SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: locogringo who wrote (121422)1/8/2012 7:26:58 PM
From: lorne1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224705
 
Obama’s Global Godfather dragged in with the CH2M Hill scandal tide?
=================
============
From Canada Free Press:
by Judi McLeod
December 2, 2011
romanticpoet.wordpress.com

Rusty Weiss’s fully documented expose of CH2M Hill—the multinational that was awarded $2-billion in stimulus money—dragged something unexpected in with the tide: proof of President Barack Obama’s Global Godfather.

Obama’s Global Godfather is Canadian UN Poster Boy Maurice Strong—employed by CH2M Hill as chairman of its influential International Advisory Board.

Followers of the global poohbah money track have known since his arrival in the Oval Office that Obama’s puppet strings were being pulled by George Soros. Now they can officially add Soros’ one-time business partner in the failed Chinese Chery automobile project, Maurice Strong.

Taking in the scope of the combined power of Soros and Strong, it’s no wonder that the puppet dances and gyrates on puppeteer strings while the Fundamental Transformation of America is closer with each passing day.

With those in the know still reeling from the shock of discovering that CH2M Hill was awarded more than three times as much funding as the now bankrupt Solyndra, George and Maurice the puppet masters remain off the radar screen.

In Weiss’s The Case of CH2M Hill: $2 Billion in Crony Stimulation, he warns that of the companies involved in the Solyndra scandal, CH2M Hill “should be next on the House GOP radar, having used nearly $10 million in stimulus funding to design the elaborate Solyndra facility in Fremont, California.”

Just for openers with their millions of dollars in pocket, “CH2M Hill clearly outdid themselves on the Solyndra project, building a facility the likes that had never been seen before in the heart of the Silicon Valley. The facility covers 300,000 square feet, ran a price tag of $733 million, and was equated by some to the Taj Mahal. Bloomberg News reported on some of the extravagant amenities..amenities which might surprise for a company using taxpayer funds to maintain operations.

“It wasn’t just any factory. When it it was completed at an estimated cost of $733 million, including proceeds from a $535 million U.S. loan guarantee, it covered 300,000 square feet, the equivalent of five football fields. It had robots that whistled Disney tunes, spa-like showers with liquid-crystal displays of the water temperature, and glass-walled conference rooms.

“All on your dime.”

“Why, having been awarded more than three times as much funding as Solyndra, has CH2M Hill escaped serious scrutiny,” Weiss asks in his exposé. “Perhaps it is the significant donations and lobbying efforts they have doled out, targeting key Democrats in charge of the stimulus, or the revolving door of employees and White House administrative positions that have allowed them to continue their dominance in procuring government funding.”

Besides being a “consistent government favorite” for taxpayer money and the 60% of nearly $65,000 in campaign finances to Democrats, what is CH2M Hill’s main claim to fame?

From Wikipedia: “CH2M Hill is an American-based global provider of engineering, construction, and operations services for corporations, nonprofits, and federal, state, and local governments. The firm is headquartered in Meridian, an unincorporated area of Douglas County, Colorado in the Denver-Aurora Metropolitan Area. The postal designation of nearby Englewood is commonly listed as the company’s location in corporate filings and local news accounts. As of December 2010 CH2M Hill had 23,000 employees, and 2010 revenues totaled approximately $6.3 billion.[2] The firm is employee-owned,[1] with an internal stock market that operates buy/sell events quarterly.”

These are the big boys of big business; big politics.

CH2M Hill was one of the prime contractors in Iraq, its job to oversee other on site contractors. It was also the leading U.S. contractor in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. In the aftermath of Katrina-devastated New Orleans, it was one of the companies that landed the contract to build trailer parks.

CH2M Hill has also shown up in the weirdest of places. For example, when the controversial Maurice Strong-led Earth Council took flight from the Costa Rican government which had been pursuing the Earth Council for payment of U.S. $1.65 million for the wrongful sale of land it imprudently donated to the Council, the Earth Council files and folders landed with no fanfare, in CH2M Hill’s Consumer Road Toronto office towers, where as far as is known, they remain to the present day.

The international political influence of CH2M Hill would have to be rated as monumental.

Strong, who hightailed it to China in the fall out from the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, and where he remains to this day, was described thus by Nicholas Sonntag, a Canadian who heads up the Beijing office of CH2M Hill: “They (China) are taking a big risk. They’re determined to be the economic engine of the world. This is why Maurice Strong is here—to help them think things through.”

Compared to Communist China, Barack Obama would be a piece of cake.

More >>>>
romanticpoet.wordpress.com



To: locogringo who wrote (121422)1/9/2012 8:09:26 AM
From: lorne2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224705
 
Is this why Stephanopoulos ripped GOP candidates?
Look where debate moderator's ties go back to
Published: 15 hours ago
wnd.com


inShare.2Text biggerText smaller Print Email ABC News commentator George Stephanopoulos has a previously undisclosed connection to President Obama: The two were part of a small group at Harvard University that met for a period of three years purportedly to promote involvement with U.S. community institutions.

Participants at the research project, which took place between 1997 and 2000, include scores of individuals with ties to Obama, including several activists who were later appointed to Obama administration positions. Other participants were instrumental in promoting Obama’s political career.

Just yesterday, Stephanopoulos was the subject of conservative criticism for pointed questions he asked Republican presidential candidates while hosting Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate.

Stephanopoulos is best known as the chief political correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor of ABC morning news program, “Good Morning America.” He also returned last month as host of the Sunday morning news program, “This Week.”

Prior to joining ABC News, he was a senior political adviser to the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and later served as Clinton’s White House communications director for two years.

However, an overlooked detail of Stephanopoulos’ work history is his participation alongside Obama in Harvard’s Saguaro Seminars, a long-term research project aimed at significantly increasing Americans’ connectedness to one another and to community institutions.

The project and its relationship with Obama was exposed in the recently released book, “Red Army: The Radical Network that must be defeated to save America,” by reporters Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott.

Saguaro’s signature effort was the 1997-2000 dialogue “on how we can increasingly build bonds of civic trust among Americans and their communities.” The dialogue resulted in a study being published in 2000 recommending Americans participate more with community groups.

In “Red Army,” Klein and Elliott detail how the idea for the Saguaro Seminars begins with author Robert D. Putnam, who is attributed with charting the “decline of civil engagement in the USA over the last 30 years or so.”

In a January 2001 review of “Bowling Alone,” David Moberg explains at In These Times, a socialist-style magazine, that Putnam defines social capital as connections among individuals and “‘community’ adapted to a large-scale capitalist society.”

Social capital, Moberg explains, is “more abundant in small communities than in big cities, but networks that constitute social capital develop in churches, unions, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, fraternal organizations and even bowling leagues (which have declined in the United States, thus ‘Bowling Alone’).”

“[At Saguaro Seminars] we find a number of people who have either been instrumental in promoting Obama’s agenda or have used their positions of influence on his behalf,” write Klein and Elliott.

In 1992 Obama served on the founding board of Public Allies, an organization dedicated to training a cadre of community organizers. Public Allies cofounders Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, at Obama’s suggestion, interviewed his wife, Michelle Obama, to head a new Chicago office. Michelle Obama served as executive director from spring 1993 until fall 1996.

Obama left the Public Allies board when Michelle was hired, although he served on the Public Allies national board in 1997, when both he and Vanessa Kirsch participated in the Saguaro Seminars.

A second Saguaro Seminar member close to Obama is Reverend Bliss W. Browne. In December 1995, Browne’s United Imagination Network, also called Imagine Chicago, a collective of five elementary schools and one high school, was one of the first 35 school networks and their partners to receive school improvement funds from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC.

The CAC was founded by Weatherman domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who served as the group’s director. With Ayers, Obama served as president of the CAC board of directors from 1995 to 1999. He continued as a member of the board until 2002.