Where there's smoke there's fire?Follow

That was yours?

Oh, wait! You also had your innuendo. "Where's there's smoke, there's fire! so please don't look too closely and just believe that there's fire... please?"


The "cost assessment" of giving billions and billions and billions of dollars to companies who don't need it? Yeah, I guess I did "forget" to call that a benefit to give giant piles of money to someone who didn't need it anyway and would have done what they were doing, regardless. Shit, the McDonald's by me looks like it's doing pretty well. Tomorrow I'm going to just give them a thousand dollars and it's be a huge benefit to me! Erm... somehow... You know, when they make burgers that day, it'll be all because of... me?

Silly me. I forgot all about that in my "cost assessment".

I'm not sure how that eliminates the potential that corrupt processes may have led a hand in the granting of the loan to this particular company though. I'm not talking about the other 19. I'm talking about Solyndra and the question of some sort of political quid pro quo being involved.



Sure. The questions that need to be asked are who knew that the model they were using wouldn't be price competitive and when did they know it? Was it before or after they were granted the loan? Did someone intervene to grant this loan even though there was evidence that their product wouldn't be able to compete? The point being that this company was denied a loan under the same program when Bush was in the White House. Suddenly, Obama takes office and the company gets the loan? What changed? The DOE recommended against loaning them money. It can be assumed that they knew that the odds of success were low (they relied on what was basically the opposite of the existing business trend occurring).

It's certainly possible that this was just a mistake that occurred in the rush to get as many alternative energy projects going as well. That's "bad", but not criminal. But if someone in the White House pressured the DOE to grant the loan, it could potentially be criminal given the company's lobbying actions in the past.

That's the "fire" I'm talking about.



Sure. And how many taxpayer dollars were involved in that? Did Iomega lobby a political party, and then get a big loan to help them make those, only to find the whole industry fail to better competing products a year later?

Companies fail all the time. But when they are started with private investment, it's the people who risked their own money who suffer the loss or reap the reward. When the government invests in such things, it's not doing so for a direct profit motive like a private investor would, so we need to look a lot closer at what is going on to make sure that our money isn't being invested into bad businesses just to hand money back to political supporters.

At least until the next time one of them declares bankruptcy.

Which isn't happening any time soon, alas.

I think you mean Halliburton. Blackwater was the politically connected mercenary thugs Bush hired to kill civilians.