By Ed Lasky
Between golf outings (13 weekends in a row), musical soirees in the East Room, fantasy basketball pickup games, and trips to fundraisers for high rollers, Obama has made numerous trips to promote so-called clean-tech energy ventures. He has touted these companies as the wave of the future and as the hope for job growth in America. However, as is true of most actions Barack Obama takes there is an ulterior motive -- and it all has to do with himself.
The Washington Post reports that the focus of these clean-energy trips have been to ventures backed by huge donors to Barack Obama:
In all, Obama has visited 22 clean-tech projects in 19 separate trips....
Republicans and outside critics also have honed in on the political connections of some companies that have received federal help. The most attention has focused on Solyndra, a Silicon Valley solar company that ran into financial trouble after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee commitment....
Some of the biggest investors in Solyndra, which makes easy-to-install solar panels, were venture capital funds associated with Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, a key Obama fundraiser. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said he is "concerned that there was a hurry to get this money out of the door and that companies and individuals that supported the president were among the beneficiaries.''(snip)
Obama began his out-of-town clean-tech travel in March 2009. At a number of the companies the president visited, there were connections - not all of them close, to be sure - to his 2008 campaign. Over the months, Obama touted a Florida's utility's electric grid project (a company in an Obama fundraiser's portfolio was doing extensive business with the project) and a Nevada company that generates emission-free power from waste heat, the warmth radiated by machines or industrial processes (an Obama fundraiser is a partner in a venture fund that has a small stake in the company).
The benefit from these travels are immense. A company cannot buy this type of public relations. After all, Obama only frees up his spare time for pleasure trips.
While Obama touts these companies as being incubators for job growth, they are failures in this regard. Clean energy does not generate many jobs at all and those that are generated are often temporary, costs taxpayers a great deal of money per job, or are jobs generated overseas since so much of the equipment being produced has a made in China or made in Europe label stamped inconspicuously on them
American Thinker has been reporting for many months about the ties between taxpayers' funding for the profit-making ventures backed by Obama donor s(see Green Schemes benefit Democratic "Friends and Family" Program Members and Cheap Natural gas and its Democratic Enemies).
So much for all the change and hope. Deep down, as Obama himself said, he sees politics as the practice of hurting your enemies and rewarding his friends.
He is a creature of Cook County after all.
The ties are numerous and incestuous. American taxpayers are being used to fund the high-flying ventures of Democratic donors. If the projects fail (and they are failing left and right) we lose. If they succeed (at least for a short-time) by going public, private investors (those Obama donors) win big. Taxpayers do not see any return.
The game has been rigged by Obama and his fellow Democrats. "Clean" indeed in two meanings of the word. The donor money is being returned to them multiplied by Obama's sending taxpayer dollars back to them. And we, the American taxpayers, are being taken to the cleaners.
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