President Obama’s three year spending spree has brought the country to the precipice of bankruptcy but as Speaker John Boehner noted, the president seems to fear losing re-election more than default on our national debt.
Despite facing a default deadline for months, the president and his team focused on what they do best – raising and spending other people’s money.
The President’s re-election team announced that between the Democratic National Committee and the Re-election committee, the president had raised an incredible $86 million. Was it a sign of broad grassroots support for an embattled president? Hardly.
244 people, “bundlers” in Washington parlance, gathered most of the money. As Jerry Seinfeld used to ask, “Who are these people?”
Many of the fundraisers, according to Politico are executives with major regulatory or financial interests before the administration. “A review of a list of high-dollar volunteer fundraisers, or bundlers, released by the Obama campaign last week includes a number of corporate officials whose companies have major business stakes in the decisions of government regulators and administration officials. In some cases, grants, loans and contracts were given to companies that bundlers were heavily involved or invested in.”
It isn’t capitalists who support the president; it’s the crony capitalists.
In addition to the established pigs eating at the federal trough – companies like UBS, Pfizer and other billion dollars corporations – companies like Google and Salesforce.com and Tesla have joined in the orgy.
Steve Westly, a major investor in the electric car company Tesla, bundled up to $200,000 for the president this cycle — while his company received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Google, of course, has invested years in the president and have pushed for regulation of the Internet through “Net Neutrality” and have staffed key executives in White House positions.
Tim Carney, from the Washington Examiner, has also noted that much of the money came from lobbyists, despite the president’s shameless condemnation of “special interest lobbyists.”
Take Google’s Beltway operatives. Vint Cerf is one of the guys who actually did invent the Internet, and now he works for the ardently pro-Obama Web giant as “senior vice president and chief Internet evangelist.” Cerf evangelizes government policymakers, we know thanks to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Cerf leaned on then-White House tech policy official Andrew McLaughlin — himself a former unregistered lobbyist for Google — to advance “net neutrality” regulations that would profit Google.
Ginny Hunt works out of Google’s K Street offices as its “global communications and public affairs manager.” An online bio says, “Ginny builds partnerships and initiatives with campaigns, non-profits and governments. …”
Cerf gave $5,000 to the DNC in June, and Hunt gave $250 to Obama’s campaign in April. Neither Hunt nor Cerf is registered to lobby the federal government — meaning that legally, they must spend less than 20 percent of their time lobbying Washington — so Obama can take their money and still claim to reject all money from “Washington lobbyists.”
What we are seeing is two failures. The first is the president’s failure to change Washington. The second is a failure of businesses that cannot compete in the marketplace without a hand-out and leg-up from government.
In the end, both with vanish from the playing field. The only question is how long will the government prop them up and at what cost to the American people.