The Financial Benefits Of Promoting ‘Green’

Friday’s Wall Street Journal posted an article about a small car company, California startup Fisker Automotive Inc., (coincidentally backed by Al Gore) that has received a $529 million government loan to build a hybrid car in Finland.  Finland?  With out tax money?  It’s even worse than that.  The car, the Karma, is a hybrid sports car that will sell for $89,000.

The article points out:

“Fisker’s top investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a veteran Silicon Valley venture-capital firm of which Gore is a partner. Employees of KPCB have donated more than $2.2 million to political campaigns, mostly for Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.”

Quite frankly, this infuriates me.  At a time when unemployment in America is approaching double digits, $529 million of our money gets spent to provide manufacturing jobs overseas to produce something that most of us will never be able to afford.

Meanwhile, back in America:

“Some companies that have been turned down for loans from DOE say they did not get much feedback from the department about their applications. O. John Coletti, president of EcoMotors International of Troy, Mich., said his company applied for a $20 million loan from the agency last December, and last month got a one-page rejection letter from the loan program’s director, Lachlan Seward. EcoMotors’ lead investor is Vinod Khosla, himself a former Kleiner Perkins partner and a longtime campaign contributor to Republicans and Democrats alike.”

I am willing to bet that there will never be any accountability as to how the funds designated to help car manufacturers meet new government fuel efficiency standards have been spent.  I strongly suggest we begin to cut off the money flow to Washington and keep more of our own money.  This is ridiculous.

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