It wasn't bad enough that Democrats abused GSEs Fannie and Freddie with 'Enron-style' accounting in order to rake in millions in largely sinecure salaries while inflating the housing bubble, then letting the crooks walk while threatening banksters. It wasn't bad enough that Obama gave GM to the unions, screwing investors and non-union workers in the process, and it wasn't bad enough that they went after mom and pop financial ops while letting people like Corzine walk. It wasn't bad enough that they gave 8 Obamacare waivers to unions for every 1 given to private corporations, or that those corporations were mostly campaign donors to Obama, or that they lavished 8 dollars in federal subsidies for green energy boondoggles on Obama-donor connected companies for every 2 dollars awarded to others.
No, they are using impressed labor and forced contracts to enrich themselves:
The Obama administration is using prison labor to advance its green energy agenda, enriching foreign companies and some of the president’s largest campaign donors in the process.
Federal Prison Industries, most commonly known by the trade name UNICOR, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Justice. Established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934, UNICOR was intended as a voluntary work-training program for federal inmates. It has recently gone into business supplying federal agencies with green energy technology such as solar panels.
Hundreds of federal inmates earn between $0.23 and $1.15 per hour manufacturing solar panels at UNICOR facilities in New York and Oregon. The panels are then sold to a variety of government agencies, which are obligated by law to purchase them…
Who says that Obama isn’t creating jobs? However, these aren’t union jobs. They don’t even pay anywhere near minimum wage. So where is the outrage?
One of the alleged rationales for the program is to allow federal agencies to purchase domestically produced solar panels at an affordable price.
Among the beneficiaries, Rahm Emanuel, also enriched by a sinecure at Freddie when its financials were collapsing at the expense of taxpayers everywhere.
Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel helped broker the $8.2 billion merger between PECO Energy and Unicom that led to the firm’s creation in 2000. It was the biggest deal of Emanuel’s two-year career as an investment banker in Chicago, during which he pocketed more than $16.2 million, according to congressional disclosure forms.
Obama’s close ties to Exelon became a contentious issue during the Democratic primary in 2008, when Hillary Clinton accused her opponent of cutting deals “behind closed doors” to benefit “one of his largest contributors.” …
To be perfectly fair to Rahm and Barry, Chicago does send a lot of labor to the federal prison system. Sure, trust Rahm's brother with your Complete Lives Care. What could go wrong? I mean, apart from their telling you when it's complete enough? Somehow, the part where Julia got bundled off to the Liverpool care pathway got excised.
Convicted domestic terrorist and perjurer Brett Kimberlin was employed in a prison shop, where according to his own account, he deliberately sabotaged aircraft parts destined for the US military.
More impressed labor: Racine teachers used students to canvass against interests of their parents.
UPDATE: Still more sickening self-dealing from Kim Strassel at WSJ:
Rewind to 2009. The fight over ObamaCare is raging, and a few news outlets report that something looks ethically rotten in the White House. An outside group funded by industry is paying the former firm of senior presidential adviser David Axelrod to run ads in favor of the bill. That firm, AKPD Message and Media, still owes Mr. Axelrod money and employs his son.
The story quickly died, but emails recently released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee ought to resurrect it. The emails suggest the White House was intimately involved both in creating this lobby and hiring Mr. Axelrod's firm—which is as big an ethical no-no as it gets.
Mr. Axelrod—who left the White House last year—started AKPD in 1985. The firm earned millions helping run Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Mr. Axelrod moved to the White House in 2009 and agreed to have AKPD buy him out for $2 million. But AKPD chose to pay Mr. Axelrod in annual installments—even as he worked in the West Wing. This agreement somehow passed muster with the Office of Government Ethics, though the situation at the very least should have walled off AKPD from working on White-House priorities.
It didn't. The White House and industry were working hand-in-glove to pass ObamaCare in 2009, and among the vehicles supplying ad support was an outfit named Healthy Economy Now (HEN). News stories at the time described this as a "coalition" that included the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the American Medical Association, and labor groups—suggesting these entities had started and controlled it.
This is what our enlightened MSM is protecting.
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