Obama needs to be removed from office ASAP by any means necessary. Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor. When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show. When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing. Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-smallpox-20111113,0,4293298.story
More of the same. Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes. The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009. The government support â which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates â largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG â even Google. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/b...for-renewable-energy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
And even more of the same.... =================================== Obama's Lucky Friends Where did green-energy cash go? Straight to campaign donors. In the government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backersâindividuals who were bundlers, members of Obamaâs National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Partyâ¦. One might think that the Department of Energyâs Loan Program Office, which has doled out billions in taxpayer-guaranteed loans, would be directed by a dedicated scientist or engineer. Or perhaps a civil servant with considerable financial knowledge. Instead, the departmentâs loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants. The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears âarbitraryâ and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials âdid not always record the results of analysisâ of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, âlacks performance measures.â No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy âhad treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others. Full article at link below: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newswe...ative-energy-programs-became-green-graft.html