RAPED BY WASHINGTON: A TECHNOLOGY TALE
XYZ Company (not their actual name) was one of many, solicited by the U.S. Government to help America create new jobs, national security enhancements and new energy options.
In the process, XYZ experienced, within the highest levels of Washington, DC: fraud, lies, organized crime, hit-jobs and an epic abuse of the public trust. They saw the theft of taxpayer dollars, by federal officials and corrupt campaign billionaires.
This is their story.
Like the others, who experienced the same abuse, they are a team of engineers. They are the kinds of folks who invent and build “the next big thing”. They have received decades of issued patents, awards, contracts with famous clients, and been on TV for their accomplishments. They had a huge stack of reference letters, and customer orders, that they personally hand-delivered to top Washington, DC officials to show the market demand for what they were to work on. They received a Congressional Commendation in the Iraq War Bill. They had “street cred”. Popular Science, NPR and Network news applauded them.
In XYZ’s case, The U. S. Government asked them to deliver “the next big thing”. Unfortunately for XYZ, their technology threatened to put a rigged multi-billion dollar, insider, criminal commodity scam, set up by corrupt senators and Silicon Valley campaign financiers, out of business.
XYZ did not know this, when everything began.
XYZ, and their peers, witnessed White House staff, Department of Energy officers, U.S. Senators and sociopathic Silicon Valley billionaires, engage in crimes with impunity, audacity and a complete disregard for ethics.
They, and staff from Bright Automotive, ZAP Automotive, Fischer, Aptera, Elio, Eco Motors, and many, many, other companies, were encouraged to spend extensive amounts of their time, and money, on what, they were all told by top State and Federal officials, was a sure thing. They did not realize that they were all playing against a rigged deck that had been “hard-wired” for a few campaign financiers, from the very start. They had their dreams, companies, life savings (And maybe some of their peers) killed off by a Corrupt program operated by the heads of the Department of Energy, under the direction of senior White House officials.
There was more than enough money to fund all of the applicants – so there was no possibility of the fund running out of money. Any excuses about “not enough money” by Steven Chu, and his staff, have been shown to have been lies in order to protect the Silicon Valley Cartel from having any competitors. There are still unspent billions of dollars sitting in the fund, half a decade later.
All of those applicants, in the top-tier final-round groups, had exceeded the technical, and financial, qualifications by many magnitudes, beating Tesla, Solyndra and Fisker many times over. Any excuses about “not being technically qualified”, by Steven Chu, and his staff, have been shown to have been lies, in order to protect the Silicon Valley Cartel from having any competitors. Evidence now shows that Chu had his staff, and contractors: McKinsey, Argonne Labs, Deloitte and IBM Consulting, rig the review process to favor campaign financiers stock and sabotage their competitors.
In one case, Steven Chu told an electric car company, which competed with Silicon Valley campaign financiers, that they were disqualified because they had not planned to use enough gasoline!!!! Rejections by Chu and his staff got even more ludicrous from there.
Most of Chu’s picks failed. They went bankrupt, got raided by law enforcement, and were investigated for stock manipulation fraud, lied on their financial reports and were all connected to the same campaign financiers. Funny coincidence.
In fact, news analysts always asked why Chu didn’t spread the risk by awarding even a single funding approval to any company who was not one of his business associates holdings? Energy Secretary Moniz, known around Washington as “Chu Too”, still, laughingly, orders the Department of Energy press office to send out monthly stories proclaiming the Green Energy CleanTech program “not that big of a failure”. That cover-up pitch has worn so thin that the media now responds with overt derision and belly laughs. The Department of Energy Program has now set the world record, (for all of recorded history to date) for government funding for the most failures, in the shortest timeframe, with the biggest taxpayer losses in history!
History has also proven that the Department of Energy only awarded funds to Silicon Valley campaign financier-approved holdings, and sabotaged any other applicant, particularly any that competed with John Doerr, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jurvetson and the “Silicon Valley Cartel” of campaign purchasers.
The entire Department of Energy ATVM and LGP funding programs, and a portion of the TARP program was used to pay kick-backs to campaign finance billionaires.
It turned out that XYZ technology had put Steven Chu’s, Diane Feinstein’s, Harry Reid’s and White House Staff’s personal stock profits at risk (A criminal, and moral, conflict of interest in the first pla
ce). Those people, and their backers, had rigged the funding for the lithium battery and indium solar chemicals in which they controlled the profit stream. They didn’t like any technology which showed up the failures of the monopolized mineral mining deals they had picked, so they sabotaged every other energy technology.
Unfortunately, they picked the wrong horse. Lithium blows up when it gets wet. Millions of dollars of millionaire wet-dream Fisker sports cars turned into piles of ash, in spectacular fireballs of destruction, when they got damp from storms. Lithium explodes, on its own, spontaneously, for no apparent reason. Aircraft have crashed because their lithium batteries turned into fireballs, killing the crew. Boeing lost vast amounts of money when it had to redo its lithium batteries because they kept igniting. Tesla’s burst into flames from bumps in the road. A recent Tesla crash killed the driver and burned him into an unrecognizable lump. Getting the lithium from Bolivia and Afghanistan has gotten quite a lot of people killed, including U.S. soldiers. To get it, you need to invade another country. The mining deals, to process the lithium minerals are under investigation for their connections to the Russian mafia and Goldman Sachs criminal commodity market manipulation. When lithium “goes thermal”, in its daily fire incidents around the world, it releases toxic vapors which have been proven to cause brain damage, lung damage, liver damage, fetal damage and neurological toxicity. The “we smell smoke” issues, in many trains and planes, is often someone’s lithium ion cell phone battery going off. Lithium battery fires have set children, senior citizens, homes and offices on fire. Tesla lithium battery partner: Panasonic, is under global investigation for corruption. Lithium battery factories poison the workers, and nearby villages, to death.
While Chu’s Silicon Valley financiers joined up with Goldman Sach’s to flood Washington, and Wall Street, with articles saying that “Afghanistan is the Saudi Arabia of lithium” and “Trillions of dollars of lithium in Afghanistan for the taking”… the pitch turned out to be a poorly researched scam to try to get jobs for Russian mining companies. Many, now feel, that Russians may have trumped up the pitch about what a sweet deal “taking over Afghanistan” was. Main stream news report that the U.S. loss from Afghanistan, to U.S. taxpayers as of today, is six trillion dollars, and climbing. Chu’s handover of federal cash to so many Russian owned, Silicon Valley-partnered, companies with investors who are now on FBI “Watch-Lists” raises many eyebrows. While Kleiner Perkin’s “Troll farms” flood the internet with “Elon Musk is a Genius”, “Oil Sucks”, “Batteries are Good” spam, the public has gotten wise to the grift.
So: Yah, that whole lithium thing may not have been thought out very well.
Of course the same mining deals, and monopoly skims, applied to indium. The mining chemical that, now fiasco’d, Solyndra and Abound Solar needed. The FBI and law enforcement shut them down and they are still being reviewed for embezzlement and kick-backs. The Solyndra disaster was particularly painful for Senator Feinstein’s family who owned the stock, employment service, leases, real estate contracts, supplier holdings, construction company and other kick-back “perks” for both Solyndra and Tesla.
So the Silicon Valley scam of “monopolize-one-energy-chemical” thing was a bust and the whole lithium thing blew up, literally.
Steven Chu and the Silicon Valley billionaires hate oil, but they didn’t hate it enough to not try to copy it. They thought: ‘the oil companies have this one chemical, called petroleum, we will get us one chemical and control it, and kill oil, and be all ‘not oil’. They saw the “treasure maps” about the “trillions of dollars” of these mining chemicals and wanted those trillions in their pockets. They were willing to do anything to get it.
Science doesn’t work like that.
Greed overcame technical reality, and the great “Cleantech” rush turned into the “Cleantech Crash” (Per the 60 Minutes tv show).
To keep XYZ out of the funding, and prevent them from competing with the campaign financiers. Chu first said, in a recorded conversation, he would waive the fee he was going to charge them (Federal lawyers question the legality of charging citizens for federal awards in the first place). Then he assigned his top staffer to respond to them to give feedback to their investors who were loaning the money to pay that “fee”. The staffer promised, in writing, to respond. XYZ called him, faxed, him, Fed-ex’d him and messenger’d him and he never got back to XYZ with the critical information the investors needed in order to release the funds for the “fee”. His secretary, on multiple occasions, even stated that he was “in the next office and would get right back to you”.
The day after the deadline for the “fee”, Steven Chu’s top staffer finally responded, in writing, and said, “oh, you missed the deadline” , “you are out of the program”. He had intentionally waited until after the arbitrary deadline in order to cut off the XYZ application. Alas, for DOE, XYZ had another application in process, and that one became part of a federal crime investigation that brought down some of the biggest names in politics.
XYZ, and the other applicants, experienced huge numbers of lies, misrepresentations, manipulations, “missing hard-drives”, “lost” documents, stone-walling and actual attacks.
Because they filed a complaint, the Campaign Financiers, and, likely, White House staff, hired their associated front groups: Gawker Media, Media Matters, Google and In-Q-Tel to run retribution hit-jobs on those who complained
One company, in the same boat, published this damning letter in the media:
Secretary Steven Chu
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D.C.
Dear Secretary Chu,
Today Bright Automotive, Inc will withdraw its application for a loan under the ATVM program administered by your department. Bright has not been explicitly rejected by the DOE; rather, we have been forced to say “uncle”. As a result, we are winding down our operations. Last week we received the fourth “near final” Conditional Commitment Letter since September 2010. Each new letter arrived with more onerous terms than the last. The first three were workable for us, but the last was so outlandish that most rational and objective persons would likely conclude that your team was negotiating in bad faith. We hope that as their Secretary, this was not at your urging. The actions – or better said “lack of action” — by your team means hundreds of great manufacturing and technical jobs, union and non-union alike, and thousands of indirect jobs in Indiana and Michigan will not see the light of day. It means our product, the Bright IDEA plug-in hybrid electric commercial vehicle, will not provide the lowest total cost of ownership for our commercial and government fleet customers, saving millions of barrels of oil each year. It means turning your back on a bona fide step forward in our national goal to wean America away from our addiction to foreign oil and its implications on national security and our economic strength. In good faith we entered the ATVM process, approved under President Bush with bi-partisan Congressional approval, in December of 2008. At that time, our application was deemed “substantially complete.”
As of today, we have been in the “due diligence” process for more than 1175 days. That is a record for which no one can be proud. We were told by the DOE in August of 2010 that Bright would get the ATVM loan “within weeks, not months” after we formed a strategic partnership with General Motors as the DOE had urged us to do. We lined up and agreed to private capital commitments exceeding $200M – a far greater percentage than previous DOE loan applicants. Finally, we signed definitive agreements with state-of-the-art manufacturer AM General that would have employed more than 400 union workers in Indiana in a facility that recently laid-off 350 workers. Each time your team asked for another new requirement, we delivered with speed and excellence. Then, we waited and waited; staying in this process for as long as we could after repeated, yet unmet promises by government bureaucrats. We continued to play by the rules, even as you and your team were changing those rules constantly – seemingly on a whim. Because of ATVM’s distortion of U.S. private equity markets, the only opportunities for 100 percent private equity markets are abroad. We made it clear we were an American company, with American workers developing advanced, deliverable and clean American technology.
We unfortunately did not aggressively pursue an alternative funding path in China as early as we would have liked based on our understanding of where we were in the DOE process. I guess we have only ourselves to blame for having faith in the words and promises of our government officials. The Chairman of a Fortune 10 company told your former deputy, Jonathan Silver, that this program “lacked integrity”; that is, it did not have a consistent process and rules against which private enterprises could rationally evaluate their chances and intelligently allocate time and resources against that process. There can be no greater failing of government than to not have integrity when dealing with its taxpaying citizens. It does not give us any solace that we are not alone in the debacle of the ATVM process. ATVM has executed under $50 million of transactions since October of 2009. Going back to the creation of the program, only about $8 billion of the approved $25 billion has been invested. In the meantime, countless hours, efforts and millions of dollars have been put forth by a multitude of strong entrepreneurial teams and some of the largest players in the industry to advance your articulated goal of advancing the technical strength and clean energy breakthroughs of the American automotive industry. These collective efforts have been in vain as the program failed to finance both large existing companies and younger emerging ones alike. Our vehicle would have been critical to meet President Obama’s stated goal of one million plugin electric vehicles on the road in 2015 and his commitment to buy 100 percent alternative fueled vehicles for the Federal Fleet. So, we are not the only ones who will be disappointed. The ineffectiveness of the DOE to execute its program harms commercial enterprise as it not only interfered with the capital markets; it placed American companies at the whim of approval by a group of bureaucrats. Today at your own ARPA-E conference, Fred Smith, the remarkable leader of FedEx, made the compelling case to reduce our dependence on oil; a product whose price is manipulated by a cartel which has caused the greatest wealth transfer in our history from the pockets of working people and businesses to countries, many of whom are not our allies.
And yet, having in hand a tremendous tool for progress in this critically strategic battle — a tool that drew the country’s best to your door — you failed not only in the deployment of funds from ATVM but in dissipating these efforts against not just false hope, but false words. For us, this is a particularly sad day for our employees and their families, as well as the employees and families of our partners. We asked our team members on countless occasions to work literally around the clock whenever yet another new DOE requirement came down the pike, so that we could respond swiftly and accurately. And, we always did.
Sincerely,
Reuben Munger
Mike Donoughe
CEO, COO
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Of course the Department of Energy got sued, for running a corruption operation, by applicant’s trying to gain a modicum of justice and get their damages covered. All of those applicants discovered that the news head-lines about: “no justice left in America”, may be true. In one lawsuit the feds dismissed the case because, according to the court, there is no law that prevents the Department of Energy from engaging in corruption. Nice!
No law enforcement, or regulatory entity, at the State or Federal level, seems to want to upset the pig trough of kick-backs and corruption. It is hard for the FBI, or the SEC, to stomach putting their own bosses in jail.
XYZ had the customers, the factories, the suppliers, the jobs and every advantage. So did all of the hundreds of other domestic companies, that experienced these attacks and manipulations. But Japanese and Russian companies got some of the cash because they were partners with the Silicon Valley campaign financiers and those campaign financiers, directly, got handed the rest of the money that went out.
In Tesla’s (Solyndra’s financial and real estate sister) case, the “fee” was entirely waived for Tesla. Even though Tesla had the worst debt-ratio of any applicant; horrible credit ratings per Treasury; no design; inaccurate price models; a BOM that was $100K over budget per car; no factory; lawsuits with it’s founders, exploding batteries, many technical problems, no experience and few customers; to mention only some of the vast numbers of red flags; Tesla was hand-held through Steven Chu’s program and handed cash without any questions. Major papers have recently outed Elon Musk as the biggest taker of government kick-backs in history: over $6 Billion of “payola” from taxpayer’s pocket’s to billionaire Musk’s bank vaults, protected from investigation, at the highest levels.
So, it didn’t hurt that Steven Chu was nominated, and placed in Office, by Tesla’s owners and investors.
Every single item of technology that XYZ, and the sabotaged applicants, built; worked. The big players, that Steven Chu funded, copied them and now sell copies of their products globally, proving that they work. They, laughingly, tell the applicants they stole from to “sue them if you think you can afford the millions of dollars of legal expenses” to go after a Kleiner Perkins, Google or the rest.
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This article shows how the Senator, or Secretary of Energy, that shakes your hand, is picking your pocket with his other hand:
Small businesses claim US government stealing their ideas
By Eric Shawn
Feds putting companies out of business?
“They stole all my stuff and used taxpayer money to do it,” John Hnatio, a Maryland small business owner, says of the U.S. government.
Hnatio claims the government has put his company, FoodquestTQ, nearly out of business by stealing his firm’s software that was designed to be licensed to the Food and Drug Administration to monitor food safety.
The FDA “took our ideas, plagiarized my doctoral dissertation on which a patent was based, and then they infringed on our patent. The result was that it decimated our business,” he adds.
Hnatio says his company has been left hanging by a thread. He has had to fire employees and says that the remaining three, including himself, are receiving no salary and have been forced to go on unemployment insurance.
“I have never seen anything like it,” says Hnatio, who is a retired federal government official.
He says the FDA “duplicated exactly what we were selling to industry and they were giving it away for free…instead of helping small business commercialize their product, what we are seeing is a dragon, in the name of the U.S. government that is eating their own young.”
FoodquestTQ is only one of numerous small businesses that accuse the government of stealing their intellectual property or trade secrets when they enter into contracts or research agreements with federal agencies.
“The government interceded, stole the technology and attempted to use this in classified programs,” says Jim O’Keefe, the president of the small New Jersey technology company Demodulation. He has filed a $50 million lawsuit against the U.S. government, accusing it of taking his firm’s research.
Demodulation developed an advanced technology involving fiber coated wire, called microwire, which is thinner than a human hair. The company says its microwire can be used for a variety of national security applications, such as tracking drones, keeping tabs on soldiers on battlefields, transmitting information without a power source, and that it even has the ability “to render objects invisible to radar.”
“It sounds incredible and impossible that the U.S. government is taking things from people,” says Demodulation lawyer Sean Callagy. “We believe this is the greatest country in the world with the greatest justice system in the world but the U.S. government is not an eagle or a flag, but human beings. And human beings make mistakes.”
The lawsuit accuses the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others, of illegally swiping the firm’s information by “using microwire and Demodulation’s trade secrets in its mission to gather intelligence.”
It also says that the U.S. has even built “a secure facility for the production of microwire” on its own.
“There are classified reports showing the technology,” declares Demodulation attorney Ben Light, who says that after the company “shared the secret sauce” about microwire with federal officials, they simply “took (the) wire.”
The Department of Energy referred Fox News’ requests for comment to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which did not respond to repeated requests for a comment about the company’s allegations.
The Department of Justice denies Demodulation’s charges in court filings.
Stuart Delery, an Acting Assistant Attorney General, wrote that while “the United States admits that it continues to conduct research regarding what is generally known as ‘microwire,” he says that the government did not act improperly.
The Department of Justice claims the government did not take any proprietary information or develop the microwire technology based on Demodulation’s work, and that “none of the asserted patents have been infringed on by the United States.”
Delery also pointed out that some of Demodulation’s patents had expired.
“The only reason the patents expired is because Demodulation was driven out of business,” responds the firm’s lawyer, Light. “It doesn’t affect the entire case because any infringement during the period when the patents were enforced is still compensable.”
O’Keefe
says the government denials are “an impossibility based on the evidence I have.”
He is calling for “reform and legislation to protect us. I hope through our litigation we will be able to expose some of the problems.”
It turns out that the government is routinely accused of similar wrongdoing and sometimes has to pony up.
The U.S. Army settled a case in November by paying $50 million to a Texas company, Apptricity, which claimed the government took some of its software, which tracks military equipment from MRE’s to troops, without paying for it.
The company’s court papers said that the government “willfully infringed” on its copyrights, “failed to provide information” about what it did and was engaged in “actively concealing the Army’s misappropriation of Apptricity software.”
The complaint said the Army paid for using the software on five servers and 150 devices, but actually “copied and installed Apptricity software on at least 98 servers and at least 9,063 devices” without telling the company.
“I don’t think there was malicious intent,” Apptricity’s founder and president Tim Garcia tells Fox News in the aftermath of the settlement. He says his company pursued its case by the “standard process through the Court of Claims.”
There are numerous other companies that have filed similar actions at the Washington, D.C.-based court, which is the venue for legal claims against the federal government. Among them:
Liberty Ammunition, which is suing the government for allegedly infringing on its copyright for developing a lead-free “green bullet” after it worked on the invention with the Department of Defense.
Net Results, which claims that the Army infringed on its patent for a “mine detecting device” by giving out its design to six other government contractors.
In 2009, NASA was ordered to pay $28.3 million to Boeing after the court found that the government infringed on the company’s aluminum alloy patent.
In a noted case in 1999, the U.S. government paid then Hughes Electronics $154 million in damages after a 30- year long legal battle found that the government illegally appropriated the company’s satellite technology.
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims calls itself “the people’s court,” and says it is considered “the keeper of the nation’s conscience.” It is situated right across Lafayette Park from the White House.
“There is no reason to think it can’t happen,” observes New York University law Professor Jeanne Fromer, an intellectual property and copyright law specialist.
“The government can take patent rights, as long as they compensate for it. It is not dissimilar, in that sense, to notions of eminent domain.”
“The government is a big sprawling place and there are lots of people acting in it. I think some of them act very nobly…but it’s hard to say that everyone always does.”
“We are hearing more frequently from companies about intellectual property theft by the government,” notes John Palatiello, head of the Washington, D.C.- area lobbying group, the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, which is studying the issue.
“Companies are becoming more vocal about it.”
Hnatio believes there is a troubling explanation for alleged government flinching.
“What we are seeing is a direct competition between the private sector and the U.S. government. The problem for small businesses is that they are simply being destroyed by their own government in spite of the fact that we hear politicians say all the time, that small business is important…it’s extremely disturbing because it means we lose jobs, and it means we lose our competitive edge in the world. It creates a very dangerous situation for our national security.”
Fox News repeatedly requested comment from the FDA regarding Hnatio’s allegations about FoodquestTQ, but the agency did not issue a statement.
While the Demodulation case is expected to go to trial next year, Hnatio says he has been left without any money to hire a lawyer to go to court.
“From the time I was a little kid I dreamed of starting a business. But I do have to tell you that there is a grave danger to the American dream,” he says.
Follow Eric Shawn on Twitter: @EricShawnonFox
Becky Diamond contributed to this report.
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One of the Cleantech peers was a fellow named Gary D. Conley. He blew the whistle on Solyndra and Tesla and was later found with a bullet in his head behind Beale Air Force base in Northern California. That was always a disturbing item
. Do crazy Silicon Valley billionaires really do mobster things? Type: “Silicon Valley Cartel” and take a look. There have been over 80 CleanTech-connected investment bankers, reporters and technicians who took “the big sleep” in mysterious and unexpected ways during the Cleantech Crash. Many of them must have seen their “trillion dollars” suddenly vaporize and headed for the window…the rest?.., Hard to tell, yet…
Between then, and now, some interesting and unexpected things happened:
The Solyndra FBI raid; The Snowden/Assange/Guccifer leakers revealed that every corrupt politician since 9/11 has been surveilled and recorded doing all of their dirty deeds; The Chinese and Russians broke into the CIA, White House, Federal Records and Sony and grabbed all of the documents that show who was really in bed with whom; The GOP took over Congress; The Age of Transparency went full boogie and some of the biggest political names at the White House, NHTSA, DOJ, IRS, DOE, and other agencies, suddenly resigned to “spend more time with their families (It was because they got caught in the Cleantech Crash investigations, actually); The West lost control of the Middle East; Main stream print-news died and digital online independent news sprang to life; The Lois Lerner case proved that the White House uses federal agencies to put hit-jobs on U.S. Citizens that it does not like; The rest of the world began taking the internet away from Silicon Valley; Even Bill Cosby imploded; and more shockers seem to pop up daily…
We appear to live in a new world where things done in the dark, always come to light.
XYZ set out to serve their country, help out with the economy and make something cool and exciting.
What they got was ripped off, attacked, and punished for doing what the American Dream said they were supposed to do. Over 80 of their peers were targeted, and terminated, because they dared to build something better than the Silicon Valley campaign financiers.
In an ironic twist of fate, Russian and Chinese lawyers are now offering to front the costs of suing Elon Musk, John Doerr and Eric Schmidt for RICO Racketeering, fraud and infringement… hmmmmmm? This could get interesting.
This is a cautionary tale for voters everywhere. You have inherited an America with a Washington DC run amuck with corruption. The District of Columbia represents Goldman Sachs and six dot com billionaires, and not you!
You get a chance to change that in 2016. Will you go for the chump or the champ this time?
(This story includes authorships from ZAP Motors Staff, Bright Automotive Staff, Eric Shawn, Carol Leonning, Dave Lessons, Washington Post, Fox News, LA Times, and Susan Alexander. For updates, see http://www.xyzcase.com )