Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, who is also a Breitbart editor, reveals the full extent of the DOE scandal in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out. The book is featured in this week’s Newsweek, and was the subject of 60 Minutes this past Sunday, Nov. 13.

Schweizer’s research reveals that of the $20.5 billion in the DOE’s 1705 Loan Guarantee Program, $16.4 billion in taxpayer money–roughly 80% of all loans in the program–went to green enterprises “either run by or heavily owned by Obama financial backers–individuals who were either bundlers, members of Obama’s national finance committee or large donors to the Democratic Party.”

In 2009, President Obama had promised that the allocation of all federal stimulus monies would be nonpartisan, ethical, and fair. “Let me repeat that: Decisions about how Recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists,” Obama said.

However, Schweizer alleges, the Obama administration may be guilty of “the greatest–and most expensive–example of crony capitalism in American history.”

The details of how the DOE loan scheme was apparently conducted are almost as shocking as the billions bagged by Obama’s backers.

Instead of appointing a team of scientists or engineers to direct the DOE’s loan program office, Schweizer contends, the Obama administration placed some of the president’s biggest fundraisers in control. For example, Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was himself a top bundler, was tapped as the “chief strategic operations officer” for the DOE’s loan programs. Spinner was joined at DOE by another Obama fundraiser, Sanjay Wagle, and by Democrat donor Jonathan Silver, who would serve as executive director of the program.

With the scientists and engineers effectively out of the way, and the President’s top backers at the levers of the DOE’s loan program, the Obama administration was able to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars back to green energy companies associated with the President’s political and financial patrons.

For members of Obama’s national finance committee, the returns on investing in Obama’s 2008 campaign were incredibly lucrative, according to Schweizer. For every dollar committee members raised, they received $24,783 in return in the form of DOE sweetheart loans, on average.

Other top winners in the Obama campaign donor giveaway included several familiar billionaires. For example, a company indirectly owned in part by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the founders of Google (Sergei Brin and Larry Page) landed a loan almost three times as large as the Solyndra loan, at $1.4 billion. And Ted Turner and Paul Tudor Jones snagged a jaw-dropping $4.7 billion loan for their green company, First Solar–a sum almost nine times as big as the controversial loan given to Fisker Automotive.

The Government Accountability Office red-flagged this apparent–and historic–pattern of crony capitalism in its March 2011 report, which found that the DOE’s loan and grant programs had doled out federal monies through a process that appeared “arbitrary,” lacked proper documentation, and that “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.”

In Throw Them All Out, Schweizer writes that untangling and uncovering every instance of Obama’s crony capitalism would “take a large team of investigative reporters.” Moreover, according to Schweizer, despite the fact that some successful companies were among the beneficiaries, the DOE loans and grants appear to have failed to create any significant short-term job gains.

“The true short-term effect of this money,” Schweizer concludes, “has been to enrich cronies of the party in power.”

Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) with Indie Energy Systems Co., LLC, Aug. 18, 2010

The company, Indie Energy Systems Co., LLC, is located in Evanston, IL. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, it was previously a “stealth” company, relying on loans from ShoreBank and other investors to stay afloat. The $2.5 million stimulus grant brought Indie Energy out of the shadows, and into the world of big government. The money for the new heating system at the union HQ created “13.78” jobs, according to Recovery.gov, at an average cost of $181,422 per job–though it was supposed to “create and preserve 51 jobs,” according to the official description of the project.

The International Union of Operating Engineers is the biggest contributor to the re-election campaign of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), giving the Political Action Committee maximum of $10,000 for the 2010 primary and general elections. Interestingly, the union gave its contribution in March 2009, shortly after the stimulus was passed last February. That suggests a quid-pro-quo could have occurred, with Indie Energy used as the conduit.

[UPDATE: Local 150 makes its political contribution decisions independently of the national organization’s Political Action Committee, to which Local 150 also contributes.]

Yesterday, Schakowsky visited another Indie Energy project, this one located on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University. She touted the company as “an innovative small business that can help grow our country’s evolving clean energy economy.” She neglected to mention its connection to the union heating project, its links to ShoreBank, or its heavy reliance on federal stimulus funds. Nor did she explain how the benefit of $2.5 million in federal funds found its way to her biggest contributor.

Small, high-tech startup businesses like Indie Energy are precisely the kind of enterprises that need to grow and succeed in order to drive innovation and job creation. Yet if they remain dependent on big government largesse, they will fail–and so will our economic recovery.

Last year, President Obama promised to focus “every single day” on getting Americans back to work:

“My commitment to you, the American people, is that I will focus every single day on how we can get people back to work, and how we can build an economy that continues to make real the promise of America for generations to come.”

Of course, today the President seemed to take a mulligan on his jobs’ vigil, opting instead to do a taping of “The View” and attending a few fundraisers in NYC.  But not to worry, just yesterday, one of the President’s staunchest allies, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) introduced legislation to amend the Stimulus legislation to promote an obviously important component of sustained economic growth:

By Mr. CLYBURN:

H.R. 5878. A bill to amend the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to make funds and tax benefit available to assist job creation and workforce diversification in the golf industry, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Ways and Means, and in addition to the Committee on Education and Labor, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.

Of course, in a certain way, this makes perfect sense.

From the blog White House Dossier:

President Barack Obama has played a remarkable 41 rounds of golf since becoming president, easily outpacing his predecessor and possibly damaging his ability to portray himself in 2012 as a populist advocate of average folks.

With the excursions lasting on average at least five hours, the president has devoted a total of more than 200 hours to golf, not counting time spent on the White House putting green. That’s the equivalent of twenty five eight-hour work days, or five work weeks spent smacking golf balls.

The former community organizer’s 41 trips around the links – a standard of recreational activity well beyond the budgets of most Americans – compares to only 24 total outings for former President George W. Bush, according to statistics compiled by White House chronicler Mark Knoller of CBS News. Bush, whose golf outings were used to help deride him as a callow, lazy, rich boy, played his 24th and last round on Oct. 13, 2003, saying he was ending the practice out of respect for the families of Americans killed in Iraq.

Since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 rig workers and started the Gulf oil spill, Obama has teed up seven times, according to White House Dossier’s count. This includes back to back sessions April 23 and 24 while on vacation at the Grove Park Resort & Spa in Asheville, NC, just days after the crisis began.

Now, here I had thought these golf outings were simply a little recreational break for the First Golfer. It looks like there were actually some kind of economic fact-finding missions. Having immersed himself in the nation’s golfing sector, he’s ready to mobilize the federal government and do whatever it is that sector needs. I guess Obama really meant it when he said he would focus “every single day” on creating jobs… even while golfing!

When I realized that this week is the 30th Anniversary of this, well…let’s just say I bow to the One’s brilliance.

Rep. John Olver

Now here comes crowded Republican primaries for Massachusetts’s other congressional races. Many of these candidates will lose, but by running they will give their opponents the first real race many of them have seen in decades and they will give new life to an endangered species, the Massachusetts Republican.

This is all part of a transition, moving the people of Massachusetts and their politics back to the middle, back to better representation.

For the Massachusetts congressional delegation, times are tough. Demographic change has meant that their numbers have shrunk to ten members, the lowest for the Bay State since the 1860s. If Republicans retake the House, the people of the Commonwealth will be all but shut out of congressional policy. With Ted Kennedy dead and no one left to direct the delegation, the congressmen will make for easy pickings, despite their considerable warchests amassed over the years. Here’s an assessment of the perceived vulnerabilities of John Olver (MA-1) that Republicans might exploit, moving his congressional district closer to the accountable government we’ve been looking for, and saving the people of Massachusetts much embarrassment once Republicans retake the Congress.

The Boston Globe reported just some of his earmarks, August 7, 2007:

Olver’s earmarks include $6 million for improvements to the Fitchburg-to-Boston rail line; $1 million for downtown streetscapes in Pittsfield; $150,000 for repairs to the William Cullen Bryant homestead, a national historic landmark, in Cummington; $275,000 to renovate the Berkshire Music Hall; and $1.5 million for the Silvio Conte Wildlife Refuge. Each of these expenditures is important to somebody.

Oh, but that’s not all. Olver spent some $45,000 in taxpayer dollars on mailings to his constituents, through franking, bragging about his “successes”. The Boston Herald reports:

Olver, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, sent out one newsletter with a two-page glossy map of his district showing about 30 projects the panel funded “at my request.”

The map noted $3.5 million in federal earmarked funds for Pioneer Valley bike paths, $13.4 million for Route 2 safety improvements and $8.8 million for the Pittsfield Intermodal Transportation Center.

Whether or not these earmarks generate jobs or cause instability for much needed projects as people look to goverment, not business to provide investment, is another question as his district has been hit hard by the recession, with few jobs to show for his support of the so-called stimulus bill. If Olver were to be defeated, his twenty-two staffers would have to find other work. (The national average for congressmen is only 14.) The current bill for their salaries? Some $904,000 a year!

Never a boondoggle too big for him to want to get federal funds for — Amtrak and a $4 million planned train project rank among them — the transportation unions love him, which explains their hefty contributions at some $36,500 in 2010 alone. John Olver is quick to give them payback. In 2004, he gave them a much-needed amendment when he sponsored a bill that placed additional hurdles on foreign-made trucks entering the U.S. from Mexico or Canada, delaying implementation of NAFTA, and giving a big boon to the Teamsters Union. Not for nothing does Manuel “Matty” Moroun, billionaire-owner of the Ambassador Bridge over Detroit River, been known to throw money his way, when Moroun isn’t fighting tooth and nail to stop a rival bridge from being built,

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Democratic Rep. John Olver of Massachusetts, the bill’s author, rose to stake Pittsfield’s claim, based on the recent discovery of a 1791 Pittsfield law banning “Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls” near the town’s new meetinghouse.

“Even back in 1791, youths were already breaking windows playing America’s favorite national pastime,” Rep. Olver said. “With that, the first mention of baseball was penned into history.”

Massachusetts voters in the first congressional district may hope to pen Olver’s name into history, especially after revelations that he received a corporation-sponsored junket to Hawaii to study, well, aviation at a pristine beach with the American Association of Airport Executives picking up the $6000 tab. Here’s how he described the trip to The Wall Street Journal in 2005:

Rep. John Olver (D., Mass.) says the trip to Hawaii helped him learn more about the aviation industry and how policy made in Washington affects airlines, airport operators and labor unions. “You got the whole picture all at once,” says Rep. Olver, the top Democrat on the committee that funds aviation projects. “I feel that it was a pretty useful thing. In a discussion, you would get several different points of view.”

Uh huh. Like maybe which beaches to enjoy, eh congressman? I’m sure it was only a coincidence that your House panel offered to increase the hugely inefficient Essential Air Service subsidy up to $130 million, a federal program which wasteful subsidizes airports in the boonies up to $74 a passenger.

Air transport isn’t the whole thing near and dear to Congressman Olver. Amtrak has a special place in Olver’s heart. When President Bush threatened to eliminate subsidies to Amtrack, he went after Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. “Do you know,” he asked repeatedly, “of any transit system or a rail passenger system anywhere else in the world that breaks even or makes money?”

A fair point — as Reason.tv’s latest video makes clear, but maybe we ought be building roads, instead?

Olver’s weirdest vote, though, has to be his no vote on a federal ban for reimbursements for sexual-enhancement drugs, like Viagra, after revelations came out that some 800 sex offenders received Medicaid-funded payments for the drug.

Republicans may well fail to take this seat and it’s likely that the seat itself will get cut up once the 2010 census is completed and Massachusetts loses yet another congressional seat. Should Olver retire, he’ll get both a federal and state pension from his years as a UMass Amherst chemistry professor. Indeed, Olver’s been on the state payroll since November 1992, and currently collects $2,263.21 a month, which works out to $27,158 per annum.

Still John Olver’s opponents would do well to seize on how his big government liberalism has made the Bay State impossible to live in. A new study found that a single mother of two needs an income of 62,000 a year just to get by. Olver hasn’t made it any easier. He supports the trillion dollar new health care entitlement at a time when Massachusetts’s health care premiums are the second highest in the nation and Gov. Deval Patrick plans to do price controls. Scott Brown promised to send health care back to the drawing board. Let’s hope the people of Massachusetts’s First congressional district send Olver back to Amherst.

The Secretary of Transportation says “it’s fun playing Santa Claus to states and cities around the nation”

…as the Department of Transportation furloughs federal bridge and road inspectors

Washington politicians and bureaucrats enjoy ‘lavish’ government pensions; Federal employees can draw on their pension beginning at age 50 and can get as much as 80 percent of their final salary

National Institutes of Health spends $3.9 million to develop ‘Avatar’ sex-ed video game for kids

National Science Foundation pays to produce a “free” CD for road trips on a highway in California

Director of Louisiana housing agency charged taxpayers for personal expenses; Unallowable charges included a $150 bill at hair salon, items from a sporting goods store and Wal-Mart, and telephone and electric bills

BAILOUT WATCH: Fannie Mae seeking a $15.3 billion bailout

78 percent of Americans say government spending is out of control and 59 percent of U.S. citizens do not trust the federal government

The Milwaukee newspaper, along with the Los Angeles Times health blog, called on Congress to ban the product.  Then, on December 14, the examiner.com reported that Democrat Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand had proposed a bill outlawing the use of BPA in food container linings for infant and toddler food.  Washington, with its Senate vote on Friday, is the latest among several states that are not waiting for federal bans.

But as reported here, in the fall, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) had announced the award of $30 million in research grants, $14 million of which represents Obama administration stimulus money, to study BPA further.

What might account for such odd behavior?  There are enough peculiarities and strange connections to suggest that the media, the academy, and liberal political forces are working together to pursue an ideological agenda—with the help of stimulus funds.

The competing goals between normally cooperative anti-BPA forces in the environmental advocacy science community and a newspaper could stem from the fact that the newspaper invested much in a series that nonetheless earned them only the position of finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, the same scientists that the newspaper relied on as authorities to make claims about BPA’s dangers find themselves recipients of government money to “study” the issue further.  The newspaper could hardly be expected to drop the topic it had invested so much in—one that has produced attention-grabbing headlines for much of the mainstream media, and windfalls for producers of “BPA-free” products.

So, on December 29 the Journal-Sentinel again expressed dismay that the FDA would miss another self-imposed deadline, the third, by year’s end, to inform consumers about the safety of BPA.  “The repeated delays have angered health advocates who consider the chemical a threat to human health,” Meg Kissinger, co-author of the original “investigative series” on BPA, wrote.

On January 5, the newspaper fired another salvo that claimed a desire to hear the FDA’s opinion, while proclaiming, “BPA is a hazard for both kids and adults.  It’s time to act.”  Quite obviously, the editors want to hear only one kind of opinion from the FDA, one that matches their own, which is based on questionable scientific research.

Such badgering seems to be having an effect on the agencies in the Obama administration.  The Wall Street Journal on January 30 noted that the FDA is sending out mixed messages regarding BPA, telling the public that it does not pose a risk at low levels of human exposure, yet recommending ways to limit exposure.

The NIEHS seems to be sending a self-contradictory message, as well. Although grants had been awarded by the end of September on the presumption that BPA required further study, Linda Birnbaum, director of the NIEHS, on December 11, 2009, told the Journal Sentinel that people should avoid ingesting the chemical, which has been used for more than 50 years in such plastic products as eyeglasses and bottles.

But Birnbaum, along with NIEHS Scientific Program Administrator Jerrold Heindel, signed the Chapel Hill Bisphenol A Expert Panel Consensus Statement, which emerged from a meeting of anti-BPA scientists and environmental activists at Chapel Hill in 2006.  (At the time Birnbaum was with the Environmental Protection Agency.)  Of the ten awardees of the Recovery Act NIH Grand Opportunities grants focusing on BPA research six scientists were signatories to this Consensus Statement.

And as the final decisions about awardees were being made, seven of those who would receive the grants put their signatures on a September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Birnbaum expressing their concern about the “review process” and objecting to the allocation of $10 million to the FDA and National Toxicology Program for studies on BPA.  Thirteen of the thirty-three signatories had been part of the Chapel Hill Consensus.

Christine Flowers, Director of Communications at NIEHS, stresses that, even though only six months had elapsed from the request for applications to the announcements of the awards, the agency’s usual rigor—thanks to extra hours put in by employees–was used in determining these stimulus funds grants.

Certainly, the fact that NIEHS officials and some awardees were at the same “consensus” meeting in 2006 raises questions about the review process.

One recipient of these stimulus funds and signatory of the September 21 letter, Frederick vom Saal, has been a long-time crusader against BPA.  Along with signatories Patricia Hunt, Csaba Leranth, and Wade V. Welshons, he is cited frequently as an expert on the dangers of BPA in articles published by the Environmental Working Group, which receives support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Pete Myers, a main signatory of the letter and member of the organizing committee of the Chapel Hill conference, however, serves on the Board of the Environmental Working Group.  He also runs a lab that is a “sister organization” to the Advancing Green Chemistry organization, whose executive director came from the environmental and nuclear non-proliferation advocacy group, W. Alton Jones Foundation (which Myers himself previously had directed).  Birnbaum was a speaker at a 2008 conference sponsored by Advancing Green Chemistry.

According to Human Events’ Rowan Scarborough, The Environmental Working Group is a client of Fenton Communications, which “pitches for trial lawyers, collectively the largest contributors to the Democrat Party, as well as for the hard line environmental group Greenpeace; Venezuela’s socialist leader Hugo Chavez; anti-war demonstrator Cindy Sheehan; and gay and abortion advocates.”  They also pitch for George Soros’s Open Society Institute and were behind the infamous MoveOn.org “General Betray Us” smear campaign and Obama’s Campaign to Rebuild and Renew America Now, and represent a manufacturer of “BPA-free” products.

Vom Saal was also the primary expert quoted in the Consumers Union article, which reinvigorated the scare about BPA last fall.  Consumers Union has received support from Soros for its “Democratic Pluralism in Media Project” and supports other leftist causes like the Democrat-sponsored health care reform bill.  It’s also significant that vom Saal’s lab conducted the experiments for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for its series on BPA that won several environmental reporting prizes and finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

While vom Saal and signatories to the letter charged that industry-supported studies have a flawed “review process,” Trevor Butterworth at George Mason University’s STATS Center, claims that vom Saal himself is in disrepute among the international scientific community and calls the review process for the Journal-Sentinel series “incestuous.”   The “outside expert” used to evaluate vom Saal’s lab work was Patricia Hunt whose work has been championed by vom Saal.  She has also coauthored articles with vom Saal and signed the Chapel Hill Consensus statement and the letter to the FDA with vom Saal.

In a 2008 JAMA article, vom Saal and Myers charge that “The FDA and the European Food Safety Authority have chosen to ignore warnings from expert panels. . . .”  Yet the only “expert panel” they cite in the footnoted reference is their own Chapel Hill “consensus” meeting.

In addition to the “incestuous” relationship among some scientists, there seems to be an “incestuous” relationship between newspapers and environmental activists claiming to be health experts.  Consider that the “health advocates” quoted in the December 29 Journal-Sentinel article by almost-Pulitzer Prize winner Meg Kissinger are Janet Nudelman of the Breast Cancer Fund and Alex Formuzis.

The Breast Cancer Fund’s agenda, despite its name, is environmental issues.  On December 14 the deceptively named News-Medical Net cited the organization for its claim that “immediate action” is needed “to protect the public while the [FDA] agency finalizes safety review [of BPA].”   Alex Formuzis is with the Soros-supported Environmental Working Group.

Inquiring minds should be curious about these connections.

All aboard the stimulus gravy train! $54 million of stimulus funds for a California “wine train” and $2.2 million for a golf course being threatened with closure

Congressional Republicans trumpeting their efforts to rein in federal spending have tucked thousands of pet projects costing more than $1 billion in the $446.8 billion omnibus appropriations bill expected to be passed this week

$500,000 National Science Foundation grant studies how people use Facebook

Washington Metro, facing a $175 million budget shortfall, spending more than $1 million on lobbying and government relations

Juan de Fuca Festival gets federal stimulus funds; “It demonstrates the high esteem in which the festival is held for the Juan de Fuca Festival to receive such a big piece of the pie,” says group’s executive director