Biden to Showcase Business Tied to Energy Sec Granholm
In infrastructure push, Biden promotes company in which Granholm holds multi-million dollar stake
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm owns up to $5 million in the electric battery and vehicle manufacturer President Joe Biden will promote on Tuesday as part of his push for a $1.9 trillion infrastructure bill.
Biden’s virtual visit to the electric battery producer Proterra comes days after Vice President Kamala Harris paid a visit to Thomas Built Buses, a North Carolina-based school bus company that counts Proterra as its main supplier of electric vehicles. The back-to-back White House visits to Granholm-connected companies risk at least the appearance of impropriety and demonstrate how lawmakers can use policy initiatives to pad their own wallets. Biden's infrastructure package includes a $174 billion investment in the electric vehicle market, calls for the replacement of "50,000 diesel transit vehicles" in favor of electric alternatives, and creates a Clean Buses for Kids program that will "electrify at least 20 percent of our yellow school bus fleet."
Granholm has taken a leading role in the administration’s forthcoming infrastructure package. The president in February tasked her with "identifying risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks."
The Department of Energy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Granholm joined Proterra’s board of directors in March 2017; internet archives list her as a board member as recently as February 19, 2021, shortly before her confirmation on February 25. Her financial disclosures reveal up to $5 million worth of stock options in the green tech company, which went public in January through the special purpose acquisition company ArcLight Clean Transition Corp. Arclight, a NASDAQ-listed company, saw shares shoot up about 55 percent since its September IPO, a spike financial traders attributed directly to the acquisition of Proterra.
In a January 16 letter to the designated agency ethics official, Granholm vowed to step down from the board and sell her stock in the company, as well as the steps she will take "to avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest." The former Michigan governor has sold some stock, but has not offloaded any of her Proterra shares, according to a White House official. Granholm’s stake in Proterra represents her largest financial asset outside of a house in Oakland, Calif., that she values as between $1 and 5 million, according to her financial disclosures.
The White House confirmed that Granholm still holds stock in Proterra, but said she played no role in planning the president's visit.
"Proterra was selected for today’s virtual visit because it is the leading U.S. manufacturer of electric buses, employing 600 workers at its South Carolina and California plants," a White House official told the Washington Free Beacon. "Neither Secretary Granholm nor the Department of Energy were involved in selecting the Proterra plant."
The official said Granholm is "in the process of selling off all stock in the company" and will have it sold "within the 180-day window permitted by the ethics agreement."
After publication of this story, the White House cancelled Biden's planned remarks on infrastructure due to news of an incoming verdict in the George Floyd murder trial. Biden took part in a virtual tour of Proterra.
In a February 24 executive order, Biden placed Granholm in charge of "identifying risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks." One of Proterra’s key products is electric-vehicle batteries.
Proterra’s website boasts that "our flexible design enables Proterra® EV batteries to be the best choice for commercial vehicles ranging from transit buses and trucks to delivery vehicles, construction equipment, and more."
Nearly 85 percent of Proterra employee campaign contributions went to Democrats, including Joe Biden, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Collin Anderson contributed to this report.
Hawley: 'Mega Corporations Have Way Too Much Power in American Society'
(CNSNews.com) - "Mega corporations have way too much power in American society, way too much power in American politics, and they want to run our democracy...is the bottom line. They want to run our government," Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Fox News Tuesday night.
Hawley was talking about corporations such as those bowing to the social justice crowd in Georgia, pretending to be "woke" by protesting Georgia's new voting integrity law, but actually causing harm to the same communities they pretend to care about.
The response should be to break the monopolies, Hawley told host Ben Domenech:
We see monopolies across a lot of industries in some of the farmer areas, banks. We need to break up the monopolies pure and simple. We've done that before in American history -- that has been a tried and true remedy for mega corporations that want to exert too much power.
But can I just say one thing about the corporations and racial justice since you bring it up? These corporations are delighted to give some money to BLM, to say that they are woke, to say that they believe in racial justice, but what have they been doing for the last 20, 30, 40 years?
They’ve been shipping jobs overseas, they've been hollowing out the urban core, they've been taking away good paying jobs for Americans of all races and backgrounds. And they want to be left to continue to do that. They want us to look the other way while they continue to pursue those policies that have devastated whole communities, including in the urban core and pretend that they are somehow socially just. It's a shell game. And it's time we called them on it.
Hawley said it's "absolutely vital" for the Republican Party to end its financial dependence on corporate America, "especially the multinational globalist" companies.
Our voters have been telling us for years that they don't like our jobs being shipped overseas. They don't like the way that these corporations kowtow to China on one hand and then turn around and lecture Americans about social justice at home when they are some of the worst offenders.
I mean, look at who is actually dependent on global slavery. It's a lot of these corporations who depends on slave labor or exploited labor. It's the same corporations and yet here they want to tell Americans what to do. So, we need to -- it's time for Republicans to get tough and to say that we are not taking orders from these corporations.
We're not going to base our policy around them. And it's time we listen to our voters. And we've got to get tough on the corporations themselves. And I say again for those that are monopolies, they should be broken up.
Hawley said trust-busting used to be the "signature policy" of the Republican Party, and "it needs to be again."
As conservatives, he said, it's "all about free, fair competition, robust competition."
"You know, monopolies, stranglehold by big business -- that's not competition. We need to get back to supporting competition, to supporting small business and medium-size business, to supporting real innovation.
"Having these big multinational corporations try to lecture the American people and try to dictate the political process, including basically blackmailing legislatures like Georgia and others, that's wrong, that's dangerous. It is a danger to self-government. And we can't allow it," Hawley said.
Earlier on Tuesday, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hawley called out the "powerful corporations" that have told so many "lies" about Georgia's election law.
No comments:
Post a Comment