Big Donors, Big Green Big Bucks from Stimulus

Fox News:

As the White House rejects charges that the Obama administration was motivated by politics in its decisions on green energy loans, scrutiny is increasing over the preference given to Democratic donors seeking federal loans. 

Recent emails suggest that politics did play a role in administration decisions regarding its energy loan guarantee programs. But beyond the timing of political announcements, the Solyndra investigation has churned up questions about the White House's overall strategy of doling out taxpayer money. 

 The rolls of green energy subsidies show that beyond a few headline-grabbing cases, several well-connected Democrats obtained taxpayer assistance for environmentally friendly projects. 

Among the recipients are: 

-- Solyndra, which received $535 million in loan guarantees and whose chief investor was the George Kaiser Family Foundation. George Kaiser was an Obama campaign bundler.  

-- Brightsource Energy, which received $1.6 billion and whose senior adviser is Robert Kennedy, Jr., an early Obama backer; 

-- Solar Reserve, which got a $737 million loan, and whose major investor is a company run by Michael Froman, who was a deputy assistant to the president. Froman bundled up to $500,000 for the president's 2008 campaign;  

-- Granite Reliable Wind Generation, which received a $168.9 million loan. The company's majority owner is a firm formerly led by Nancy Ann DeParle, now a White House deputy chief of staff and former head of the president's health care communications team during the reform debate; and   

-- Abound Solar, which received a loan guarantee worth $400 million. A key investor is billionaire heiress Pat Stryker, who gave $87,000 to Obama's inauguration committee, and hundreds of thousands more to Democratic causes. 

Peter Schweizer, author of the book, "Throw Them All Out," wrote that at least 10 members of Obama's finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers took money from administration loan programs.  

Schweizer told Fox News that he believes that many of those who were chosen to receive loan guarantees, were picked almost solely for their success in raising money for the Obama campaign. 

Obama used the alternative energy program as an opportunity to make his campaign contributors "even more wealthy than they are," he said.  

"This is a payoff to people who are your political backers and supporters. And this is really a wealth transfer from middle class taxpayers to billionaires," Schweizer said, adding that about 75 percent of the loans and grants doled out by the federal government has gone to "Obama-connected companies" even though the acceptance rate in the program is less than 10 percent.
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There is much more.

At best this is a crony venture capital scheme.  Ironically these Big Green fat cats were not much better at picking investments with government money than they were in picking their candidate to begin with.  Both Obama and most of these investments are losers.