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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (156623)	9/7/2011 10:54:49 PM
From: Sam	1 Recommendation Respond to of 206110

In this case any partial due diligence would have saved the tax payers a half a billion. In the case of Macondo, due diligence on the part of the both the govt and the companies involved would have saved the country and the various industries that were damaged by it many billions of dollars. This project was political IMO and hence corrupt. Much of the Obama "stimulus" money was in the form of payoffs to interest groups. I guess you didn't read either the article I posted in my first answer to you or any of the pieces that it referenced. Here is an excerpt: Why has Solyndra done so well in fundraising? Some of it has to do with circumstances. Solyndra actually applied for DOE loans back in 2006, when Bush was still President. When Obama announced that he wanted to rev the energy economy, Solyndra happened to be first in line. Investors were also intrigued by the novel tubular module. A tube, potentially, can harvest sun for more hours each day. The design, at a minimum, gave them some assurance that they weren't investing in a me-too panel. But, at each juncture, instead of pulling out and pulling the plug, investors doubled down. My bolding above. So, first of all, they began applying for grants under Bush. But, honestly, I don't know when they were given the loan guarantees, and I haven't really followed this company. From the little reading I've done, it sounds like DOE screwed up in giving them a guarantee for so much money. The govt also screwed up in approving clean up plans in the GOM that included references to penguins, lol. They are half of the equation; the private companies involved are the other half. Was there deliberate fraud? Maybe. Were payoffs required to cover up the fraud? Maybe. I don't know. As for the second allegation--I don't even know how to respond to that. Undoubtedly you believe it, it is repeated often enough by people who don't like Obama. I don't have a real breakdown of where all of the money went, and I strongly suspect that neither do the people who repeat these things. A lot of it went to the states to help them with their deficits,. Obviously, it didn't do what was hoped, but my guess is that things would be much worse if it hadn't happened. At least a fair bit of the unemployment we have now has to do states and cities laying people off, people who would have been laid off sooner without that money. The private sector hasn't been great, but it hasn't been terrible either. The public sector has been terrible this year. Some people--I am just guessing that you are in this camp--believe it would have been better to just let the chips fall where they fall, let the country hit bottom, and then there would have been a real depression from which the private sector, left to its own devices, would have regained its vigor, and we would be in a real recovery now. Perhaps, but I don't believe it. My guess is that things would have frozen, demand would have been even worse, and even the private sector would have been worse off. There is no way to prove either of these views. I believe priority one is jobs. I wonder if that is the number one priority of the green movement? I am sure you agree we should not be spending a half a billion $ on political projects. I agree with you that jobs are the number one priority right now. And I agree that we shouldn't "be spending a half a billion $ on political projects." I disagree with your belief that the Solyandra project was "political," at least not in any crass sense, and that the green movement isn't concerned with jobs. Perhaps there were payoffs w/r/t Solyandra, but my guess is that it is more probable that it was incompetence. There are plenty of green jobs, and there could be plenty more. Eric has documented this in many posts, some of which you have probably read. For example, Message 27355970 . The "green movement" is always coming up new ways of employing people. Are there problems with them? Sure, there are problems with all forms of energy, as far as I can see. I've pointed to Port Arthur in the past-- see msnbc.msn.com for an article that articulates the "jobs vs health" issue in that city pretty well. Should we shut down refineries until we solve all of their problems? Should we not require them to clean up the pollution that they cause? To try to address the health issues that result from their business? Or should we just consider those negative externalities as collateral damage for the greater good?