Before Mao Tse-tung enthusiast Ron Bloom was handed the position of car czar, there was Steve Rattner. Rattner managed the billion-dollars bailout to the automobile industry and the government takeover of GM and Chrysler. His good fortune has since run out.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today that Steven Rattner, the banker and Democratic donor who led the Obama administration's restructuring of the automobile industry, remains under investigation in his office's long probe of the former New York State Comptroller, Alan Hevesi.
A top Hevesi aide, David Loglisci, pled guilty today to knowledge of corruption in the comptroller's office, where a top political aide, Hank Morris, allegedly controlled the contracts to manage hundreds of millions of dolllars. The original Loglisci indictment included the fact that Rattner, one of the politically-connected money managers who was given access to the money of New York State public workers, also financed a low-budget, money-losing movie called "Chooch," which happened to be produced by Loglisci's brother.
David Loglisci's brother, Steve, made the film "Chooch" backed by Rattner's financing. ("Chooch" is an Italian word connoting an idiot.) If Rattner dipped into state money to finance Steve Loglisci's film thanks to David's influence, the man who managed Obama's massive auto company bailout could be headed to prison.
Rattner resigned his position as car czar in May 2009, claiming he wanted to return to the private sector. More likely Obama knew investigators were circling and didn't want Rattner to become a liability. Rattner is being investigated chiefly by New York Attorney General and Senate hopeful Andrew Cuomo, a close ally of Obama's. It has yet to be seen whether Obama will pull a few strings to keep the former car czar safe.
Ron Bloom, Obama's car czar, has surfaced, buried at the end of a U.S. News and World Report blog entry. Columnist Peter Roff reports that Bloom may have been the catalyzing force behind the Toyota recall.
Whatever the reality concerning the performance of the Toyota vehicles, the investigations are themselves riddled with conflicts of interest. Thanks to President Barack Obama's multibillion-dollar bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, the agencies looking into the safety of the Toyota fleet are part of the same U.S. government that owns large chucks of the same GM and Chrysler that have been losing market share to Toyota and the other Japanese automakers for decades.
Sources who follow the issue suggest that Ron Bloom, the former White House car czar who is now a senior counselor on manufacturing issues, is at least partly to blame for keeping the spotlight focused on Toyota's troubles.
Bloom is an unelected czar charged with overseeing the reconstruction of America's domestic auto industry. The government initially put pressure on Toyota to recall their cars after it was revealed many Toyota models were suddenly accelerating, injuring and killing drivers. Toyota had the highest rate of sudden acceleration problems, although GM and Chrysler had plenty of incidents as well.
Bloom previously worked for the SEIU. Toyota, meanwhile, has refused to unionize its workers. Bloom is also charged with remaking the American auto industry, while Toyota is based in Japan. Bloom has previously said he agrees with mass murderer Mao Tse-tung that "Political power largely comes from the end of a gun." He has also said, "In today’s world the blather about free trade, free markets and the joys of competition is nothing but pablum for the suckers."
To be fair, Nicole Yvette Lamb-Hale was confirmed by the Senate and has an official position (Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing), unlike so many of Barack Obama's other czars. But the president doesn't need another adviser on manufacturing. He already has Manufacturing Czar Ed Montgomery and crazed anti-capitalist Car Czar Ron Bloom.
Lamb-Hale previously worked at the business consulting firm Foley and Lardner LLP, one of the largest in the country. There, she specialized in the restructuring of companies in the manufacturing sector...especially automobile companies. Obama's government currently has huge ownership stakes in two of America's largest car companies. His administration has been persecuting the biggest competition, Toyota, by demanding massive recalls. Now he brings in a woman renowned for her ability to tinker with the car industry. It smells like socialism and central planning.
Most of the companies that owed TARP money have repaid it. Now it's time for the reverse to happen. Obama needs to get the government the hell out of GM and Chrysler...and fire Montgomery, Bloom, and Lamb-Hale.
It’s fun to laugh at Barack Obama’s blunders on his one-year anniversary, but remember that the president is a radical Chicago pol. He’s inexperienced of course, but he’s also gotten away with some pretty egregious things during his first year. Here are 25 of the worst, in no particular order.
1)Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, says that Fox News isn’t a real news network. Days later, Fox is denied an interview with Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg, even though Feinberg is made available to the other networks. The White House ultimately retreats from this sinister and anti-American activity.
2)Obama appoints John Holdren to be his Science Czar. Holdren is a eugenicist who believes overpopulation will destroy the planet and who has written that forced abortions or sterilizations could be justified under the Constitution.
3)Obama appoints Kevin Jennings to be his Safe Schools Czar. Jennings once headed up GLSEN, a radical gay group that promoted pornographic sex books for children. When asked by a young student what to do about a sexual encounter with an older man in a bus station, Jennings dismissively said, “I hope you used a condom.”
4)Under the influence of Obama’s Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd, and following widespread attacks on the "The Fairness Doctrine", the FCC embraces “localism” and starts thinking of ways to take down large radio companies (most of which employ conservative personalities) and redistribute their money to smaller, minority-owned stations.
5)Obama appoints Ron Bloom to be his Car Czar, a union hack who once called the free market “nonsense.”
6)Obama tries to jam the Employee Free Choice Act through Congress, a union grab bag that would shift power to Big Labor and eliminate the secret ballot for workers voting on whether or not to unionize.
7)Obama gives the United Auto Workers labor union massive ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler after both businesses accepted government bailouts. Using the government to hand companies over to their workers? Classic Obama Marxism.
8)Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office use Enron-style accounting tricks to disguise the negative consequences of their radical policies. Most recently, the OMB announced it would be counting jobs “funded” rather than actually “created” by its stimulus bill.
9)Obama’s Pay Czar, Kenneth Feinberg, is given truly tyrannical power. He can determine the salaries of corporate CEOs and mid-level employees, and “claw back” money already paid.
10)Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor has previously stated that empathy is a crucial factor in judging, and that her Hispanic upbringing somehow made her more qualified to sit on the highest court in the land.
11)Obama’s Justice Department sues the state of New Jersey because they administer an exam to aspiring police sergeants which more whites pass than minorities. The lawsuit is purely racial and resembles the Ricci case in Connecticut that got Sotomayor in so much trouble.
12)Hillary Clinton gives a speech celebrating the creation of the UN Population Fund, a group dedicated to providing women with “reproductive services” and that has been convincingly accused of working with China to enforce its one-child policy.
13)After Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona criticized Obama’s stimulus, the White House phones up Arizona’s governor and threatened to withhold stimulus funds to that state if Kyl kept up his criticisms.
14)Obama makes another sick deal with Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. In exchange for Nelson abandoning his concerns about abortion in the health care bill, Obama offers to have the federal government pay all of Nebraska’s Medicare costs…at the expense of taxpayer money from the other 49 states.
15)Obama is caught at the center of a scheme to sell his former Senate seat in Illinois. Most of the blame appropriately falls on Governor Rod Blagojevich, but some of the president’s chief advisers are implicated on tape as well, including Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett. Neither is fired nor disciplined in any way.
16)Obama pays off the AARP. With A. Barry Rand, a longtime Obama crony, helming the AARP, Obama bought off the organization by giving them an astonishing $18 million in stimulus money. In return, the AARP strongly supported the health care bill, even though it included massive Medicare cuts, which the group had criticized in the past.
17)Obama brings in Van Jones as his Green Jobs Czar. Jones was entrusted to coordinate the president’s strategy on so-called green jobs, despite his former membership in a group called STORM that advocated the overthrow of the government, and despite a long history of radical and inappropriate comments. Jones later resigns after it’s revealed he signed a petition questioning whether the government destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
18)Obama brings in Jeff Jones. This Jones is a former Weather Underground terrorist (along with Bill Ayers) who later established a group called the Apollo Alliance. The Apollo Alliance wrote the cap and trade bill that Obama later tried to ram through Congress.
19)Obama appoints Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, (Rahm’s brother), to be one of his budget advisors. Emanuel has previously written at length about the need to ration health care.
20)Obama appoints Patrick Gaspard to be his political director. Gaspard is all tied up in the network of corrupt community organizations that produced Obama himself, including the SEIU, ACORN, and the Working Families Party. He has observed that his greatest achievement is "raising two children of color in the U.S." Instead of, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was born?
21)Obama’s National Endowment of the Arts, under the leadership of Rocco Landesman, tries to coax artists into creating pieces that lionize Obama. In other words, taxpayer money is used to fund artistic propaganda.
22)Obama appoints Robert Bauer to be his White House counsel. Bauer is an ardent ACORN defender and wrote a memo to the Justice Department during the 2008 election asking them to investigate whether the McCain campaign broke the law by criticizing ACORN.
23)Obama gives a speech at the University of Cairo in which he constantly praises the Muslim world and attempts to whitewash its problems with terrorism. The speech is appeasing and useless, since a Muslim bomber would attempt to blow up a Detroit flight less than a year later.
24)Obama attempts to pass a health care bill that, among other egregious provisions, requires every American citizen to purchase health insurance. This tyranny is unprecedented in America’s history, as a requirement for citizenship has never before been in place.
25)Obama joins Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in failing to accept the election results in Honduras, where a peaceful coup overthrew brutal Marxist Manuel Zelaya, who had refused to leave after being voted out of office. Zelaya is now hiding out in the Brazilian Embassy.
