Wealthy Government Officials Proven To Be Making Millions Trading Constituents Business Interests With Remarkable Timing Provided By Insider Trading Schemes With Their Political Financier/Beneficiaries.
Never-before-seen IRS records show that Government officials, Senators and agency heads are making multimillion-dollar bets on the stocks of direct competitors and partners — and doing so with exquisite timing provided by insider payola graft tips..
In “The Secret IRS Files – Inside the Tax Records of the .001% “ ( https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files ); The Panama Papers, The Swiss Leaks and other leaks, it is quite obvious from the records that Senators Reid, Pelosi, Harris, Feinstein, White House executives and much of the US. Department Of Energy are complicit in manipulating public policy in order to profiteer while harming their enemies using government resources.
Here is how this works: On Feb. 21, 2018, August Troendle, an Ohio billionaire, made a remarkably well-timed stock trade. He sold $1.1 million worth of shares of Syneos Health the day before a management shake-up caused the company’s stock to plunge 16%. It was the largest one-day drop that year for Syneos’ share price. The company was one Troendle knew well. He is the CEO of Medpace, one of Syneos’ chief competitors in a niche industry. Both Syneos and Medpace handle clinical trials for biopharma companies, and that year they had jointly launched a trade association for companies in the field. The day after selling the Syneos shares in February 2018, Troendle bought again — at least $3.9 million worth. The value of his Syneos stake then rose 75% in the year that followed.
In February 2019, Troendle sold much of that position, netting $2.3 million in profit. Two days later, Syneos disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating its accounting practices. The news sent the company’s shares tumbling. Troendle’s sale avoided a 25% loss, the stock’s largest decline in such a short period during either that or the previous year. (Troendle declined to comment.)
The Medpace executive is among dozens of top executives who have traded shares of either competitors or other companies with close connections to their own. A Gulf of Mexico oil executive invested in one partner company the day before it announced good news about some of its wells. A paper-industry executive made a 37% return in less than a week by buying shares of a competitor just before it was acquired by another company. And a toy magnate traded hundreds of millions of dollars in stock and options of his main rival, conducting transactions on at least 295 days. He made an 11% return over a recent five-year period, even as the rival’s shares fell by 57%. These transactions are captured in a vast IRS dataset of stock trades made by the country’s wealthiest people, part of a trove of tax data leaked to ProPublica. ProPublica analyzed millions of those trades, isolated those by corporate executives trading in companies related to their own, then identified transactions that were anomalous — either because of the size of the bets or because individuals were trading a particular stock for the first time or using high-risk, high-return options for the first time.
The records give no indication as to why executives made particular trades or what information they possessed; they may have simply been relying on years of broad industry knowledge to make astute bets at fortuitous moments. Still, the records show many instances where the executives bought and sold with exquisite timing. Such trading records have never been publicly available. Even the SEC itself doesn’t have such a comprehensive database. The records provide an unprecedented glimpse into how the titans of American industry make themselves even wealthier in the stock market.
U.S. securities law bars “insider trading” — buying or selling stocks based on access to nonpublic information not available to other investors — under certain circumstances. Historically, insider trading prosecutions and SEC enforcement have both focused on corporate employees, and those close to them, trading in the stock of their own companies.
But executives at companies, and n the Federal Government, can also have extensive access to nonpublic information about rivals, partners or vendors through their business. Buying or selling stock based on that knowledge can run afoul of insider-trading law, according to experts. ProPublica described multiple trades, without mentioning names, to Robert Zink, a former chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section, who responded that if he were still at the Justice Department, “of course we would look at it.” He added that the key to ProPublica’s findings is “the trading doesn’t appear to be a one- or two-time thing. It’s happening a lot.” Harvey Pitt, former chair of the SEC, said it was unwise for corporate officials to bet on the fortunes of competing companies.
“Executives should not be trading in the stocks of their competitors,” Pitt said. “Why go looking for trouble? It’s perfectly possible to invest in the stock market without investing in companies you have actual nonpublic information about or that you might be argued to have nonpublic information about.”
There’s at least one sign that the SEC has gotten interested in this sort of trading. In 2021, the agency brought an insider-trading case against an executive at a biopharmaceutical company who learned his own company was about to get acquired, then bought options in a competitor, whose share price also rose on the news. (The case is still pending; the defendant has denied improper conduct.) It’s not clear if that action is a harbinger of increased enforcement by the SEC, which declined to comment about its enforcement priorities.
Insider trading is a simple concept and simultaneously difficult to prove, because it hinges on blurry definitions and court rulings that have favored defendants and weakened enforcement. Matters are even murkier when it comes to executives buying and selling shares of rivals and partners. This can be perfectly legal.
But even when legal, such trades can allow executives to win when their companies lose, according to securities experts. Executives are often handsomely compensated with their own company’s stock, which gives them a direct reward for maximizing profits and raising their company’s stock price. Owning shares of competitors’ stock potentially gives them a reason to root for their rivals to succeed, said Alan Jagolinzer, a professor of financial accounting at the University of Cambridge’s business school.
And by making millions through trading on nonpublic information, executives could contribute to the perception that the stock market is rigged to benefit the privileged. Well-placed executives enjoy access to information within their industry that isn’t available to ordinary investors. The perception that industry insiders use that knowledge for personal gain could undermine the public’s confidence that the markets are fair.
In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, Americans learned that wealthy corporate executives had taken advantage of their positions to reap profits on their personal investments. In response, Congress created the SEC and passed reforms aimed at leveling the playing field for investors. Those reforms required top executives of public companies, who swim in an ocean of nonpublic information, to disclose any trades they make in their own company’s stock.
This disclosure requirement, however, has never applied to trades that executives make in shares of partner companies and competitors. Congress also didn’t explicitly ban, or even define, insider trading. Instead, it generally outlawed securities fraud, and left it to regulators and judges to hash out the specifics.
Still, the basic concept of insider trading is well-established. Any employee (or contractor who works for them, such as lawyers or investment bankers) who knows about, say, a coming announcement of a bad quarter, a new blockbuster product or an upcoming takeover is generally prohibited from buying or selling shares in that company.
To bring a case, federal authorities have to prove two main elements. First, they must show that the trader had what’s known as “material nonpublic information”: a significant fact, not yet publicly known, that would affect the company’s share price. And second, that the employee who traded on that information, or provided the tip to the person who did, had a duty not to disclose it or use it for personal benefit.
These elements can be hard to pin down. The CEO of a public company can argue their well-timed trade of a competitor’s shares was informed by a deep knowledge of the industry, not a nonpublic tip. The owner of a private firm may argue that they can use nonpublic information from their own company to trade the stock of competitors because they have no duty not to use the information for personal benefit.
Many employers add their own restrictions. Law firms and investment managers often require employees to clear any securities trades ahead of time. Some companies have policies that forbid trading while in possession of nonpublic information about competitors, clients or partners. Medpace, the publicly traded company that Troendle has led while profiting from trades in several competitors, acknowledges the likelihood that employees will learn nonpublic information about firms other than their own and warns that employees “who obtain material non-public information about another company in the course of their duties are prohibited from trading in the stock or securities of the other company.”
No other executives in ProPublica’s database appear to have traded in shares of rival companies on the scale that Isaac Larian did. The CEO of MGA Entertainment, whose Bratz fashion dolls competed with Mattel’s Barbie dolls, Larian traded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his rival’s securities between 2005 and 2019. (Records show Larian also traded, often profitably, in shares of Hasbro, another close competitor.)
Over a recent five-year span, Larian earned about $28 million in profit on Mattel trades. That equates to an 11% return on his investment, which sounds like a modest outcome until you consider that Mattel’s stock crashed by 57% during the same period.
MGA and Mattel are fierce competitors. Larian has poached Mattel employees, and he frequently lashes out at the company on social media and cable news. He uses mocking nicknames to describe Mattel executives in public, referring to former general counsel Bob Normile as Bob “Abnormal,” and refers to the company as the “evil empire.”
Mattel and MGA have sued and countersued each other. Larian’s rival filed suit in 2004, claiming MGA had stolen the idea for Bratz, its first giant success. The litigation dragged on for years, with MGA ultimately claiming victory after an appeal.
And through it all, Larian was buying and selling shares of Mattel. For example, on June 5, 2008, he sold $3 million of Mattel stock. That same day, he was in court fighting the company in the Bratz lawsuit — and he had just obtained evidence that could hurt Mattel. He had received an anonymous letter alleging Mattel was spying on Larian and his family. It was a potentially game-changing piece of evidence in a lawsuit in which Larian’s MGA was being accused of unsavory business practices.
The judge ordered the letter sealed, but its existence became public later that day, when it was revealed in the press. The next day, Mattel stock fell 2.6%. Having sold the day before, Larian avoided the loss on those shares.
By 2015, the two companies were in litigation once again. At that point, MGA was alleging that Mattel was stealing its ideas for new toys. In April, Larian emailed Mattel’s CEO after the two met, suggesting that Mattel’s share price would rise if the two companies came to an out-of-court agreement. “I believe the street will reward the Mattel stock positively once this is settled and the legal fees go away,” Larian wrote in the email.
But Larian never settled. And he appears to have invested millions in bets against Mattel during the month the companies were discussing a settlement. The trades are not described as short sales in the IRS data. But when Mattel’s share price fell, Larian’s broker reported profits, a scenario two securities experts said suggested the trades were either short trades or stock options that Larian took out in anticipation the stock would tumble.
Larian has publicly acknowledged shorting Mattel stock. “I made a LOT more money shorting Mattel stock than they did running a $4.5 billion toy company,” Larian boasted in one LinkedIn post in 2020. (In other instances, he has also posted about holding a long position in Mattel. “I’m a major shareholder,” Larian said on LinkedIn in 2017.)
Larian’s trades sometimes corresponded with the rollout of new MGA products that could cut into Mattel’s market share and thus might lower Mattel’s stock price. In the month before MGA unveiled a new line of Bratz dolls in July 2015, Larian appears to have invested (here, too, the evidence is not conclusive) about $3 million betting against Mattel.
At other times, Larian traded Mattel stock before the company announced news, which industry experts said he may have been in a position to learn about as CEO of a rival. Toy companies all deal with the same vendors and retail stores and compete with each other for prime shelf space. It’s not uncommon to gain intelligence on how well a competitor is doing. And according to interviews with eight people who have worked for him, Larian is a boss with an endless appetite for information about his company and its competitors, constantly grilling subordinates on minutiae about the industry.
On July 26, 2017, Larian sold $1.4 million worth of Mattel shares. The next day, Mattel announced its earnings for the previous quarter, with declining sales for Barbie and some of the toymaker’s other doll lines, including Monster High and American Girl, all of which MGA had competed with. Mattel’s stock fell nearly 8% by the end of the next day, the beginning of a 23% slide over the next month. Larian avoided those losses.
ProPublica described Larian’s trading history — without identifying him or the companies involved — to multiple securities experts. They said the pattern was potentially troubling and deserved regulatory and legal scrutiny. But they also noted numerous caveats and ways in which the law offers latitude for this sort of trading. Generally, the experts said, these types of trades are more perilous for executives at either public companies or private firms with investors. Executives at such companies typically have a clear duty to refrain from using company information for their own personal benefit, according to experts.
But if an executive owns all of his company, trading ahead of his own actions, such as the announcement of a new product line, or based on his own sales data, would likely not be legally problematic. (Larian’s tax data suggests he owns about 80% of the company, but it’s not clear whether another person or a different Larian entity owns the rest.) “U.S. law does not generally prohibit trading on information that you own,” said Joshua Mitts, a Columbia University law professor who has studied insider trading laws.
However, using confidential information from outside one’s own company, such as if an executive traded after learning something about a competitor from a retailer, experts say, could raise legal questions, as could trading after learning a nonpublic fact that was expected to remain confidential during litigation or settlement talks. “The SEC would certainly look at this,” Mitts said.
Pitt, the former SEC chair, echoed those concerns. “This conduct contains the seeds of some very potentially pernicious activity,” he said. “This is very risky.”
Larian declined requests for an interview and also declined multiple requests to answer a list of detailed questions for this article. His lawyer, Sanford Michelman, told ProPublica that any suggestion that Larian violated the law is “false and defamatory.” He asserted that they were not aware of any evidence suggesting that Larian possessed material, nonpublic information that Larian knew was obtained in breach of a duty. Michelman also accused ProPublica of making “false assumptions and allegations” but did not identify any specific errors in ProPublica’s reporting. Often executives can know even more about their business partners than they do about their competitors. ProPublica’s data shows that some executives have bought stock in their partners with superb timing.
Gerald Boelte is the chairman and founder of LLOG Exploration, one of the largest privately owned oil production companies in the U.S. After the Deepwater Horizon spill spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, some companies gave up on drilling there. But Boelte stayed, buying up new leases.
One of Boelte’s oil production partners was Stone Energy, at the time a publicly traded company; both LLOG and Stone were based in Louisiana. In 2013, the two companies drilled a deepwater well together in the gulf. And in June 2015, they struck oil together on a well in another part of the gulf known as Viosca Knoll.
That same summer, a separate project Stone was working on in another part of the gulf south of Louisiana, the Cardona wells, looked to be turning into a success. In an earnings report on Aug. 5, 2015, Stone announced that the value of its reserves had increased, along with revealing promising new details of the Cardona field. In the days that followed, Stone’s stock surged.
That was good news for Boelte. The day before Stone’s earnings were announced, he began purchasing $527,000 in the company’s stock. His tax data suggests it was the first and only time he bought the company’s stock during the years for which ProPublica has data. By the time he sold the shares two months later, Boelte claimed $343,000 in profit, a 65% return.
Aside from being Stone’s partner, there’s another reason Boelte could have received insights about how the company was doing before the public did. After seeing positive signs in its Cardona project, Stone sold LLOG its stake in the Viosca Knoll well the two companies had been working on together. Stone planned to use the sale proceeds to continue developing its own projects, such as the Cardona wells. The two sides concluded the sale in October, according to company filings, but typically such negotiations take months, an expert said. That suggests Boelte might have known about Stone shifting resources before he bought shares.
In a detailed statement, Boelte said, “I do not and have never traded on any material, non-public information of competitors, business partners or others.” He went on: “I did not draw any conclusion about Stone Energy’s intentions for other specific investments one way or another, and I had no discussions with Stone Energy regarding their intentions with respect to other investments by Stone Energy.” His purchase of the shares, he said, was motivated by his expectation that crude prices were about to rise; based on that, he invested in “several energy securities, including Stone Energy.”
Boelte said he quickly sold half of the Stone shares, and held on to the remainder until 2021 (which is beyond the period covered by ProPublica’s data), and that overall he lost money on the trades. “Any implication that I was investing based upon advance knowledge,” Boelte said, “is therefore clearly false.”
The board of Checkpoint Systems had been quietly considering its “strategic” options for more than a year. The New Jersey-based company, which makes anti-theft tags and other inventory tracking devices for stores, was suffering as its clients closed brick-and-mortar locations. By late 2015 and early 2016, Checkpoint’s board had made a list of potential acquirers, and the company’s bankers began contacting them.
Talks heated up with one potential buyer, CCL Industries, and Checkpoint gave the company access to its confidential business and financial documents. In January 2016, CCL told Checkpoint that it was going to ask its board for approval to make the acquisition. CCL would offer $10.15 per share, a significant premium.
As this was happening, on Jan. 14, Jim Sankey, the CEO of InVue, one of Checkpoint’s competitors, bought $285,000 in shares of the company. He was just getting started. Over the course of the next month, Sankey bought more shares, $3.2 million in all. (ProPublica’s tax records show no indication that he had traded shares of Checkpoint before.) A month later, news broke that Checkpoint was getting acquired. Sankey made $2.3 million in profit from his investment, a cherry on top of the $25 million he made from his own company that year.
In an interview, Sankey said that he did not know Checkpoint was going to be acquired, and that his company was not among those approached by Checkpoint about a possible sale or partnership. Sankey said he bought shares because the price had been falling. Years earlier, in 2007, he had overseen a roughly $150 million sale of one of his anti-theft product lines to Checkpoint. He knew that division’s operating income at the time of the sale, and that it hadn’t lost clients since. Based on that calculation, he believed the stock was undervalued. “I built the business,” said Sankey, who remains CEO of privately held InVue. “And I knew they couldn’t screw it up.”
Sankey said that investigators, he believes from the SEC, interviewed the two brokers he had instructed to buy Checkpoint shares. The investigators, he said, dropped the matter after his brokers relayed his explanation for why he bought shares. He had no proof, Sankey said, but “they took my word.”
For Barry Wish, on one occasion, losing a contract to a competitor came with a significant benefit. In the 1980s, Wish co-founded Ocwen, a mortgage-servicing company, then helped steer the West Palm Beach, Florida-based firm for decades on its board. Mortgage servicers essentially act as brokers between lenders and homeowners, handling billing, modifying loans for borrowers and carrying out foreclosures.
In the years after the housing crash, Ocwen and its competitors grew rapidly, as big banks auctioned off the loans they were administering amid costly new regulations.
One of the prize tranches — $215 billion in home mortgages from Bank of America — was won by Wish’s rival, Nationstar, in January 2013. The day the company’s deal with Bank of America was announced, its stock shot up almost 17%, its biggest one-day gain since the company had gone public almost a year earlier. According to reporting at the time, Wish’s firm had been jockeying with Nationstar for the deal. But losing wasn’t a total loss for Wish.
Less than three weeks earlier, he had bought $600,000 of Nationstar shares. The day the deal became public, Wish sold his shares, earning himself a $157,000 profit. In a phone call with ProPublica, Wish said he didn’t recall buying Nationstar shares. Asked if he ever traded competitors’ stock, he said, “No, not at all.” When told his tax data showed he had, Wish said, “You might see it, but I don’t have any recollection,” before hanging up.
Steven Grossman is another executive who was fortunate enough to buy stock in a company just before it was acquired. Grossman’s grandfather founded Southern Container Corp., a corrugated packaging and containerboard manufacturer based on Long Island. It was one of the largest private companies of its kind, with more than half a billion dollars in annual sales until Grossman sold it in 2008 for about $1 billion. He stayed on after the sale, remaining on the payroll of the new owner, Rock-Tenn, until 2013.
ProPublica’s data shows that during his years in the industry, Grossman was also frequently trading the stock of companies he competed with. He sold no company’s stock in higher volumes than that of Temple-Inland, a Texas-based corrugated packaging firm.
Many of Grossman’s trades were well-timed, but few were as timely as his June 2011 purchases. On June 2, he bought $223,000 of Temple-Inland shares. Then, on June 6, he bought an additional $428,000.
On the very day of Grossman’s second and larger purchase, after trading closed, another paper company announced it was trying to acquire Temple-Inland. Executives had secretly been negotiating the takeover for weeks.
When the market opened the next day, Temple-Inland’s stock skyrocketed in what was its biggest one-day increase in more than a decade. Grossman quickly cashed out, making a 37% return in less than a week.
In an interview, Grossman denied trading stock altogether. When told that IRS data documented his trading activity, and asked about Temple-Inland in particular, Grossman said, “I haven’t traded stock since then.” The IRS data shows he continued to trade. Grossman said that after he sold his company in 2008, he never worked for the buyer, Rock-Tenn. But his tax data shows he was on Rock-Tenn’s payroll through 2013. “They paid me but never used my services,” Grossman said. He asserted that he did not know about the acquisition talks involving Temple-Inland when he bought shares. Asked what prompted him to buy that day, Grossman replied, “That was 10 years ago.” With that, he hung up.
When an investor sells stocks, bonds or other securities through a broker, the firm is generally required to issue a tax form called a 1099-B, which details several pieces of information about the transaction, including a description of the asset sold, the proceeds from the sale and the date the sale occurred. The brokerage provides a copy of the 1099-B both to the investor and to the IRS. ProPublica’s universe of trades was drawn from tens of millions of these records, part of a larger set of records that formed the basis of ProPublica’s series “The Secret IRS Files.”
ProPublica’s database does not include a complete picture of all trades made by or for investors. Investments made through a separate legal entity like a partnership, for example, are not included. Additionally, 1099-B forms are produced when an asset is sold, not when it is purchased. Many records, however, did list the date the securities were acquired, so ProPublica’s reporters were often able to see a portion of an investor’s purchasing activity. Securities that were purchased but not sold until recently are not included in the data.
The dataset spans roughly two decades. Trades from more recent years generally include more information because disclosure requirements have increased over the years. That additional detail allowed ProPublica to better determine how successful the individuals in our data were in the stock market. For stock bought before 2011, brokers were required to report the date it was sold and the total proceeds it generated but not the price paid.
These disclosure changes also affected how certain types of trades appear in the data. That includes short sales, in which an investor borrows shares of a stock, sells the borrowed shares, then “closes” the transaction by buying an equal number of shares to replace the borrowed stock at what they hope is a lower price. The IRS previously required that brokers issue a 1099-B disclosing only when someone entered into a short sale and how big the position was, but not when they closed the short. For shorts initiated after the disclosure changes in 2011, the agency required brokers to submit information about the short being closed, listing both the date it was closed and the overall profit, but no longer required the date the short was entered into. By 2014, options trades were also required to be reported in more detail.
Sometimes it was straightforward to identify short sales and options — for example, a field on the 1099-B form described them as such. However, according to experts, the forms are nonintuitive and brokers frequently fill them out incorrectly. To determine whether the anomalous cases were indeed short sales, ProPublica presented them to experts and the subjects themselves to ascertain the nature of those trades.
To gauge how a stock’s price changed after an investor purchased or sold shares on a given date, ProPublica obtained a dataset outlining the price history for stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq or the American Stock Exchange. We combined that data with the records of the trades documented in our IRS records. Reporters then compared the closing price of a stock on the day a trade occurred to the closing price after a number of different intervals of trading days (5, 10, 20, 60 or 120 days). Closing prices were used because brokers aren’t required to report the share price at the moment the trade was made. This approach mirrors a common method used by academic researchers who study insider trading.
By calculating a stock’s change in price after various time intervals, we could identify trades made close to significant movements in a company’s share price. But because the prices of some securities are much more volatile than others, it was important to determine how anomalous those swings were.
We compared the return from each individual trade to the full distribution of returns for that stock: For example, a one-day return of 20% was compared to all other one-day returns for that stock over a certain period of time. We found several instances in which the days executives traded in their competitors’ stock were more opportune — if not the most opportune — over certain windows of time. One executive, for example, sold more than $1 million worth of shares in a competitor’s stock the day before the company had its largest one-day price drop that year.
ProPublica also examined what ties, if any, individuals had to the companies they were trading, using interviews, news reports, SEC filings, tax records, court records, social media and other avenues.
New open-source, and free, public software let’s any citizen get any corrupt politician arrested. Any voter can use the software from the comfort of their living room. The AI replicates itself (Like A benign digital version of Covid) across the entire web.
Illegal and corrupt Congressional insider trading tends to be something we don’t hear about until it’s hit the big news networks and newspapers as the SEC goes for the throat of the accused. By then, unfortunately, those committing it have made their gains, usually in the multi-millions of dollars, and the damage has been done to the stock, its company, investors and the American Way.
Quite frankly, the jail time assessed doesn’t correct the damage done, and the fines rarely aid the investors, or the voters, in getting their money and their democracy back. Many of those hurt are Average Joe’s and Jill’s who were just trying to save their retirement nest eggs. Shame is the tool that works best on the corrupt!
These crimes involve a Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris or Dianne Feinstein investment banker husband using information, which was not available to the public, buying and selling a company’s stock in an underhanded manner. It is particularly onerous when one of those Senators buys Tesla, Google, Facebook or Solyndra stock, and makes laws that only benefits Tesla, Solyndra, etc, while sabotaging their competitor constituents. Because the dealings involved are pretty much done on the sly, it’s been difficult, until now, for the governing body of the SEC to prove illegal insider trading, unless one of the cohorts tattles on the others or their actions become glaringly obvious. In some cases, a sharp mind around the action may take notice and become what’s called a whistle-blower.
Previously, writes Andrew Beattie of Investopedia: “... insider trading is often difficult for the SEC to spot. Detecting it involves a lot of conjecture and consideration of probabilities.” That was the ‘old days‘, though. Today, the new AI software can bust through these scams like a hot knife through butter!
With this new open-source, free, public spy agency-class software, detecting illegal insider trading is actually less complicated than it sounds.
To the eyes of this new super-powerful AI observer server bot and peer-to-peer databases, it is easy work.
You, the citizen, just type the politician or agency employee name into a field and hit the “analyze” button. A few minutes later you receive a multi-page PDF report similar to an FBI report on the target. You can either research the subject in more detail or send copies of the report to the FBI, GAO, OSC, SEC or other enforcement group.
The software is an automated AI temporal matching system which includes 24/7 analysis of all stock trades involving politicians to its information source, politician finances, communications and policy participators. it uses some of the same software code used by the CERN mega-research center in Switzerland.
The technology Core Evaluation Points:
- Analyst estimates – these come from what an analyst estimates that a company’s quarterly or annual earnings will be. They are important because they help approximate the fair value of an entity, which basically establishes it price on the stock exchange.
- Share volume – this reflects the quantity of shares that can be traded over a certain period of time. There are buyers and there are sellers, and the transactions that take place between them contribute to total volume.
One Way The AI Detects Congressional Insider Trades
Metricized signs of illegal insider trading occur when trades occur that break out of the historical pattern of share volume traded compared to beneficiary participation’s of those connected to company and political entity. Another clue of the illegal insider trading is when a lot of trading goes on right before earnings announcements. That tends to be a sign that someone already knows what the announcement is going to indicate, and it’s an obvious violation. One module of the new software hunts these trends around-the-clock in an unmanned manner like a detective who never needs to sleep.
The software red alerts are issued when trades are linked closer to the actual earnings and politicians bills instead of what the predicted earnings were. In a corruption case, it’s clear the trades – especially made by politicians close to the company – stemmed from information that was not readily available to the general public.
In other words, at the time an insider makes a trade, the trade has a stronger relationship to earnings guidance rather than to earnings results achieved.
Part Of The Insider Trading Detection AI Uses ‘Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)’
In econometrics, which is a concept frequently used by quantitative analysts to evaluate stock market prices, dynamic time warping (DTW) is an algorithm that can be used for measuring similarity between two data sequences by calculating an optimal match between the two. This sequence “matching” method is often used in time series classification to properly “line things up.”
The method, coupled with AI machine learning ensemble methods, can provide a clear path between the trades made by insiders and public data used to make the trades.
This is a product of artificial intelligence that has been expanded by Indexer, Splunk, Palantir and other firms fast becoming experts in products that can be used to advance the art of manipulating political and social trends in business and markets by using social media, financial data and news stories. The new software process has taken that sort of approach to the next level and targeted every member of Congress, their staff, family and friends. The first emphasis is on California and Washington, DC public figures.
In a hypothetical example, a group of executives failed to trade by industry standards by leveraging material non-public information and policy manipulation. Although consensus estimates called for higher commodity prices at the end of 2015, it appears key executives traded for their personal accounts as a result of the forecast provided by a specialist system within the firm that was adept at predicting prices alongside lobbyist manipulations. Flash-boy trading is now dirtier and powered by Google-class server systems.
In the hypothetical scenario the software aggregates executive trades in 2014 and 2015 and finds a strong link between buys and sells of executive stock options, which line up with material non-public estimates of commodity prices that were provided by the specialist system.
For example, in a “Exec Sell and Exec Buys” graph, a green line represents sells, while a black line represents buys. In the corresponding period, one finds a red line represents unrevised prices provided by the specialist system, and green line represents consensus estimates.
During Q1-2014, there was $28M in purchases of executive stock options, while in Q2-2014, there was $25M in sales of executive stock options. The specialist system called for Q3-2014 commodity prices to make a precipitous decline going into the end of 2014. Remember, under this scenario, no revisions were made to the specialist systems’ price forecast. In this example, executives were afforded a significant advantage using price predictions from the specialist system.
In a final bullet chart, there was a dynamic time warping distance between trades and consensus estimates of 7.23, but this distance is only 2.19 when comparing specialist system estimates and executive trades. Please note, the closer the distance score is to zero, the more similar the trades are to the estimates they are measured against.
We have applied this process to companies well-known for influence buying like, Google, Tesla and Facebook
It’s obvious that the tech executives involved did not follow industry standards in their actions and make public the “insider” information they had access to prior to the trades they made. The lobbyists they hired promoted this rigged trend and paid off Senators with perks. These are the kind of violations the SEC and other governing bodies can look to in attempting to protect the trading public and the integrity of financial marketplaces. Artificial intelligence tools are a major factor in assisting the tracking of insider trading. Eric Schmidt, of Google, does not look good under such circumspection.
“Every facet of our everyday lives has been impacted, infiltrated and greatly influenced by artificial intelligence technologies,” says Vernon A. McKinley, a multi-jurisdictional attorney, based in Atlanta. “In fact, the U.S. government and its multiple agencies have developed specialized intelligence units to detect, track, analyze and prosecute those unscrupulous individuals seeking to profit from the use of such tools, specifically in the financial industry, and to protect the integrity and strength of the U.S. economy and its investors.” Now these tools are being turned against the corrupt!
The public can now detect trading anomalies in financial situations using this artificial intelligence software on their desktop computers. No public official will ever be able to do these kinds of corruptions, again, without getting caught.
This approach has already had an impact on how political insiders trade on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world.
This technology can end this corruption in America forever!
A module of the software uses data from The Center for Responsive Politics, ICIJ Panama Leaks records, Swiss Leaks records and FEC files to reveal covert routes. Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and other famous California politicians own part of Tesla Motors, Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and other companies they helped get government money for. All of their competing constituents have suffered for it or been put out of business by exclusive deals that only Tesla Motors, Facebook, Google, Netflix and YouTube got. That is a crime!
A large volume of forensic research proves that Silicon Valley Cartel tech firms receive benefits from politicians and politicians,at the same time, benefit from these firms.
This evidence on the exchange of benefits between politicians and firms proves an agreement between the politicians and the companies. This agreement, however, cannot be in the form of a written contract as writing direct fee-for-service contracts between a politician and a firm is considered bribery (Krozner and Stratmann 1998; 2000). In addition, either party to this agreement might renege on its promise and the other party cannot resort to the courts.
Procon.org, for example, reports: “Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than$50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about$5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease. The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama . . . shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications businesswhose principal backers . . . had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.” (http://insidertrading.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=1580#obamaa. See more examples from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) report (2009).)
The literature and our eye-witness experience proves that politically-connected Silicon Valley tech firms monthly obtain economic favors, such as securing favorable legislation, special tax exemptions, having preferential access to finance, receiving government contracts, or help in dealing with regulatory agencies. The evidence proves that Google’s support,for example, can help in winning elections. For example, firms can vary the number of people they employ, coordinate the opening and closing of plants, and increase their lending activity in election years in order to help incumbent politicians get re-elected. (SeeRoberts 1990; Snyder 1990; Langbein and Lotwis 1990; Durden, Shorgen, and Silberman 1991; Stratmann 1991, 1995, and 1998; Fisman 2001;Johnson and Mitton 2003; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Ueda 2004; Sapienza 2004, Dinç 2005; Khwaja and Mian 2005; Bertrand, Kramarz,Schoar, and Thesmar 2006; Faccio 2006; Faccio, Masulis, and McConnell 2006; Jayachandran 2006; Leuz and Oberholzer-Gee 2006; Claessens,Feijen, Laeven 2008; Desai and
Olofsgard 2008; Ramanna 2008;Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2008, 2009; Cole 2009; Cooper, Gulen, and Ovtchinnikov 2009; Correia 2009; Ramanna and Roychowdhury 2010;Benmelech and Moskowitz 2010.)
The software can see that the share ownership of politicians serves as a mechanism to quid-pro-quo their relationships with big tech firms, is as follows:The ownership of politicians plays multiple distinct (but not necessarily independent) roles; one that relies upon the amount of ownership and one that does not. First, as investors in firms, politicians tie their own interests to those of the firm. Thus,harming (benefiting) the firm means harming (benefiting) the politician and vice versa. By owning a firm’s stock, politicians commit their personal wealth to the firm and reduce a firm’s uncertainty with regard to their actions toward the firm. This will,in turn, enhance the firm’s incentive to support the politician-owner during both current and future elections in order to prolong the incumbency period for as long as possible. Firms have their lobbyists push to be able to know the amount of ownership likely to be material to politicians. This knowledge, in turn, enables them to judge whether the politician’s interest is aligned with the firm’s interest and optimize quid-pro-quo.
The Political Action Committee (PAC) contribution of firms (which is a direct measure of benefits flowing from firms to politicians) is a significant determinant of ownership allocations by members of Congress. The ownership of Congress members in firms that contribute to their election campaigns is roughly 32.8% higher than their ownership in noncontributing firms even after accounting for factors that are associated with both ownership and contribution (such as familiarity, proximity and investor recognition). Democratic members invest more (less) in firms that favor, i.e., contribute more to, the Democratic Party. Politicians are partisan investors.
The committee assignments of politicians is a proxy for whether their relations with firms are enforced (Krozner and Stratmann 1998).Silicon Valley tech firms like Facebook, Tesla and Google obtain private benefits out of their mutual relations with politicians. When the strength of the association between ownership and contributions at the firm level increases, the provision of government contracts to those firms increases.
Members of Congress, candidates for federal office, senior congressional staff, nominees for executive branch positions, Cabinet members, the President and Vice President, and Supreme Court justices are required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to file annual reports disclosing their income, assets, liabilities, and other relevant details about their personal finances.
Personal financial disclosure forms are filed annually by May 15 and cover the preceding calendar year. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) collected the 2004–2007 reports for Congress members from the Senate Office of Public Records and the Office of the Clerkof the House. The Center then scanned the reports as digital images, classified the politicians’ investments into categories including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and built a database accessible via a web query.
Using CRP’s data, you can use the software to collect the shares in S&P 500 firms held by members of Congress between 2004 and 2007, for example.You can collect the stock ownership data for every firm that joined the S&P 500 Index any time between January 2004 and April 2009;regardless of when it joined the index, and the software can obtain all the available stock ownership data for that firm between 2004 and2007. Likewise, if a firm dropped out of the index at any time during 2004–2008, the software, nevertheless, will retain the firm in a sample for the target period. As such, the sample would include stocks in hundreds of unique firms owned by politicians between 2004 and 2007, for example.
Politicians are required to report only those stocks whose value exceeds $1,000 at the end of the calendar year or that produce more than $200 in income. They are CURRENTLY not required to report the exact value of the holding, but instead must simply check a box corresponding to the value range into which the asset falls. The CRP then undertakes additional research to determine the exact values of these stocks. When the Center makes these determinations, it reports them instead of the ranges and I use these values in my study. When only the range is available, you should use its midpoint as the holding’s value. You would, thus have data on the stock holdings of hundreds politicians for that time period.
Using the software, you can search for all Political Action Committees (PACs) associated with tech firms. It then collects data on each contribution these PACs made to candidates (both the winners and losers) running for the Senate and House elections. Tricky corrupt Silicon Valley firms establish several PACs, each in a different location, and each of these PACs can contribute to the same candidate. In such cases, the software would total, for each candidate, every contribution he or she received from PACs affiliated with the same firm. To parallel the investment data sample period, for example, the software collects every contribution made from the 2003–2004 cycle up to and including the 2007–2008 cycle. Many Silicon Valley tech firms use deeply covert Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, BlackCube, Psyops-type service to make very hidden additional payola payments to California politicians.
For sources, for example, the software collects government contract data from Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc., one of the leading commercial providers of Federal procurement and grant business intelligence and http://www.usaspending.org. Eagle Eye collects its contract data from Federal Procurement Data System–Next Generation (FPDS-NG), the contract data collection and dissemination system administered by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). FPDS-NG provides data on procurement contracts awarded by the U.S. Government. When these contracts are awarded to company subsidiaries, Eagle Eye searches for the names of their parent companies and assigns each subsidiary to its appropriate parent. The software collects both the number and aggregate value of government contracts that were awarded to sample firms between 2004 and 2007 in this example time-frame..
The software reveals, for example, that Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) is a ten-term member of Congress and a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee. She arranged a meeting between the Department of Treasury and One United Bank, a company with close financial ties to Ms. Waters, involving both investments and contributions.
“In September 2008, Rep. Waters asked then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to hold a meeting for minority-owned banks that had suffered from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac losses.
The Treasury Department complied and held a session with approximately a dozen senior banking regulators, representatives from minority-owned banks, and their trade association. Officials of One United Bank, oneof the largest black-owned banks in the country that has close ties to Rep. Waters, attended the meeting along with Rep. Waters’ chiefof staff. Kevin Cohee, chief executive officer of One United, used the meeting as an opportunity to ask for bailout funds.
. . . Former Bush White House officials stated they were surprised when One United Officials asked for bailout funds. . . . In December2008, Rep. Waters intervened again, asking Treasury to host another meeting to ensure minority-owned banks received part of the $700billion allocated under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. . . . Within two weeks, on December 19, 2008, One United secured $12.1million in bailout funds. . . . This was not the first time Rep. Waters used her position to advance the interests of the bank. Rep.Waters’ spouse, Sidney Williams, became a shareholder in One United in 2001, when it was known as the Boston Bank of Commerce. In 2002,Boston Bank of Commerce tried to purchase Family Savings, a minority-owned bank in Los Angeles. Instead, Family Savings turned to a bank in Illinois. Rep. Waters tried to block the merger by contacting regulators at the FDIC. She publicly stated she did not want a major white bank to acquire a minority-owned bank.
When her efforts with the FDIC proved fruitless, Rep. Waters began a public pressure campaign with other community leaders. Ultimately,when Family Savings changed direction and allowed Boston Bank of Commerce to submit a winning bid, Rep. Waters received credit for the merger. The combined banks were renamed One United. . . . In March 2004, she acquired One United stock worth between $250,001 and$500,000, and Mr. Williams purchased two sets of stock, each worth between $250,001 and $500,000. In September 2004, Rep. Waters sold her stock in One United and her husband sold a portion of his. That same year, Mr. Williams joined the bank’s board. . . . One United Chief Executive Kevin Cohee and President Teri Williams Cohee have donated a total of $8,000 to Rep. Waters’ campaign committee. . . .On October 27, 2009, less than two months before One United received a $12 million bailout, the bank received a cease-and-desist order from the FDIC and bank regulatory officials in Massachusetts for poor lending practices and excessive executive compensation . . . the bank provided excessive perks to its executives, including paying for Mr. Cohee’s use of a $6.4 million mansion . . .” (Crew report 2009,pp. 123–125)
Thanks to Crony quid-pro-quo revelations by an earlier version of the software, you can also see that Fisker Automotive, Inc.’s $529 Million U.S. Taxpayer Loan Approval by the Department of Energy was dirty. Fisker Automotive’s Chief Operating Officer Bernhard Koehler pleaded with the Department of Energy in a panicked Saturday midnight hour email to receive a $529 million loan as the company was 2 weeks from Chapter 7 liquidation, that it was laying off most of its employees, that no private sector investors would fund the company without DOE guarantees, and that Fisker was unable to raise any further equity funding from independent private-sector investors given the company’s financial condition.These statements were made to a Loan Officer at the DOE . No private sector Loan underwriting (approval) committee would ever grant a low interest loan to a desperate buyer that had just confessed it was in a state of insolvency and was about to layoff most of its staff. Yet within a few weeks the DOE would approve a $529 Million Credit Facility to Fisker. Despite the DOE Loan Officer official’s sworn testimony at April 24th’s House Oversight Committee that the DOE used “same private sector underwriting standards when approving Fisker and other approved Taxpayer Funded Loans” – likely perjury based in documents.
In a ‘U.S. GOVERNMENT CONFIDENTIAL EMAIL’: FISKER AUTOMOTIVE: August 2009: Co-Founder Bernhard Koehler emails U.S. Dept. of Energy Loan Officer in Sat. midnight Panic admitting VC Firms all declined to invest, and company is out of cash. Weeks later the U.S.Department of Energy approves $529M U.S. Taxpayer Funded Loans to FISKER. NO PRIVATE SECTOR Lender would every authorize a Loan for even $5 Million let alone $529 Million after receiving this email stating private sector investors had examined the company and declined equity investments, that they might loan money as more secure Debt, and the Chief Operating Officer of the company further stating that the borrower is totally insolvent. (Weeks after this email the U.S. Federal Government Dept. of Energy Loan Committee Approves Fisker Automotive as a credit-worthy borrow for $529 Million in U.S. Taxpayer Funded Loans). Fisker got the cash because President Obama said to “give it to them” in order to please his campaign financiers.
The same thing happened with Tesla Motors. Elon Musk and Tesla Motors were broke when DOE gave them the money.
PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh stated in an official statement: “The documents obtained by PrivCo paint a picture of how an insolvent,unproven automaker received $192 million in taxpayer funding. The Department of Energy made a loan that no rational lender would have made. This loan was the equivalent of staying execution on a company that was terminally ill to begin with.” Tesla and Fisker could not have been taxpayer funded unless bribes and criminal quid-pro-quo was underway by President Obama and the U.S. Senator insider traders.
XP Vehicle’s had been the first to initiate negotiations to retask the NUMMI plant in Fremont, California after Elon Musk went on the record saying the NUMMI Plant was worthless to Tesla. Dianne Feinstein’s chief of staff then threatened XP Vehicles and warnedthem to cease action on NUMMI. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced they had acquired the NUMMI plant which Dianne Feinstein’s family owned a business interest and she had arranged for Tesla to get funding and presided at the Tesla re-opening of the NUMMI plant.
Per Christine Lakatos 2014 began with a bang: “Obama’s Second Term Is All About Climate Change.” New York Magazine, in their reporting, claimed that the evidence of this has to do with President Obama’s appointment of John Kerry(“longtime climate obsessive”) as Secretary of State, as well as other key green appointees.
Kerry, by the way, while recently in Indonesia, blasted climate change deniers, warning, “Climate change may be the world’s ‘mostfearsome’ weapon of mass destruction and urgent action is needed to combat it,” wrote CBC News Canada.
This scare tactic –– now adding to the long list of liberal crap, which includes ludicrous allegations that climate change will lead to “an orgy of killing, looting, rape and burglary” (just ask James Delingpole) –– surfaced just weeks afterPresident Obama’s State of the Union address (January 28, 2014) where he emphatically declared that the climate change debate is over.
But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we didall we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.
A claim that many Americans, including Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, find “absurd” –– with even co-founder of Greenpeace Patrick Moore, last month, stating to members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee thatthere is no scientific proof of man-made climate change.
The president, during his speech, which was a “call to action” with or without Congress, also pumped up his “all the above” energy strategy, asserting that it was working: “America is closer to energy independence.” Later, Mr.Obama claimed that his energy policy “was creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet.”
While Marita Noon (energy expert and Towhall.com columnist) has continually tackled the president’s so-called “energyindependence” assertion, together we have debunked the green jobs hype and deception many times, including in my recent study on theObama-backed green energy failures.
Moreover, a year ago, we blew the lid off of Climate Hawk Kerry and his part in green corruption. What’s most disingenuous is that while Kerry preaches “global warming doom andgloom,” his “government carbon footprint” is enormous — with no end in sight. (And who’s tracking his personal carbonfootprint?) Worse, Kerry played a part in crafting President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, which was a piece of legislation that allowed himto create a financial footprint inside this scandal as well. This includes timely green energy investments with the Big VC firm Kleiner Perkins (where “climate billionaires” John Doerrand Al Gore are partners) that will be mentioned many times in this post, including the fact that this firm was a huge winner from theGreen Bank of Obama.
The massive spending bill, commonly known as the economic stimulus package, which was signed into law five years ago, was marketed as a means to save our economy from the brink of disaster and create American jobs. If youcaught Michelle Malkin’s tribute to the so-called (failed) Recovery Act, you’ll discover, “Theactual cost of the $800 billion pork-laden stimulus has ballooned to nearly $2 trillion.” Even Speaker of the House John Boehner weighed in, ”The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results …”
Tucked inside was approximately $100 billion earmarked for renewable energy, which became “a special-interest feeding frenzy.”
Obama’s Agenda: Climate change by executive fiat & billions more of taxpayer cash
Obama has continually pledged during his second term, that he will be “governing unilaterally, by executive order and by regulatory mandate,” warned a Washington Times reporter –– thus his weapons of warfare are his “pen and phone.” Forget about the Constitution and its check and balances.
Even as those on the Right are up in arms over in the president’s excessive use (and abuse) of executive power, leading Democrats are applauding this move and pushing for more. Yet if we go back in time to 2008, we find that then-candidate Obama played a different tune,slamming President Bush’s use of executive action.
The author of the New York Magazine piece also noted that other than Secretary of State John Kerry, severalObama second-term moves signal the high priority he assigns the issue of climate change: “This is true not only of the figures Obama hasappointed to posts that inherently concern climate change, like his green appointees to run the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and the Department of Energy [DOE], but also to general politicaladvisors, like Denis McDonough and John Podesta, both committed environmentalists who will drive Obama’s climate focus” ––both McDonough and Podesta from the left-wing think tank, Center for American Progress (CAP), and the focus of this Green Corruption File.
Podesta, who in November 2013, was spotted at a fundraising event for Hillary Clinton, according to the Washington Post, “Is expected to stay with the Obama administration for a just a year, freeing him to join thecampaign of Mrs. Clinton if she runs for president in 2016.” It turns out that McDonough was the one that brokered his “executivepower gig,” of which “Podesta’s portfolio would be broad and would include climate-change issues and executive actions, as well asthe troubled health-care law,” reported the Washington Post.
As Kerry and Obama continue their campaign of “climate disaster on the horizon,” the strategic move in adding Podesta as White House counselor had already signaled anaggressive approach to their radical, expensive and deceptive green energy agenda. In fact, Podesta began is his role inside the ObamaWhite House by stirring up the liberal base, when in a profile published on December 17, 2013 by POLITICO, “Podesta is quoted comparing Republicans to the infamous cult led by Jim Jones, who wasresponsible for the 1978 cyanide poisoning of more than 900 of his followers in Guyana…” –– only to later apologize via twitter of all places.
Now labeled “climate change and energy transformation agenda,” Obama and hisminions have been, and continue to push through their radical views with mandates, regulations and legislation, which benefits special interest groups and the Obamaadministration’s green cronies, while adversely affecting American families. Even the non-partisan organization Reason.com, too, seesthe dire reality here: “Obama’s [Climate Five-Year] plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce andconsume energy.” One of those is directing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “to work expeditiously to complete carbonpollution standards for both new and existing power plants.”
Using the iron fist of the EPA –– a key department in Obama’s “war on energy” known for its abuse of power –– the president also tried to force refiners to produce cellulosic biofuels. However, as noted by Political Outcast, “The standards set were completely unrealistic and unattainable.” On the horizon are new green rules for trucks, buses and other heavy-duty vehicles, as well as whatever maneuvers the White House deems suited for their “green energy revolution.”
Additionally, whether we like it or not, this clean-energy mission is funded by taxpayers –– President Obama’s “save the planetslush fund.” A March 2012 report by the Brookings Institute places the Obama administrations’ “totalgovernment spending (both stimulus and non-stimulus) on green initiatives at $150 billion through 2014. But that’s not enough to save the planet. Last month, the president began pushing for a $1 billion taxpayer-funded program “to help communities across the country prepare for the effects of climatechange” –– AKA the climate resilience fund. This program is separate from the “Climate Action Plan” that the president introduced in June 2013, which also calls for releasing more taxpayer money ($8 billion from the DOE Loan Guarantee Program).
Furthermore, Obama’s DOE is attempting to establish a new renewable energy section (under the DOE Loan Guarantee Program), for grid-integrated green power projects ––with the plan of spending anywhere from $1.5 billion to as much as $4 billion of taxpayer money. The Obama administration is alsorestarting the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM), which is also part of the DOE Loan Guarantee Program –– with morethan $15 billion in remaining authority.
This is the same Energy Department program which the Green Corruption Files has exposed many times how, in the process of dolingout $34 billion of taxpayer money, at least 90 percent of the recipients have meaningful politically connections (bundlers, top donors, fundraisers, etc) to the president and otherhigh-ranking Democrats –– in many cases, to both. While the DOE will have you believe that these loans were based on “merit,” thekicker is that in March 2012, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee unleashed a damaging report revealing that the stimulus-created 1705 section of the DOE’s Loan Program had doled out in excess of $16billion to 26 projects, of which 22 of the loans were rated “Junk” grade due to their poor credit quality. “The remaining ended up onlowest end of the investment grade of categories, giving the DOE’s 1705 loan portfolio an overall average of BB-.”
So, it’s no wonder that this loan program fostered big alternative energy losers such as Solyndra, Beacon Power, Abound Solar, Vehicle Production Group, and Fisker Automotive, flushing billions oftax dollars down the toilet –– with billions more still at risk. Yet, the loan program is not the only one place you’ll find thepresident’s “cleantech” losers. In January, I released my new study, documenting 32 Obama-backed green energy failures, while tracking the financiallytroubled, and even those, ironically, having environmental issues as well –– over 30 and counting.
Besides the fact that the Energy Department continues to subsidize green energy, there are also many stimulus-created programs that have been extended and are still dishing out “thegreen.” One of the largest is the 1603 Grant Program, which to date has awarded over $20 billion of tax-free cash. The Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit program(48C Program), which was funded by $2.3 billion, just unleashed Phase II. The currently passed 1,000-page trillion-dollar farm bill will continue to fund renewable energy programs such as the Biorefinery Assistance Program, administered by the U.S.Department of Agriculture’s (USDA). The USDA, with $1.02 billion in loan power, along with $600 million stimulus funds from the EnergyDepartment and a $132 million DOE stimulus loan, used taxpayer money to fund 31 “not so shovel-ready” risky projects (also politicallyconnected) –– of which last time I checked (August 2013), about a third were having issues.
Podesta Power
Over the course of unleashing this scandal, I’ve hinted that CAP is a dark, driving force behind President Obama’s massive greenenergy scheme –– roles that range from legitimate to shady lobbying practices, to the fact that numerous CAP “fellows” wereat the helm of the green energy deal making, holding key positions inside the Obama White House, his Green Team, and his EnergyDepartment.
Today’s Green Corruption File will connect the dots as to Center for American Progress’ part in this scam, while shedding light onold and new data. As I progress, I’ll expose its alternative energy advocacy as well as its funders –– corporatedonors that were kept secret until their release in late 2013 –– with those in the renewable energy business (at least 17)cashing in at the Green Bank of Obama.
Let’s go back in time when Podesta –– former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton –– was infamous for what is dubbed “Project Podesta“: “This was a system that enabled the Clintons to push through unpopular policies that neither Congress nor theAmerican people wanted. Its implementation marked a dramatic tilt in the balance of power, giving the executive branch an unprecedentedability to force its will on the legislative branch,” documented DiscoverTheNetworks.com.
Most know that in 2003, Podesta founded CAP, which as mentioned, is organization funded by billionaire George Soros, who has a massive footprint inside this green corruption scandal. He then served as the organization’s president and CEO, of which it was reported, “Podesta was hand-picked for the job by CAP co-founders Soros andMorton H. Halperin.”
In 2008 and early 2009, Podesta, an Obama bundler, while still at CAP, ran Obama’s transition team as the co-chair along side Valerie Jarrett and Peter Rouse. Meanwhile by 2011, Podesta stepped down from his CEO role and became the Chair of CAP and the CAP Action Fund –– only to leave CAP and join the White House at the end of 2013 in his new role asObama’s “executive power czar.”
But if you go back to right after the Republican 2010-midterm victory, Podesta already had a plan: “The president should bypassCongress and wield the executive powers of his office,” reported Bloomberg last December. In fact, “Podesta had compiled 47 pages ofproposals for unilateral action on issues from immigration to solar energy.” Podesta even wrote the foreword for that CAP report “on how the president could use his executive authority to advance a progressive agenda, including actions tounilaterally force the U.S. economy to become greener.”
Furthermore, Podesta has served as an Independent Advisory Council member of the notoriously corrupt community organization ACORN . Podesta was also on the board of the Apollo Alliance as late as 2011.While I’ve unleashed the Apollo Alliance (now BlueGreen Alliance) and their part inside this massive clean-energy scam, I’ll briefly touch uponthem again today. But what’s key here is that Apollo is another Soros-funded left-wing organization, who along with its “green jobs radical network,” exerts powerful influence on the views and policies of the Obama administration –– and they too wereinvolved in drafting the 2009-Recovery Act.
CAP’s Left-wing Billionaire George Soros: Obama’s “agent of green”
Meanwhile, Soros is one of the 2009 stimulus authors that I had covered in October 2013: Those individuals and groups that were involved in crafting the clean-energy sector of the 2009 Recovery Act, and who ultimately financially benefited directly (and/or their invested firms, family or friends) from the $100billion that was earmarked for renewable energy.
According to Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster 2011 bestseller Throw Them All Out:
Billionaire George Soros gave advice and direction on how President Obama should allocate so-called “stimulus” money in aseries of regular private meetings and consultations with White House senior advisers even as Soros was making investments in areasaffected by the stimulus program.
While we know that early on, Soros had visited the White House on at least five occasions since Barack Obama became president, possibly more, Schweizer givesspecifics, “Mr. Soros met with Mr. Obama’s top economist, [Larry Summers –– also a CAP fellow] on February 25, 2009 and twice more with senior officialsin the Old Executive Office Building on March 24th and 25th as the stimulus plan was being crafted. Later, Mr. Soros also participatedin discussions on financial reform.”
As documented by Schweizer, “In the first quarter of 2009, Mr. Soros went on a stock-buying spree in companies that ultimately benefited from the federal stimulus,” including twelve alternativeenergy and utility companies. Moreover, if we add in other Soros green energy investments that bagged “green” funds, we canconfirm that this Soros is connected to at least $11 billion from the Green Bank of Obama, the majority from the 2009-Recovery Act.
Due to the fact that Soros is a well-known donor to CAP, here’s a sneak peek of what I personally tracked in my March 2013 Green Corruption File, exposing how this left-wing billionaire not only bankrolled Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns,but cashed in on the stimulus bill that he helped craft. Interestingly, four of these companies are also CAP corporate donors(marked with an asterisks), which will be detailed later.
- Brookfield Asset Management (BAM): As documented in the March 20, 2012 House Oversight report on the DOE’s disastrous loan program, “George Soros and Martin J. Whitman, both prominent Democratic donors, are both heavily invested in Brookfield.” In September 2011, The Granite Reliable wind project was awarded $168.9 stimulus loan, which is owned BAM. Then on May 23, 2012, they also snagged a $56 million 1603 stimulus grant for “wind in New Hampshire.” While there are additional ties to this wind deal that I’ll highlight later when I get to Heather Podesta (super lobbyists sister-in-law of John Podesta), whose firm Heather Podesta & Partners, from 2009 until 2012, served as lobbyists for BAM.
- First Solar*: Through various fund, and as early as 2007, Soros invested in First Solar –– the big solar company that is tied to $3 billion of the 1703 DOE stimulus loans, including one project that was sold to NRG Energy –– another Soros timely investment.
- SolarCity: In February 2012, the Private equity firm Silver Lake Kraftwerk invested in SolarCity –– whereas in early 2011, Silver Lake had launched a clean energy fund in collaboration with billionaire Soros and Cathy Zoi (former DOE Insider). SolarCity,which will be detailed later, so far (and since 2009) has been subsidized with “green” through various stimulus funds, grants and federal tax breaks at the tune of $514 million.
Soros’ Twelve “Stimulus” Green Energy Stock-Buying Spree:
- NRG Energy and its subsidiaries: Initially won $5.2 billion in 1705 stimulus loans for four projects and at least 65 grants that total over $363 million of taxpayer money with 37 unaccounted for. Plus much more green energy funds through various alliances.
- American Electric Power (AEP)*: at least four stimulus grants totaling $740 million. Plus, more detailed later.
- Ameren: five stimulus grants totaling about $672.5 million
- FirstEnergy Solutions: at least two stimulus grants totaling just over $71 million. No cash that I could find for BioFuel Energy benefited when the EPA announced a regulation on ethanol.
- Constellation*, an Exelon Company: at least one grant worth $200 million stimulus grants and Constellation is one of the most prolific providers of green energy to federally owned facilities.
- Covanta Energy*: unclear as to how many green government subsidies or the exact dollar amount, but obviously Covanta stands to benefit from the NAT GAS Act if it comes to light again. And what about those Congressional earmarks Schweizer found?
- Edison International: at least two stimulus grants worth $64.6 million, and I’m sure there are more…
- Entergy: I’ve only tracked two small stimulus grants, which add up to close to $10 million
- PPL Corporation: I found one stimulus grant at $19 million
- PSEG: one stimulus grant for $76 million.
- Powerspan Clean Energy Technology: one large stimulus grant worth $100 million
Mr. & Mrs. Podesta the Super Lobbyists: Strike “green” gold
In my June 2013 Green Corruption File, I briefly addressed John Podesta, but more so profiled his brother, Tony Podesta –– dubbed “TheLobbyist” by Newsweek, and the founder and Chairman at the Podesta Group, which he started with his brother John in 1987.
Even though news hit in early 2013, that Heather and Tony Podesta, the married super lobbyists separated, they are both (via different firms) tiedto numerous Obama-backed clean-energy deals.
As documented by the Center for Responsive Politics, you’ll find that the Podesta Group‘s lobbying income went from $16,070,000 in 2008 to $25,780,000 in 2009,and has since significantly increased. Their client lists (past and present) includes large corporations such as Bank of America, BPAmerica, and General Electric (GE aviation), General Motors, and Google (Computers/Internet) –– all in the green energy business,with BofA, GE and Google also CAP donors that won green energy funds from the Obama administration.
CH2M Hill
Nevertheless, there are quite a few others, of which in 2009, the Podesta Group took on as clients that stand out –– those that ultimately won a significant amount of stimulus funds,starting with CH2M Hill that received $1.3 billion for the clean up at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Thedetails on this special stimulus earmark can be found in my June 2013 “Nuclear Crimes and Misdemeanors” story, which highlights not only the cronyism and corruption, but the fact that in June 2013, CBS Newsreported that this costly project has been plagued with problems, “delaysand billions over budget.”
SolarReserve
SolarReserve got special treatment from the Department of Interior (DOI) for their Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project located in Tonopah, Nevada, which received a $737 million DOE stimulus loan. SolarReserve also snagged stimulus grants, yet the amount is unknown. This large DOE deal (anothernon-grade investment) was announced on May 19, 2011, and despite those inside the Energy Department that wanted to “kill the transaction,” it was finalized on September 28, 2011. Along the way, it included “relentlessassistance” by the Majority Leader Harry Reid as well as some drama. Not to mention, SolarReserve, a predominately Democrat donor, executives had given to Reid’s campaign since 2008.
Needless to say, there are more SolarReserve investors in the mix that can be found in my November 2013 Green Corruption File: “Underneath Senator Harry Reid’s Clean-Energy Dirt: Career politician directly linked to over $3billion in green energy stimulus loans.” One of the key connections to this deal is Citigroup, who has been a major investor in SolarReserve since 2008, which is chronicled in my February 2013 post, “Citigroup’s Massive ‘Green’ Money Machine.” Still, since Citigroup is also a CAP corporate donor, we’ll dig deeper later.
General Motors & the Chevy Volt
General Motors (GM) –– the failed Big Auto company that was bailed out by taxpayers in 2009 –– was a client of the Podesta Group from 2010 until 2012. GM was also a CAP donor in 2011, and a big recipient of stimulus money. Starting in 2009 until recently, they have bagged hundreds of millions ofstimulus dollars (I tracked $471.6 million so far) to support the Chevy Volt as well as green car components, of which I’ll get morespecific when I dissect CAP’s corporate donors.
Duke Energy
Duke Energy, the nation’s largest electric power company, is another CAP corporate donor, which has been a client of the PodestaGroup since 2009. What’s interesting here is that Jim Rogers, the chairman of Duke Energy is another Obama donor, and was a major player at the 2012 Democratic convention, as a contributor, creditor, host, and a speaker. Duke Energy won hundreds of millionsof green energy money for various projects, which will be detailed later.
Progress Energy
From 2011 to 2012, the Podesta Group added Progress Energy, which in 2009, won a $200 million smart-grid stimulus grant. Progress Energy is acustomer of Silver Spring Networks that is a Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Google investment –– all with friends and ties to the Obama White House that willbe documented a few times in the post.
SolarCity & SunEdison
Additionally, in 2012, the Podesta Group added SolarCity and SunEdison to its list of clients –– both members of ACORE, therenewable energy lobby powerhouse that helped “design the Department of Energy grant programs that partly offset the loss of tax equity financingarrangements.” This is part of the green corruption story that I chronicled in my post, “The RAT in the Recovery and the Gang of Ten.”
Founded in 2006, SolarCity has a string of connections to the Obama White House that I’ve beentracking and reporting on for some time, including billionaire players that received taxpayer money for other green energy deals,such as Elon Musk, Nicholas J. Pritzker, and George Soros. Throw in other stimulus winners like Al Gore’s firm Generation Investment Management (early investor and major stockholder) as well as Obama’s Wall Street buddies: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup. In between, SolarCity has developed partnerships with PG& E, and Google. But before Podesta came along in 2012, SolarCity had been an energyclient of top D.C. lobbyist McBee Strategic Consulting, since 2009 –– another major green corruption villain that I tackled in September 2013.
Nevertheless, Fox News reported in December 2012, when SolarCity was under a federal probe that theyhad applied for $341 million in grants. However, I found 33 federal stimulus grants from the 1603 Program that were awarded to SolarCity and USB SolarCity Master Tenant in 2011 and 2012, ranging across 15 states, totaling over $92 million.
MARCH 9, 2013 SolarCity UPDATE: Right after this publishing this post, it was brought to my attention that SolarCity, whose success isdependent on government handouts, has received additional green energy subsidies, which places their total at $514 million.
According to California Watchdog.org…
SolarCity has accepted more than $11 million in federal stimulus funds [from September 2009 to March 2010] to make its business run. But the real public support appearselsewhere. Because SolarCity technically owns the energy systems it installs, SolarCity — not the homeowner — earns the federal taxbreak intended as an incentive to go solar. So far the company has earned $411 million in such tax breaks. The company also may earn additional income on state subsidies.
Meanwhile, SunEdison, a global provider of solar-energy services, was an early Goldman Sachs clean-energy investment –– Goldman, another CAP donor, and huge winner from the Green Bank of Obama that I’ll get to muchlater. But we can confirm that SunEdison, in 2013, won 5 federal stimulus grants from the 1603 Program for “solar electricity” that ranges across 5 states, totaling over $1.8 million tax dollars.
Granite Reliable / Brookfield Renewable Power
On the other side, there is Granite Reliable that received a $168.9 million stimulus loan in September 2011 for a wind projectin Coos County, New Hampshire. Then on May 23, 2012, they also snagged a $56 million 1603 grant for wind in New Hampshire, which I am assuming is the for the same project. Work on Granite Reliable’s wind farm created 198construction jobs and six permanent jobs.
Nancy Ann DeParle, President Obama’s former Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the White House, had a financial stake in the success of Granite Reliable, due to the fact that she and sat on the Board of Directors for Noble Environmental Power,LLC, which owned Granite Reliable.
Obviously, this is a conflict of interest, but there are additional ties to this wind deal. Noble sold Granite Reliable in December 2010 to Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), just 6 months prior to the conditional approval (June 2011) of the DOE loan guarantee and deep into the applicationprocess. Despite the speculative credit rating, this loan was finalized in September 2011.
Not only was Brookfield Renewable Power (a subsidiary of BAM) represented by Citigroup as lead advisor during the loan review process, BAM has additional Democrat ties such as Diana Taylor, former New York City MayorMichael Bloomberg’s long-time girlfriend. As mentioned earlier, George Soros and Martin J. Whitman, which are both prominentDemocratic donors, are both heavily invested in Brookfield.
But this case directly hits the Podesta family, because from 2009 until 2012, Heather Podesta, sister-in-law of John Podesta, via Heather Podesta & Partners served as lobbyists for BAM –– and they’ve been lobbying on behalf of Brookfield Power (electric utilities), since 2011, raking in over $1.3 million from the two connected groups.
Southern Company
Mrs. Podesta’s firm also represented Southern Co. from 2008 until 2010, raking in over $300,000. This energy giant is part the Vogtle Project, which in February 2010, won a massive DOE loan: “a conditional commitment for $8.33 billion to support the construction of the nation’s next generation of advancednuclear reactors.” Despite the project’s troubles coupled with harsh criticism, the Obama administration just finalized this DOE deal.
Southern Company –– a heavy hitter lobbyist and big donor to both political parties –– bankrolled President Obama’s 2013 Inauguration. And due to the fact that thiswas another DOE loan approval that was pressured by the White House (this one in December 2009), further Intel is found in myJuly 2013 Green Corruption File, “Nuclear Disaster: $10.33 billion in energy loans pressured by the White House and POTUS approved, nowat risk.”
Center for American Progress: The “green” pusher
While CAP characterizes itself as “an independent nonpartisan educational institutededicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and action,” according to left-leaning Huffington Post, they’ve “been a vocal voice for this president’s policies in the media and on the Hill. Buttheir area of highest visibility is advocacy for a clean-energy economy where John Podesta has personally led the effort.”
Of course, as a strong proponent of alternative energy, CAP has also been a big backer of the Energy Department’s hugemulti-billion-loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects –– a government program, of which the stimulus law added $16 billion in lending power (the DOE’s “junk bond” and cronyism portfolio), where we find that many of CAP’s corporate donors have cashed inbig time.
We also know that according to the Washington Free Beacon, in September 2008, CAP “authored a report titled “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and StartBuilding a Low-Carbon Economy” that included many recommendations ultimately incorporated into President Obama’s controversial $800billion stimulus package.” But CAP is not done: since the president released his Climate Action Plan in June 2013, CAP continues to pressure for additional action, including, but not limited to, rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and a call to dole out billions more in renewable energy funds.
CAP, the progressive think tank with deep rooted ties to the Clintons, has been on my radar since 2010, and periodically mentioned throughout my work. As noted already, they areclosely aligned with, and have a major foothold inside the Obama White House. This is not limited to the new CAP additions:Denis McDonough, White House Chief of Staff and Obama’s new advisor, John Podesta.
What’s been forgotten is that a squadron of CAP experts worked with President Obama’s transition team, and they have been“reportedly highly influential in helping to craft White House Policy.” In 2008, Edwin Chen of Bloomberg, in his article, “Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font,” noted “CAP, which has180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs [ThinkProgress and theWonk Room], events, publications and media outreach.”
In fact CAP boasts of John Podesta’s part: “Podesta served as co-chair of President Barack Obama’s transition, where he coordinated thepriorities of the incoming administration’s agenda, oversaw the development of its policies, and spearheaded its appointments ofmajor cabinet secretaries and political appointees.”
In addition to Podesta as the co-chair, “at least 10 other CAP experts” were advising the incoming administration, “includingMelody Barnes (Obama bundler), the center’s executive vice president for policy who co-chairs the agency-review working groupand Cassandra Butts, the senior vice president for domestic policy, who is now a senior transition staffer,” reported Bloomberg.
What was has not been widely disclosed is CAP’s dark participation, other than their “recommendations,” inside thestimulus package, whereas as noted, $100 billion was earmarked for renewable energy. Hidden deep inside the 1,073-page stimulus bill,which was drafted by the Obama transition team and congressional aides, was a RAT: an attempt to suppress potential investigations, and only a few newsoutlets caught it in February of 2009: the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner, and completely exposed in my Green Corruption File entitled, “The RAT in the Recovery and the Gang of Ten.”
Entitled the Obama-Biden Transition Project, it employed approximately 400 people and it was comprised of Obama bundlers and campaign contributors as well aslobbyist and those that operate inside Washington’s egregious revolving door. What’s more fascinating to point out is thataccording to the Center for Responsive Politics, “Members of Barack Obama’s presidential transition team weren’t necessarily selectedsolely on their resumes and expertise — some may have scored positions over similarly qualified individuals because they supportedthe president-elect by bundling money for his presidential campaign or opening their own wallets to him.”
Five CAP Fellows at the Center of “the green”
More relevant to green corruption is that this lengthy list provides us with some familiar members operating inside thisclean-energy scam, which of course, were also bundlers for Obama’s 2008 campaign –– even bundling again in 2012. Even though, in October 2013, I gave insight into the Obama-Biden Transition Team and the numerous greenenergy players, here’s an overview with the CAP fellows marked with asterisks:
- Valerie B. Jarrett (Obama bundler): Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-Chair
- *John Podesta (Obama bundler): Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-Chair /Now “Executive Power Czar”
- *Carol M. Browner (Obama bundler): Advisory Board Member and Energy Policy Working Groups / Was promoted to Climate Czar, from January 2009 until February 2011
- Michael Froman (Obama bundler): Advisory Board Member
- TJ Glauthier (Obama bundler): Executive Office of the President
- Lisa Jackson (Obama bundler): Energy and Natural Resources Team Leads
- David Sandalow (Obama bundler): Energy Policy Working Groups
- *Steve Spinner (Two-time Obama bundler): Technology, Innovation & Government Reform Policy Working Groups / Was promoted to DOE Advisor in April 2009 until September 2011
- Tom Wheeler (Two-time Obama bundler): Working Group Members; Science, Tech, Space and Arts Team Leader
- Heather Zichal (Obama bundler): Energy Policy Working Groups
Add to this list two more CAP fellows: Lawrence Summers, who, in late 2008 (until 2011), became President-elect Obama’s Director of the National Economic Counciland Van Jones, who in March 2009, was appointed as a special adviser for green jobs for the Obama White House, until he resigned in September 2009. This means that we havefive CAP fellows that I’ll profile below.
Obviously, operatives from this team were rewarded with positions inside the Obama White House, while others in 2009, snagged other keygreen energy roles. My focus has been on the “DOE Insiders” –– those from Obama’s “Green Team” and his Energy Department officials and advisors, which included its fair share of Al Gore disciples andwell-connected Venture Capitalists. There has been a dozen on my radar that are either directly connected to tens of billions of green-government subsidies(loans, grants and special tax breaks), or helped their friends secure the funds.
Ironically, many have fled since their 2009 appointments, but it’s worth noting that the “DOE Dirty Dozen,” under Energy Secretary Stephen Chu,includes Carol Browner (1), Lisa Jackson, Van Jones (2), Steve Isakowitz, Steve Spinner (3), Matt Rogers, Jonathon Silver (4), CathyZoi (5), Kristina Johnson (6) and others like James Markowsky (7), Steven Westly (8), Sanjay Wagle (9), David Danielson (10), DavidSandalow (11), David Prend (12) –– another piece of this scandal currently in the works.
What’s telling is that these DOE Insiders were part of the decision making process, even as the rest had access influence in oneway or another. They were in charge of picking winners and losers, especially in regards to the Energy Department’s multi-billion LoanGuarantee Program, mentioned many times in this post, whereas I have personally been tracking since 2010.
What we find is that many of those operating inside the Energy Department had more sinister roles and were using tactics such aslobbying, pressure, collusion, and coercion. The evidence of this started circulating in 2011, when the Solyndra Saga broke, but worse,was confirmed in many of the DOE email exchanges released to the public since that time, which includes the massive “2012 InternalDOE Email Dump” that was unleashed in late October of that year.
These correspondences basically prove that the president, the White House, Secretary Chu, and certain DOE officials lied about how they handled the green energyloans on various fronts –– which was followed by secrecy, cover-ups and even perjury.
In November 2012, Marita Noon and I began unleashing the content of these email interactions, of which we found plenty of references to the president, POTUS, the White House,the “7th floor,” and “the Hill.” More disturbing is that contrary to House Oversight testimonies by DOE officials, thoseinside the DOE were rushing the approval of the DOE loans –– a fast track process imposed at the POTUS level, yet they were met withresistance by the Treasury as well as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), amongst others involved in the deal making process.
As it turns out, these emails reveal that many of the DOE loans were rushed and approved for political reasons –– visits,speeches, announcements, photo ops, and talking points for the president as well as for the purpose of helping those connected tothe companies seeking the loans –– CEO’s, investors, and Democrat politicians, which goes beyond subsidizing Nevada companies in order to help Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid win his 2010 reelection campaign.
These bombshell emails also expose the cozy relationships DOE officials and advisors had during the loan review process with loanapplicants and their CEO’s, lobbyists, and investors, etc. It’s no surprise that they had meetings and calls with DOE officials andEnergy Secretary Chu, but there are documented meetings and calls with the president, VP, and WH as well as plenty of “greenfraternizing” going on –– bike riding, coffee meetings, sleepovers, “beer summits,” Al Gore parties, dinners, Democratfundraisers, and so on.
NOTE: “2012 Internal DOE Email Dump” is in reference to the House Oversight huge document dump that wasunleashed in October 2012 (see Memorandum, Appendix I and the 350+ page Appendix II), and due to its value, will be sourced many times in this report.
Today we’ll stay focused on Center for American Progress, staring with the fact that other than John Podesta, we have ValerieB. Jarrett: President’s Obama’s longest serving advisor and confidante, of which some refer to her as the “shadow chief of staff.”
While Podesta is directly tied to CAP, Ms. Jarrett has an indirect connection: Prior to joining the Obama administration as Senior Advisor and assistant to the president, she served as Vice Chairman of The Joyce Foundation (Obama sat on the board 1994 to 2002), the Chicago-based organization, who is a major donor to radicalenvironmentalist and conservation groups as well as progressive movements like CAP.
This was part of the climate scam that not involves many green corruption suspects, but leads to cap-and-trade, of which I began to unravel in 2010, and what I refer to as the “pot of gold at the end of the climate rainbow” –– warning that with so much at stake, even if theplanet blows up, they will get their cap-and-trade, or a version of it.
Jarrett, also in September 2009, hosted a “Clean-Energy Summit” where an array of attendees just so happened to “collectively strike gold” with over $5.3 billion in taxpayerfunds from the Green Bank of Obama. We also know that internal emails showed (released in 2011) that deliberations on Solyndra –– the first DOE loan to go bad and scream corruption –– “reached into Obama’s inner circle, includingsenior adviser Valerie Jarrett and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.”
Additionally, we can confirm via the “2012 Internal DOE Email Dump” that Ms. Jarrett had a December 7, 2010, meeting with “theCEO’s of NRG and Reliant.” NRG Energy (a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 Index company) and its subsidiaries (Reliant is one) was the recipient of most of junk-rated stimulus loans, which includes NRG Solar for the Agua Caliente project ($967 million); NRGSolar for the California Valley Solar Ranch ($1.2 billion); BrightSource Energy Ivanpah project ($1.6 billion); and Prologis forProject Amp ($1.4 billion).
NRG Energy is one of those twelve timely Soros investments that I alluded to earlier (along with additional Obama administrationconnections) that snagged $5.2 billion in loans and a truck load of grants as well as other cleantech funds from the Green Bank of Obama.But it is the highly paid president and CEO (since 2003) David Crane (stock owner and an aggressive pusher of clean energy) who appeared to have significant influence. During the course of the June 2012, House Oversight hearing, Crane admitted that between the Bush administration and the Obamaadministration, he had visited the White House “14 to 15 times,” of which 6 to 7 of his visits were with the Obama White House.
Lawrence Summers: Currently listed as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress
- Former Director of President Obama’s National Economic Council (designated on November 24, 2008 to 2011)
- Former Secretary of Treasury under President Bill Clinton (from 1999 to 2001)
It’s worth noting that back in the day (November 2008), President-elect Barack Obama rolled out his National Economic Council(NEC), and installed “economic czar” Larry Summers (not subject to pesky confirmation hearings), who had served as Robert Rubin’s protégé at Treasury. Rubin, on the other hand, who had spent 25 years atGoldman Sachs before serving as Secretary of Treasury under the Clinton administration (1995-1999), after his government stint went to Citigroup as a Senior Counselor, only to retire in January 2009. However, what’s not widely known is that behind the scenes [during Timothy Geithner’stime at Treasury], “Rubin was still wielding enormous influence in Barack Obama’s Washington,” documented POLITICO.
What’s worth pointing out again is that Summers’ private memos to Obama, which were released by The New Yorker in early 2012, revealed the real intent behind the economic stimulus bill. American Enterprise Institute reported, “A key source for writer Ryan Lizza is a 57-page, “Sensitive & Confidential” memo written by economist Summers to Obama in December 2008,” which exposed “11 stunningrevelations from Larry Summers’ secret economics memo to Barack Obama.” One in particular was that the stimulus was aboutimplementing the Obama agenda and rewarding his green cronies.
The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quicklyand be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaigncommitments.
Summers, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at CAP, has significant ties to Wall Street, which if you’ve been paying attention, they ensured an Obama victory in2008. Prior to Summers heading to the Obama White House as top economic advisor,he had an elaborate gig where he worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at D.E. Shaw –– a New York-based $39 Billion Hedge Fund Giant. According to the Wall Street Journal, Summers “received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financialinstitutions,” which included “frequent appearances before Wall Street firms including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs andLehman Brothers.”
What’s significant is that both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup (profiled later) are corporate CAP donors that either won billions ingreen energy funds, or made money off of the deals that occurred. And, the majority of the deal making came from the now $32 billionEnergy Department Loan Guarantee Program, with the majority of the loans awarded and finalized between 2009 and September 2011. This is the same programthat, as mentioned earlier, has been pushed and promoted by Center for American Progress for some time.
During Summer’s time inside the Obama White House, it’s unclear how involved Summers was in the loan program decision makingprocess, but we can confirm via the “2012 Internal DOE Email Dump” that he was part of a scheduled January 2010 meeting with JonathanSilver (head of the Loan Program at the time), a few DOE officials, and Carol Browner –– the latter another CAP fellow that will beprofiled next.
“Nearly a year before Solyndra went bankrupt and engulfed the White House in scandal, PresidentObama’s top economic advisors [Summers and Timothy Geithner] warned him about the risks of the clean-energy loan program that granted thesolar company more than a half-billion dollars” –– as reported by the Business Insider in September 2011.
Needless to say, Solyndra was only one of the 22 “junk” loans awarded by the Energy Department’s $16 billion stimulus program –– a program where we find that Summers isdirectly tied to one of those DOE deals, while his buddy David Shaw, a two-time Obama bundler, had an invested interest in more.
Mr. Shaw is the founder of D.E. Shaw, where Summer’s worked before joining the Obama White House, and a firm that is connected toat least two renewable energy companies that snagged billions in DOE stimulus loans: First Wind and First Solar that are also CAPcorporate donors, which will be expanded upon later. First Wind was the winner of a $117 million DOE stimulus loan, plus hundreds ofmillions in stimulus grants, of which, according to Peter Schweizer, “Larry Summers was part owner of First Wind.”Meanwhile, First Solar won three large stimulus loans, totaling over $3 billion of taxpayer money –– not to mention additional greenenergy funds.
Carol M. Browner: Founding member of Center for American Progress and currently a Senior Fellow
- Currently on the Advisory Committee of the Export-Import Bank of the United States
- Headed the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (AKA Climate Czar), from January 2009 until February 2011
- Obama-Biden 2008-Transition Team role: Advisory Board Member and Energy Policy Working Groups
- 2008 Obama Bundler
Browner, a career Washington insider, who directed the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA) during the Clinton administration, is an Al Gore acolyte, and an environmental extremist with a few left-wing radical ties on her secret resume. While Browner worked for Gore as far back as 1988, at some point(between 2007 and 2009), she served as a board member of the Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection –– which, in July 2011, was morphed into “The Climate Reality Project.” From what I gather, this was the result of merging two environmental groups: The Alliance for ClimateProtection and The Climate Project, which were both founded in 2006 by Al Gore.
Browner was also a 2008 Obama bundler and part of the Obama-Biden Transition Team, who was later appointed to the president’s 2009Green Team as the “climate czar,” only to abruptly resign in early 2011.
Prior to her tenure at the Obama White House, Browner was a founding board member (from 2003-2008) for CAP, and she is currentlylisted as a Senior Fellow. Browner, not only “pushed for billions of dollars for renewable energy in the economic stimulus bill,” she was part of the decision-makingprocess inside the Energy Department’s Loan Guarantee Program, which at the time of her departure had doled out $34.7 billion of taxpayer money. Browner is implicated in an array of issues surrounding these loans, as reflected in many of the DOE email exchanges released to the publicsince 2011, as well as the “2012 Internal DOE Email Dump.”
With such deep connections to the former-Vice President Al Gore, and his climate mission, one wonders why Gore and his investmentfirms –– Kleiner Perkins and Generation Investment Management –– raked in so much of the DOE money under her watch. As of January2013, I tracked that these two firms combined are tied to at least $10 billion (more if you add in Silver Spring Networks and the factthat their “customers” raked in $1.3 billion in smart-grid stimulus grants), from the taxpayer-funded Green Bank of Obama, themajority coming from the 2009-Recovery Act –– the stimulus bill (renewable energy part) that Doerr helped author, while Brownerpushed to include taxpayer money.
Browner may have left her “climate” post, but she currently sits (and has for a while) on the Advisory Committee of theExport-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im), another means where our government dishes out billions of American taxpayer dollars insupport of clean energy.
“The Ex-Im Bank uses taxpayer money to backstop politically favored projects, which “just greases the wheels of the powerful and often corrupt big WashingtonEstablishment,” wrote Heritage Action. This is another “green bank” that not onlysupports other Nations, but where you’ll find corporate welfare and crony capitalism run amok, which includes quite a number of the president’sfavored firms: Abengoa, First Solar (Exelon Corp.) and SolarWorld, to name a few.
As recently as October 2013, at a Washington, D.C. CAP event (10th anniversary policy conference), Browner had this to say about the Keystone Pipeline: “There will be some twistsand turns” in the political debate over the pipeline, but “at the end of the day [Obama] is going to say no,” reported the Huffington Post. This was an even that besides Browner, featuredother Big Green personalities such as Van Jones, Tom Steyer, John Podesta, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Secretary of State John Kerry,California Governor Jerry Brown, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and of course, Al Gore.
Tom Steyer, CAP Board Member and Donor, Climate Change Radical, Big Oil Investor, Obama Bundler andBillionaire Buddy
At that event, Browner was joined on a panel with Van Jones, the former “green jobs czar” –– also a CAP fellow (profiled next) –– along with environmentaladvocate Tom Steyer, who has been on an anti-Keystone XL crusade for some time. In fact, Jones has been on the record slamming the president’s delay on denying the pipeline. Meanwhile, Steyer isthe same hedge-fund billionaire and megabucks Obama bundler and Democrat donor that was also a Big Oil Investor through his formerfirm Farallon Capital Management that has an invested interest in the rejection of the pipeline.
Like most prominent Obama fundraisers, Steyer has enjoyed relatively easy access to the White House, and as of the summer of2012, it was reported that he had met with senior White House officials in the West Wing on at least four occasions. Steyer waseven handpicked to make a cameo appearance at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
Additionally, Steyer, “plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and stateofficials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers,” reported the New York Times last month.
In September 2012, the Washington Free Beacon documented that Steyer “is reportedly one of the backers of Greener Capital, which invests in alternative fuel companies that benefit from the anti-oil policies of the Obama administration.” What’skey to this Green Corruption file is that “Steyer has donated at least $1.4 million to the Center for American Progress (CAP) since2009 through his TomKat Charitable Trust. As of 2010, he was listed as a director of the left-wing think tank.”
In December 2013, The Beacon, in their piece “Keystone to the Kingdom,” we find a stunning look at the relationship between Mr. Steyer and John Podesta: “Steyer is on the board of the Center for American Progress, and in the earlymonths of 2012 he and Podesta cosigned a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas,” arguing against Keystone and for tax loopholes such as the Production Tax Credit,increasing the value of the green energy companies in which Steyer invested and on whose boards Podesta sat.”
Moreover, while a slew of Democrats who oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, stand to benefit from its rejection, Farallon Capital Management “has extensive holdings in fossil fuel companies — including investmentsthat could benefit from the blocking of the Keystone pipeline,” reported The Daily Caller in May 2013. One in particular stands out: “Farallon also still holds stock in BP” –– the oil giant thataccording to POLITICO in 2010, Obama was the biggest recipient of BP donations over the past twenty years.”
In case you didn’t know, British Petroleum, the oil and gas giant that in 2001, began re branding to Beyond Petroleum (BP), washeavily in the “green” business via BP Alternative Energy (biofuels, wind and solar). However, in the spring of 2013, BP switched gears and started abandoning renewable energy. Still, that was after BP had snagged millions in“green” funds from the Obama administration, of which I began to unravel in April 2013 due the fact that BP is in cahoots with Sempra Energy, the winner of a $337 million DOE stimulus loan for theMesquite Solar Project in Arizona. Also, BP, at that time, was part of all five of Sempra’s wind projects. BP Alternative Energy is also an investor in BrightSource Energy –– the winner of a $1.6 billion DOE stimulus loan that involves more CAP corporate donors and a slew of additional Obama cronies that I’ll get to much later.
Van Jones: Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress (it is unknown when Van first joined CAP, but we doknow that he rejoined in February 2010)
- Green Jobs Czar, from March 2009 to September 2009
- 2008 to 2009 Crafter of the Recovery Act: both personally and via the Apollo Alliance, as part or their National Steering Committee, where Van Jones was a board member from 2006 to either 2008 or 2009
As the story goes, Van Jones –– left-wing radical, turned CNN contributor –– was handpicked to become Obama’s “green jobs czar” in 2009: “We were so delighted tobe able to recruit him into the White House,” Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, stated on August 12, 2009. Mr. Jones’ advisorypost at the White House was short lived due to his radical past and behavior, and in September 2009 he resigned, blaming it on a “smear campaign of lies and distortions to distract anddivide.”
Nevertheless, Van is another very active CAP member where his focus remains on “green-collar jobs.” He’s still a strong forcein the midst of the climate change debate, pushing green jobs, as well as his extreme environmental ideology.
YOU can fight back and destroy dirty oligarchs!
When the bad guys, and their lap-dog politicians, attack you because your products are better than theirs they are proving that they have to cheat to compete. They cheat with political bribes, black-lists, character assassination attacks, collusion and other anti-trust violating acts.
When your Senator holds stock market shares in companies that exist to profit on the backs of consumers, then it is impossible for that Senator to ever do anything but be corrupt!
The crooks at Google, Facebook, Tesla, Linkedin, Netflix, etc., broke felony laws and the basic principles of Democracy.
They bribed your Senators, White House Staff, insider agency staff and operated a Silicon Valley Oligarch sociopath political Cartel.
As Mother Jones top editor says:
In 18 years of living here, I find zero evidence that the “City Family” is benefiting anybody but its members, developers, old-school socialites, and tech billionaires.
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) February 14, 2020
I can’t even with how insular and incestuous and corrupt SF is. Mayor @londonbreed acknowledges she had relationship with DPW Nuru two decades ago and that they remained close friends https://t.co/HEhIlulkyj
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) February 14, 2020
Your public officials set-up, operated and maintained an organized crime scheme for personal profit at the expense of every taxpayer. They went after Five Trillion treasury dollars of your tax money for their personal interests via rigged stock market scams, rigged government contracts, exclusionary policy manipulations and other schemes that harmed American taxpayers.
YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF AND THE NATION TO TAKE THEM DOWN!
YOU CAN WIPE THEM OUT, ALL BY YOURSELF, IN 100% LEGAL WAYS.
YOU CAN WIPE THEM OUT EVEN FASTER WITH CROWD-SOURCED FORENSICS AND ANTI-CORRUPTION AI SOFTWARE! JOIN THE REST OF THE PUBLIC IN AN EPIC ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORT!
You must write FBI-quality criminal activities reports and file those reports, by certified mail, with every law enforcement and regulatory agency in every country in the world, including the FBI, OSC, GAO, EU, Interpol, FSB, UN, etc. CC the social media sites with your reports.
You can use basic private investigator websites to track and back-ground every person, organization and company involved in the corruption and trace their RICO law violations. You can provide that data to The U.S. Congress and every agency, with a copy to every social media posting.
You can now use open-source, free, collaborative NSA-class global databases that can track all of the locations, hookers, fake fronts, family trusts, bank accounts, stock market accounts, bribes and other goodies, of any corrupt public official, in minutes! You get that free anti-corruption software from GitHub, CodePen, Torrents, Onion Project, The Guardian, ICIJ and all over the web.
YOU open your own private investigator/citizen sleuth crowd-sourced investigations into the following:
– Every stock market account they or their family owns
– Every Uber or Lyft ride they ever took for any meeting or transport of sex workers
– Every flight manifest they appeared on
– Every bank account they have ever held
– Every lawsuit, divorce record and police record they have ever appeared in
– Every trust fund they or their family holds
– Every shell corporation they, or their family holds
– Every person named in the Epstein Pedo book: https://www.scribd.com/document/416207833/Jeffrey-Epsteins-Little-Black-Book-Redacted cross referenced across all of the other databases and then supplied to the FBI and Child Protection Agencies
– Every item in the Swiss Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
– Every item in the Panama Papers Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
– Every item in the WikiLeaks that cross connects to their holdings
– Every item in the Snowden Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
– Every sex trafficking incident that connects to each of them alone, and in groups
– Every financial transaction between any of the parties on the master list and the character assassination and hit job firms of: Google, Univision, Gawker Media, Unimoda, Jalopnik, Gizmodo,Black Cube, Fusion GPS, Media Matters, Think Progress, IN-Q-Tel, K2 Intelligence, WikiStrat, Podesta Group, YouTube, Alphabet, David Drummond, Larry Page, Facebook, Correct The Recor, Stratfor, ShareBlue, Sid Blumenthal, David Brock, Eric Schmidt, Sunshine Sachs, Covington and Burling, Buzzfeed, Perkins Coie and Wilson Sonsini or their derivatives with common owners.
– Every item in the Quest Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
– Every tactical deployment, by a campaign financier, of the tactics listed in this manual: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP89-01258R000100010002-4.pdf
– Every sex service that their credit card payments every connect too
– Every real estate transaction that any name or company they, or their family, were involved in, tracks to
….. and hundreds of thousands of other information points about them that prove that they benefit from crimes that they engage in for others who engage in crimes using the America public policy system.
It all goes into shared 100% legal public collaborative databases that work like XKEYSCORE, or MS Access, or Oracle Databases.
The proof of collusion, organized criminal actions and raw covert corruption is indisputable. The actors are all the same people. The beneficiaries are all the same people. The communications between the parties all coordinate the same actions.
Demand their arrests, indictments, exposures and bankruptcies in public ads, letters to the editor, blog posts, bumper stickers, lawsuits, flyers, newsletters, email and every other outreach manner.
Say “Fuck You” to the Silicon Valley Oligarch ‘Illuminati’ scumbags and the crooked Senators and Governor’s they bribed.
Show these oligarch crooks what billions of taxpaying voters with collaborative FBI-class forensics investigation software can do to their corrupt tech Cartel!
What To Do To Write Up The Dossier On Each Person And Each Corrupt Politician:
-
- Dig through their trash and buy their trash bags from the garbage man after they pick them up
- Locate a beneficiary for a probate proceeding
- Research current and / or historical property holdings
- Identify mortgage information
- Identify secured lenders
- Identify related party property transactions
- Determine current market value of real property
- Locate bankruptcy filings
- Retrieve and analyze bankruptcy records
- Uncover improper relationships
- Locate federal civil lawsuits
- Locate federal criminal records
- Retrieve and analyze federal civil and criminal records
- Retrieve mug shots from arrest records
- Provide independent analysis
- Locate state and local criminal arrest records
- Retrieve and analyze review criminal records
- Provide peace of mind
- Locate home phone numbers
- Locate cell phone numbers
- Identify owner of home or cell phone number
- Determine owners of corporation
- Retrieve and analyze corporate records
- Locate current or former executives
- Interview current or former executives
- Find and retrieve judgment and lien filings
- Research familial history
- Connect the dots
- Locate witnesses for a civil or criminal lawsuit
- Interview witnesses for a civil or criminal lawsuit
- Find assets
- Find current or historical boat registrations
- Find current or historical aircraft registrations
- Search for hidden assets
- Conduct business intelligence
- Discreet intelligence gathering
- Determine connections between parties
- Locate bank account information
- Locate current or former employees of a company
- Interview current or former employees of a company
- Locate significant inheritances
- Show you the big picture
- Identify a will for an estate
- Locate probate records
- Identify foreign assets
- Locate regulatory records
- Identify regulatory actions
- Identify professional licenses
- Determine prior disciplinary records for professional licenses
- Analyze state and federal political contributions
- Analyze state lobbyist records
- Analyze federal lobbyist records
- Identify potential whistleblowers
- Vet expert witnesses
- Interview industry sources
- Gather competitive intelligence
- Identify related party business transactions
- Retrieve and analyze non-profit financial filings
- Knock on doors
- Obtain and analyze Department of Labor Form 5500 Filings
- Submit FOIA / FOIL requests to government agencies
- Obtain driving record history (in applicable states)
- Find current vehicle registrations
- Find historical vehicle registrations
- Make you look brilliant
- Determine current market value of motor vehicles
- Assist with jury selection
- Background checks on prospective jurors
- Analyze documents for potential fraud
- Identify Risks
- Identifying corporate relationships
- Give you a competitive advantage
- Identify Uniform Commercial Code filings
- Foreign corporation research
- Help you manage sensitive situations
- Overseas litigation research
- Identify stock ownership
- Find facts
- Locate online resume
- Identify online networking profiles
- Locate historical video or news footage
- Conduct historical newspaper research
- Conduct mobile or stationary surveillance
- Perform clandestine operations
- Find undisclosed ties
- Identify and retrieve U.S. Tax Court cases
- Locate a missing person
- Identify and confirm education history
- Identify and confirm previous employment history
- Scour the Internet
- Research presence on social networks or message boards
- We will tell you what those bastards are up to!
- Send the IRS information about how Google, Netflix, Alphabet are cheating on their taxes and hiding money in Ireland and the Cayman Islands. Get the IRS to sue the oligarchs in tax court.
- Enhance the publishing of research articles proving that Silicon Valley tech companies destroy the minds of children with tech addiction and brain manipulation and get parents to sue those companies for harming their children
- Expose every secret cash conduit that the oligarchs use to bribe politicians
- Demand new laws in Congress to stop politicians from owning any stock because that is the #1 source of bribes
- Use lip-reading software to see what they are saying or have an actual deaf-person do it
- Photograph them with any hotties they are seen with and then face-track the hotties to see if they are hookers or ill-repute escorts
- Use one of the many free on-line news publishing softwares and make a global online newspaper that constantly exposes their crimes
- Write every federal agency and demand investigation and prosecution of the perps
- Assemble the massive number of news reports about their sex scandals and distribute those reports as books, articles, documentaries and news aggregations to prove what a bunch of sick perverts these people are
- Publish the speaker list from Techonomy, Davos, TED, Burning Man, etc. to show that it is always the same little group of arrogant assholes that self-promote their hype at each of these elitist events
- Leave notices on the windshield of any of their Tesla’s reminding them what douche-bags they are
- Organize petitions and letter-writing campaigns to have the overtly corrupt ones removed from their jobs
- Go to their share-holder meetings and hand-out flyers about their corruption
- Hire Charles Spies ( https://www.dickinson-wright.com/our-people/charles-spies?tab=0 ) to sue them
- Hire Harmeet K. Dhillon (http://www.dhillonlaw.com ) to sue them
- Hire COA ( http://www.causeofaction.org) to sue them
- Hire law firms from China or Russia to sue them for a very low price
- Hire Steven S. Biss ( http:// www.linkedin.com/in/steven-s-biss-6517037 ) to sue them
- Blog about the corruption of the political targets every day with the day’s news each day
- Read their divorce filings in court records and see who else might help expose their corruption
- Read their locations over the last 12 months – https://www.protocol.com/government-buying-location-data
- Talk to every neighbor that has filed a complaint about them
- Hire Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP to sue them, especially tech media companies
- Re-read all of the latest “How To Be A Private Investigator” books and brochures
- Ask Paul Kangas in San Francisco how he investigates the corrupt
- Go back to http://www.pacer.gov and read each of the lawsuits against them to get more clues about them
- Put a card table and a pop-up booth outside their office and hand out flyers about them
- Publish every stock market share they, and their family, owns
- Produce a dossier on every corrupt partner of every Silicon Valley VC firm
- Know that there are over 3000 additional forensic tools you can use to expose them 100% legally…
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Revenge-Serious-Getting/dp/0806521414The Big Book Of Revenge: 200 Dirty Tricks for Those Who Are Serious About Getting Even [George Hayduke] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book by Hayduke, GeorgeCleantech Investing Gets Its Day in the Sun As Congressional Insiders Pump And Dump Like Mobsters
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By Zachary A. Goldfarb |
Washington Post Staff Writer
Everybody seems to be looking for ways to make money on technologies that are said to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, wean the country from foreign oil and, generally, save the world. Venture capitalists have invested $3.64 billion nationally this year in search of promising ideas in what they call “greentech” or “cleantech.”
Locally, a few prominent venture capitalists have invested in the field. But they are wary about the bubble-like feeling that has taken hold across the country. Such investing has its own unique risks.
Backing Web companies or software companies often requires only a few million dollars. But investing in greentech can require lots of research and development, as well as buying factories to make the technologies. Environmental laws regulating the industry can change rapidly, or not at all, making it tricky to pinpoint the right moment to release a product.
Michael R. Steed, founder of the District’s Paladin Capital Group, said many greentech companies are overvalued. With the president promoting investment in alternative energy and Congress preparing an energy bill that could shift an enormous amount of money into the area, Steed said, “everyone is running in saying because of what Congress is going to do, my company is worth three times what it was.”
Still, Paladin is one of the Washington area’s largest investors in greentech with four companies in its portfolio. Last month, it led a group of investors putting $77 million in HelioVolt, an Austin firm.
HelioVolt builds thin solar panels made of a material known as copper indium gallium selenide that is said to produce the same amount of energy for almost half the cost of electricity, at 50 cents per watt, possibly enabling the widespread expansion of solar technology to buildings and homes. Silicon solar panels, which can cost $2 per watt, have been the target of investments for three decades.
“The best deals we’re seeing are deals which bring to the table disruptive technologies,” Steed said.
Paladin, with former CIA and NSA directors on board, invests with homeland security in mind. For example, Paladin wants power to be distributed widely and stored where it’s needed in cases of emergency, rather than at central power plants.
“It isn’t that we’ll just do anything in the alternative energy base,” Steed said. “We want to support products and services that focus on distributed power as opposed to core power.”
That kind of specialized approach to investing in greentech is typical of local firms. “It’s a big and important space that investors are going to be looking at for many years to come,” said Jonathan Silver, founder of the District’s Core Capital Partners.
Core Capital was part of a $35 million investment in Infinite Power Solutions, a Littleton, Colo., firm that is creating thin film batteries that the company claims significantly reduce the space that electronic devices need for batteries. By next year, Silver expects to have invested in three or four more cleantech companies.
Still, he sees risks.
Insider trading on green energy in Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein offices
The Wall Street Journal reported about a staffer in Harry Reid’s office who nearly doubled his $3,500 investment in a renewable energy firm in 2008. Sen. Reid helped pass legislation that benefitted the firm.
——————————-
Congressional Staffers Gain From Trading in Stocks
By
Brody Mullins,
Tom McGinty and
Jason Zweig
WASHINGTON—Chris Miller nearly doubled his $3,500 stock investment in a renewable-energy firm in 2008. It was a perfectly legal bet, but he’s no ordinary investor.
Reid’s spokesman tried to defend the staffer, Reid’s top energy policy adviser, by asserting that he had no influence over tax incentives for renewable energy firms.
—————————————–
Under federal securities law, of course, it is not important whether the staffer had any influence over legislation, Sen. Reid or anyone or anything else.
If it can be shown that the staffer breached a duty of confidentiality in using “inside information” as the basis for buying and selling the stock, then he may very well be guilty of the crime of insider trading.
In May 2009, the Associated Press reported,
Federal prosecutors and the FBI have been investigating possible illegal insider trading by two Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement attorneys who were in a position to receive sensitive information about agency probes of public companies.
Similarly, if the staffer had material information that the public didn’t have and he took advantage of it in the buying and selling of securities, he could have committed a serious crime — as well as anyone he may have tipped off.
Reid’s staffer has denied wrongdoing, but that should not be dispositive.
The Department of Justice, FBI and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ought to be investigating the staffer as well as any other potential insider trading violations described in the WSJ article.
At the very least, the staffer should be afforded the same opportunity as Martha Stewart to chat with federal investigators — that worked out so well for her.
Don’t expect this to happen, however, as Sen. Reid and other members of Congress will no doubt quietly work to quash any investigation.
Big Brother Has Turned Green
The environmental movement has cultivated a warm and fuzzy public image, but behind the smiley-face rhetoric of “sustainability” and “conservation” lies a dark agenda. The Greens aim to regulate your behavior, downsize your lifestyle, and invade the most intimate aspects of your personal life.
In this stunning exposé, Steve Milloy unveils the authoritarian impulse underlying the Green crusade. Whether they’re demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial, the Greens are envisioning a grim future for you marked by endless privation.
Steamrolling nearly all opposition with its apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom, the Green movement has gained influence throughout American society–from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country. And their plans are much more ambitious than you think, says Milloy. What the Greens really seek, with increasing success, is to dictate the very parameters of your daily life–where you can live, what transportation you can use, what you can eat, and even how many children you can have.
Citing the tactics and goals of Green groups as explained by their own activists and leaders, Green Hell demonstrates:
* How Green pressure campaigns threaten the safety of your home and your car, and public health overall
* Why the election of President Obama portends a giant leap forward for coercive Green policies
* Why Greens obstruct the use of all forms of energy–even the renewable sources they tout to the public
* How wealthy Green elites stand to profit fabulously from the restrictions and regulations they seek to impose on the rest of us
* How Green pressure campaigns are hamstringing the military and endangering our national security
* Why big business is not only knuckling under to the Greens, but is aggressively promoting the green agenda to the detriment of its own stockholders
* What you can do to help stop the great Green machine
A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive takedown of the entire environmental movement, Green Hell will open your eyes to a looming threat to our economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.
‘Green Hell explains why Americans can’t afford to fall for Al Gore’s `the debate is over’ line on global warming. While we’re all for the environment, Green Hell explains why we need to oppose the environmentalists.”
–Fred Barnes, Executive Editor, the Weekly Standard
“Green Hell is the `inconvenient truth’ on extremist, growth-killing environmentalism. A must-read for those interested in keeping America free and prosperous.”
–Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes
“Regardless of whether you believe global warming is a fraud, the fact is that the current depression, the past spike in oil prices, and the coming technology of electric cars are all going to solve whatever problem exists. Liberals want to use climate change as an excuse to take over the economy and regulate everything and this book exposes their plans.”
–Dick Morris, FOX News commentator and former political consultant to Bill Clinton
“This book describes why the world can’t afford to fall for global warming alarmism and environmental hysteria. Steve Milloy shows how to avoid the environmentalists’ vision of our future.”
–VACLAV KLAUS, President of the European Union and President of the Czech Republic
“Free market capitalism is still the best path to prosperity. Green Hell is a must-read for anyone who wants to keep America on that path and away from Soviet-style command-and-control environmentalism.”
–Larry Kudlow, Host, CNBC’s The Kudlow Report
Former President Barack Obama liked to portray himself as a politician watching out for the little guy.
But it looks like he spent much more time protecting his rich friends – and manipulating the government to help make them a fortune.
It was all part of a scheme that looks a lot like insider trading – or what author Peter Schweizer calls “smash and grab.”
In his new book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Schweizer lays out how Obama used government regulations to help lifelong pals buy up companies for pennies on the dollar.
Basically, the Obama Administration would threaten and devalue companies, and Obama’s pals would be ready to swoop in and buy them on the cheap.
And apparently nobody ever stopped to consider the effect that this plot would have on ordinary shareholders – who lost millions – or the employees at the companies.
In an interview with Breitbart, Schweizer gives one shocking example – the case of Marty Nesbitt, who has been described as Obama’s “best friend.”
After Obama was reelected on 2012, Nesbitt set up a private equity firm called Vistria to invest in highly regulated industries – in other words, industries that Obama and his administration can help control.
Schweizer points to Vistria’s acquisition of online learning giant the University of Phoenix as an example of Obama and Nesbitt working together on a “smash and grab” deal.
The Obama Administration had threatened to withhold GI Bill money from the University of Phoenix over the quality of its education, sending its share price tumbling.
Then, Nesbitt and Vistria were able to purchase the university for “three cents on the dollar,” Schweizer reports.
After the deal was made, the Obama Administration withdrew its threat to withhold federal funds.
Schweizer says Obama repeated the strategy throughout his presidency to enrich liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer and George Soros, who have both worked to ruin current President Donald Trump.
“Barack Obama smashes coal companies, [and] what do these guys do? They go in, they buy them for pennies on the dollar, and when the regulatory weight is lifted, their valuations increase, and they make a lot of money, and you see that pattern in all of these industries,” Shweizer said.
And what happens to other shareholders – the ones who aren’t friends with Obama? They’re left holding the bag when the companies are devalued.
Schweizer says that some of the ill-gotten gains realized by Obama’s friends eventually found their way to the Obama Foundation.
It’s a scheme that absolutely cries out for a federal investigation. But with so many Obama puppets still left in the government, we won’t be holding our breath.
HOW QUID PRO QUO WORKS AT THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
How do you give payola, funded by working class taxpayers, to millionaires that don’t need it, to pay kick-backs for funding Obama’s political marketing?
Easy: You use the U.S. Department of Energy as the world’s biggest political slush-fund. This way, you get to pay bribes IN PLAIN SIGHT!
The Department of Energy bosses get to claim everything is on the “up and up” but EVERY SINGLE TIME, only the political campaign financiers get the money and their competitors get sabotaged. Neat trick, right?
Here is how it works:
Quid pro quo (“something for something” in Latin[2]) is a Latin phrase used in English to mean an exchange of goods or services, in which one transfer is contingent upon the other; “a favor for a favor”. Phrases with similar meanings include: “give and take”, “tit for tat“, “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”, and “one hand washes the other”. Other languages use other phrases for the same purpose.
Corruption in politics at the Department of Energy arises from the mismatch on Capitol Hill: squadrons of well-paid, experienced lobbyists versus DOE offices where aides are overworked, underpaid and have to depend on those lobbyists for information about issues. We want to see DOE offices with more aides, supervised by FBI agents, who would get better pay, to keep them on the Hill longer while they develop their own expertise. We would also close the metaphorical revolving door, through which staffers and lawmakers travel to make more money as lobbyists.
The need for campaign finance reform has always been an urgent one. The quid pro quo of shadow money and special interest campaign financing is at the root of corruption in this country, particularly at the Department of Energy. When government uses millions of taxpayer dollars to rent a bond hastily acquired and for no clear purpose from a ‘party financier’, that is the spectre of campaign finance related corruption showing itself. When construction companies that finance political campaigns to the tune of millions are being awarded public work contracts worth billions under questionable public tendering rules, that is campaign finance related corruption. When a branding company that provided ‘free’ billboards to a political campaign is given the lion’s share of billboard and branding contracts under a new government, we see the spectre of corruption. And then of course there is the issue of abuse of state resources for campaigning, something we seem to have come full Animal Farm on.
Elon Musk, Solyndra, Fisker, Abound and over a hundred other wire transfers from the Department of Energy were quid-pro-quo payoffs to Obama financiers. The layers of the deals were complex but the money always ended up in the same few pockets.
The Department of Energy has a massive fake due diligence program which spends a hundred times more time and money than any bank undertakes to provide funds. All of that due diligence is a fraud. It is a smoke-screen to provide the appearance of “proper review” when, in each and every case, the funds were covertly already arranged in a back room deal.
All of those people that work on those due diligence efforts must feel like fools. Their work is pointless because the deals were already done in smoke-filled back rooms at Perkins Coie, Wilson Sonsini and Covington Burling lobbyist buildings. All of the Department of Energy staff own the stock of the company that “wins” the government cash and most of them leave the Department of Energy, right after the money is transferred, and go to work at that company or it’s suppliers.
It is an EPIC crime!
Now, the need for reform is even more urgent, particularly considering the complexity of how capital moves in an oil and gas economy and the impact of that capital on political decision-making. (ie: “…One emerging party, for example, has been against renegotiation of the oil contract with Exxon, arguing that we should accept it and guard against exploitative arrangements with future contracts. When the Department of Energy recently revealed that it had recently hired a US firm to do what should have been done years ago, revise the decades-old Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act, it was casually revealed that the local firm the US company had partnered with is owned by the Presidential Candidate of the very new party that has – along with the PPP and APNU+AFC – refused to consider contract renegotiation, even in the wake of the damning Global Witness report….”)
By breaking the close bonds between lobbyists and congressional offices, lawmakers might become less beholden to the lobbyists’ employers — the corporations, unions and special interests that underwrite American politics.
As value is in the eye of the beholder, the something being exchanged for another something may not be equal in value, instead skewed based on one’s perspective.
Democrats and their media masters are salivating over now having what they believe is a smoking gun to take down President Trump. Notwithstanding that this must be their hundredth smoking gun, and that each previous one misfired, they are hot on impeachment over this Latin term “quid pro quo.”
The Washington Post, happy to let democracy die in darkness while they endeavor to overturn the last presidential election, is giddy over quid pro quo.
In politics, quid pro quo is standard operating procedure. Take campaign contributions, for example. I contribute to Senator X because I want Senator X to support legislation favorable to my business interests. My money, something of value, will be exchanged for a tax break or new regulation, which is usually of greater value to me, as a quid pro quo, and perfectly legal and acceptable.
A bundler for a presidential candidate raises millions of dollars for said candidate. If that candidate wins the presidency, the bundler may have a choice of any number of ambassadorships around the world. The value of the campaign cash is exchanged for a four-year stint living in the American embassy in London or Paris, attending parties and banquets. Something for something.
Members of Congress do the quid pro quo thing amongst themselves all the time. I’ll vote for your bill to build a military facility in your district if you support my bill creating an NSA data center in my district. In Congress it’s called “horse trading.”
What about economic sanctions? The Council on Foreign Relations, also knows as Club Deep State, explains how economic sanctions work.
Governments and multinational bodies impose economic sanctions to try to alter the strategic decisions of state and nonstate actors that threaten their interests or violate international norms of behavior.
Economic sanctions are defined as the withdrawal of customary trade and financial relations for foreign- and security-policy purposes.
Sanctions take a variety of forms, including travel bans, asset freezes, arms embargoes, capital restraints, foreign aid reductions, and trade restrictions.
Quid pro quo, something for something. If you want American money in terms of trade or aide, you had better behave, meaning do as we tell you to do in your political and economic decisions.
Here are a few examples of quid pro quo economic sanctions.
Economic sanctions were put in place against Cuba in 1958. Similar sanctions have been in place against North Korea since the Korean War. Economic sanctions have been in effect against Venezuela since 2015 and Sudan since 1997. These are quid pro quo moves — behave, give up your nukes, provide human rights, or we will punish you economically. Something for something.
Several of the ladies of the Squad hinted at cutting off aid to Israel after one of the gals was denied entry to Israel last summer. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders threatened, “Israel would have to ‘fundamentally change’ its relationship to Gaza to receive aid if he is elected.” Something for something, quid pro quo.
Three Democratic senators wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general,
Expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake.
They wanted something for something, quid pro quo.
Then Vice-President Joe Biden, in a now well-known interview, acknowledged, “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. He got fired.” Quid pro quo, something for something.
So, what did Trump do? He asked the Ukrainian President to investigate corruption, specifically foreign interference in a U.S. election. Biden was an afterthought in the conversation, but his pay to play corruption is fair game, whether or not he is running for president. Until he secures the Democratic party nomination, he is not Trump’s political opponent. What if Bernie or Pocahontas win the nomination?
Trump has a constitutional duty as president to investigate corruption. The U.S. and Ukraine share a treaty ratified in 1999 for “Mutual assistance in criminal matters.”
There is also “The United Nations Convention against Corruption” of 2003, signed by both Ukraine and the U.S. And then finally is President Trump’s Executive Order signed in December 2017, “Blocking the property of persons involved in serious human rights abuse or corruption.” Note that last word.
Trump is doing his job as president, yet the Democrats and media howl in outrage over a supposed quid pro quo. But something for something is standard operating procedure in Washington, D.C., even to the point of corruption as Joe Biden illustrated in Ukraine, China, and possibly Romania.
The psychologists call this Democratic caterwauling “projection,” accusing others of doing what you are guilty of. Trying to impeach President Trump over a quid pro quo would be like impeaching him because he didn’t keep a campaign promise, something every elected official, past and present, is guilty of.
Since its ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed concern regarding corruption or the appearance of corruption stemming from political quid pro quo arrangements and the deleterious consequences it may have on citizens’ democratic behavior. However, no standard has been set as to what constitutes “the appearance of corruption,” as the Court was and continues to be vague in its definition. As a result, campaign finance cases after Buckley have relied on public opinion polls as evidence of perceptions of corruption, and these polls indicate that the public generally perceives high levels of corruption in government. The present study investigates the actual impact that perceptions of corruption have on individuals’ levels of political participation. Adapting the standard socioeconomic status model developed most fully by Verba and Nie (1972), an extended beta-binomial regression estimated using maximum likelihood is performed, utilizing unique data from the 2009 University of Texas’ Money and Politics survey. The results of this study indicate that individuals who perceive higher levels of quid pro quo corruption participate more in politics, on average, than those who perceive lower levels of corruption.
Quid pro quo is not a difficult concept to understand. Too bad the media doesn’t endeavor to investigate and explain it. Your politicians don’t work for you, they work for their own insider trading stock market holdings for themselves!
More evidence of the charged crimes and harms has now been filed in this case than in any other corruption matter currently in US. Courts. More third party investigative, regulatory, public news outlet and forensic reports have now confirmed Plaintiffs assertions than in any other modern case. More proofs and charges of active political bias and justice blockades by law enforcement and regulatory agencies have been proven, this year, in Congressional hearings, than in any other year in history. It is now virtually impossible for Defendants to deny the occurrence of the issues charged herein. Any effort, by Defendants, to do so, would be viewed by the entire public constituency, and any Jury, to be a laughable attempt, by government lawyers, to further an overt cover-up of well-documented corruption. The funding of Plaintiff by one part of the Federal government was obsoleting Tesla Motors failed, toxic, explosive, child-labor-based, corrupt car company, which other corrupt Federal officials covertly OWNED! Those federal government officials used federal government resources (paid for by Plaintiff and other taxpayers) to attack and destroy Plaintiff because they had to CHEAT RATHER THAN COMPETE!
