The Department of Energy bragged about giving a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to SunPower, a politically connected solar energy company, to create “10-15 permanent jobs,” raising critical questions as to if California SunPower is the next Solyndra in the ongoing Crony-Gate scandal.

Unlike Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving the loan from the government leaving taxpayer on the hook, SunPower’s deal is more complicated.  Many questions are being raised about how the company was able to obtain the loan and what they did after they got the money.  Questions include:

• How could the Department of Energy give a loan to a company that was under a shareholder suit alleging securities fraud and misrepresentations?
• The son of Rep. George Miller (D-CA) who was paid $178,000 to lobby on behalf of the company represented SunPower as a lobbyist.  Why did Rep. George Miller tour the SunPower facility – which is outside his congressional district – and what other official action did Rep. Miller take on behalf of the company that is represented by his lobbyist son?
• Did the company’s hefty political contributions to the Obama campaign and the DCCC play a role in the deal?
• Did U.S. taxpayers help pay for the company to open a facility in Mexico after the announcement of the loan?
• Was the U.S. government aware that company executives were in the process of selling a portion of the company to a French company – an action that was undertaken two weeks after the loan was awarded?  Did the loan allow insider’s to cash out leaving other investors holding on to the stock that has dropped by more than 60% since the loan was awarded?

Questionable Finances

In 2009, a year before the DOE awarded the loan, investors in SunPower filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging SunPower and certain of the Company`s executive officers were in violation of federal securities laws.

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The Obama administration has cost so many Americans jobs, it’s a wonder more of those in it still have theirs. David Axelrod’s current job seems to be selling Obama’s jobs bill. But then, you can’t spell “jobs bill,” let alone sell it, without bs.

As the Senate prepares to vote on President Obama’s jobs bill, the Obama campaign released a memo by senior strategist David Axelrod that seems designed to give wavering senators reason to vote for the bill: it makes the case that “there is no Republican alternative that would create jobs now.”

Are Democrats poised to try and pass Obama’s jobs bill in pieces?

Senate Democrats are poised to bring Obama’s jobs bill to the floor for a vote Tuesday, but with passage facing long odds, party leaders may break the legislation into parts, hoping for greater success in smaller increments.

The AP has Romney in the hot seat for tonight’s debate. Perry has been moved over a seat in the arrangement to make room for Herman Cain. While more window dressing, than anything,  in  terms of the debate, it should prove interesting if a shift in the  current  race  dynamics shakes up anything in  addition  to the seating  arrangements. Stay  tuned.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — They’re coming to what is essentially his home turf — and they are ready to challenge Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney on the economy, the central issue to the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign.

Is this Perry’s now-or-never debate? If not,  it may be getting close. Bachmann is trying to assure supporters that her campaign isn’t floundering. Tough sell.

Uh-oh: Romney advisors met several times with White House staff during the debates over ObamaCare. Chances this topic comes up in tonight’s debate: 150%!

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Elizabeth Blackney discuss Michael Isikoff’s story detailing the relationship Romney’s team had with Barack Obama during the crafting of Obamacare, a brewing Romney crony capitalism scandal, and explore the buddy-buddy relationship Romney has with Herman Cain.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Michael Isikoff: White House used Mitt Romney health-care law as blueprint for federal law
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Perry Campaign: Romney’s Remedy
Romney’s distance from past decisions helps explain potency in current criticisms
Romney aide trades on political ties
Mitt Romney: Vote for me — or for Herman Cain

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Well, the hippies are still sleeping on the ground down by Wall Street, defecating who knows where, dragging their tarps from street corner to street corner and having sexual relations out in public. (I guess it’s kinda like Woodstock, minus the bad music.)

President Obama is still in their corner. He’s still trying to convince us that these freaks are simply giving voice to the “frustration” average Americans feel, while not admitting that these little socialists are the products of the very ideology and class-warfare that he’s been peddling under the guise of “hope and change” for three years now.

I wish he’d just come out and call them his comrades.

Now, enter Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain: he sees the hippies for what they are. Over the weekend he called them out for being “jealous’ Americans who “play the victim card” to get their hands on other people’s stuff.

Unlike Obama, Cain understands how business works: he knows what it’s like to work for living, to manage employees, and to have to make a profit. Thus he knows the only thing these dirty hippies are accomplishing is the destruction of someone’s bottom line.

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From HumanEvents:

How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project.

The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain.

Two men with insight into the process are SunPower rooter Rep. George R. Miller III, (D.-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee and the co-chairman of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and his SunPower lobbyist son, George Miller IV.

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From Reuters:

New York City’s securities industry could lose nearly 10,000 jobs by the end of 2012, according to a report by New York state’s comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the Wall Street Journal said.

In a report due for release on Tuesday DiNapoli also said bonuses were likely to shrink this year, reflecting lower profits on Wall Street, the WSJ reported.

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From MSNBC:

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”

The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

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Lisa Fithian, the anarchist who is organizing #OccupyWallSt “direct actions” with unions and Democrats across the country, addressed several hundred evidently brainwashed activists at their “General Assembly” in Chicago on October 10, 2011.

She described the coordination between “community-based organizations” and unions across the country in a “fall campaign,” and described the racial speech codes that #Occupy enforces at its meetings.

Fithian actually called for white men to speak first at meetings, in order to create a racial solidarity that can unite all of #Occupy’s disparate groups. [Update: It was apparently unclear, even to the activists, whether Fithian used the pronoun "they" to refer to white men, or to everyone else.]

The cult-like crowd repeated almost every word.

Transcript:

Hello Occupy Chicago!

Hello Occupy Chicago!

My name is Lisa.

My name is Lisa.

I was on Wall Street September 17th.

I was on Wall Street September 17th.

I’ve had the pleasure to be involved [in] OccupySanFrancisco, OccupyLA, OccupyDC, and now OccupyChicago!

[Cheers] (more…)

#OccupyChicago: thousands of anarchists, union members, and Democrats–and not one American flag.

Just like the Tea Party!

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) was on hand. She addressed a mob outside the Hyatt Regency Chicago, where some activists apparently attempted to disrupt a meeting of the Mortgage Bankers Association. She then led them in one of five feeder marchers that combined into a sea of pot-smoking, bongo-drumming, flea-infested dreadlock lunacy outside the Art Institute of Chicago.

We caught up with Jan, and asked for her thoughts on the patriotism of the protest, since we could not find one American flag in her parade of nearly 1000 liberal loons.

Cross-posted at RebelPundit. Follow @RebelPundit on Twitter.

As a Republican Mean Girl, I talk a lot about getting the government out of our day-to-day lives. Let us keep more of our own money to spend and stimulate the economy as we see fit. Don’t tell me what kind of health insurance to buy. Don’t force me to send my kids to a school based on my zip code instead of my choice.

As much as I don’t like the government meddling in my life, I recognize that it is a necessary evil to maintain a civilized society. There are legitimate functions of government, like law enforcement, that keep us from devolving into Lord of the Flies-like chaos.

Criminal justice is an important part of what makes America awesome. Your rights end where someone else’s begin, or, as my friend Jimmie Bise once succinctly put it, “My right to swing my fist through the air ends where your nose begins.” The police are there to (among other things) arrest the bad guys that violate other people’s rights to life, liberty, and property, thus keeping order in our communities.

So what happens when the police stop doing their job? We’re about to find out in Topeka, KS, where the city council has voted to stop prosecuting domestic violence cases because there’s just not enough money.

Seriously? Of all the ways to pinch pennies, we’re supposed to believe that leaving women vulnerable to abusive partners is the best option? There’s not another line in the budget that could be cut so that the police can do their job and protect Americans? This calls for The Google, my friends.

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From The Hill:

Democratic leaders in the Senate are scrambling to avoid defections on President Obama’s jobs package, which appears headed for defeat on Tuesday.

A lack of Democratic unity on the president’s bill would be embarrassing for the White House, which has been scolding House Republicans for refusing to vote on the measure.

Obama has been touring the country, aiming to put pressure on the GOP to act. But Senate Democrats have indicated they are feeling some heat. Last week, Democratic leaders revised Obama’s bill, scrapping his proposed offsets. Instead of raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 annually, Senate Democrats lifted that figure to $1 million.

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Congressional hucksters sold last year’s “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” as a pro-consumer effort to prevent future big bank bail-outs. The good news, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, is that Dodd-Frank expanded big government payrolls by nearly 3,000 new positions and seven new agencies. The bad news is the bill has destroyed 130,000 private sector jobs, will cost consumers $11 billion in fees, and is doing a fine job of creating a new American bank crisis.

The U.S. House and Senate took only 21 days to pass the Dodd-Frank Act. And it was signed into law by the President on July 21, 2010 as the largest overhaul of banking in our nation’s history. The massively complex Act is 2,300 pages long and a masterful piece of crony capitalism, which explains why Congress passed the bill before anyone could actually read it.

The public was deeply concerned by the rushed passage and has never been in favor of the legislation. A recent poll by FTI Consulting found that only 12 percent of the public were satisfied with bill, while 54% were dissatisfied. A large majority, 66%, believes the act is insufficient to protect against future bailouts. These opinion polls are about to go from concerned to downright angry as the public begins to learn how much pain they will suffer.

I estimate that the Dodd-Frank Act will cost banks in the United States $22 billion annually. Approximately one third of those losses will come from the “Durbin Amendment”, which was secretly inserted into the bill for the sole benefit of the merchandise retailing association. The language in the Act directs the Federal Reserve to set debit card swipe fees that “are reasonable and proportional to the cost incurred by the issuer.” Although this language looked innocent, it had the effect of cutting the $.44 per swipe fee banks receive to $.26 per swipe. When multiplied on the 180 million debit cards outstanding, the banks are required to transfer $7 billion of profit to the retailers. To survive crony meddling by Congress in their private industry affairs, the banks have no choice but to begin firing another 130,000 staff and directly charging consumers for their losses.

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It was a year and a half ago (May 17, 2010) when we first warned about Greece and hypothesized just how close France and the UK might be to the continental vortex we thought was in the process of spinning out of control. We also warned that we could expect the same result here if we persisted on pursuing the same economic model in the United States. Well, things have not improved.  Not there, and not here. Things have only gotten worse.

Greece is in violation of the covenants that were imposed as conditions of the first tranche of the bailout it received just last July. Italy just experienced a severe downgrading of its debt as did two of the three largest banks in France, with France’s largest bank having been placed on a negative watch list by the rating agencies. A major French/Belgian-owned bank is in a state of near collapse over its exposure to Greek debt as we write this. Concurrently, The Fed has embarked on what can be described as “QE 3 light” (…if at first — or second — you don’t succeed…), with Chairman Bernanke warning just last week that the US economy “is close to faltering.”

Let’s review the anatomy of the persistent and growing dilemma in Europe as well as the vacuous, if not clueless, approach the White House is pursuing to deal with our own deteriorating situation in the United States.

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Tonight, GOP candidates meet in New Hampshire for a debate sponsored by Bloomberg and The Washington Post. Still boggles our mind that the GOP is willing to let its enemies in the press orchestrate their vetting process.

Last week, Hank Williams Jr. was blindsided by ‘Fox & Friends’ hosts with a political question. (He was booked to talk about a new CD of his father’s music.) In his response, he made a similar analogy to one we’d suffered through from celebrities throughout the Bush Administration. For speaking against the regime, ESPN (!) removed him from its Monday Night Football pre-game segment. It was a one-week suspension, but Bocephus quit the show completely. He also recorded a new song about the incident, which you can download here.

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Every five years, the National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) conducts a “Census of Agriculture” that includes a snapshot of America’s black farmers–how many, average farm size, sales, etc. Since 2007 was the last year the census was conducted, election year 2012 will give us our next best picture of how agricultural communities generally and black farmers in particular are managing through the economic downturn.

Because the 2007 agriculture census was conducted before the economy began to slide, it is probably safe to say that what we think we know today may not necessarily be true when fresh data becomes available. At the time of the census, there was plenty of room for optimism, though.

The numbers showed that the U.S. farming and ranching population was becoming much more diverse and the number of black farmers and ranchers was on the upswing. Blacks have a history of small business entrepreneurialism in this country, and farming and ranching represent a natural entry point for them. Because their enterprises are smaller, however, economic shocks put them in a more precarious position financially.

Having grown up on a tobacco farm and worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I can tell you that the concerns that keep black farmers up at night are not unique and are shared by farmers of all stripes. Aside from some specific issues of discrimination, black farmers worry about access to capital, pray for a little luck with the weather, and wish for a more predictable regulatory environment. High levels of uncertainty translate into a lack of investments and lack of jobs on the farm, just as on Wall Street. (more…)

In light of the “Fast and Furious” fiasco, the Obama administration is embarrassing itself whenever it tries to convince the public that on issues like healthcare and immigration reform, the government is well equipped to ensure the safety of the American people.

Presently, a scandal surrounding the White House alleges that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) purposely allowed Mexican drug cartel gang members to gain possession of illegal weaponry on the US side of the border. Despite his denials, Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are suspected of knowing about the effort whose intent was to track gunrunning kingpins by way of a “tactic known as ‘letting guns walk.’”

Gun walking involved the feds standing by and doing nothing while weapons such as “an antiaircraft machine gun, a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher” were loaded into trunks by suspected Mexican straw purchasers.  The illegal acquisition of the weapons was overlooked, with the intent to use the guns as a pseudo-GPS system to track down and overtake dangerous Mexican drug cartels.

The problem is, those same guns eventually turned up at murder scenes alongside the bodies of two dead Border Patrol agents, Jamie Zapata and Brian Terry, not to mention the innumerable Mexicans killed in drug wars with guns smuggled in from Arizona.

In a letter to members of Congress, Eric Holder defended his lack of familiarity with the controversial undertaking, maintaining that he had “no recollection of knowing about the operation, called ‘Fast and Furious,’ or of hearing its name prior to the public controversy about it.”

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You may have seen the 10-minute video clip of U.S. Rep. John Lewis‘ unsuccessful attempt to address the ‘Occupy Atlanta’ crowd, but did you notice the self-proclaimed “Teamsters Union Thug” apparently from the Jimmy Hoffa’s army Division.  Is this really why congress and FDR gave union’s the power to force people to pay tributes to union bosses in order to get or keep a job?