Crony Capitalist Level 3 Nets $13.8 Million Payback from Obama

It’s a pretty simple arrangement. Help elect a mega spending progressive to the White House, and reap the regime’s plunder of the private sector. Politico carries an excellent exposition of how Obama's rich friends trade fund raising activity for cash, jobs, and influence. The story is written by iWatch News.org, a website of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on investigative journalism.

Known as “bundlers”, Obama’s mega-funders raised at least $50,000 and sometimes more than $500,000 in campaign donations for Obama’s campaign. Many of those in the “Class of 2008” are now being asked to bundle contributions for Obama’s re-election, an effort that could cost $1 billion.

From the Politico Story...

...Few stories illustrate more vividly how friendship, fundraising, business and politics can intertwine at the White House than that of Gips, Obama’s choice for ambassador to South Africa.

In the 1990s, he wrote a report that later formed a blueprint for AmeriCorps. In 1998, Gips left government, where he had supervised wireless spectrum issues for the FCC and served as Vice President Al Gore’s chief domestic policy adviser. He joined Level 3, a budding telecom company that has received more than $100 million in federal contracts in the past decade.
There, at a 2004 fundraiser, he met Obama, who was then running for the Senate in Illinois. The two grew close: Obama asked Gips to help edit his campaign book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Gips collected more than $500,000 for Obama. James Crowe, chairman of the Level 3 board, was an Obama bundler, too, raising at least $100,000. The firm’s vice chairman, Charles Miller III, bundled more than $50,000.

At the White House, Gips was a powerful force to decide who got coveted jobs. Obama appointed Crowe in October 2010 to chair the presidential advisory committee on telecommunications and wireless issues.

And Level 3 was awarded some $13.8 million in federal stimulus contracts, to extend broadband connections in rural areas of states where it had networks.

[Read the full story here...]