PrintDecember 14, 2009
Using taxpayer money to subsidize electoral victory
I am sure Joe Biden's son's running for the Senate from Delaware to take his dad's old seat has nothing to do with the Department of Energy's award of 500 million dollars in loans (taxpayer money) to Fisker Automotive after it agreed to manufacture its hybrid cars in Delaware.
I am sure Delaware is a very pro-business state - not.
Car companies - to the extent they expand at all - are doing so in Southern states because of the work force their and the pro-business policies those states have in place. We were warned that the government would base its investing and spending decisions on political grounds, not economic ones. Here is one example from an article by Neil King in the Wall Street Journal.
When tiny Fisker Automotive Inc. hit a financing glitch last year, threatening its plan to build a fancy gasoline-electric hybrid car in Finland, it turned to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The DOE had a bolder idea. Why not also step up the company's plans to develop a less-expensive model, and assemble it in a closed U.S. auto plant?
Within months, Vice President Joe Biden, the former senator from Delaware, was helping lure the embryonic car company to a shuttered General Motors Co. factory four miles from his house in Wilmington, right across the tracks from Biden Park. Soon, Fisker Automotive, a two-year-old business that has yet to sell a car, won loans from the federal government totaling $528 million.
Investors from California (another bleu state) were behind Fisker but needed a lot more money so they tapped their Democratic friends in high places.
In the middle of August, they learned the plant had drawn interest from Fisker. CEO Henrik Fisker came to see it and dropped by the office of a Delaware senator, Tom Carper, a Democrat. The visit unleashed a flurry of activity. Gov. Jack Markell, also a Democrat, quickly called an old friend at Kleiner Perkins to check on Fisker. "Basically, we wanted to know, 'Are they for real?'" said Mr. Levin.
Kleiner Perkins itself has political roots. A leading partner, John Doerr, sits on President Barack Obama's economic advisory board, and another partner is former Vice President Al Gore.
The DOE, in August, hadn't yet ruled on Fisker's loan request. Delaware's governor and congressional delegation began peppering U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu with calls on Fisker's behalf. They also had repeated discussions with Vice President Biden and his staff, according to Mr. Levin and several others.
It worked. Fisker got taxpayer money-hundreds of millions for a venture that had it been appealing would have drawn interest from private investors. Instead the government stepped in with our dollars in order to reward to play politics, help the very blue state of Delaware, and the political chances of Vice-President Biden's son.
Hope and change, hope and change.
