HOW THE CRONY CAPITALISM OF THE CLEANTECH CRASH ALMOST DESTROYED AMERICA
See More at: http://thecleantechcrash.wordpress.com
Crony Capitalism – The Real Cause Of Society’s Problems
Submitted by Tyler Durden
Fail
Gambling
Germany
Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Ludwig von Mises
New York Times
Nomination
None
Real estate
Volkswagen
Washington D.C.
White House
Submitted by Richard Ebeling via EpicTimes.com,
Since the economic downturn of 2008, the critics of capitalism have redoubled their efforts to persuade the American people and many others around the world that the system of individual freedom and free enterprise has failed.
These critics have insisted that it is unbridled capitalism, set loose on the world, which is the source of all of our personal and society misfortunes. We hear and read this not only in the popular news media and out of the mouths of the political pundits. We see it also in the election of a radical socialist to the leadership of the British Labor party, and a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” riding high in the public opinion polls for the Democratic Party’s nomination to the U.S. presidency.
The first observation to make is that many if not most of the social and economic misfortunes that are most frequently talked about are not the product of a “failed” free enterprise. The reason for this is that a consistently practiced free enterprise system no longer exists in the United States.
The Heavy Hand of Regulation
What we live under is a heavily regulated, managed and controlled interventionist-welfare state. The over 80,000 pages of the Federal Register, the volume that specifies and enumerates all the Federal regulations that are imposed on and to which all American businesses are expected to comply, is just one manifestation of the extent to which government has weaved a spider’s web of commands over the business community.
The Small Business Administration has estimated that compliance costs imposed on American enterprise by this mountain of regulations maybe upwards of $2 trillion a year.
At the same time, the tangled web of corrupt government-private sector relationships is also reflected in the size and cost of special interest lobbying activities connected with the Federal government.
According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Government, in 2014 there were almost 12,000 registered lobbyists working in Washington, D.C. Their job is to influence the writing of legislation that serve special interest groups attempting to obtain sectorial tax breaks, anti-competitive regulations or market restrictions, redistributions of wealth, or taxpayer funded subsidies and protections from the realities of free market competition and trade, or to advance various ideologically motived “causes.”
Spending Big Money to Plunder Others
The Center for Responsive Government, which tracks who lobbies and for what purposes and causes through the targeting of specific holders of or contenders for Federal elected office, including the Presidency and both Houses of the U.S. Congress, estimated that in 2014 lobbyists spent nearly $3.25 billion in the pursuit of privileges for some at the expense of others in society.
Just alone in 2013-2014, over $500 million dollars was spent on lobbying activity by the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors. Ideological and single-issue groups spent more than $352 million. Lawyers and lobbyists spent $151.5 million; health industry companies spent $142 million; and labor unions “invested” $140.6 million on lobbying.
Communications and electronic companies spent $116 million; energy and natural resource sector, $115 million; agribusiness, $77 million; construction companies, $67.7 million; transportation firms, $61 million, and defense companies, $25.4 million.
Based on the Senate Office of Public Records, the Center for Responsive Government calculates that lobbyists spent close to $41 billion on lobbying activities over the last 15 years, since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
These billions of special interest-serving dollars have influenced and affected the spending of trillions of dollars of Federal government expenditures over the same decade and a half. The lobbyists work with and use those who hold high political office so the special interest and ideological groups who employ them can plunder many others in American society; they can be viewed as among the most successful enterprisers in the country.
The Best Politicians Money Can Buy
But the symbiotic relationship between politicians and special interest groups of all types does not begin or end with the formal lobbying for legislative, regulatory and fiscal privileges and favors in the halls of Congress and the White House in Washington, D.C.
It goes on all year round all over the country in the form of campaign and electioneering contributions to get those elected or reelected who can be depended upon to direct the powers of government in ways that interest groups and ideological activists desire and from which they hope to benefit.
Again according to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2013-2014, individuals and PACS donated over $1.6 billion to 1,671candidates of both major political parties running for office in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Democratic Party candidates received $736 million, while Republican Party candidates received $901.5 million.
While it may seem unseemly to suggest such a thing, these amounts for legislative lobbying and campaign funding, of course, do not include more millions of dollars that grease the palms of those in political power or who want to be in those lofty positions that represent funding that are outside the official channels in the form of “gifts,” travel junkets, off-the-books expense accounts, and out-and-out bribes of one type or another.
The real world of corrupted and corrupting crony capitalism includes more than lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions to have ringside seats in the halls of political plunderland.
The media has been in a frenzy with the revelations that the Volkswagen automobile company manipulated information about emission standards on its diesel vehicles to deceive environmental regulators in both the United States and Europe. This is being portrayed by many in the media as another example and “proof” of the consequences of unbridled capitalism, when left outside of sufficiently tight and demanding government regulation and intense oversight.
Government Partnerships and the Volkswagen Scandal
However, a closer look shows that this is, instead, another example of the result arising from government, business and labor union “partnerships.” In Germany, labor union representatives sit on the executive boards of large companies and corporations that work closely with various levels of the German government to attain political and “social” goals and objectives very different and separate from what a truly free market company does in pursuing peaceful and honest profits in the service of consumer demand on open, competitive markets.
On September 25, 2015, The New York Times quoted a former Volkswagen executive who said:
“There’s no other company where the owners and the unions are working so closely together as Volkswagen. [Volkswagen] guarantees jobs for over half the supervisory board. What management, the government and the unions all want is full employment, and the more jobs, the better. Volkswagen is seen as having a national mission to provide employment to the German people. That’s behind the push to be No. 1 in the world. They’ll look the other way about anything.”
In such a politicized market economy, working for and serving “national” and “social” interests become the guiding principle of business decision-making. Not only does it lead to wasteful and inefficient economic business operations having less or sometimes nothing to do with cost-effective management and allocation of labor and resources to make better, newer and less expensive products, it also corrupts the individuals participating in these activities.
Breaking one or more regulatory standards imposed by government on these enterprises is merely one way of “doing business” to advance other political goals such as “jobs” and “full employment” that are expected as part of the “partnerships” with local and national-level politicians and labor union leaders.
The only thing expected from the business enterprises in these intricate political webs is: Don’t get caught. If you do, then your political partners become like Captain Renault, the prefect of police in the 1942 movie “Casablanca.” When Renault orders the closing of Rick’s Café, the owner asks him on what grounds. Renault declares that he is “shocked, shocked” to discover that there is gambling going on in the café. At which point the roulette coupé appears with a stack of franc banknotes in his hand and says to Renault, “Your winnings, Sir.”
Volkswagen got caught, and will pay handsomely in financial and other penalties that will, no doubt, be imposed by the U.S. and European governments. And all the time, Volkswagen’s political partners, especially in Germany, who fostered and worked with the company to play its part in the “game” of government interventionism that has nothing to do with market-oriented enterprise, will sanctimoniously condemn the greedy and “selfish” conduct of profit-hungry businessmen.
What all these examples and facts about lobbying activities, campaign funding and government-business partnerships highlight is the pervasive extent to which “capitalism” as it now exists in the United States or Europe – or in fact all other parts of the world – has nothing to do with free market, laissez-faire capitalism.
Corrupting Hand of the Interventionist State
The Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, described this twisted, corrupted, and politicized capitalism over 80 years ago, in 1932, in an essay on “The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism,” published shortly before the coming of Hitler and the Nazi movement to power:
“In the interventionist state it is no longer of crucial importance for the success of an enterprise that the business should be managed in a way that it satisfies the demands of consumers in the best and least costly manner.
“It is far more important that one has ‘good relationships’ with the political authorities so that the interventions work to the advantage and not the disadvantage of the enterprise. A few marks’ more tariff protection for the products of the enterprise and a few marks’ less tariff for the raw materials used in the manufacturing process can be of far more benefit to the enterprise than the greatest care in managing the business.
“No matter how well an enterprise may be managed, it will fail if it does not know how to protect its interests in the drawing up of the custom rates, in the negotiations before the arbitration boards, and with the cartel authorities. To have ‘connections’ becomes more important that to produce well and cheaply.
“So the leadership positions within the enterprises are no longer achieved by men who understand how to organize companies and to direct production in the way the market situation demands, but by men who are well thought of ‘above’ and ‘below,’ men who understand how to get along well with the press and all the political parties, especially with the radicals, so that they and their company give no offense. It is that class of general directors that negotiate far more often with state functionaries and party leaders than with those from whom they buy or to whom they sell.
“Since it is a question of obtaining political favors for these enterprises, their directors must repay the politicians with favors. In recent years, there have been relatively few large enterprises that have not had to spend very considerable sums for various undertakings in spite of it being clear from the start that they would yield no profit. But in spite of the expected loss it had to be done for political reasons. Let us not even mention contributions for purposes unrelated to business – for campaign funds, public welfare organizations, and the like.
“Forces are becoming more and more generally accepted that aim at making the direction of large banks, industrial concerns, and stock corporations independent of the shareholders . . . The directors of large enterprises nowadays no longer think they need to give consideration to the interests of the shareholders, since they feel themselves thoroughly supported by the state and that they have interventionist public opinion behind them.
“In those countries in which statism has most fully gained control . . . they manage the affairs of their corporations with about as little concern for the firm’s profitability as do the directors of public enterprises. The result is ruin.
“The theory that has been cobbled together says that these enterprises are too big to allow them to be managed simply in terms of their profitability. This is an extraordinarily convenient idea, considering that renouncing profitability in the management of the company leads to the enterprise’s insolvency. It is fortunate for those involved that the same theory then demands state intervention and support for those enterprises that are viewed as being too big to be allowed to go under . . .
“The crisis from which the world is suffering today is the crisis of interventionism and of national and municipal socialism; in short, it is the crisis of anti-capitalist policies.”
How different is today, in its essential qualities, from Mises’ description of the interventionist state and government-business “partnerships” during those years between the two World Wars?
Real Free Markets Mean Privileges for None
If what we have today is what is widely referred to as “crony capitalism,” then how might we define and explain what a truly free market capitalism would be like? Let me suggest that the following seven points capture the essence of a real free economy:
All means of production (land, resources, capital) are privately owned;
The use of the means of production is under the control of private owners who may be individuals or corporate entities;
Consumer demands determine how the means of production will be used;
Competitive forces of supply and demand determine the prices of consumer goods and the various factors of production including wages of workers;
The success or failure of individual and corporate enterprises is determined by the profits and losses these enterprises earn in free competition with their rivals in the market place;
The free market is not confined to domestic transactions, and includes freedom of international trade;
Government is limited in its activities to the enforcement and protection of life, liberty, and honestly acquired property against, violence and fraud.
In a real free market, there is no place for politicians to offer privileges and favors, because there are none to sell. There is no motive or gain for special interest groups to spend huge sums of money in campaign contributions or lobbying expenses, because political benefits for some at others’ expense cannot be bought.
Wasteful and corrupting “partnerships” between government and business enterprises cannot occur because political authority is restrained from any task other than the securing of each individual’s right to his life, liberty, and peacefully acquired property.
As Ludwig von Mises said, the political and economic crises through which the world suffers is not the crisis or failure of the free market. No, it is the crisis and failure of the interventionist-welfare state, and its anti-free market capitalist ideology.
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Have you seen the, now famous, 60 Minutes episode? Take a look:
Click This Link:
https://videopress.com/v/wNlHgLlK?hd=0&autoPlay=0&permalink=0&loop=0
You can see more about that in the many broadcast news stories; at this link:
https://policystudy.wordpress.com/top-videos/
or this link:
http://wp.me/P6h5en-60q
Here is the story, that you have seen in the news lately, about the group known as: “The Silicon Valley Cartel, the biggest scam in tech.”
As an example of one of nearly a hundred attacks on U.S. taxpayers, and voters, by corrupt Senators, and their campaign financiers, take a look at this example case:
In a case of “awkward timing”, During the Iraq War, Team-6 was asked, via Congressional invitation and Congressional Commendation (published in the Federal Register by the United States Congress), to develop, for the United States, via the U.S. Department of Energy, the technology requested as the back-up plan, for when, and if, the Middle East went “sideways”. (If you have been reading the news, you will have noticed that has already happened) Team-6 won federal and industry commendations, federal grants, historical patents, federal contracts, industry acclaim U.S. Congressional commendation in the Federal Register, built and demonstrated numerous versions of the technology. The technology is an instant-swap/recharge battery that runs longer than almost any other battery, can use almost any one of over 3000 organic material fuel compositions, it leaves only drinkable water as it’s waste, needs no new infrastructure and can be created entirely from domestic materials including household kitchen waste. All of the technology is already fully functional, globally, in industrial uses.
Not only did the technology work, it has been deployed by competing interests globally in over $300M worth of contracts. 100% of the technology is in use in the world today.
Alas, the technology Team-6 developed was the one technology that, not only, obsoleted the Cartel’s scam but, in hindsight, exceeded it, by many paradigms in safety, cost, national security, ease-of-distribution, consumer access, consumer price-point, and a vast number of other metrics. The Cartel had taken over the lithium battery industry, which relied entirely on foreign incursions, toxic chemicals and off-shore mining deals, in advance, but nobody told Team-6 before they got roped into building the “lithium-killer”.
This journalist says it best: “With this fuel cell technology, If UPS, FedEx, a natural gas line or a water line, could reach your home, then your home was already set-up to use clean, sustainable energy that you had control over. The Cartel didn’t like that, because that meant that 3.4 billion consumers could already compete with them. ‘We couldn’t have consumers doing things on their own, now could we’?”
The Cartel politicians, and their campaign backers, went to war over it.
In retribution for assisting federal investigators, and for Team-6 “building a better mousetrap”, the corrupt billionaires hired Gawker Media and Gizmodo (SEE THIS LINK FOR DESCRIPTION OF THIS GROUP), a “troll farm” blogging service and “sock puppets”, to embed the word “scam” next to every mention of Team-6 ‘s name, and staff, on the internet, HR databases and network services, as a character assassination program, in order to seek to terminate income flow, in retribution and revenge for Team-6 helping Congress and law enforcement interdict the political and financial crimes.
Click This Link, BELOW, to download an adobe .pdf file with the latest press clippings about Gawker lawsuits and investigations: (GAWKER MEDIA EXPOSED AS HIT-JOB FRONT FOR SILICON VALLEY CARTEL)
Gawker and their Silicon Valley Campaign partners, who own Google, then had Google lock the attack on the front page of Google, refusing to remove it after numerous legally correct requests by lawyers, in order to accelerate the damage to Team 1. The FBI, The San Francisco Police Department, The SEC, The OSC, The GAO, The FTC, The U.S. Senate and other agency’s, are now investigating this political and economic retribution attack on Team-6 and active case numbers now exist for this, and related matters, with those agencies. Google, and the coordinating parties, have now been tracked and confirmed, by digital forensics, as fully complicit and now bear the brunt of all loss liabilities to Team-6 . In addition to the recent Sony, Snowden, HSBC and other leaks; forensic IT tracking data; Silicon Valley and Washington DC whistle-blowers ; the sheer volume of the attacks; and their exclusive, IT data metrics confirmed, locked position on Google, prove the point of a coordinated and consciously manipulated attack, thus holding Google, and the related Cartel entities, liable for all losses and damages. In England this is called “hoisted by your own pitard”. English and French courts are discussing litigation against Google, with this case as one of the example metrics of Google’s manual search results manipulation to attack adversaries. Over 400,000 pages of evidence have now been acquired.
In short: Team-6 engineered, designed, built, demonstrated, delivered, patented and began marketing technologies that the Cartel either asked to look at, then took, without compensation, or sabotaged because they beat the Cartel technologies. After millions of dollars of federal patent office research, not a single Cartel technology has proven to have preceded Team-6 technologies. In every single case, it has been proven that this Cartel of campaign finance manipulators, asked, in writing to look at Team-6 technology, and then, either: rejected it in writing as “unworkable”, yet they then copied and sold 100% copies of the “unworkable” technologies as their own; or, sabotaged the technology to prevent it from affecting their market. Team-6, and other companies, who suffered the same attacks, are seeking fair, equally resourced public federal court & media hearings, to resolve the issues.
This was particularly ironic, since some of the Cartel “bad guys” have now been arrested, indicted and/or placed under FBI investigation for actually running a real embezzlement scam. The FBI Solyndra Raid, the U.S. Senate investigations and 14 other criminal investigations have put severe heat on the corrupt technology investors and politicians who Team-6. Per data exposure from Snowden, Greenwald, etc., Per Snowden/Greenwald/HSBC/Sony leaks, federal investigators have been found to have had every suspect under long-term extensive surveillance and now, their state and federal prosecutions are only a matter of time.
Team-6 will, now, always fight the good fight against criminal behaviour, bad ethics and public policy corruption. Their credentials, references, broadcast news videos and past project evidence, clearly counter-measure any of the attack false-hoods presented by those people. The GAO, OMB, FBI, U.S. Treasury, Washington Post, and hundreds of university research groups, calculate the loss, to the United States and the American taxpayer, from these crimes, at well over one trillion dollars of losses.
NEWS COVERAGE OF THE INCIDENT:
By Dan Epstein
News flash: Government subsidies and special-interest favors go hand in hand.
The latest example comes from a federal green-energy loan program. Last month, the DC District Court ruled that Cause of Action, where I am executive director, can proceed with a lawsuitagainst the Department of Energy. We’re suing the federal government for the blatant political favoritism in its $25 billion “Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program.”
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In principle, this taxpayer-funded program was supposed to support the manufacture of energy-efficient cars. In practice, it rewarded a select few well-connected companies.
Since the program was created in 2008, numerous businesses have applied for its taxpayer-backed financial support. Yet only a small number were approved. Among the lucky few were two electric car manufacturers: Teslaand Fisker.
Both companies’ political connections run deep, especially Tesla’s. The company’s founder, Elon Musk, was a max donor for President Obama. One of its board members, Steven Westly, was appointed to a Department of Energy advisory board. And another Obama bundler, Tesla investor and adviser Steven Spinner, secured employment in the department’s Loan Program Office—the very office that gave the company a taxpayer-backed loan.
Fisker also has friends in high places. The company, which has since gone bankrupt, was backed by a San Francisco venture capital firm whose senior partners donated millions to the 2008 Obama campaign and other Democrat causes. One partner, John Doerr, parlayed his support into a seat on the President’s Council of Jobs and Competitiveness.
Such connections can allow a company to exert political pressure to enrich itself. Unsurprisingly, Department of Energy emails show that such pressure was rampant in its loan programs.
There’s no shortage of examples. The department’s leaders—including then-Secretary of Energy Steven Chu—repeatedly promised to deliver results to politicians like Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). One emails reads, “DOE has made a political commitment” to approve a company’s loan. Another says the “pressure is on real heavy” from none other than Vice President Joe Biden. And still another shows an employee asking, “what’s another billion anyhow?”
Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration gave Tesla and Fisker preferential treatment, and then some.
The Department of Energy revised its review process in order finish the companies’ applications faster. The government gave them extraordinary access to its staff and facilities—even to the point of having government employees personally walk them through the loan application and approval process. The department ignored its own lending rules in order to approve the companies’ loans. And it renegotiated the terms of some loans after the companies could not keep their original commitments or were experiencing financial difficulties. Tellingly, Fisker has since gone out of
