Teapot Dome II - Military Procurement, Obama & Crony Capitalism

The story of the Navy being forced to purchase millions of gallons of biofuel from Obama cronies at $16 a gallon - fully three times the cost of normal fuel - is corrupt crony capitalism off the charts.  It is a modern Teapot Dome scandal.   What makes it all the worse is that it is money coming out of a defense budget that has been cut down to beyond the bone, threatening our national security in order to line the pockets of Obama's cronies with our tax dollars. This from IBD:

SolyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon. …

Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands of gallons of alternative biofuel in place of standard JP-5 fuel for Navy aircraft — the biggest federal purchase of biofuel ever.

It’s part of the White House’s “we can’t wait for Congress” strategy as the 2012 election year looms. But JP-5 typically costs less than $4 a gallon. If a family on a budget started filling up with $16-a-gallon gas, it might want to adopt the motto, “we can’t wait to go broke.”

A look at the lucky seller of this environmentalist version of the proverbial $600 Pentagon toilet seat indicates that the move is not just wasteful, but ethically suspect.

As J.E. Dyer noted over the weekend on the Hot Air Green Room, “a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a ‘strategic advisor’ at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked — shock, shock — on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.”

Solazyme had already gotten a nearly $22 million chunk of change out of the taxpayers thanks to the 2009 stimulus. We heard the ludicrous excuse last week from Obama Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, as quoted in the National Journal, that “we are doing this for one simple reason: It makes us better fighters” because “our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas.”

What about the “very real threat” to the Navy of not having enough money for the ships, fighters and ammunition it needs to protect America? President Obama’s assault on the Pentagon could scrap 60 of the Navy’s ships, including two carrier groups.

Anyone in the military chain of command who supported this, up to and including the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense, needs to fired, if not prosecuted. This screams for investigation every bit as much as Fast and Furious. This modern replay of the Teapot Dome scandal is pure corruption on a scale to make the Nixon administration look pristine by comparison.