Was This Money Wisely Spent?

On October 25th, WattsUpWithThat posted an article about spending on green energy and the results of that spending.

The article reports:

Economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division): “Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.” … The net of it is clearly we haven’t made any progress.”

The article includes the following graph:

The article also includes the following Tweet:

I think it is time to go back to the drawing board.

I’m A Little Concerned About This

On Wednesday, NewsMax posted an article about the coming diesel crisis in America.

The article reports:

Diesel fuel inventories in the East Coast are at their lowest level ever heading into the winter, prompting some areas in the Northeast to ration fuel.

According to one estimate, the U.S. has only 25 days of diesel fuel — the lowest since 2008.

One supplier, calling “conditions rapidly devolving,” is requiring customers to give 72 hours’ notice to secure fuel and freight, Bloomberg reports.

“At times, carriers are having to visit multiple terminals to find supply, which delays deliveries and strains local trucking capacity,” said the supplier, Mansfield Energy, in a note to clients.

In areas of the country where diesel fuel is tightest, prices are 30-80 cents higher than the market average, according to Mansfield.

The article notes:

The shortage, which is also spreading to Europe, is due to underinvestment in refining capacity and refinery closures, according to Goldman Sachs.

The Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels has discouraged the investments needed to grow the industry enough to keep up with the demand. Banks are not going to lend to an industry that the government is trying to shut down–they are smarter than that. Until we get either enough sensible people in Congress to promote sensible energy policies or elect a new President in 2024, we will have fuel shortages of various kinds and the American people will pay a price for electing our current leaders. The thing to remember here is that it is the ‘little guy’ (who prospered under President Trump) who is suffering. Congress does not personally pay for their gasoline (the taxpayers do), and most Congressmen have somehow earned enough to pay for heating their Washington residences and their homes. The war on fossil fuels is simply more of the Biden administration’s war on the middle class.

Our Southern Border

On June 2nd, Breitbart reported the following:

U.S. border officials are quietly bussing a vast flood of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants into Americans’ towns and cities, despite the court-ordered preservation of the Title 42 barrier.

“It’s like 8,000 to 9,000 a day now,” and there are more on the way, migration monitor Todd Bensman told Breitbart News.

U.S. border chief Alejandro Mayorkas and his pro-migration deputies are using the Title 42 barrier to send some Central American single men and families back to Mexico. But Mayorkas is cutting loopholes in the barrier to place everyone else on government-funded buses to cities and towns around the United States, said Bensman, who works for the Center for Immigration Studies.

They’re [letting in] people from the Middle East, Asia, Africa — the extra-continentals — and also from Cuba and South America. They’re letting in Peruvians — about 500 a week now. They’re letting in Ecuadorians and tons and tons of Venezuelans.

The article describes the shelter system that has been set up in America for these illegal immigrants:

The U.S. shelter network is a northern mirror of the cartels’ southern network of camps, bus stations, and housing created to transport migrants up through Mexico to the U.S. border.

The northern-side network has been created by a variety of U.S. nonprofits that are funded by donations from pro-migration business elites, progressive charities, and government contracts. They form a nationwide catch-and-release network that helps the U.S. government and cartels smuggle the indebted migrants into Americans’ jobs without exposure from national TV broadcasters.

The number of illegal immigrants coming across the border has a detrimental impact on the wages of Americans:

The elite-delivered flood of migrant workers aids employers, investors, and wealthy professionals. But it imposes much damage on many millions of working-class Americans, who are forced to accept lower wages, higher rents, crowded schools, and lower political status in their own homeland.

That wage loss has been lauded by business interests, such as Goldman Sachs, and is acknowledged by many business groups and even by Biden’s White House advisors. The flood of cheap labor is expected to reinflate the post-1990 Cheap Labor Bubble that has suppressed wages for tens of millions of ordinary Americans. The Wall Street-boosting bubble was deflated by President Donald Trump’s low-migration/high-wage policies in 2020 and 2021.

Migration advocates also celebrate the displacement of Americans in their own country. “The phenomenon of [population] replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice,” said a May 17 op-ed in the New York Times. “What the far right calls “replacement” is better described as renewal.”

Progressives claim that the migrants will offset the economic damage to ordinary Americans by buying food and services from Americans — despite the evidence of minimal wage growth since 1990. ‘The average effect, at all skill levels, is nothing in the short term,” said Michael Clemens, a migration expert at the Center for Global Development.

Please follow the link to read the entire article.

This is not a problem created by one political party–the Republicans are as guilty as the Democrats. The Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans love the cheap labor that the illegal immigrants provide. Open borders is a policy supported by people in both political parties who are part of the Washington swamp. The Republicans (and the Democrats) have had multiple opportunities to solve the crisis at the southern border AND the illegal immigration crisis. Both parties have chosen not to solve the problem.

The Corruption Only Gets Worse

We all know about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the scandal surrounding the reporting of the laptop and its contents. Many of us have suspicions about the amazing prices people are paying for Hunter Biden’s artwork. But there is a new Hunter Biden scandal being exposed by The U.K. Daily Mail.

In an exclusive report, The U.K. Daily Mail reports:

  • The Russian government held a press conference Thursday claiming that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military ‘bioweapons’ research program in Ukraine
  • However the allegations were branded a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US
  • But emails and correspondence obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show the claims may well be true
  • The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases
  • He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine 
  • The president’s son and his colleagues invested $500,000 in Metabiota through their firm Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners 
  • They raised several million dollars of funding for the company from investment giants including Goldman Sachs 

The article also notes:

But emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.

The article includes screenshots of various emails to Hunter Biden regarding the business deals involved.

The article concludes:

In another sign of the deep ties between Metabiota and the Department of Defense, Hunter’s RSTP business partner Rob Walker said he would ‘have a friend reach out to DoD on the down low’, in order to prove the company’s bona fides to top prospective investors Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in October 2014.

RSTP was a subsidiary of Rosemont Capital, an investment company founded by Hunter and former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz in 2009.

Metabiota also has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), suspected to be the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.

WIV was a hotspot for controversial ‘gain of function’ research that can create super-strength viruses.

Chinese scientists performed gain of function research on coronaviruses at the WIV, working alongside a US-backed organization EcoHealth Alliance that has since drawn intense scrutiny over its coronavirus research since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers from the Wuhan institute, Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance published a study together in 2014 on infectious diseases from bats in China, which notes that tests were performed at the WIV.

Shi Zhengli, the WIV Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases who became dubbed the ‘bat lady’ for her central role in bat coronavirus research at the lab, was a contributor to the paper.

Metabiota has been an official partner of EcoHealth Alliance since 2014, according to its website.

I wonder when the American media will cover this story.

The Biggest Lie Told In Last Night’s Debate

Breitbart posted an article last night which detailed the biggest lie told in the Democratic debate in Iowa.

The article reports:

Blue-collar and white-collar Americans “are being clobbered, they’re being killed,” former Vice President Joe Biden claimed at the January 14 Democrat debate in Iowa.

However, unemployment is at record lows, many sidelined Americans are getting jobs, and blue-collar wages are rising at rates not seen for many years amid President Donald Trump’s new curbs on legal and illegal immigration.

The article quotes Joe Biden’s remarks:

Working-class people — where I come from in Pennsylvania, the places I come from in Delaware — I have great support. I have support across the board, and I’m not worried about taking on Donald Trump at all. And with regard to the economy I can hardly wait to have a debate with him.

Where I come from — the neighborhoods I come from — they’re in real trouble: working-class people and middle-class people. When the middle class does well, [the] working class has a way up and the wealthy do well. But what’s happening now: they’re being clobbered, they’re being killed. They now have a situation where they [believe] — the vast majority believe — their children will never reach the stage that they reached in economic security.

I love that [economic] debate because the American public is getting clobbered. The wealthy are the only ones doing well. Period. I’m looking forward to the economic debate.

The article reports the facts:

Wages for blue-collar Americans rose by 4.3 percent in 2019 — or 2.7 percent after inflation — in President Donald Trump’s tightening labor market, according to a December report by Goldman Sachs.

The wage gains come amid very low inflation of just 2.1 percent in December.

…Blue-collar wages are rising faster than white-collar salaries because of different demands from employers, said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “White-collar wages have been moving up over time, a bit, and the demand there, because of technology and other things, is not as high as the demand [for blue-collar skills]. … It’s a reality of the market,” he said January 9.

But Biden wants to increase the flow of foreign workers who will reduce wages for Americans.

“Biden will work with Congress to first reform temporary visas to establish a wage-based allocation process and establish enforcement mechanisms to ensure they are aligned with the labor market and not used to undermine wages,” said Biden’s plan for legal immigration. “Then, Biden will support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country, which create unacceptably long backlogs,” the plan says.

Hopefully enough Americans are familiar with the actual facts to believe this garbage.

One Has To Wonder About Their Motives

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article with the following headline, “Leaked Documents Prove Soros’s Open Society Is Working with UN in Supporting Current Illegal Migrant Crisis.”

The article includes the following:

Also in 2016 Breitbart.com obtained a leaked document from the Soros Open Society Foundation that reveals their close links to UN migration representative and former Goldman Sachs executive Peter Sutherland.

The George Soros Open Society also claims that through Sutherland they are able to influence international migration policy due to the current migrant crisis.

…George Soros’ Open Society Foundation admits influence and incredibly close links with UN migration representative and former Goldman Sachs executive Peter Sutherland in leaked document.

The paper, which told of how the migrant crisis presented an “opportunity” for the foundation to extend its global influence and attract more money, mentions Sutherland’s pro-migrant work. The foundation notes that through Sutherland they have been able to advocate at an “elite level” behind the scenes.

Open Society are one of the contributors to the Columbia Global Policy Initiative (CGPI) which hosts Mr. Sutherland and claim that through Sutherland they are able to influence international migration policy due to the current migrant crisis. On the United Nations website Sutherland is described as a “strong advocate for promoting practical action to increase the benefits of migration” and has routinely made comments against national borders and national sovereignty in Europe. Sutherland has even called for the European Union to “undermine the homogeneity” of member states.

Sutherland has even gone as far as defending all migrants regardless of whether or not they are legitimate refugees saying, “We’re not just talking, either, about refugees. We’re talking about economic migrants, many of whom could be the future, and some at the present… are survival fighters. They’re not to be dismissed as an irrelevance.”

It is becoming obvious that the United Nations has lost its way.

This is the Preamble to the United Nations Charter:

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
  • to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
  • to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

There is nothing in that Preamble about overwhelming countries with migrants in order to abolish national borders. If the United Nations truly worked for justice and human rights in the countries the migrants are fleeing, the migrants would not be fleeing.

We have to stop the migrant caravan at our border and insist that the people in the caravan go through the legal process of immigration. While we are at it, it might be a really good idea to get rid of the United Nations.

 

 

 

You Might Want To Look At This List

The Gateway Pundit has posted a detailed list of the top Wikileaks Podesta Emails.

Here is a small sample:

Hillary Policies –

Hillary Clinton Dreams of ‘Open Trade and Open Borders’
Hillary Admits Saudi Arabia and Qatar Fund ISIS – But Took Their Money Anyway
Hillary sat on Board that funded ISIS
Hillary’s own advisor blamed Hillary for Benghazi
Hillary bragged about being invited to Russia’s Putin’s ‘Inner Sanctum’
Clinton Campaign Fudged Climate Change Data – Inflated Emission Numbers
Hillary team picked Tim Kaine as VP in July 2015
Clinton Camp worried as Chelsea hosts “fundraiser” aka Cash payment for Radical Islamic Group that wants to end Israel
Hillary concerned Obama’s over regulation of banks is killing the industry (but this is her position as well)
Obama’s rhetoric ruined the status of forces agreement with Iraq, thus creating ISIS
Trump is right – liberal Hispanic judge’s wife met with Podesta
Hillary’s team agrees that Hillary is running for Obama’s 3rd term
Clinton campaign discussing how to make Hillary more likable
Donald Trump tweets: Obama owes Hillary for illegally holding his emails
Hillary agrees Obamacare stinks in speech to Goldman Sachs (but promotes with public)
Democrats downplay Benghazi because only 4 people died
Smoking gun on Iran deal Nuclear War coming

Please follow the link above to read the complete list–it is chilling.

Who Made This Decision?

On Sunday The Wall Street Journal posted an article about some of the recent bank settlements that were supposed to help consumers. Well, I think consumers were on the list right after political entities.

The article reports:

Imagine if the president of the United States forced America’s biggest banks to funnel hundreds of millions—and potentially billions—of dollars to the corporations and lobbyists who supported his agenda, all while calling it “Main Street Relief.” The public outcry would rightly be deafening. Yet the Obama administration has used a similar strategy to enrich its political allies, advance leftist pet projects, and protect its legacy—and hardly anyone has noticed.

The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to “identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing” in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.

The most recent came in April when the Justice Department announced a $5.1 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs. In February Morgan Stanley agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement. Previous targets were Citigroup ($7 billion), J.P. Morgan Chase ($13 billion), and Bank of America, which in 2014 reached the largest civil settlement in American history at $16.65 billion. Smaller deals with other banks have also been announced.

You might expect that maybe some of the money would go into the U.S. Treasury to pay off some of the deficit. Silly person.

The article reports:

…a substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list. Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but.

…As part of their “consumer relief” penalties, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase must also pay a minimum $75 million to Community Development Financial Institutions—taxpayer-funded groups propped up by the Obama administration as an alternative to payday lenders. “Housing Counseling Agencies” also get at least $30 million. This essentially circumvents Congress’s recent decision to cut $43 million in federal funds routed to these groups through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The politicians who negotiate the settlements as part of the RMBS Working Group have also directed money to their supporters and states. Illinois’s Democratic attorney general Lisa Madigan announced she had secured $22.5 million from February’s Morgan Stanley deal for her state’s debt-ridden pension funds—a blatant payout to public unions. The deals with J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup yielded a further $344 million for both “consumer relief” and direct payments to pension funds.

The article concludes:

Despite the best efforts of a few principled legislators late last year, Congress missed an opportunity to amend the Justice Department’s funding bill to stop further handouts. Lawmakers now have another opportunity as Congress enters budget negotiation for fiscal year 2017. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) introduced a bill in April that would prevent government officials from enforcing settlements that funnel money to third parties, and it needs to gain wider traction with his colleagues. The political shakedowns disguised as public service must end.]

Is there any doubt that we need a new paradigm in Washington? There was no “Main Street Relief” involved in any of this–there was, however, Washington corruption. It was nothing more than a legal stick-up.

The Neighborhood Bully Meets His Match

One of the unpleasant outcomes of the financial crisis of 2008 is the way the Obama Administration has treated many of the banks who wrote some of the bad mortgages. Never mind that many of the bad mortgages were required to be written because of government regulations regarding discrimination or that some of the leading Democrats in Congress were making sure that bad loans were continually being made, the Obama Administration is going to make the big banks pay for bad policy on the part of the government. Well, one bank has decided to stand up to the bully that the federal government has become.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Japanese bank Nomura is refusing to settle out of court in a case brought against them by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

The article reports:

The claim is that Fan and Fred—the government-created dominators of the mortgage market—were unwitting victims of the banks. To believe this fairy tale, you have to ignore the findings of a bipartisan congressional inquiry, as well as separate federal lawsuits in which the government is arguing that Fan and Fred did the misleading.

Yet regulators figured that the banks would probably cave to avoid unpleasant publicity and a juror pool angry about bank bailouts. And 17 banks did cave, paying the Beltway bandits nearly $18 billion to make these Little Orphan Fannie claims disappear. Firms like Bank of America , Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan all wrote checks to buy peace with the politicos.

Nomura did not settle out of court and the trial is set for March 16. This is causing the government lawyers to lose no small amount of sleep.

The article reports:

In January the feds dropped their claims for damages. The government claims it can recover as much or more from the “equitable” claims, in which Nomura would merely be required to buy back the securities it sold to Fan and Fred. But Nomura says the damage claims were the most lucrative part of the case.

Why would the government want to limit its potential winnings shortly before the trial? Well, because abandoning damage claims lets the government avoid a jury trial. That means leaving it all to federal Judge Denise Cote, who is well known for tilting toward the government against business and has been siding with the feds in pre-trial rulings.

FHFA’s lawyer explained in a recent filing that a “bench trial clearly would conserve time and assets.” That may be true. But when the defendant is a large multinational bank and the government doesn’t want to face a jury in this era of public anger at big banks, that tells you how much confidence the feds have in their case.

This trial could be very interesting. Last fall, Nomura Bank offered evidence to show that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went shopping for sub-prime mortgages in order to align themselves with their political partners.

It would be nice to see this go before a jury that would get a chance to see the true facts of the case. The Obama Administration has engaged in shakedowns of anyone they think they can get money from or anyone they consider a political enemy. It would be nice to see that practice end.

Overregulation And The Little Guy

The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial this morning about the 2010 Dodd Frank law. The law is a mass of overregulation put in place after the financial crisis of 2008 that actually does nothing related to the cause of the financial crisis of 2008. (If you still believe the mainstream media about the financial meltdown of 2008, I suggest you watch the this video.) Dodd Frank is sheer legislative mush that accomplished nothing, written and sponsored by some of the people who caused the problem in the first place. Well, wait a minute, it actually did accomplish something.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are treating the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law as holy writ because she says it punishes the big banks. But then why is Lloyd Blankfein so content? On Tuesday at an investor conference, the Goldman Sachs CEO explained how higher regulatory costs are crushing the competition.

“More intense regulatory and technology requirements have raised the barriers to entry higher than at any other time in modern history,” said Mr. Blankfein. “This is an expensive business to be in, if you don’t have the market share in scale. Consider the numerous business exits that have been announced by our peers as they reassessed their competitive positioning and relative returns.”

The real problem with overregulation is that it leads to crony capitalism. Dodd Frank is another example of the government passing laws that make it harder for the average American to create and run a business.

Solyndra Through The Eyes Of James Pethokoukis

Image representing Solyndra as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

On Friday, James Pethokoukis at Reuters posted an article about the scandal surrounding government loans to Solyndra. Mr. Pethokoukis reminds us that President Obama intended to reorganize the American economy around ‘green energy’ in view of the dangers of global warming (which is NOT settled science).

The article points out:

At its core, Obamanomics is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income. Government spending on various “green” subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits.

Oh, and Wall Street, too. Who was the exclusive financial adviser to Solyndra when it was trying to secure the $535 million loan from Washington? Goldman Sachs. And had the cap-and-trade scheme been enacted, big banks stood ready to reap billions from the trading of carbon emission credits.

Thank God cap and trade did not pass. The entire ‘green energy’ plan was a scheme to put money into Democrat party supporters’ pockets so that they could in turn donate substantial amounts of that money to Democrat campaigns.

My understanding of the Solyndra business plan was that they would build a solar panel for six dollars and then sell it for three. Even under new math, that won’t work for very long. The good news here is that Americans are aware of what happened and the crony capitalism that was involved. We need to understand that there will always be some degree of crony capitalism. Think about it–if you hold office, wouldn’t you rather do business with someone you know than someone you don’t know? The challenge is to avoid using large amounts of taxpayer money to fund businesses that do not have a viable business plan.

Part of the problem with the Obama administration is that it exists in the first place. We as voters need to be more aware of the backgrounds of the people we nominate and the people we elect. I cannot guarantee that John McCain would have made a better President, but I can say that I did not feel that John McCain was the best candidate the Republicans had to offer. The challenge for all Americans in the coming year is to be involved in the primary election process and to do everything we can to make sure that the candidates chosen represent us–regardless of which side of the political spectrum we fall on.

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