The Daily Mail UK
written by Brian Darling
Friday October 21, 2011
U.S. President Barack Obama is a Venture Socialist. Venture Capitalists put up money on start-up companies with privately raised money in an effort to make a profit. Venture Socialism is when a government uses taxpayer moneys to invest in private companies to promote a political outcome. President Obama has used taxpayer loan guarantees authorized by his original stimulus plan to fund risky green energy ventures including solar panels and electric cars.
Obama is willing to put the taxpayers on the hook for risky investments favored by liberals in the federal government and friendly corporate interests. It does not matter if money is lost, because the federal government does not care if they make money on these investments. Obama is a Venture Socialist, and also a Crony Capitalist, in the sense that he has been funneling money to private enterprises run by liberals. It is a great time in America to be a corporate friend of the Obama Administration.
ABC News reports that the Obama Administration has invested American tax dollars in another risky green energy adventure -- Fisker.
With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work. Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.
Henrick Fisker, the founder of the Company, admitted to ABC News that 500 manufacturing jobs migrated to manufacture electric sports cars in Finland to a Finnish company Valmet Automotive. These cars cost $97,000, so don't expect middle to low income Americans to ever benefit from these sports cars for the rich. Movie star Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be the target audience, because he was delivered one of the first cars manufactured.
Guess who has invested in this no lose proposition? Former Vice President and global warming activist Al Gore.
The loan to Fisker is part of a $1 billion bet the Energy Department has made in two politically connected California-based electric carmakers producing sporty -- and pricey -- cutting-edge autos. Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. And Tesla Motors, whose prime backers include PayPal mogul Elon Musk and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, says it will do the same in a massive facility tooling up in Silicon Valley.
If this investment is a success, Gore will make millions. If this investment is a failure, then the taxpayers will lose millions. Venture Socialism can be lucrative for those who have insider information on the name of companies the Obama Administration is willing to back.
Neil McCabe at Human Events reported on another Venture Socialist experiment for the Obama Administration - SunPower. SunPower manufactures solar panels and roof tiles at a cost of $80 million per job to the American taxpayer for the 350 permanent American jobs expected to be created.
How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project. The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain.
The answer is that the company had friends in the Obama Administration and on Capitol Hill.
That brings us to Solyndra. Solyndra was a California based solar panel company that received $535 million in taxpayer backed loans. The company recently declared bankruptcy and laid off over one thousand American workers.
According to Bloomberg, President Obama visited the company to promote it as a model Venture Socialist green energy investment for the taxpayers at a time when accounting firms were sounding alarms about the company's economic viability.
Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010. Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
After the trip, the company descended into bankruptcy because they could not sell solar panels at a profit. This company had links to Obama fundraiser George Kaiser and he made numerous trips to the White House to protect his investment in Solyndra.
The Obama Administration has engaged in a dangerous game of investing taxpayer monies in risky private enterprises. These investments are not worthy of Venture Capitalist monies, because private sector investors are interested in making money, not putting up cash on ventures unlikely to make a profit. The American taxpayers have been the big loser in this President Obama's Venture Socialist experiment.
1 comment:
Thanks!
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