Saturday, October 08, 2011

Solyndragate: Emails Implicate the Obama Administration

More evidences of crony capitalism from President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ policies.

From the Business Insider (bold highlights mine)

The White House released a bunch of emails related to the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal to Congressional investigators today, in what has become a regular Friday evening email dump.

The emails, obtained by several news organizations, implicate the most senior levels of the Obama administration in scandal, which has tainted the White House since the solar company went bankrupt last month, leaving taxpayers on the hook for a $534 billion federal loan.

Here are the highlights:

One email, obtained by the Washington Post, suggests that Obama and/or his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was actively involved in trying to get Solyndra's loan application approved in time for a September 2009 press conference.

“Ron said this morning that the POTUS definitely wants to do this (or Rahm definitely wants the POTUS to do this?),” one White House staffer told an Obama scheduler on Aug. 17, 2009, referring to Ron Klain, former chief of staff for Vice President Joe Biden.

Steve Spinner, an Obama fundraiser who worked in the DOE loan department, repeatedly pushed the chief loan officer to expedite approval of Solyndra's loan — despite the fact that his wife worked for the law firm representing Solyndra. The firm received at least $2.4 million in fees related to the loan, according to the AP. DOE officials have previously stated that Spinner did not "actively participate" in Solyndra's application.

“How [expletive] hard is this? What is he waiting for? Will we have it by the end of the day?” Spinner wrote on Aug. 28, 2009. “I have OVP [Office of Vice President] and WH [White House] breathing down my neck on this. They are getting itchy to get involved if needed. I don’t want that.”

Read more here

Political distribution of scarce resources extrapolates to favoritism, nepotism and cronyism which results to the gaming of the political economy that ultimately leads to corruption.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote,

Corruption is an evil inherent in every government not controlled by a watchful public opinion.

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