Wondering why $787 Billion in Stimulus funds isn't translating into jobs for Americans? This might be part of the reason.
As we warned here and here, a new study confirms that yes indeed, Stimulus funds are being given to foreign companies, offshore, with no restrictions.
Of the $1.05 billion in clean-energy grants handed out by the government since Sept. 1, 84 percent – a total of $849 million – has gone to foreign wind companies. Spanish utility company, Iberdrola S.A., alone has collected $545 million through its American subsidiary.
Even more striking is the fact that there are few restrictions on the how the grants can be used, according to a transcript of a Treasury Department briefing. In fact, more than $800 million has been given to firms for wind farms that were already producing electricity before they received the grants, according to a review of the records by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.
"There are no restrictions on the use of the funds," Dan Tangherlini, an assistant secretary for management at the Department of Treasury, said, during a Sept. 1 conference call to announce the grants.
Could the money be used to pay shareholders?
"You know, that's possible," Tangherlini said, when a reporter asked that question during the call.
This is particularly odious since green jobs have been peddled as the next innovation, a market sector that would produce the jobs of tomorrow.
Aren't you glad your tax dollars, adding to a massive deficit, are being given to foreign companies, offshore, with no restrictions?
And you wonder how the unemployment rate could be at 10.2% with such large government expenditures. This is how.
Read the full investigation report here. It has additional facts, graphs and details.
h/t to manufacture this
I know we don't want to offend MNCs and China
Screw the unemployed at the expense of not offending multinational corporations and China.
But hey, free trade will save us all but not before China owns all of the world's natural resources and US.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Most of this is EU companies
Shock and surprise! Although China is getting in there by selling solar panels below cost...
But this use of taxpayer funds to offshore outsource...
I mean is it just me or is this so obvious it makes no economic sense in terms of the national interest...
notice that keyword outsourcing isn't in the national dialog? Notice that most economists act like the term doesn't even exist?
To me, it's pure insanity.
BTW: I went looking to see what is in the latest health care bill and it looks on first pass like caca. Just a mandate with no real cost controls at all. I'm just thinking how absolutely nuts, we already know the U.S. pays twice as much as any other nation per person, so where is the big analysis determining how the U.S. is getting gouged and doing something about it?
I kind of gave up tracking on this when I saw single payer nixed plus the Obama administration making deals with lobbyists.
It's also seemingly impossible to obtain real objective information.
If someone knows or a truly objective analysis on this 2k+ page bill, please post in an Instapopulist but I looked high and low and couldn't find anything that wasn't focused on the trivial vs. the system.
Is it Incrementalism or intentional?
Intentional discrediting of policies that could work. Counter-cyclical fiscal policies work but they won't work under such huge leakage of aggregate demand. So in a couple of years after we are truly established in a "new normal" with staggering high unemployment, neo-liberals will say once for all can we put an end to Keynesian economics because it doesn't work and then get us back on track to the destruction they started in 1980. Thanks to Democrats?
Same with health care. We needed to blow up this employer based health insurance system but what we got was a super subsidized gift to health insurance industry. A weak-ass public option with a requirement that every one get insurance. Can there be a bigger giveaway to insurance industry? Actually, the Senate is working on that.
This notion or strategy of incremental policies lead to the ultimate goal may work in a vacuum but they fail miserable when corporation own congress.
My prediction: at this rate - Democrats will be rendered the minority party for the next 20 years. They will be swept out by a populist rage led by astro-turf groups and Fox News.
Some weak-ass health care reform will pass and but when implemented will not keep health care costs down. When this new 'astro-turfed' populist majority (probably led by Sarah Palin) takes over they will repeal this health care reform and we will go back to status quo of early 2000s and complete destruction of middle class.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
You may be right, but...
...this could be the item (states being refused the option of opting out and going single payer) that instigates the future Balkanization of America, and splits up the country.
GOP: Buy health insurance or go to jail
up to 5 years in prison if you do not buy health insurance.
Is this true? I'm suspect of anything the GOP puts out but if it is...
hmmmm, I think the average stay for murder is still 7 years.
Debtor's prison?
Thanks for making sure those costs are down....and what exactly is the requirement to get subsidized?
RebelCapitalist:Same with
RebelCapitalist:Same with health care. We needed to blow up this employer based health insurance system but what we got was a super subsidized gift to health insurance industry. A weak-ass public option with a requirement that every one get insurance. Can there be a bigger giveaway to insurance industry? Actually, the Senate is working on that.
________________-
You haven't gotten anything yet. The bill has not even passed the Senate.
Government-Subsidized Private Insurance Industry Bill
Sorry, I'm pressed for time, but I did skim some of those (about 2,000) pages and believe the following to be fairly accurate:
$70 billion giveaway to the private health insurance companies
$213 billion cut from Medicare.
Mandated purchase of private insurance.
Insurance exchange underwritten by the US tax payer.*
So-called "public option" is minimally accessible -- only a few millions will actually be able to use it.
Ostensibly, taxes are supposed to be levied on the upper 3% to pay for this, but I'm uncertain about this claim as President Obama backed away from any closing down of those "offshore finance centers" he had promised the electorate.
And this "healthcare reform bill" (gag me with a super-sized spoon!!) doesn't go into effect, for those needing health care, of course, until 2013!
Proper name for this bill if we were living in an alternate universe with human integrity, either the
Government-Subsidized Private Insurance Industry Bill,
OR
The Tax Payer-Underwritten Insurance Exchange Speculation Bill
Now where do you suppose they will be speculating on mortality derivatives and mortality-linked securities???
*(Up until now, those exchanges utilized for speculation to screw the citizens were financed primarily by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and the oil cartel boys.)
that's what I get out of it too
It's just a huge pig fest, modeled on the prescription drug bill, for the health insurance lobby and they aren't doing much of anything to examine the waste, gouging, overcharges in the system and reducing costs while not sacrificing care. Obviously if so many other industrialized nations have better health care, longer life expectancy with half to 1/10th of the costs, America is getting ripped off.
What a disappointment and fail or pass I get this is Democrats Waterloo. I can't wait because Republicans will be controlled by the exact same lobbyist strings Democrats are.
The powerful call the shots
I guess that letter from the Bretton Woods Committee (dated Feb. 11, 2009) to Pelosi (the worst dem speaker of the House in my lifetime) and Reid (the worst dem majority senate leader in my lifetime) worked --- that was their letter seeking to kill that "Buy American" clause from the stimulus legislation! They claimed it went against the WTO Financial Services Agreement, which indeed those bankster bailouts most definitely did! Oh to be ultrapowerful!
Now, should any non-econopopulist types be reading this - those web lurkers out there - please review the following:
One judges a president by his/her appointments and Obama's appointments are even more toxic than Bush's, which were equally as toxic as Clinton's, and Bush #1, and Reagan and Carter. If they be Wall Street lobbyists, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, oil cartel lobbyists, we the sheeple will be getting screwed at each and every opportunity.
A sensible response to these reports.
Here is a response from Jerome a Paris on Daily Kos. The argument is that short sighted U.S. policy has not supported an increase in production capacity. A la pro-oil and coal policies.
Interesting perspective especially this part:
I agree we desperately need an industrial policy or strategy but the reality is there has to be a certain level of support given to U.S. industry in order to compete on a global scale. And if that is defined as "protectionism" or enforcing existing trade agreements is deemed as such then so be it. Health care is a perfect example of helping U.S. industry to compete - no other industrialized nation has the employer sponsored health care system that we do. Look at Germany, you don't see German manufacturers grappling with rising health insurance costs.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
while I respect Jerome A Paris quite a bit
and I agree with him and have written so many posts on the U.S. needing a national strategy for manufacturing, economic development and trade....
I'll stick with my outrage and no excuses on these grants being given to EU countries. The reason is this is supposed to be "Stimulus" and if we did not have the capacity, at minimum there should have been terms and conditions on sending U.S. tax dollars, supposedly to Stimulate the U.S. economy...overseas.
The entire idea of Federal Government spending to Stimulate an economy is to keep that money contained within the domestic economy! It won't work of course otherwise.
So, he seems to be making excuses almost for a pretty outrageous act.
Of course if one is going to have these great "green jobs" as the "jobs of the future" one should have put into place industrial, economic, trade, job policy to foster that new industry....
It's all hype and B.S. They are not even thinking about the economy or considering it.
It isn't just Green jobs being offshored, money offshored
Caterpillar offshore outsourced.
JPMorgan Chase received TARP funds, increased offshore outsourcing by 25%
Citigroup received TARP funds, signed a $1.2 billion dollar contract to offshore outsource jobs.
IBM is firing people in droves, offshore outsourcing jobs.
Microsoft is firing 5800, offshore outsourcing jobs...
the list goes on and on and on.
One of the most absurd things I find offshore outsourced is state jobs to manage social services. That's taxpayer dollars to help those who need a job and to get food stamps.
Those jobs could easily be done from home too. So, here we have people out of work, desperate, receiving welfare and instead of hiring some of those people to work for state social services, states offshore outsource those jobs.
And the culprit is....
"One of the most absurd things I find offshore outsourced is state jobs to manage social services. That's taxpayer dollars to help those who need a job and to get food stamps."
You know, I believe the politician who pioneered that was Governor Gary Locke of Washington, who is now President Obama's Secretary of Commerce, the same secretary of Commerce who signed all those "buy offshore" waivers for the American-based multinationals in receipt of federal stimulus funds.
think you're right
it sure seemed the Obama administration was bound and determined to get the biggest corporate puppet they could find in that Sec. of Commerce post too.
What is even more scary is how NASSCOM has inroads to state and federal contract awards.
As in bias and that's a foreign nation, India, their BPO industry, getting contract after contract and frankly I question any claim these are "economically competitive" from the overall contract awards amounts I see flying by.
I don't believe it. I think we have yet another "Inside track" on how to
bribeobtain government contracts, like Accenture....the guys who cannot code their way out of a paper bag, yet manage to obtain billion dollar contracts, even though they have failed, failed, failed on delivery. Same with SAIC, there are a bunch of them...and many of these "projects" have actually failed. Billions wasted with no results.
Give me a break! One could hire teams of out of work techies in the U.S., out of work call center people - call centers could be great for single mothers, people with disabilities because one could easily do that job from home....
yet any of this common sense stuff even considered? Hell no! It's big corporate bucks sucking off the government dole...
uurrggghh, I'm going off on a rant, all of this really pisses me off.
This country has lost it's ethical and patriotic compass.