion a year should also be considered a waste in its totality. Since its founding more than three decades ago, the Department has not developed and deployed a coherent and effective national energy program and has not developed or financed the development of any technology or energy source that would justify tens of billions of dollars a year in its budget.

Hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and wasted, through the years with nothing to show for it.

Gas prices that have doubled since January, 2009 with no long term energy strategy or plan in place that is either environmentally friendly and/or economically friendly.

No new energy technologies for the housing, automotive, or commercial sectors of the economy that have proven worthwhile as a result of Energy Department funding or Energy Department initiatives.

No new auto technologies that will miraculously get unheard of mileage from a new generation of cars as a result of Energy Department funding or Energy Department initiatives.

What a colossal waste of time, energy, money, and government resources, both historically and over the past couple of years, relative to the energy situation in this country.

However, what the entire Federal energy bureaucracy, the entire Federal political class, and hundreds of billions of dollars could not do, change the energy paradigm in this country, a high school senior in Grant City, Missouri may be doing for a few hundred dollars.

Consider the amazing story of high school senior Don Gibson, age 18, as described in the May 18, 2012 issue of The Week magazine and in other credible journalistic channels:

• Mr. Gibson purchased a 1995 Geo Metro auto and ripped out the engine.
• He went on Ebay and purchased a used fork lift for $200.
• He stripped out the fork lift's electric motor and installed it into the now motorless Geo Metro.
• The retrofitted car is street legal and deemed safe to operate on the street in the eyes of the Missouri state government's department of motor vehicles.
• He has been driving the car his entire senior year of high school without any problems.
• He can attain a top speed of about 62 miles per hour.
• He can recharge the electrical batteries in the fork lift engine in about six hours, which he does overnight every day.
• A complete charge costs about $.25 which means he gets the equivalent of about 200 miles per gallon, based on the current cost of a gallon of gas.
• His range is about 30 miles before he needs to recharge the batteries.
• The Chevrolet website estimates that its electric car, the Volt, has a range of 35 miles from its electric engine, only about 17% longer than Mr. Gibson's Geo Metro.
• However, recall that the Chevy Volt received over $1 billion form the Federal government to help attain that 35 mile range while Mr. Gibson received $0 to attain his 30 mile range.
• He feels he could get the range substantially higher with newer battery technology as opposed to the current fork lift battery technology he used.
• The 18 year old is quoted in the article as saying: "If you live in a small community and you just need to drive around town, this is the most ideal vehicle you could drive." This sounds an awfully like the initial Volt advertising I saw where it hyped the fact that if you drive around town, you would never need to use gas.

Incredible, this young man is doing with hundreds of dollars what the Federal government and General Motors could not do with billions of dollars, probably hundreds of engineers, and the latest knowledge on materials, batteries, aerodynamics, etc. He is making an absolutely positive impact on the environment and our dependence on foreign oil sources in his garage using existing technology without the waste and cronyism of the political class. 

What a great advancement and what a great embarrassment to those who think we need the Federal government to oversee and overspend our tax wealth to cure the environmental and dependence problems inherent in our current energy paradigm.

But wait, the story gets even better. According to news reports, Mr. Gibson is working on the development of his own personal windmill-powered charger station so that he can charge his high mileage, low pollution converted Geo Metro with wind power. Unbelievable. A true tribute to American innovation and a true indictment of America's politicians.



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 or 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 freedom for 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/

The Stench From Solyndra Continues To Rise

Most informed Americans should be somewhat familiar with the whole Solyndra affair so far:

• Solyndra was a California solar panel manufacturer that received a Federal loan guarantee worth about $535 million.
• The company received the loan even though they had never posted a profit during their existence.
• The company received the loan even though analysis from PriceWaterhouse showed that the company's long term viability was doubtful
• The company received the loan even though due diligence by the Office of Budget Management was not completed regarding the full analysis of the company's financial viability.
• The company received the loan even though a major Democrat fundraiser had emailed the White House about his concerns about whether Solyndra would survive financially.
• The reason for this short circuiting the due diligence was to provide photo opportunities for the President to visit the plant, a short circuiting that may have cost the country and its taxpayers more than a half billion dollars.
• As the company sank further into financial troubles, the Federal government possibly broke the law by putting private Solyndra investors ahead of the Federal government and American taxpayers' rights in any bankruptcy laws and distribution of bankrupt assets. 
• One of the private, institutional investors who leapfrogged the bankruptcy rights of taxpayers has a deep relationship with a major Obama fundraiser.

All of this is bad enough but the latest news and investigations are uncovering even more bad and disgraceful behavior and facts, as reported in a Reuters article from October 7, 2011:

• An Obama appointee at the Energy Department pressured White House personnel to sign off on the Solyndra Federal loan even though his wife worked for Solyndra's law firm. Conflict of interest?
• At the time of the loan approval, the appointee was an advisor to the Energy Department on its use of economic stimulus funding to encourage new energy technologies and the appointee made constant inquiries on the status of the loan application.
• In one email, the appointee reveals that the Office of the Vice president and the White House are "breathing down my neck on this (the loan approval process)," a probable reference to the administration wanted to short cut the due diligence process.
• The appointee was a major Obama fundraiser during the President's 2008 Presidential campaign.
• Other recently released emails show that Treasury officials, who I believe had responsibility for administering stimulus funds, were distressed about the Energy Department's decision to restructure the company's debt in early 2011, a restructuring that placed $75 million in private investments ahead of taxpayers' rights in an event of a bankruptcy.
• One set of emails indicate the reordering of bankruptcy rights was done by the Energy Department and that the Energy Department had not informed the Treasury of the changes. This set of emails stated the legal position that the stimulus law did not allow for the government loan to be subordinated to private investors.
• The article reports that the House Energy and Commerce Committee has now requested that the Treasury Department turn over all documents related to the loan guarantee which will add to the tens of thousands of documents already collected from the White House and Energy Department.
• The chairman of the Committee, Fred Upton, is quoted: "the paper trail released by the White House portrays a disturbingly close relationship between President Obama's west wing inner circle, campaign donors, and wealthy investors that spawned the Solyndra mess."
  

An interview with Congressman Cory Gardner, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revealed the following findings by the committee's investigation:

• Taxpayers are unlikely to ever recover any of the $535 million loan guarantee.
• The head of the Energy Department agency that approved the loan resigned this past week, raising additional issues of who is at fault within the Energy Department.
• The Congressman stated that a 2005 law clearly states that a loan like this cannot be subordinated to other investors' assets and claims.
• The FBI is also investigating the company for fraud.
• A market analyst had predicted that the company would fail when the loan was approved in 2009 but the administration ignored this warning, and many others, and approved the loan anyway.
• The Congressman claims that the President stated this week that the success to failure ratio on these types of programs would likely be one to one, i.e. for every successful Federal loan to energy companies there will be one failure, not a great success rate when you are talking about billions of taxpayer dollars.

What a disgrace and waste. Given that the political class has shown a constant inability to successfully, efficiently, and effectively operate any component of government:

1. What made them think they could pick a winning company in an emerging energy field?
2. What made them think that a company that had never shown a profit could turn around their business and be successful and not a taxpayer liability?
3. What made them think they were smarter than PriceWaterhouse, the aforementioned market analyst, the Office of Budget Management, and other experts who warned and/or predicted a Solyndra collapse?
4. What made them think they could ignore a Federal law and move private investor bankruptcy rights ahead of taxpayer bankruptcy rights?
5. What made them think clean energy photo ops were more important than extensive due diligence, are they that vain that their political careers take precedence over taxpayer wealth?

I think the answer to all of these questions is that they did not think at all and we are out over half a billion dollars as a result of their lack of thinking.

A number of changes from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are needed so that we do not continually waste taxpayer money on political class escapades:

• Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year over five years so that the Federal government focuses on far fewer but more important issues. This focus would hopefully allow them to do some things right from a governance perspective. One of the activities they would not and could not do as a result of limited funding and limited responsibilities would be handing out taxpayer money to politically connected friends and companies.
• Step 39 would institute term limits so that the incestuous relationship between incumbent politicians and campaign donators would be greatly reduced, removing the incentive for politicians to direct taxpayer money to their campaign fundraisers and for politicians to place fundraisers assets and liabilities ahead of taxpayers'.
• Step 23 proposes a process, with minimal political class input, that would establish once and for all an effective and strategic national energy plan, a plan that actually works and is far more effective than this very tactical, corrupt, and flawed approach of funding individual companies with taxpayer money without an overarching strategic plan to guide it.

Solyndra, a stench of corruption and political incompetence that continues to rise and which cost over a half a billion dollars of taxpayer money to create.






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