This is what happens when the government chooses the winners and losers

Green Schemes benefits Democratic 'friends and family' program members

Ed Lasky

File under Green Schemes:

Abound Solar received a $400 million grant to ramp up production of cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels. Here's a coincidence: Russ Kanjorski, nephew of Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski, is a marketing executive at Abound, which got a $3 million federal grant in 2008. He previously had been a principal of Cornerstone Technologies, which got $9.2 million in earmarks from Kanjorski and then went bankrupt.

The channeling of taxpayer dollars to as part of the Democratic Friends and Family Program via the "renewable energy" charade continues apace.

To add insult to injury, Abound is a Spanish owned company that is teetering a bit as the Spaniards wise up and realize their solar ventures have been fiscally disastrous and they begin to wean themselves away from the delusions that led them to the path of fiscal Armageddon. Who better to keep Abound afloat than US taxpayers? So our money is going to help bailout a Spanish company.

But the Kanjorski "de facto" earmarks is just the tip of the non-melting iceberg. A lot of this type of "fringe" benefit is under the radar screen of the liberal media.

Here are but two other examples.

Solyndra is (and maybe will soon be "was") a green company that was showered with 535 million dollars of Department of Energy loan guarantees last year (the first such guarantee the Department had issued in years). Steven Chu, Obama's handpicked energy guru (with zero experience in the real world), could not wait to send the dollars flowing, issuing the guarantee before he even hit the three month mark as Cabinet Secretary. He hailed it, as did Joe Biden, as a miracle in the making. Barack Obama toured the factory and hailed it as "leading the way towards a brighter and more prosperous future"

How is that working out?

Solyndra canceled an initial public offering because its auditor said its operating losses and negative cash flow raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern.

Well maybe it was prosperous for executives and suppliers but not for the company and certainly not for the taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of the biggest investors in the company was Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser - a big bundler for the Obama-Biden campaign. Not to worry for Mr. Kaiser. The administration is looking to extend hundreds of millions of dollars in additional loans (our money) to the venture. Needless to say, where is the major media that was so busy reporting on the Bridge to Nowhere (and that has also been conspicuously silent in the billions of dollars Robert Byrd sent to West Virginia to raise monuments to himself). Throwing good money after bad doesn't really matter when the money is Other People's Money and you are providing a return on investment for a big campaign donor out of the public purse.

The worm turns further.

Cabinet Secretary Chu also appointed a venture capitalist, Jonathan Silver, to oversee the loan guarantee program. He had formerly been a managing partner at a venture capital fund, Core Capital Partners-located in Washington, D.C.

A digression: funny how these "shops" are opening up in Washington and not, say, Silicon Valley. Willie Sutton, the legendary bank robber, had an apt aphorism when people asked him why he robbed banks: because that is where the money was. Venture capitalist and crony capitalists agree.

Oh, one of Silver's colleagues at the D.C.-based venture capital fund was Tom Wheeler, another Obama-Biden campaign bundler.

Anyone care to wager that Core Capital investments will benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?

Now that would be a good investment-but not nearly as good as campaign dollars to the Cook County cavaliers.

See also this Barron's article and my column "Cheap Natural Gas and its Democratic Enemies" for further examples of pay and play politics and green schemes.