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Flap’s Links and Comments for March 30th on 06:32

These are my links for March 30th from 06:32 to 07:37:

  • Did Obama Administration Play Favorites With Energy Loans? Green Firms Financed By Obama Fundraiser Steve Westly Score Millions in Federal Loans – When the White House announced the federal government would loan $465 million to Tesla, a California start-up company with plans to develop an all-electric sedan, President Obama called it an "historic opportunity to ensure that the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks are made in America."

    The loan also represented a lucrative opportunity for Steve Westly, a major investor in the car company who had raised more than $500,000 for the president's campaign.

    In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy lent more than half a billion dollars to companies backed by Westly's California venture capital firm. In 2010, the White House tapped Westly for a seat on a special energy advisory panel that gives him regular access to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Westly boasts on his website that his firm is "uniquely positioned" to take advantage of the Obama administration's interest in green energy.

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    More CRONY capitalism from the Obama Administration

  • Black And Blue 2: Blacks Flee Blue States in Droves – Americans ultimately have to accept the reality that you can’t eliminate poverty by hiring professionals with postgraduate degrees and six figure incomes to sit in downtown offices and engineer policy solutions to urban ills. Poverty in a society like ours is a human problem and it is solved one human being at a time, usually through person to person contact: above all the parent but also the teacher, the preacher, the mentor, the entrepreneur who helps the lost and the overcome find solid ground on which to stand and build a life.

    As Blacks flee the citadels of blue thought, and as the paladins of blue like Bob Herbert move toward retirement, the problems of the inner cities and the underclass are still very much with us. Top down solutions and bureaucratic interventions have at best a limited utility in this new environment; it is time for a national re-think and a national re-engagement on the problems of race, poverty and class.

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