by Ben Shapiro
Unfortunately, Detroit itself went bankrupt. And the American people are still over a barrel with Government Motors. In order for the taxpayers to get their money back, GM’s stock would have to triple.35 Overall, the UAW walked away with more than $26 billion—as much money as the United States spends virtually every year on foreign aid. The factories closed anyway.36
“SEIU IS ON THE FIELD, IT’S IN THE WHITE HOUSE”
Senator Obama began his presidential campaign among friends at the Service Employees International Union; in September 2007, he told the Purple People Eaters, “Your agenda’s been my agenda. . . . I’m tired of playing defense all the time. . . . I’ve spent my entire adult life working with the SEIU. . . . The question I ask SEIU members is, not ‘Who is talking about your agenda?’ but ‘Who can change politics in Washington to make that a reality?’ Change starts by making sure a Democrat is in the White House. Change doesn’t end just because a Democrat is in the White House. It’s time to turn the page on the old way of doing business.”37
The SEIU spent $85 million on the 2008 election. “SEIU is on the field, it’s in the White House, it’s in the administration,” SEIU president Andy Stern told members on the hundred-day mark of the Obama White House. He wasn’t kidding: between Obama’s inauguration and July 31, 2009, Stern visited the White House twenty-two times, more than any other person. He met personally with Obama seven times.38 Obama stacked his administration with SEIU bigwigs: former SEIU official Patrick Gaspard joined Obama as the White House political director; Anna Burger, a high officer in the SEIU, ended up on the Obama Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Most important, though, Obama tapped associated general counsel for the SEIU and AFL-CIO Craig Becker for the all-important National Labor Relations Board.39 The NLRB is granted power under federal law to fix unfair labor practices—when unions don’t like what management does, they take their complaints to the NLRB. For years, Democrats in the Senate had stopped President Bush from appointing members to the NLRB. Upon Obama’s accession to the White House, however, he simply crammed his appointees into the NLRB under the auspices of recess appointments. After an attempted filibuster by Republican senators, Obama announced in March 2010 that Becker, along with Mark Gaston Pearce—a labor lawyer—would join the shorthanded NLRB.40
The NLRB quickly became a union tool. As the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation pointed out, the NLRB launched an Office of Public Affairs to publicize its decisions—and proceeded to cover only decisions beneficial to unions. Its rulings, according to NRTW, came out pro-union in 88.7 percent of cases between October 14, 2009, and August 2013.41
The most egregious case of NLRB bias began in April 2011, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers tried to file a case with the NLRB against Boeing, on behalf of thirty-one thousand workers for the company. The union objected to Boeing’s building a $750 million Dreamliner factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, instead of in Washington State. The union said that building outside Washington constituted illegal retaliation against strikers under federal law.
The NLRB agreed, based on the fact that Boeing was being rational: it wanted to locate in a state where it wouldn’t have to deal with unions destroying all economic incentives. Acting NLRB general counsel Lafe Solomon said that such sentiments displayed “anti-union animus,” and that the Boeing factory was therefore illegal. The NLRB requested that a judge order Boeing to relocate its production from South Carolina to Washington. Representative John Kline (R-MN) called the NLRB’s action a “shameless campaign to bully an American employer.”42
That was accurate. Solomon actually attempted to broker a deal with Boeing whereby Boeing would give extra goodies to the Washington union employees, and the NLRB would then drop the charges. Boeing agreed not to fire Dreamliner employees in Washington State before the end of its union contract—but that wasn’t enough for Solomon, who withdrew his proposed settlement and went ahead with the prosecution anyway. As Greg Mourad of the National Right to Work Committee said, “Mr. Solomon did what IAM bosses told him to.”43
Solomon, for his part, treated the whole sham prosecution of an American company jovially. In one email, he responded to an article criticizing the NLRB’s economic impact: “The article gave me a new idea. . . . We screwed up the [U.S.] economy and now we can tackle europe [sic].”44 He told the press that even if Boeing had made the decision because it wanted to locate in a state with free labor, that could be enough to allow the government to crack down: “Companies can make rational economic decisions that can be in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”45
Blackmailed by the NLRB, Boeing caved, announcing a new contract that would give workers in Washington a four-year extension with huge raises, ridiculous job security provisions, and commitment to spend cash building new production facilities in the Puget Sound area. The union promptly asked the NLRB to drop the case, and the NLRB complied. Solomon said, “This case was never about the union or the NLRB telling Boeing where it could put its plants. This was a question for us of retaliation, and that remains the law.” He added ominously that if the NLRB saw a similar case, “we might well issue a complaint.”46 The corrupt bargain prompted the Wall Street Journal editorial board to fume, “The NLRB is supposed to be a fair-minded referee in labor disputes, making sure neither side breaks the law. But the board put its fist squarely on the union side to make Boeing pay a price for moving one of its 787 assembly lines to a right-to-work state, to make sure Boeing never did that again, and to demonstrate to any other unionized company that its investment is at risk if it makes the same decision. . . . [I]n practice the result is likely to be that more companies simply send jobs overseas where there’s no NLRB. Congratulations.”47
In 2013, Obama renominated Solomon to join the NLRB as permanent counsel.48
Solomon, Becker, and Pearce weren’t the only union lackeys packed into the NLRB. In January 2012, Obama sought to stack the NLRB further by appointing Sharon Block and Richard Griffin. Block made her bones working for Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and as deputy assistant secretary for congressional affairs at the Department of Labor. Griffin was a lawyer on the board of directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyer Coordinating Committee. Obama had just one problem: Congress wasn’t in recess when he tried to appoint the two via “recess appointments.” The federal appeals courts of both the Third and Fourth Circuits agreed that the Becker, Griffin, and Block appointments were illegal and in violation of the constitutional rights accorded to the Senate to advise and consent on nominees.49 Judge David Sentelle wrote that Obama’s attempt to stack the NLRB without Congress would amount to “free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction.”50
As of September 2013, despite the court rulings, biographies of both Griffin and Block state that they were “recess appointments” of the president.51
In July 2012, Obama decided to appoint Nancy Schiffer, associate general counsel at the AFL-CIO, and Kent Hirozawa, chief counsel for Pearce.52 That’s horrible news for American business, which remains subject to the whims of the paid-off Obama NLRB. And it’s horrible news for fans of anticorruption, given the cozy relationship between the unions and President Obama’s labor policies.
STIMULATING THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN
Great spending always comes attendant with great corruption. President Obama has spent more money than any president in American history. And with the administration awash in inflated cash, Obama’s cronies have reaped the benefit.
In February 2009, shortly after his election, President Obama made the case that the only way to stimulate the American economy back into life would be to infuse massive amounts of money into the consumer economy. The recession, Obama argued, could “linger for years” unless America decided to “take dramatic action as soon as possible.”53 The stimulus package included massive subsidies for
green energy, “shovel ready” projects, and public welfare programs. Obama also promised that with his proposed $787 billion stimulus package, the unemployment rate would drop below 6 percent quickly.
That obviously has not happened. But even as the economy continued to experience the slowest recovery in American history, Obama’s friends got rich. More than $1 billion went to airports in the middle of nowhere, including a $5 billion taxiway in Findlay, Ohio, $2.2 million for a runway extension at Wilbur Airport in Washington State, and $1 million for a runway in Dover, Delaware. Three million dollars went to a turtle crossing in northern Florida, $10 million to an abandoned train station, and millions more to ten thousand corpses still getting Social Security checks, according to Judicial Watch.54 Democratic states with low unemployment rates received wildly disproportionate checks from the stimulus package. According to Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and John Lott Jr., “Obama may have claimed that he was motivated to help out those in the toughest shape, but it looks more likely that Democrats were more interested in helping their supporters.” No joke. Washington, D.C., received $3,745 per capita, while Florida got just $553 per capita.55
Throw Them All Out author Peter Schweizer found that the Obama administration’s $20 billion in green technology loans contained $16 billion for companies related to President Obama or his cronies—companies with links to Obama bundlers or people on his campaign finance committee. A full 16 of the 27 companies funded by Al Gore and John Doerr, a major Obama donor, got loans. Ninety percent of applicants for energy loans failed. Gore and Doerr got 59 percent of the loans for which they applied. As Ashton Ellis of the Center for Individual Freedom wrote, “Simply put, without the massive amount of money being spent from the Recovery Act, bundlers-turned-government-cronies would have been unable to funnel billions of dollars to friends and colleagues.”56 This is textbook bribery.
The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) has studied the Obama administration’s corruption in depth. During Obama’s first three years, campaign bundlers visited the White House more than three thousand times combined. Many of their companies got federal contracts, including one company—Level 3 Communications, whose vice president Donald H. Gips raised over $500,000 for Obama—that pulled down $13.8 million. Thomas McInerney, an Obama bundler, explained, “There was so much money this time, and there were so many people involved in raising the money, the number of people looking for something was exponentially more.”
CPI also found that “184 of 556, or about one-third, of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role.” That number jumped to 80 percent for those who put together more than half a million for President Transparency. Some of those appointees included Professor Spencer Overton of the George Washington University Law School, who became deputy attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy; Thomas Perrelli, who went to law school with Obama and also ended up at Justice; and Karol Mason, who ended up at the department, too. The Justice Department declined comment.
The Department of Energy also ended up chock full of Obama bundlers. Four people who raised $1.6 million for Obama’s election effort ended up working at the department.57
No wonder the Department of Energy became a hotbed of kickbacks.
Solyndra was a solar panel maker owned by Argonaut Ventures, which was part of a broader foundation owned by George Kaiser, an Obama fund-raiser. The company was the first to get a loan from the Obama stimulus program. Solyndra received a $535 million federal loan. Two years later, the company collapsed, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the entire amount, and putting out of work some 1,100 employees.
The White House denied any involvement in the loans. But that was a lie. Just as Solyndra sought a second loan, Kaiser met with the White House. He visited the White House on several occasions during 2009–2010. Kaiser and his partners in Argonaut saw the Obama White House’s involvement as crucial to the success of the company. “It appears things are headed in the right direction and [Secretary of Energy Steven] Chu is apparently staying involved in Solyndra’s application and continues to talk up the company as a success story,” wrote Steven R. Mitchell, managing director of Argonaut.58 Kaiser, meanwhile, was busy dumping $340 million into Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kaiser’s hometown. “George saw Solyndra as an investment and as something that could provide jobs in Tulsa,” said Tulsa mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr.59
Emails from the Obama White House demonstrate that the White House directly pressured the Office of Management and Budget for final sign-off on the Solyndra loan so that Vice President Biden could announce the loan at an event in September 2009. The OMB repeatedly objected, complaining about “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” OMB officials worried, “There isn’t time to negotiate.” “We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote to Biden’s domestic policy adviser. The White House, which officially suggested that it had no involvement in the loans, responded to the emails by stating that the White House just had interest in the loans, but wasn’t trying to exert pressure. Which is like saying that Don Corleone had an interest in Johnny Fontaine receiving a movie part.60
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu testified before Congress, “As the secretary of Energy, the final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the taxpayer in mind.” Just to emphasize the point, he added, “I want to be clear: over the course of Solyndra’s loan guarantee, I did not make any decision based on political considerations.”61 The bankruptcy of Solyndra didn’t stop two dozen employees from taking down a total of $368,500 in bonuses.
Solyndra was only the beginning.
The Department of Energy gave BrightSource Energy, a company building solar thermal power plants, a $1.6 billion loan guarantee under the auspices of the stimulus program. The single biggest investor in BrightSource: VantagePoint Capital Partners, headed by Sanjay Wagle. Wagle raised millions for Obama in 2008 and—yes, really—was “renewable energy grants advisor” at Obama’s Department of Energy. BrightSource was also a massive supporter of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The company canceled its initial public offering thanks presumably to its inability to show a marketable decent balance sheet.62
The Vehicle Production Group, a portfolio company of Perseus—another company affiliated with an Obama bundler—picked up a $50 million loan. The Department of Energy stated that “the decision to provide the Vehicle Production Group a loan was made based on the merits after more than two years of review by officials in the DOE loan program.”63 The company stopped operations in 2013 and dropped its staff. The company didn’t file for bankruptcy, but all one hundred employees ended up out of work.64
Overall, the Washington Post reported “$3.9 billion in federal grants and financing flowed to 21 companies backed by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.”65 The green loans program created fewer than 2,400 jobs between the passage of the stimulus plan and June 2012—a cost of $6.7 million per job, according to Mercatus Center research fellow Veronique De Rugy.66 One of the biggest companies in the United States, General Electric, got particularly special treatment from President Obama—not surprising, given the fact that GE also owned NBC. GE gave the Obama campaign in excess of $529,000 during the 2008 election cycle;67 Obama provided GE with extraordinarily generous financial benefits. No wonder GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told a group of businesspeople in July 2011, “The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action under way.” As Immelt stated in 2008, “We at GE will continue to support and advocate swift passage of [stimulus] legislation that is acceptable to the Senate, the House, and the Administration, and that can be promptly signed into law by the President.” According to some estimates, GE received in excess of $3 billion in green loans from the Obama government.68
> In November 2012, San Francisco–based XP Technology filed a federal claim against the Department of Energy alleging favoritism in its loans. “XP has received information demonstrating that the unprecedented number of failures in the DOE program relative to what DOE officials have claimed to be ‘the most expensive and extensive due diligence in history’ is explained by manipulated reviews, in the due diligence effort, on behalf of what the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigations found to be ‘favoritism’ in published investigation reports. A [S]enate ethics investigation states, in published reports, that ‘negligence and mismanagement by DOE officials’ was a regular occurrence,” the lawsuit claimed.69 No one at the Energy Department has been fired or prosecuted.
SPREADING THE GREEN AROUND
In May 2013, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a bombshell report alleging illegal favoritism at the Environmental Protection Agency. Under Obama administration EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the agency had become a bulwark of pro-environmentalist corruption, with Jackson utilizing her vast regulatory power to target coal plants, pipelines, and factories across the country. But now the CEI alleged that the EPA had forced conservative groups to pay fees for their Freedom of Information Act requests, while waiving those same fees for green groups. According to the CEI, “green groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and EarthJustice, had their fees waived in 75 out of 82 cases. Meanwhile, EPA effectively or expressly denied [Christopher] Horner’s request for fee waivers in 14 of 15 FOIA requests over this same time.” That means that green groups got waivers 92 percent of the time, compared with conservative groups’ 7 percent.70