{"id":11206,"date":"2011-09-18T12:28:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-18T16:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11206"},"modified":"2011-09-18T12:28:48","modified_gmt":"2011-09-18T16:28:48","slug":"solyndra-not-just-crony-capitalism-as-usual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/18\/solyndra-not-just-crony-capitalism-as-usual\/","title":{"rendered":"Solyndra: not <em>just<\/em> crony capitalism as usual"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/articles\/print\/277512\" target=\"_blank\">Andrew C. McCarthy<\/a> shows the difference between the collapse of Solyndra and ordinary crony capitalist use of government funds:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the \u201cclean energy\u201d enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy &mdash; the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president\u2019s injection of $535 million in federal loans &mdash; the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company\u2019s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.<\/p>\n<p>As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law &mdash; compassionate conservatism in green bunting &mdash; is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can\u2019t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy\u2019s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these \u201cinvestments\u201d must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry &mdash; as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets <em>anyone<\/em> &mdash; from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders &mdash; who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires \u201cto defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.\u201d The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrew C. McCarthy shows the difference between the collapse of Solyndra and ordinary crony capitalist use of government funds: Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the \u201cclean energy\u201d enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,84,9,15],"tags":[640,158,497,194],"class_list":["post-11206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-government","category-law","category-technology","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-barackobama","tag-electricity","tag-fraud"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2UK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11207,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206\/revisions\/11207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}