Obama Shovels Billion To Campaign Donors
[A]large proportion of the winners were companies with Obama-campaign connections. Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers ... a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.
posted by Michael at
7:12 AM
1 Comments:
yes, your confusion is due to the fact that the loan guarantee program is a small part of the doe recovery act (see excerpt from gao report below and link below).
interestingly, the problems with the loan guarantee program, noted by the gao and cited in your linked article, have been occurring since 2007 and likely since the program began in 2005.
"The Recovery Act provided the Department of Energy (DOE) more than $41.7 billion—$35.2 billion for projects and activities and $6.5 billion in borrowing authority—in areas such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, and environmental cleanup. This included about $3.2 billion for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program, about $3.1 billion for the State Energy Program, and about $5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. The act also
provided about $6 billion to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management
for environmental cleanup activities and about $2.5 billion to its Loan Guarantee Program Office to support such guarantees for, among other things, renewable energy projects."
http://www.gao.gov/htext/d11483t.html
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