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General Electric Making “Bank” off Obama's “Green” Stimulus Money; Over $3 Billion and Counting

Posted by Christine Lakatos on July 12, 2012 at 8:00pm

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Part two of DOE “Junk” Loans and Cronyism, exposing how General Electric –– CEO Jeffrey Immelt, Chair of Obama’s Job Council –– has raked in over $3 billion, and counting, from the Obama "green" stimulus.

As I was preparing to expose one of the big fish in this green energy scheme –– how General Electric has raked in at least $3 billion of President Obama's "green" stimulus money –– two more government-backed renewable energy projects made headlines. Abound Solar went bust and it seems that Nevada Geothermal Power is going down the drain, both included in the Department of Energy's excessively risky loan portfolio, adding more embarrassment to the president’s “highly touted green energy initiative."

Last April, I began to unleash years of research starting with the "Department of Energy “Junk Loans” and Cronyism, Introduction," setting up the first in a series of at least five topics that will prove cronyism and corruption are the driving forces behind President's Obama's green energy agenda, with total disregard for our economy and national debt.

As a recap: the March 2012 House Oversight Investigation revealed that 23 of 27 recipients of the loan guarantees were rated as junk status investments. And according to GAO statistics (and emphasized in the June 19th Congressional hearing), "For the 460 applications to the Loan Guarantee Program (LGP), DOE has made loan guarantees for 7 percent and committed to an additional 2 percent."

And who were the "lucky" 7 percent? Of the 27 loans issued (26 as BrightSource was counted twice in the House Oversight report) through the 1705 LGP to 21 firms, virtually all of them have meaningful political connections (bundlers, donors, supporters) –– to either President Obama or other high-ranking Democrats — or both!

To add insult to "taxpayer injury," in that same June 19th House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Hearing, Dr. De Rugy (a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University), had some pretty damning testimony, including how the DOE justifies the 1705 Loan Guarantee Program. She even disputed the DOE's argument that "by investing in green technology, it would create up to 5 million green jobs." When in reality, De Rugy continues, "the DOE's own data shows that $16 billion in loans were guaranteed [under the 1705 LGP], and 2378 permanent green jobs were created" –– "that means that for every $6.7 million in taxpayer exposure, ONE job was created!"


Keep in mind that 1705 LGP is not the only DOE loan program to be analyzed –– there are three, and since 2009, the DOE has guaranteed a total of $34.7 billion. As you will see, there are also other government agencies and programs doling out billions more in "green" funds.


General Electric, CEO Jeffrey Immelt, Chair of Obama’s Job Council and the Billions They Raked in Through the 2009 Obama Stimulus Package


Whereas General Electric (GE) is a heavy donor to both Republicans and Democrats, and Immelt himself "plays the role of typical corporate donor who hedges his bets on both sides of the fence," in 2008, GE gave the Obama campaign $529,855, marking them a top Obama donor. Nevertheless, GE is a major player on the clean-energy scene as well as in this green energy scheme. Even The New York Times recognized GE’s “green power,” noting that in 2009, GE lobbied Congress to help expand the “clean-energy subsidy programs, and it now profits from every aspect of the boom in renewable-power plant construction,” including “hundreds of millions in contracts to sell its turbines to wind plants built with public subsidies.” In fact, you'll be "blown away" by the billions of "wind energy grants" that blew out of the stimulus package back in February 2010, of which GE is contracted to at least 26% of them as the "Turbine Manufacturer."

In late 2009, it was reported that GE became "one of the newer smart meter players," and that they "had been working with utility Oklahoma Gas & Electric on a 6,600 smart meter trial, and had procured "a contract with Pepco Holdings (PHI)," which received Smart Grid Investment Grants totaling $168 million. GE also has a big contract with Florida Power and Light," also the recipient of a $200 million stimulus grant.

Yet, this is just the beginning of the GE "green bucks"...

While a recent "news flash" was published by the Republican National Committee, confirming via Recovery.gov that "General Electric received over $1.2 billion worth of stimulus loan guarantees, awards, contracts and grants" (the majority of which were for renewable energy projects), they missed billions more. Two large 1705 loan guarantees that I had outlined in April of this year, as well as a forthcoming $490 million cash grant and a $54.6 million loan from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Add in some smaller government subsidies and awards for a multitude of green projects, programs, and through some of their "green alliances," that I found during my 2011 research, and GE's "green tab" exceeds $3 billion in direct (some indirectly) taxpayer cash, and counting. ;

Let's take a look at GE's two projects from the 1705 Loan Guarantee Program, both of which are included the DOE's risky investment portfolio.

  • 1366 Technologies Inc, Rating B by Fitch, Sept 2011 –– $150 million
  • Caithness Shepherds Flat, LLC –– Rating BBB- by Fitch; Oct 2010 for $1.04 billion (or $1.3 billion)

 

GE sponsored the Caithness Shepherds Flat, and also supplied the project with 338 wind-turbines. On top of the $1.3 billion loan, the Caithness project is set to receive a cash grant of $490 million from the Treasury Department once those turbines start turning.

Later, another close associate of, and big donor to the president invested in Caithness. As uncovered by Peter Schweizer in his book, Throw Them All Out, "Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, served as an informal advisor to President Obama.” Still, Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman, was an Obama donor in 2008, and since April 2009, is a member of the president's Science and Technology Advisory Council (PCAST). Interestingly, Google’s $814,540 contribution to Obama’s campaign made it the fifth largest donor in 2008. As of late, Google has aimed its "search engines" at green technology, many of which have received government "help" –– BrightSource, Solar City, Telsa Motors, and others, but we’ll stay focused on GE.

The House Oversight, March 2012 investigation reveals internal memos of concern over the fact that the Caithness Shepherds Flat project was receiving “an excessive amount of public subsidy (where grants, tax credits and loan guarantees provided 65% of the funding for the project), and that private parties did not have sufficient ‘skin in the game.’”

Further, it goes on to state, “Four months after the DOE approved the Caithness loan, President Obama named Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, as the Chairman of Obama’s Job Council” –– a council stacked with Democratic donors, and several Obama bundlers, both for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

It also discloses “General Electric’s broad access to loan guarantees,” and it gives a very illuminating account. “Since Immelt’s appointment as Chair of the Job Council, two additional government-backed transactions have occurred." "First the poorly rated 1366 Technologies, sponsored in part by GE, received a direct $150 million loan commitment from the DOE for its solar manufacturing plant." Second was the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) that loaned $54.6 million to Kansas City Southern Railway Company (KCSR) "to purchase thirty new General Electric ES44AC diesel-electric locomotives" –– a loan that raised red flags in the House investigation.


President Obama's Job Council

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However, Immelts’ “special entrée” to the White House started two years prior to that February 2011 "Job Czar" position, as a member of President Obama’s 2009 Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB). Besides Immelt’s direct access to President Obama since 2009, GE was privy to Valerie Jarrett’s September 2009 "Clean Energy Summit," where an array of attendees just so happened to "collectively strike gold" with over $5.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Obama stimulus.

What's more is that GE personnel sit on the DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee (EAC) of which “recommendations” from their 2008 and 2009 reports made its way into “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and are being implemented in DOE policies and programs under the Obama administration.” Others on the EAC roster that were given DOE "green money" are American Electric Power (AEP), Austin Energy, NextEra Energy, CenterPoint Energy, to name a few.

As luck would have it, I've tracked at least five members of President Obama’s Job Council that are connected to firms that have cashed in on the green energyspending spree. Besides Immelt, winners include John Doerr partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lewis Hay chairman and chief executive officer of NextEra Energy, Inc., Richard Parsons Chairman of the Board of Citigroup, Inc., and Penny Pritzker (also from the PERAB), whom wears many liberal hats, including a prominent position on Obama’s 2008 National Finance Committee.

As for billionaire Doerr, he too served on the PERAB, and in early 2009 extended his influence with Obama's transition team and leaders in Congress, ultimately shaping what went into the energy section of the 2009 economic stimulus package. Doerr is another big winner of government clean-energy funds through his venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where Al Gore is also a partner. Doerr and Gore strenuously campaigned for candidate Obama, including financial donations, and in February 2011, Doerr even hosted a lavish high-profiled "tech-exec dinner" for the president, and these days, is considered "a very big-ticket Obama donor."

Kleiner Perkins is a firm that I began to unravel in 2010, stressing that over 50 percent of their Greentech Portfolio secured all kinds of loans, grants, and special tax breaks –– placing them in an "elite green society;" yet it’s a firm to eventually revisit, because since 2010, they have tripled their "investments" and there is much more to expose.

In a twist of fate, Richard Parsons, is connected to SolarReserve and their $737 million DOE "non-investment" grade loan, of which was covered by my new ally, Marita K. Noon, Executive Director of Energy Makes America Great and columnist at Townhall.com. As I attempt to cover the entire DOE "junk bond" Portfolio, together we will be tackling the Special Seven –– those that are not only part of the DOE's risky investments, but received millions (if not billions) from the 1603 Grant Program, both programs created by the Obama administration through the 2009 stimulus package. These firms also received fast-tracked approval by the Department of the Interior to lease federal lands in a no-bid process, and with little scrutiny over environmental issues. They include Abengoa Solar, BrightSource Energy, First Solar, Nevada Geothermal Power, NextEra Energy Resources, Ormat Nevada, and SolarReserve.

Needless to say, just last year, GE –– along with NextEra Energy (also in the House March 2012 investigation), whose CEO Lewis Hay, is also a member of Obama’s Job Council –– bought the California Desert Sunlight project from First Solar, a project that was the recipient of a $1.5 billion dollar DOE loan. Still, NextEra Energy's Genesis Solar project that received a $681.6 million DOE loan, and First Solar –– another "well-connected" solar company that was "awarded" $3 billion in DOE loan guarantees –– are both part of the Special Seven.

It's gonna be a hot summer...

Continue reading at my Green Corruption blog because there is much, much more...General Electric Making “Bank” off Obama's “Green” Stimulus Money; Over $3 Billion and Counting

NOTE: This is a rather lengthy article that includes tons of research –– GE is a huge part of this scandal, and in this piece you will find all kinds of other Obama "meaningful" connections. Plus plenty of GE "green alliances" that snagged their "fair share" of stimulus money.


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Rajjpuut's Folly: Might “the Naked W-hore, Big Business” Become “Virtuous” after All?

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on July 3, 2010 at 11:30pm

Financial Times Limited Reports that GE's CEO

Jeffrey Immelt “Hits out at China and Obama”

The old song says, “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” well, could it be? Could this be the beginning of the end of corporate sponsorship of naked progressivism and virtual communist candidates who want to gut corporations or want them taken over by ever-expanding and ever- expensive big government? Could “the Naked W-hore, Big Business" be returning to its senses? Could Atlas be shrugging right before our very eyes? YAWN, probably NOT!

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed654fac-8518-11df-adfa-00144feabdc0.html

On July 1, 2010, the London, England-based Financial Times Limited on its blogsite (FT.com) ran the story linked immediately above beneath the headline “Immelt hits out at China and Obama” a story coordinated between two writers Guy Dinmore (in Rome, Italy) and Geoff Dyer (in Bejing, China). According to the regretably mostly UNinformed duo of reporters, “Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, has launched a rare broadside against the Chinese government, which he accused of being increasingly hostile to foreign multinationals.” Gosh, do you think RED China might be tilting the playing field instead of playing nice, Mr. Immelt? Grow Up, little boy!

The article depicted Immelt expanding upon China’s cut-throat methods (and goals?) and then going on to attack the Obama administration for its anti-business sentiment and legislation. Once again, do you think a child raised by a communist mother and communist grandfather whose Kenyan birth-father wrote the essay linked immediately below (which shows us a typical communist discussion of 100% taxes on the rich, takeover of international business firms in Kenya, and the dire need to transfer wealth from Kenya’s White and Asian citizens to its Black ones) might disapprove of capitalism, Mr. Immelt? Again, Grow Up, little boy!

http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_eastafrica.html

The story, unfortunately is NOT what it seems to be, here are the facts about Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, GE CEO . . . .

1. GE and Mr. Immelt are in bed with Barack Obama. GE and he personally have not only abetted the campaign funding of candidate Obama but gone out of their way to tie their company into Obama’s pie in the sky “green initiatives” and into the dishonorable lie of global warming (despite the well-known corruption of science in the name of $34 million worth of grants, etc.) and Immelt and GE have been . . .

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece

doing so from the start. When it comes to Washington bucks, no large corporation gets more attention than GE from the Obama’s administration. Here at home GE and Immelt continuously pour praise on the Obama administration and its goals.

2. GE (traces its origin to Thomas Alva Edison, so one would hope the company would be laissez faire capitalistic to its very core) is the w-hore of w-hores in the business world. GE has monstrous holdings in the media and entertainment industry. When it comes to putting its media money where its media mouth is, it takes just three sentences to let the reader know where GE’s sympathies lie . . . . a) GE’s Spanish-language speaking Telemundo went out of its way to ensure Obama’s election and deliver him 69% of the Latino vote in 2008. b) emboldened by Telemundo Group’s propaganda potential, the owner of Telemundo and various media interests in Latin America and Puerto Rico, and Obama and the Democrats surprised Americans and actually sought to bring into law Puerto Rican statehood this April (even though Puerto Ricans themselves have consistently voted against the idea over the last 60 years) for the purpose of giving Obama a much needed two extra senators and five extra representatives in Congress c) GE owns NBC and NBC Universal and MSNBC the cable news channel which has been infamously kissing Obama’s butt-crack for the last three years even more than the rest of the NBC "journalists" do.

3. GE appears to have the inside track for receiving boons to corporations if and when Obama passes his promised legislation “creating five million new green-tech jobs” (Rajjpuut's readers remember that in the Spanish green-experiment taking that country from 3% unemployment in 1997, to 21% unemployement today . . . 22 permenant real jobs in the real economy were lost for every permanent green job because 2.2 real jobs were lost for every single $677,000 subsidized green job created and only one in ten of these green jobs eventually proved permanent).

4. GE is even tied into CCX (the originally Obama-directed Chicago Climate eXchange) which will prosper wildly when Obama's and the progressive** Dems ill-advised cap and trade bill becomes law.

So then, the semi-confused reader asks, ". . . these two reporters for Financial Times Limited got the story wrong?"

No and yes, they reported what Immelt said, exactly what he said. The problem is that if you report on a corporate lamb in corporate wolf’s clothing like Immelt and GE (when they can afford to dress so in foreign lands), it just helps to know the big picture and get that big picture across or the full truth will be lost in the shuffle. Mr. Immelt was trying to impress big European bankers as well as her corporate CEOs, top execs and other bigwigs “at a private gathering in Rome” that he was a realist and a capitalist and well on top of the global situation (where China is using semi-capitalism on top of unveiled ruthless communist techniques tied into spying, piracy and unfair trade practices to eat the rest of the world’s lunch, profitwise). Mr. Immelt presumably didn’t even bother to ponder that via the internet his “unkind” remarks would get back to American audiences.

Accordingly, GE has issued a no-denial denial^^ saying that Mr. Immelt’s words “were misinterpreted, taken out of context and reported inaccurately.” Horse sh_t! GE-sundheit! (Rajjpuut hates sneezing while blogging).

GE, you see, still needs to sell products to China. GE, you see, still needs to be allowed close enough to Barack Obama to run their corporate tongue over Barack’s backsi__ so the great man will continue to favor them . . . you get the idea . . . . hence the non-denial denial by the GE board of directors. Always a bad idea to let a little truth slip, Mr. Immelt.

Yes, China is a ruthless mafia-like entity that may someday soon dominate the entire world’s economy and yes, Barack Obama as you’ve stated, Mr. Immelt, “does not like business and most business (other than GE) does not like him.” Jeff, baby, you even went so far as to praise German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her defense of German industry and commitment to spending cuts and tax cuts (while Obama encouraged all of Europe and the G-20 to continue with the stimulus-stimulus-and-more stimulus spending ideas he’s so in love with) . . . but that doesn’t make you a good guy, Mr. Immelt, quite the contrary. It makes you an unimaginable phony and very, very dangerous to freedom lovers and American patriots.

You and the GE board of directors have taken a mighty and once great American corporation and sold out the principles of capitalism and integrity and corrupted her just as ex-British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward and BP’s board did. BP, by becoming Obama’s biggest oil-company campaign contributor, got in bed with the devil too. Not surprisingly, BP, much like GE owns 7.59% of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. a London-based company that owns Mr. Obama’s Chicago Climate eXchange . . . not surprisingly both GE and BP will presumably make more money if cap and trade legislation passes, (for doing nothing but collecting your share of the carbon-trade commissions) than they now do by drilling for oil. And not surprisingly, you two who have sold out the magnificent principles of integrity and capitalism will gain your largesse by raping the American taxpayer, and . . . all the while America waits in vain for its John Galt.

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

^^ Mr. Immelt can thus avoid losing face in front of his European contacts

** Unfortunately, while 95% of Americans think they know what a progressive is, only about 10% do know. A progressive is an ultra-leftist who wants to "progress" beyond the limitations of the "outdated" U.S. Constitution just as Barack Obama does. However, Barack Obama is telling the truth when he says, "I am not a socialist, I'm not," because technically a "socialist" who's interested in 100% taxes and 100% take over of the means of production is a communist, which he is, which is how he was raised. Of course, his first autobiography (ghostwrit by Bill Ayers the Weather Underground '60's bombplanter) "Dreams from my Father" has not been vetted by the media . . . most Americans have never heard of this book, nor has his whole background nor that of those closest to him ever been vetted. Barack is a saint and stories that put him in lesser light or stories contrary to his agenda (like the Climate Gate one linked above) canNOT be aired or printed by the mainstream media.

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