Bailout Success Stories

[Pico and ME]

Chrysler to Invest $600 Million in Illinois Plant

Chrysler Group LLC will spend $600 million to upgrade production at its Illinois assembly plant, bringing the auto maker's total announced U.S. investment to $2.1 billion since its exit from bankruptcy court last year

A Town Saved by Stimulus

Chrysler, which had idled 3,500 hourly workers in Kokomo a year and a half ago, recently announced $350 million in new investments that will make the city the hub of North American manufacturing for its next-generation transmissions. All those people have been put back to work, and 700 others have been hired.

Auto parts manufacturer Delphi will use an $89 million stimulus grant to retain 100 manufacturing jobs and make 100 additional hires at a facility building parts for hybrid vehicles.

And a Colorado solar company plans to use $300 million in stimulus funds to hire as many as 900 workers at an old Daimler auto plant south of town that will make products to export to Europe.

Even the downtown looks better. The mayor leveraged $800,000 in stimulus funds to help with a revitalization project that has netted 11 new stores since the start of the year.

GM takes another step to repay bailout

General Motors is taking a big step toward repaying taxpayers for last year's $50 billion bailout, announcing it will repurchase $2.1 billion in preferred stock held by the Treasury Department.

The automaker has already repaid about $6.7 billion in loans.

The Auto Industry Is Cruising on Slow but Steady Demand

One example is GM's decision last week to begin building a compact Buick sedan, to be called the Verano, along with a yet-unnamed Chevrolet subcompact car at a dormant former Pontiac plant in Orion Township, Mich. The move means employment for more than 1,600 unionized autoworkers who might otherwise remain unemployed. The Orion plant is expected to employ workers on two shifts, building about 160,000 vehicles a year, after production gets underway.

[Lamplighter]

Pico, It's all Obama's fault.

[Pico and ME]

My family was directly impacted by this bailout...I'm a fan.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Credit where credit is due. If Bush hadn't caused it, Obama wouldn't have been able to do anything.

[classicman]

You can follow the stimulus in your town/city/state or view by many other parameters here.

http://stimuluswatch.org/2.0/

[TheMercenary]

It is not about the few good programs they did it is about the billions they wasted. The billions wasted far out weigh the little good.

[classicman]

Here are some more success stories. Well depending where you invest and how much you care about the environment.

Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight by Stimulus

In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.
Related Stories:

* NEPA Exemptions: The Dirty Dozen List
* Wisconsin Firm Receives Energy Grant Despite Chronic Pollution Problems

The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing those projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Coal-burning utilities like Westar Energy and Duke Energy, chemical manufacturer DuPont, and ethanol maker Didion Milling are among the firms with histories of serious environmental violations that have won blanket NEPA exemptions.

Even a project at BP’s maligned refinery in Texas City, Tex. — owner of the oil industry’s worst safety record and site of a deadly 2005 explosion, as well as a benzene leak earlier this year — secured a waiver for the preliminary phase of a carbon capture and sequestration experiment involving two companies with past compliance problems. The primary firm has since dropped out of the project before it could advance to the second phase.

Agency officials who granted the exemptions told the Center that they do not have time in most cases to review the environmental compliance records of stimulus recipients, and do not believe past violations should affect polluters’ chances of winning stimulus money or the NEPA exclusions.

The so-called “stimulus” funding came from the $787-billion legislation officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009.

Documents obtained by the Center show the administration has devised a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications. In fact, administration officials told the Center they chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant.

Some polluters reported their stimulus projects might cause “unknown environmental risks” or could “adversely affect” sensitive resources, the documents show. Others acknowledged they would produce hazardous air pollutants or toxic metals. Still others won stimulus money just weeks after settling major pollution cases. Yet nearly all got exemptions from full environmental analyses, the documents show.

Link

I'm not sure who these people are nor what the deal is with this, but my initial reaction is anger.

[TheMercenary]

Not surprised.