THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY

 

‘Worse than Solyndra’: Republicans Press for Information on Biden Admin’s Favorite Electric Battery Company

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has up to $5 million invested in company Biden promoted

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm / Getty Images

Matthew Foldi • April 29, 2021 5:00 am

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Republican senators are working to make the electric battery company President Joe Biden toured to promote his $1.9 trillion infrastructure plan this administration's Solyndra.

Biden's promotion of electric battery and bus manufacturer Proterra has struck a nerve on Capitol Hill after the Washington Free Beacon reported that Biden's energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, still has up to $5 million invested in the company. The administration's $1.9 trillion infrastructure plan includes a $174 billion investment in electric vehicles, as well as plans to replace diesel-powered buses with electric-powered buses—the very product Proterra specializes in.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) says the conflict of interest created by Biden's visit has the potential to be "even worse than Solyndra," the solar panel company that went bankrupt after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government-backed loans from the Obama administration.

"President Biden's decision to heavily promote a business where his energy secretary holds a multimillion-dollar stake has all the potential to be even worse than Solyndra," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "President Biden and Secretary Granholm should immediately remove themselves from their glaring conflict of interest."

The Solyndra boondoggle became a lasting symbol of failure during the Obama administration, which awarded the green energy firm a $535 million loan guarantee through the 2009 stimulus package. The loan was announced with fanfare by then-vice president Biden and Energy Secretary Steven Chu during a Sept. 4, 2009 speech at Solyndra's California headquarters. Obama, even after being warned that the company was on the brink of failure, visited its headquarters a few months later and hailed it for "leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future."

The company months later shut down all operations and declared bankruptcy.

The overt promotion of Solyndra bears resemblance to the current treatment of Proterra, which in the first hundred days of the Biden administration won a visit by the president as well as a visit by Vice President Kamala Harris to one of its largest partners. Biden predicted during his virtual visit that companies like Proterra were "going to end up owning the future." Biden also promised the company he would return for an in-person visit in the near future.

The White House says Granholm, who has been given a major role in both crafting and selling the infrastructure package, played no role in planning the visit to Proterra. Granholm resigned from the company's board but has yet to divest her up to $5 million in the company, which was acquired for $1.6 billion this January. 

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has asked the Department of Energy's inspector general to investigate any conflicts of interest created by Granholm's stake in Proterra. 

Barrasso pointed in the letter to assurances made by Granholm during her confirmation hearing that she would not only resign from Proterra but also recuse herself from any issue with an "effect on the financial interests of Proterra" until fully divested. Biden has since used an executive order to place 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."

"Secretary Granholm leads the Department of Energy, which plays a central role in the nation's development of electric vehicles, batteries, and charging infrastructure," Barrasso said.  

Barrasso is asking for details on the status of Granholm's investment, as well as all information regarding the planning of both Biden's tour of Proterra and Harris's trip to Thomas Built Buses, the Proterra partner organization.

Granholm said she will sell the Proterra stock within the 180-day window she agreed to when she took the position. 

"I've signed an ethics agreement that requires me to divest of all of my individually owned stocks, like all federal appointees, within 180 days, and I certainly will do that," Granholm told Politico on Monday.

Brian Deese, whom Biden appointed director of the National Economic Council, joined the president on his tour of Proterra and said the infrastructure plan would direct money to the company, pointing to both the $45 billion set aside to make the country's buses electric and $32 million to boost electric battery manufacturers.

Biden from the Beginning

Right from the start, the Delaware Democrat was all about power and money.

Wed Apr 28, 2021 

Lloyd Billingsley

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White House resident Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, at the age of 29. Two years later, in 1974, the Delaware Democrat was the subject of a 4,000-plus-word Washingtonian profile, but not for anything he had accomplished in office.

“I have no illusions about why I am such a hot commodity,” Biden told Kitty Kelley.  “I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate which makes me very newsworthy.” Biden’s wife Neilia and the couple’s infant daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after Biden’s election in 1972. Biden wanted to resign, but Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield promised him prestigious committee assignments. The grieving newcomer had higher goals in mind.

“I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President,” Biden told Kelley. “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen.” As Biden’s sister Valerie explained, “Joey is going to be president someday. He was made to be in the White House. Just you wait and see.”

Biden proclaimed “there is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics,” but money was also part of it. “I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body,” Biden explained in the Senate. “It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt.” That brought a response from William Loeb, editor of the “right wing”  Manchester Union Leader.

“Can you imagine the conceit and stupidity of a young man of 30 who would say that? The voters of Delaware who elected this stupid, conceited jackass to the Senate should kick him in the rear to knock some sense into him, and then kick themselves for voting for such an idiot.”

As Kelley noted, Biden framed Loeb’s editorial and hung it in his office. “When you get a blast like that you really know you’re worth something.” Kelley had reason for doubt.

In the course of the interview, Biden leaned over his desk, shook his finger and said,  “And whether you like it or not, young lady, us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendment of yours if we want to.”  Kelley took the threat as confirmation that Joe Biden “defines politics as power.”

In 2010, Mark Bowen cited Kelley’s “notoriously revealing” profile in his 9,000-plus word Atlantic piece on the Delaware Democrat. As Bowden recalled, when Biden ran for president in 1988 he was “discovered passing off as his own passages from a speech by a British Labour politician.” In 2008, Biden finished the Iowa caucuses with less than one percent of the vote, and Bowden wondered if the Delaware Democrat might be seeking something else.

“I would not be anybody’s secretary of state in any circumstance I could think of,” Biden said at the time, “and I absolutely can say with certainty I would not be anybody’s vice president. Period. End of story. Guaranteed. Will not do it.” Biden did do it, and Bowden recalled his statement to Kelley that he would be a good president. Bowden wasn’t sure.

“Though plenty smart, Biden is not an intellectual,” Bowden explained. Biden was an “indifferent student” in college and law school, and “he makes few references to books and learned influences in his speeches and autobiography.” Bowden named no books that someone aspiring to be president of the United States might want to read, perhaps landmark works by Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, F.A. Hayek and many others. As Mark Twain said, the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

In a 1987 campaign speech, Joe Biden “borrowed liberally, and without attribution, from the British Labour politician Neil Kinnock.” At the time Kinnock and his party were heavily embedded with the Soviets, so Kinnock was perhaps the worst choice Biden could have made. On the other hand, Biden credits his humiliating plagiarism with “saving his life.” If he had stayed in the campaign, “he likely would have ignored the warning signs that sent him to the doctor.” What, exactly, the doctor needed to treat is not explained, but it is possible to guess.

Mark Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down, Huế 1968, and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. With Joe Biden the serious writer took a softer approach.

“Joe Biden doesn’t just meet you, he engulfs you. There’s the direct contact with his blue eyes, the firm handshake while his other hand grasps your arm, the flash of those famously perfect white teeth, and an immediate frontal assault on your personal space. He shoulders right through the aura of fame and high office. Forget the Secret Service, the ever-present battery of aides and advisers, the photographers clicking away: the vice president of the United States moves in like an old pal with something urgent to tell you—just you. If he’s in a chair, he’ll scoot it closer; when the furniture’s not portable, he’ll lean forward, planting his elbows on his knees, gesturing with both hands while he speaks, occasionally reaching over to touch your arm or leg for emphasis.”

Joe Biden is also a “virtuoso talker. That fluency is not a gift but an accomplishment.” Biden’s “occasional well-publicized gaffes have served to humanize a leadership team that all too often seems aloof, cerebral, and elitist.” Readers might think Biden’s gaffes are a positive accomplishment, and his politics largely a matter of style.

Contrast this highly promotional account with Kitty Kelley, known for unauthorized biographies of Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra and the Bush Family. Biden’s threats to take away First Amendment rights convinced Kelley that the Delaware Democrat “defines politics as power.”

Jump ahead to 2021 and the First Amendment is under attack as Joe Biden seems determined to take away the Second Amendment rights of every American. In the White House, Victor Davis Hanson notes, Biden is “as he always was,” as incompetent as Jimmy Carter, as corrupt as Bill Clinton and “a greater racial divider than Barack Obama.”

This is what happens when a cruddy politician taps the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” 

Darkness Falls: Bezos-Owned Washington Post To Stop Keeping Track of Biden’s Lies

Andrew Stiles • April 27, 2021 1:24 pm

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The Washington Post will no longer maintain a database of President Joe Biden's false and misleading claims, executive fact checker Glenn Kessler announced this week.

The paper, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will continue to fact check statements from Biden and others. Kessler, for example, recently challenged Sen. Tim Scott's (R., S.C.) claim that his grandfather—a black farmer who grew up in South Carolina during the Great Depression—did not lead a particularly privileged life.

Kessler has determined that Biden does not lie enough—he's more of a "flub" kind of guy; an old geezer who's trying his best—to extend the database of presidential mistruths beyond his first 100 days in office. The Post‘s readers, meanwhile, are presumably less interested in fact checks that don't involve Donald Trump (or any Republican), so the decision makes sense from a business perspective.

The move is the latest example of a journalistic organization abandoning a crucial "accountability" project in the post-Trump era. It could also be related to the so-called burnout many professional journalists have complained about in recent weeks. The New York Times announced last week, for instance, that Taylor Lorenz and other employees would get special days off for "exhaustion" in 2021.

The Post‘s motto is "Democracy dies in darkness."

Biden’s new dawn: Illusion and reality

Patrick Martin, Joseph Kishore

5 hours ago

Behind the proclamations of a new dawn in the United States, Biden’s speech Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress provided a portrait of panic, crisis and desperation on the part of the American ruling class.

And more significant than the various calls for reform measures, a far more important and sinister strategic perspective was elaborated throughout: to create the political framework for a confrontation with China to maintain, if necessary through war, the global hegemony of American imperialism.

President Joe Biden speaks to a joint session of Congress Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via AP)

After decades in which it has become ritualistic for presidents to declare in their annual addresses to Congress that “the State of the Union is strong,” Biden presented a frank admission that the social situation in the US is nothing less than catastrophic: “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” If one simply isolated the sentences in which Biden depicted the reality of American society, it provides an appalling portrait of poverty, hunger and desperation facing millions of workers in the US.

The listener may have been surprised to hear Biden speak of the massive concentration of wealth, as if he were reading from an article on the World Socialist Web Site. “Twenty million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic, working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion, in the same exact period.”

Moreover, while he referenced his first 100 days in office, more revealing of the real state of American society is the 114 days since the January 6 fascistic insurrection that nearly resulted in the overthrow of the government. Even as he spoke, the streets around the Capitol building were closed and patrolled by police and National Guard troops.

According to Biden, the situation has already drastically changed in just his first 100 days in office. “I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. Turning peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, setbacks into strength.” Millions, however, are still being infected by COVID-19 and face the threat of death. Millions are still jobless and poverty-stricken. And none of those politically responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol have been brought to justice. On the contrary, they occupied nearly half the seats in the audience Biden addressed, referred to by Biden as “my friends across the aisle.”

Aware of the deep social anger building up in the United States, Biden promised two multitrillion-dollar programs he called on Congress to adopt. The “American Jobs Plan,” he claimed, would “help millions of people get back to work and back to their careers,” including through major infrastructure projects. The “American Families Plan,” he said, would ensure a good education for everyone, including two years of free community college; quality, affordable child care for all parents; 12 weeks of guaranteed paid medical leave; and the expansion of child tax credits.

There is a lot less to Biden’s proposals than meets the eye, and even less that will ever actually be implemented, if anything passes through Congress.

Biden’s politics is the politics of the golden mean—everything for everyone. Inequality will be combatted, he promised, while proclaiming at the same time, “I think you should be able to become a billionaire and millionaire.” All the changes Biden is proposing will somehow be achieved without any inroads into the wealth of the financial oligarchy or changes in the forms of property ownership.

He pointed to the gross inequality of the 2017 Republican tax cut, with 55 of the largest corporations paying zero federal tax although they made $40 billion in profit. But his solution was raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent (reversing only half of Trump’s tax cut) and restoring the income tax rate for the superrich to the level that prevailed under George W. Bush (up from 37 percent to 39.6 percent).

All of these proposals were framed around the essential issue: to defend the global position of American imperialism.

A major theme of the speech was that the measures Biden proposed were necessary for America to “win the 21st century” from other powerful countries and, above all, China. “There is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing,” Biden said, in one of half a dozen references to Chinese economic competition.

Under President Xi, China was “deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world,” Biden said. He sought to enlist working people in the imperialist war drive, constantly invoking American nationalism. Under his legislation, he declared, “American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America to create American jobs.”

When one cuts through the acoustical changes in tone and rhetoric, Biden’s economic nationalism, trade war measures and militarist buildup, targeting China in particular, largely conforms to Trump’s own slogan, “America First.”

Within the ruling class and its thinktanks, the overriding concern is to establish the domestic political framework for American imperialism. The most recent edition of Foreign Affairs is devoted to this question. In “The Home Front: Why an Internationalist Foreign Policy Needs a Stronger Domestic Foundation,” Charles Kupchan and Peter Turbowitz worry that despite Biden’s pledge that the US is again “ready to lead the world,” the “political foundations of US internationalism [that is, US imperialist hegemony] have collapsed.”

The authors state, “What Biden needs is an ‘inside out’ approach that will link imperatives at home to objectives abroad. Much will depend on his willingness and ability to take bold action to rebuild broad popular support for internationalism from the ground up.”

Biden’s “bold action” will, in the end, amount to little. It is well known that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was wrecked by the Vietnam War. In the decision between “guns and butter,” the ruling class decided for guns. Who can believe that under Biden, under conditions of a vast erosion in the global position of American capitalism and as the ruling class is preparing war on a far greater scale, that the result will be any different?

Biden is attempting to create a political framework within the US to wage war abroad. This is the essential significance of his administration’s aggressive promotion of the official trade unions, which are to be incorporated into a “national labor front” based on economic nationalism and militarism.

In the first direct appeal for legislation in the course of his speech, Biden declared, “So that’s why I’m calling on Congress to pass the Protect the Right to Organize Act—the PRO Act—and send it to my desk so we can support the right to unionize.” The PRO Act has nothing to do with securing the interests of workers and everything to do with institutionalizing the official “unions” as corporatist instruments of the ruling class and the state.

The trade unions have for half a century worked systematically to isolate and suppress every manifestation of working class opposition to inequality and exploitation. Over the past year, they have opposed any struggle against the homicidal policies of the ruling class in response to the pandemic, collaborating in the reopening of factories and schools.

Now, the executives that control these organizations are to be even further integrated into the state apparatus. As Trotsky noted in the founding document of the Fourth International, “In time of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.”

Last week, the Biden administration announced that it was forming a White House “task force” to encourage the institutionalization of the trade unions, in line with the administration’s aggressive backing of the union campaign at Amazon. The task force will include Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chairman Janet Yellen. That is, it will include the two chief representatives of American imperialism and finance capital.

The reformist pretenses of Biden will, sooner rather than later, be exposed. The outbreak of class struggle will be met with ferocious political repression. Biden and the Democrats hope that they can suppress the class struggle and restore the supremacy of American imperialism to “win the 21st century.” Their efforts will prove futile.