Layoffs Hit Taxpayer-backed ECOtality

40 employees laid off as green energy company eyes bankruptcy

A taxpayer-backed green energy company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy laid off dozens of employees on Friday, including all remaining employees in its industrial division.

ECOtality received about $115 million in taxpayer funds through the 2009 stimulus bill and an additional grant from the Department of Energy to build electric vehicle charging stations.

ECOtality laid off 40 employees on Friday. The San Francisco-based company still has 51 people on staff, but its industrial division is empty, and it has stopped filling orders for chargers.

“It’s been a bloodbath,” one employee, who still has her job, said in documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“We heard that last Friday’s pay was the last paycheck,” the employee said.

ECOtality announced in August that it might file for bankruptcy. The Energy Department, which selected ECOtality as its primary contractor for the EV Project, suspended payments to the company in light of its financial troubles.

ECOtality faces a class action lawsuit from investors who say company executives misled them regarding its financial health.

“Neither the company’s direct sales force nor the independent dealers have generated sales volumes of its commercial EVSE products sufficient, in combination with other sources of revenue, to support the company’s operations in the second half of 2013,” ECOtality said in an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It disclosed in the same filing that some of its chargers have experienced significant manufacturing defects, in some cases even causing charge ports to melt.

“The government kept throwing good money after bad even though the inevitability of this was clear for over a year,” one company executive told the Free Beacon in an email

Via: WFB

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Senate Dems propose increasing IRS budget for targeting Conservatives and Tea Party Groups

Senate Democrats on Tuesday proposed increasing the budget of the Internal Revenue Service and other financial agencies next year. 

The IRS would get $12.07 billion in funding under the Financial Services subcommittee bill reported to the full Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, an increase of $276.5 million.

House Republicans, in contrast, have suggested cutting the IRS's budget by 24 percent.

Senate Republicans are not happy with the funding level proposed by Democrats, and subcommittee ranking member Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) took the rare step of recording a “no” vote against the bill.

“Count the IRS among the winners in the bill despite the political targeting that appalled all of us and eroded the public’s trust,” Johanns said. 

The IRS has been embroiled in controversy since May, when the administration admitted the agency had improperly handled requests for tax-exempt status by conservative and Tea Party groups.

Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), in his first markup in his new role, said the bill contains language to force the IRS to improve its management. He called the House cuts “counterproductive,” arguing they would lead to personnel cuts and result in lost tax revenue. 

In total, the Senate bill contains $23.2 billion in discretionary spending, an increase from the $21.4 billion enacted in 2013 before automatic spending cuts under the sequester went into effect.

The bill increases funding for the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) gets $110 million more and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gets $353 million in additional funds.

The bill heads to full committee on Thursday.

Via: The Hill

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All-Out Marxist Media Assault on Romney/Ryan begins with Gusto!

First and foremost—lest I forget—both the presidential and vice-presidential “debates” questioning of Romney, Obama, Ryan and Biden will be moderated by the most leftist “journalists” who inhabit the alphabet network stables. To top it off, the sole vice-presidential debate’ “moderator”—Martha Raddatz—was married to Obama FCC appointee Julius Genachowski whom the Daily Caller reports: “Genachowski and classmate Barack Obama worked together on the Harvard Law Review, Genachowski as notes editor and Obama as the publication’s president. They graduated in the same class.”

Note: This year, the media bias appears to be greater than ever…if that’s even possible.

The Marxist media have been passing on each and every Obama syndicate (which includes all White House staff and all Democrats in Congress) unsubstantiated negative story (aka “lie”) perpetrated against both Romney and Ryan. Long after they have been proven false, the media (including—of course—CNN and MSNBC) continue to float and “report on” these concocted yarns and tall-tales that Romney (while Governor of Massachusetts) outsourced jobs to India, caused a woman with no health insurance to develop and die from Cancer (not only did she have health insurance but, the entire premise of the ObamaAD appears to have been manufactured by Obama operative Stephanie Cutter illegally in conjunction with an Obama SuperPac) and—another lie delivered via Ms. Cutter—that Romney lied to the SEC and is a felon.

Note: As with all Marxists and other totalitarian aficionados, at some point it becomes almost impossible to keep up with their contrived lies. This is what they count on occurring.

However, with regards to the upcoming debates, we suspect the questioning may go a little like this:

Via: Canada Free Press

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