President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, finally responded to a reporter’s question about Solyndra today, but not without the America’s Morning News reporter getting grabbed by one of the members of the secretary’s entourage.

As the Solyndra scandal continues to boil over, the energy secretary has been frequently cited as the main player who was trying to “fast-track” the $535 million loan for the now-failed solar panel manufacturer.  E-mails show serious tension between the DOE and the Office of Management and Budget at the time of the loan and in subsequent months as fears began to rise over the financial viability of the firm.

Considering he’s been at the center of the storm that is Solyndra, it’s likely he has had time to consider his responses to a reporter’s inquiry on the subject.  That’s what makes his “20/20 hindsight” statement so curious.  It’s an obvious dodge.

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As the mainstream media continue to obsess about a painted rock in Texas, the Solyndra story continues to grow.

“A number of us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra…  Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term. . . . I just want to help protect the president from anything that could result in negative or unfair press.”

Those words appeared in an email from Solyndra investor and Obama fundraiser Steve Westly to Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett in May 2010.  The correspondence is yet another indication that the White House had immediate warning signs that the $535 million loan guarantee of stimulus money pushed through by the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) was at great risk.

President Obama visited Solyndra despite the warnings, and the resulting video footage of the photo-op has become the perfect b-roll to accompany stories describing the failed “green jobs” initiative that the president held up as a shining example of how his administration was “Winning the Future.”

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Until now the Solyndra scandal only reached the White House in the guise of e-mails from staffers fretting about the political implications of the disastrous bankruptcy and how it would reflect on the President’s “Winning the Future” rhetoric.

Until now, the Solyndra scandal was a circumstantial log of White house visits by a big Obama donor who also was the failed solar company’s chief investor (those visits occurring right before a half-billion dollar loan guarantee was awarded by Obama’s Dept. of Energy).

Until now, the White House’s direct involvement in the Solyndra scandal appeared to be over-zealous operatives looking to speed-up the loan so Vice President Biden could have a nice photo-op at the doomed solar firm.

Now, we know much more.

According to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, President Obama was warned nearly a year ago that Energy Secretary Stephen Chu’s department was not rigorous enough in vetting loan recipients and they ran the risk of funneling federal money to companies that shouldn’t receive it, or didn’t need it.  And the warnings came from the President’s top economic advisers Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner.

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Mr. Geithner, please check your crystal ball because it appears to have a major malfunction!  Either something’s wrong with the ball or you’ve got a classic case of “operator error” going on.  You might look into borrowing your good buddy Barack Obama’s.  His crystal ball seems to be shooting fairly straight these days.  “Electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket,” anyone remember this gem?  He could start a 1-800-psychic line with that one!  Hey it might not be pretty, but at least it was truthful.

In an interview with Fox News on April 19, 2011, a little over three months ago, when U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked if the U.S. was at risk of losing its AAA rating, he replied:

“No risk of that, no risk…you see the leadership of the United States of America, the President…the Republican leadership…the Democrats…recognizing now that this is the right thing to do for the economy.”

For some time now, the United States debt has been creeping up to the 100 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) mark.  That’s a disaster just waiting in the wind. It’s reminiscent of 2001 when the Bush Administration warned of potential problems and warned that financial giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could “cause strong repercussions in financial markets.”  In 2003, the White House upgraded the concerns to a “systemic risk” that could spread beyond the housing sector.  But U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D) told the House Financial Services Committee that the housing market was fine, stating, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack are not in a crisis.”

In 2008, the housing market crashed, sending the economy in a downward spiral, from which we have not recovered.  You would think that our “leaders” would have learned their lessons from the past, especially from such a debacle just a few short years ago.  But with the passing of the recent budget hijacking, debt ceiling busting deal that our lawmakers recently compromised on, ignoring the warnings of the TEA Party, it is apparent that the lessons of history were short-lived.  Shortly after the deal was done, the unthinkable happened.  The US debt hit the 100 percent mark of GDP, the market tanked, and the US credit rating was downgraded from its AAA rating, with the real possibility of being downgraded again.

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The entire political landscape is currently engulfed in debt ceiling flames, for largely artificial and concocted reasons.

This man-made inferno is now centered around and fixated upon the August 2 so-called “drop dead” date for reaching a deal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

If we do not by then do so, we are told, America will go into default.

Which is little more than repetitive absurdity.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has already given us numerous such “drop dead” dates.  March 31?  April 15?  May 16?  May 31?  July 8?  July 22?  These were all “drop dead” dates with which Geithner previously tried to concern us.

Now we’re even being told it’s as likely to be August 10 as any of the others.

In short, on this federal government power grab disguised as a fiscal “crisis,” Lil’ Timmy Geithner is many times over the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

These ever-rolling “drop dead” dates prove (at least) one additional thing: conservative Republican leverage for a deal to their liking indubitably increases every day after the date passes – else Geithner would not be so keen on repeatedly moving it.

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Some say the world will end in fire and some say in ice.

But in Washington, a lot of people say it will end if we don’t continually raise the debt ceiling.

The statutory debt limit, or debt ceiling, represents the maximum amount of debt the federal government can carry at any given time. The limit was created in 1917 so that Congress wouldn’t have to vote every time the government wanted to increase the amount of debt (which was becoming a more and more frequent occasion). Since then, the Treasury Department has had the authority to issue new debt up to whatever the limit is to fund government needs. Last year, the limit was raised to $14.3 trillion, an amount that is about to reached.

As it approaches, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said failing to raise the limit would likely mean the U.S. would default on its debt, creating “real chaos” in place of the fake chaos that’s out there now. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said that failing to raise the limit would be “deeply irresponsible” and and Austan Goolsbee, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, has said that not raising the limit would create “the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”

Eh, maybe.

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Remember all of those bold statements that the so called “Troubled Assets Relief Program” (TARP), the Bailout of Wall Street Bill, was a one time deal and our federal government should and will never do it again.  Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner testified in January of this year before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

Many Americans look at what happened with AIG, and the rest of the financial rescue, and simply ask:  Why was it necessary?  Why was it fair for the government to take taxpayer money and put it into an institution that had mismanaged itself to the edge of collapse?  The answer is that it was not fair, and it was not something our government should ever have to do.  But those Americans, those families and business owners who played by the rules and played no role in giving rise to this recession, should understand that if the government had failed to act, that failure would have unleashed substantially greater damage upon them.

If TARP “was not fair” and not “something our government should ever have to do,” then why is Congress trying to impose the TARP model on small business?  Congress will consider legislation this week to establish TARP, Jr. for small businesses to be administered and run by none other than Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. The House is considering H.R. 5297, the Small Business Lending Fund Act that provides “temporary authority to the Secretary of the Treasury to make capital investments to eligible institutions in order to increase the availability of credit for small businesses.”

The legislation creates a federally run new bureaucracy called the “Small Business Lending Fund. ”  To qualify a financial institution has to have less than $10 billion in assets and the new creation would have up to $30 billion in new investment authority.  This allegedly temporary program is set up “without further appropriation of fiscal year limitation,” i.e. not temporary, to purchase “preferred stock and other financial instruments” from small business as a means to infuse money into local banks with the condition that they lend to failing small business.  Local banks will be lending in exchange for equity small business, therefore these banks will be using federal monies to buy equity in companies.  This is an idea born from socialism and one that will harm the free market for small business, because failure will be rewarded by federal subsidies while success will be punished.

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Here’s the latest in the question of the New York Fed, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the AIG bailout, as we’ve covered here at Big Government before (here and here). Last year, Iraq war vet Kevin Murray brought a lawsuit against the Treasury Department and Ben Bernanke (Murray vs. Geithner, et al) for its acquisition of AIG– a scheme that made the US taxpayer the world’s largest provider of Shariah-compliant insurance products. Lawyers David Yerushalmi and The Thomas More Law Center’s Robert Muise found, in the course of discovery, that that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yerushalmi and Muise quickly realized that, in acquiring 77.9% of AIG, the New York Fed may have set up an illegal trust, with the knowledge that what they were to do was illegal. Tuesday, Murray’s attorneys issued a subpoena for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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This week we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in the government takeover of insurance giant AIG. In the last several months, the US government has tried, unsuccessfully, to throw out plaintiff Kevin Murray’s case, alleging that the government’s takeover of AIG puts it in the position of supporting and promoting Islam and Shariah finance.

This past Tuesday, Federal district court judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff rejected the Treasury Department’s and the Fed’s effort to prevent any further discovery while the government attempts to convince the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Zatkoff’s earlier ruling rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the government’s takeover of AIG on First Amendment-Establishment Clause grounds.

Tim Geithner: The “extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary”

The lawsuit, captioned Murray v. Geithner et al., was brought by attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin Murray, a tax payer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq. The federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government’s takeover and financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

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Yesterday we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in regards to the bailout of AIG by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, then Director of the New York Federal Reserve, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

It appears that, through it’s 77.9% control of AIG’s equity and voting rights, the NYFed “sought to accomplish an illegal financial transaction through false means” by creating an “independent”: trust that was in fact not independent, placing it “in violation of federal anti-money laundering statutes (18 USC § 1956).” Here we elaborate a bit further, laying out the issue in the text of a letter submitted to Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP)– as the government takeover of AIG was accomplished using funds provided to the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

First, however, some context: Crucially, these facts were discovered while securities litigator David Yerushalmi and the Thomas More Law Center was representing Iraq War vet Kevin Murray in Murray vs. Geithner, et al. Mr. Murray is rightfully horrified that the very doctrines of the enemy he faced in combat would be promoted by the US government. Specifically, prior to the U.S. government’s takeover of the insurance giant AIG, the company was the world’s leading promoter of Shariah-compliant finance products and businesses. Bailing out and forcefully (and illegally) taking ownership of AIG put the American taxpayer in the position of advocating Shariah-compliant finance, which is troubling on many levels:

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Many of us had no idea the Republican Party had it in them, but to devise and implement such a plan was ingenious. Think about it; party leadership acting totally inept while a charismatic young Democrat presidential candidate captures the imagination of the normally lethargic youth vote, captures the senior vote, women, and even sends a thrill up the leg of the media.

And within a few short months after attaining the presidency, he conducts himself in a manner (personally and in office) that had not only invigorated his political opponents, but has them so energized they take to the streets and even march on The Capitol (more than once). One would have to conclude Barack Hussein Obama is either the most politically clueless president ever, or… is really a stealth Republican destroying the Democrat Party from within.

Is Barack Obama a Republican plant?

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During the Presidential “Media Fest” Campaign of 2007/08, many tried to impress upon the American people that Obama was an empty suit.  Quite simply, he had no significant legislative achievement to call his own.  Heck, as an Illinois State Senator, Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times, according to the New York Times:  “effectively sidestepping” issues.  The point of those who pressed Obama’s lack of executive experience and sidestepping tactics was that we could not afford a President who would do the same.

Ten months into the Obama Presidency, it is pretty clear that Obama is living up to his Absentee Legislator past.  Painful examples abound:

1. Trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Criminal Court.  Arguably one of the most detrimental legal and foreign policy decisions of our time, and Obama openly admits it wasn’t his call – it was an underling’s call – Eric Holder.  It was a terrible decision and, as Senator Lindsey Graham pointed out, an unprecedented decision.  While I doubt Obama sat purely on the sidelines on this decision, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that someone other than Obama has to take responsibility for this decision – good or bad.  And when it goes bad, then Obama will simply dump Holder.  Problem solved.
2. Health Care.  What’s a President to do when he is devoid of any significant legislation to his name?  Allow the most significant piece of legislation in the last 40 years to be written and managed by others.  Literally.   Before us is the biggest makeover of the relationship of the private sector and government since the Great Depression and Obama is merely a passenger on a bus being driven by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  When it fails the American people, and it will, Obama will rightfully claim it wasn’t his bill.  Such is the prerogative of an Absentee President.
3. The Stimulus Bill.  It’s failing.  Indeed, over 3 million jobs have been lost since the Stimulus Bill was passed – a bill laden with pork because its passage was driven by someone other than Obama (not to say he would have passed a trimmed down bill).  Beyond that, we find out that the AIG bailout money was misspent – who would have thought?  Since the President can’t be in charge of such failures, and Obama can’t blame Pelosi or Reid,  the fall guy will be Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – because, in time, simply blaming President Bush won’t be effective anymore.
4. The November Elections.  Even though Obama went and put his personal prestige on the line for New Jersey Governor Corzine, Corzine was soundly beat – as was the Democrat candidate in Virginia – a race Obama wouldn’t touch.  But those results, according to Obama, had nothing to do with him – those were races with local implications not national influences.

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This morning, in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that, by any measurement of the strength and stability of the US economy, the economy today is better than it was when Obama took office. Sheesh, tell that to the millions of people who have lost their job since January.

Apparently, “any measurement” doesn’t include the unemployment rate, job growth, number of jobs, wage growth, hours worked, home foreclosures, rate of mortgage delinquencies, etc.

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The Federal Reserve’s purchase of $300 billion in Treasury debt, as well as its purchase of mortgage-backed securities, has aptly been described as “monetizing the U.S. government debt,” with appropriate concern that it will fuel inflation. 

If President Obama fancies himself a twenty-first century Abraham Lincoln, then we need Timothy Geithner to be his Salmon Chase. Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary was remarkably successful at financing the Civil War, with only limited inflation, and remarkable fidelity to the Constitution.

Chase was a radical Ohio abolitionist before the war (sometimes called the state’s “attorney general for runaway Negroes”), and a relentlessly ambitious rival of Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln beat Chase for the 1860 Republican nomination, he made him his Secretary of the Treasury. Almost all historians regard Lincoln’s ability to keep Chase on board as one of the marks of his genius as a statesman.

Chase was also a hard-money man, and abhorred paper money—especially the paper emitted by state banks, excoriated (if somewhat exaggeratedly) as “wildcat banks”– creditors were said to have to battle wildcats to attempt to redeem the worthless notes of these reckless frontier banks. Chase believed that the United States needed a national currency, issued by a national banking system. As the Civil War’s costs grew exponentially, Congress pressed him to monetize the government’s debt by issuing Treasury notes unredeemable in gold or silver, and to declare them to be legal tender for all debts—the “greenbacks,” which color our paper money to this day. Chase stuck to his constitutional guns for as long as he could, but finally gave in. But he “hated the crime about to be committed,” as historian Bray Hammond put it. By the end of the war, Chase got his national banking system, and had eliminated unconstitutional state-bank paper currency.

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