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Liberals Go To the Barricades to Defend Crony Capitalism

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThere’s nothing like a good fight over corporate welfare to bring out the Left’s love of Big Business.

In the current battle over the Export-Import Bank, Democratic politicians and liberal journalists have dropped their populist pretenses and openly embraced the corporate-federal collusion that Ex-Im embodies.

For some, it’s largely partisanship or disdain for the Tea Partiers who want Ex-Im dead. For others, it’s that increasing government’s role in the economy takes precedence over railing against Big Business. And for a shrewd few, it’s about raising money from K Street and Wall Street.

Liberal writer Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, who in 2013 mocked the notion of free-market populism as “Ayn Rand in overalls,” this year sees the free-market attack on Ex-Im as a grave danger to “Big Business,” and, by extension, all of America. Lind blasted “militants on the right.”

“Angry outsiders on the right are threatening to replace business-friendly market populism with real populism,” Lind warned. “And that, to the business community, is downright terrifying. It ought to frighten the rest of us, too.”

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"Crapitalism!"

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Photo Credit: Townhall“Crapitalism!”

There’s capitalism, and then there’s “crapitalism” — crony capitalism.

Capitalism is great because it lets entrepreneurs raise money so they can scale up and get their products and services to more people. If there is free competition, innovators with the best ideas raise the most money, and the best and cheapest products spread far and wide.

But it’s crapitalism when politicians give your tax money and other special privileges to businesses that are “most deserving of help.” Often those businesses turn out to be run by politicians’ cronies.

Many government agencies feed this crony capitalism. When there is scandal, such as when the Energy Department lost $500 million on Solyndra, we hear about it. But often we don’t. You probably didn’t know about the department’s other fat losses on businesses like Solar One, the Triad ethanol plant, FutureGen, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and so on.

Even the Small Business Administration is an embarrassment. They loaned $1 million to a Lamborghini dealership and $3 million to a Rolex dealer. Is this where your tax money should go? Voters assume government handouts go to people who need help. But they usually don’t. Most government handouts go to the middle class and the rich.

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Crony Capitalism Keeps the US Dependent on Vladimir Putin

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

The latest news to come out of Ukraine doesn’t involve Vice President Joe Biden, European natural gas supplies, or Vladimir Putin’s insatiable appetite for the resurrection of the Soviet Union. In fact, it hits a bit closer to home. America’s spy satellites, as it turns out, is dependent upon Russian provided technology to reach orbit.

That’s right… Not only are our astronauts hitching rides to the Russian-run “international” space station, but even our spy satellites have to hitch a ride via Putin’s Russian Military industrial complex. And any sanctions that could come out of the situation in Ukraine, may just put the future of those missions in some peril. And the worst part is that American built technology, from American Companies, is being denied the opportunity to replace the Putin approved tech upon which our space missions depend.

At issue is the engine for the Atlas V rocket that places our satellites into orbit. The RD-180 is sold to the United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) for use in the Atlas V. And while the ULA claims to have enough engines in stock to last the agency roughly 2 – 3 years, they may soon be buying up more engines from Vladimir before sanctions are put in place, according to Capitol Hill insiders.

According to ULA, American made replacement engines are several years away… Which begs the question, “are we really that far behind” in space age technology? Well… No. It seems that ULA simply enjoys their monopolistic handle on American space technology. Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has developed all American-made alternatives to the Russian engines. And just like a good old-fashioned capitalist, Musk’s technology is significantly cheaper. (But, I guess saving the taxpayers some expense isn’t a real concern unless we’re talking about soldier pay, or foreign aid.)

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Cruz: Conservatives Can Listen Timidly to DC Consultants, or Stay True to Core Values

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Photo Credit: Reuters By Tony Lee.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has the lead among Tea Partiers in nearly every 2016 GOP presidential primary poll, opened CPAC on Thursday. Cruz said that conservatives can win elections when they draw a clear and sharp contrast between corrupt Washington and the American people, in a way that the GOP establishment has not been able to do.

The potential 2016 presidential candidate noted that Washington is the wealthiest region in the U.S. and blasted the “corrupt interlocking system” of lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants that are “suckling off of Washington.”

Cruz said conservatives can choose to listen to D.C. consultants who want Republicans to be timid, or they can stay true to their core values.

“If you want to lose elections, stand for nothing,” Cruz said.

Read more this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: mailonline.comConservative firebrand Ted Cruz launches political convention with crowd-pleasing demand to abolish the IRS

By David Martosko.

Ted Cruz, the rock-ribbed conservative Texas senator who figures to be a factor in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, told thousands of conservatives Thursday morning that the IRS should go the way of the dodo.

‘We need to abolish the IRS,’ he said, calling instead for a flat income tax rate and a user-friendly tax return that can be filed on a postcard.

That verbal gauntlet, thrown as much at a near-century of tax collection as at the Obama administration, was Cruz’s biggest applause line.

‘By virtue of your being here today,’ he jokingly cautioned the nation’s largest annual gathering of politically conservative activists, ‘tomorrow each and every one of you is going to be audited by the IRS.’

On Wednesday the former IRS official in charge of vetting nonprofit groups that seek tax-exempt charitable status refused, for the second time, to tell a congressional committee what she knew about the scandal.

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Warren Buffett Reaps Crony Capitalist Billions from Gov Bank Bailouts

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Let’s start this with a great quote from Obama’s 2nd favorite billionaire backer after George Soros.

“In terms of simple profitability, an average investor could have done just as well investing in the stock market if they bought during the panic period,” Buffett told the Journal on Saturday. “You make your best buys when people are overwhelmingly fearful.”

Of course the ordinary investor didn’t have the comfort of knowing that the Federal government would use taxpayer money to insure his deals.

As he admitted on CNBC at the time, “If I didn’t think the government was going to act, I wouldn’t be doing anything this week.”

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Foreclosure ‘Solution’ Smacks of Crony Capitalism

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Photo Credit: human Events The real-estate market is reviving so quickly that talk of the busted housing bubble is passé. These days, when real estate investors talk about bubbles, they are referring to the new one that might now be inflating as home sellers sift through a frenzy of offers.

Even cities that bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis are seeing massive price jumps and many homeowners who were “under water” in their mortgages can start talking “home equity” again.

Yet some government officials seem to live in a time warp as they pursue a murky deal to “solve” the dissipating housing crisis by marrying government power with private enrichment. The Bay Area city of Richmond is the first one to sign on to an idea that lenders fear could sweep the state.

City officials would use eminent domain — i.e., the power to take property by force, upon the payment of “fair compensation” to the owner — to wrest control of hundreds of mortgages held by private-equity firms. They’re not taking the actual property, mind you, but grabbing the notes held by those who financed the homes.

Advocates see it as a way to halt foreclosures, but foreclosures are working their way out of the system — so much so that first-time home buyers struggle to compete with cash-paying investment groups that are grabbing these properties.

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Republicans Want To Cut Spending, Except For Spending In Their Districts

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Photo Credit: Majordomo2012

During the 2012 campaign, while Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were criticizing President Obama for spending too much and engaging in crony capitalism, Ryan stopped by a tank factory in Lima, Ohio, which the Army says it doesn’t need — and attacked Obama for wanting to close it.

At the time, I called this “perverse,” and suggested Republicans couldn’t effectively out-Santa-Claus Obama.

Today, Michael Scherer writes that House Speaker John Boehner is fighting to keep this tank factory open. Scherer also names other pork projects sought by Republicans who spend most of their time attacking federal overspending.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Rich Get Richer: Obama-Style Crony Capitalism

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Photo Credit: Brendan SmialowskiFor most Americans, Friday was not a very good day. Sequestration kicked in amid a drumbeat of reports about the pocketbook hits that we would take and the illegal immigrants released because of the cuts, the Commerce Department announced that personal income took its biggest hit in 20 years, and the Performance of Manufacturing Index reported a drop. Oh, and earlier in the week, fourth-quarter GDP growth was revised to a paltry 0.1 percent. Unemployment has remained up, the ranks of the poor have swelled, existing small businesses are staggering, and few new ones are being created.

But, for the privileged few at the high-end of President Obama’s coalition, things look far less bleak. The stock market yawned at sequestration and then rose. The S&P is near a five-year high and is up by 10 percent over the past 12 months.

How concerned is Obama by the bad news and the sequester cuts that on Friday he termed “dumb,” “unnecessary,” “arbitrary,” and “inexcusable”? Not very, one would think, since his own 2012 budget forecast projected the very cuts in discretionary spending that the president now abjures, and described them in glowing terms. As Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs recently pointed out. “the level of spending for fiscal year 2013 under the sequestration will be nearly the same as Mr. Obama called for in the draft budget presented in mid-2012.” Indeed, the White House budget forecast boasted that it would “bring domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration.”

For some reason, none of this feels like government by or for the people, and it isn’t. Rather, it seems as though “crony capitalism” is the watchword for this administration. Strip away Obama’s showmanship and scolding, and the president has done just fine in protecting the interests of the top 1 percent, especially among those who were his contributors and the right kind of 1 percenters.

Take green energy, the holy grail of the high end of the president’s base. Solyndra, the now-bankrupt manufacturer of solar panels, received more than half a billion dollars in government-guaranteed loans. One of the company’s key backers was billionaire George Kaiser, a 2008 Obama fundraiser—small world.

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Report: Corporations Received 22,000% Return on Investment from Lobbying

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In “Boomtown,” a blockbuster one-hour investigative special that aired Friday on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), and Steve Bannon, Breitbart News’ Executive Chairman, revealed a study discovered that for every dollar corporations spent on lobbying in 2004, they received $220 in return. This is a 22,000% return on investment.

In essence, this influence peddling is what has turned Washington, D.C., a town that does not create valuable product like oil, beef, or computers like boomtowns of the past, into America’s wealthiest region.

Schweizer noted that for corporations, lobbying is now “a lot more profitable than buying or creating a new good.”

He said 50% of corporations now have an ex-politician on their boards. General Electric, he said, spends $100,000 every single day to influence and lobby Congress.

“They spent a lot of time carving out things in the tax code that benefit them,” Schweizer said of General Electric.

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‘Boomtown’ Special Assails D.C. for ‘Extracting’ Wealth from Taxpayers

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In a blockbuster one-hour investigative special that aired on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Friday, Peter Schweizer, Steve Bannon, and Sean Hannity exposed how Washington, D.C. has extracted power and money from the United States into a centralized location to become the country’s greatest “boomtown,” despite not creating anything.

Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute, highlighted how the permanent political class that relies on lobbying and influence peddling makes more money by “growing the size of government,” which leaves no incentive on either side of the aisle to limit government.

As a result, he noted the three richest counties and seven of the top ten wealthiest counties in the nation are in the Washington, D.C. region. The District also consumes the most fine wine in the nation. He asserted the business in Washington is now “not politics” but “money.”

Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, said the best and the brightest now come to Washington because they see Washington as a Tammany Hall that will allow them to get rich off of influence peddling. He noted that Washington D.C. runs the equivalent of a $4 trillion private equity fund every year and essentially doles out 25% of the country’s wealth to those who are connected.

“Nobody has ever turned a camera on them,” Bannon said, indicating he intends to change that in the future. “This is a permanent political class that has now formed an aristocracy. That’s why nothing has changed in Washington.”

Read more from this story HERE.