OBAMA'S DISMAL TRACK RECORD.....

[AGAINST SOCIALISM]

Barack Obama’s dismal investment record
By Marc A. Thiessen, Special to The Washington Post
Posted May 26, 2012

Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama
has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain
Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama has not
anticipated. After all, if Romney’s record in private equity is fair
game, then so is Obama’s record in public equity — and that record is
not pretty.

Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars
in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending
bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated
disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal
investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions. Consider a few
examples:

– Raser Technologies. In 2010, the Obama administration gave Raser a
$33 million taxpayer-funded grant to build a power plant in Beaver
Creek, Utah. According to the Wall Street Journal, after burning
through our tax dollars, the company filed for bankruptcy protection
this year. The plant has fewer than 10 employees, and Raser owes $1.5
million in back taxes.

— ECOtality. The Obama administration gave ECOtality $126.2 million in
taxpayer money in 2009 for, among other things, the installation of
14,000 electric car chargers in five states. Obama even hosted the
company’s president, Don Karner, in the first lady’s box during the
2010 State of the Union address as an example of a stimulus success
story. According to ECOtality’s own SEC filings, the company has since
incurred more than $45 million in losses and has told the federal
government: “We may not achieve or sustain profitability on a
quarterly or annual basis in the future.”

Worse, according to CBS News, the company is “under investigation for
insider trading,” and Karner has been subpoenaed “for any and all
documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first
Department of Energy grant to the company.”

— Nevada Geothermal Power (NGP). The Obama administration gave NGP a
$98.5 million taxpayer loan guarantee in 2010. The New York Times
reported in October that the company is in “financial turmoil” and
that “[a]fter a series of technical missteps that are draining Nevada
Geothermal’s cash reserves, its own auditor concluded in a filing
released last week that there was ‘significant doubt about the
company’s ability to continue as a going concern.’ ”

— First Solar. The Obama administration provided First Solar with more
than $3 billion in loan guarantees for power plants in Arizona and
California. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report last week,
the company “fell to a record low in Nasdaq Stock Market trading May 4
after reporting $401 million in restructuring costs tied to firing 30
percent of its workforce.”

— Abound Solar. The Obama administration gave Abound Solar a $400
million loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories.
According to Forbes, in February the company halted production and
laid off 180 employees.

— Beacon Power. The Obama administration gave Beacon — a green-energy
storage company — a $43 million loan guarantee. According to CBS News,
at the time of the loan, “Standard and Poor’s had confidentially given
the project a dismal outlook of ‘CCC-plus.’ ” Last fall, Beacon
received a delisting notice from Nasdaq and filed for bankruptcy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A company called SunPower got a
$1.2 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, and as of
January, the company owed more than it was worth. Brightsource got a
$1.6 billion loan guarantee and posted a string of net losses totaling
$177 million. And let’s not forget Solyndra, the solar panel
manufacturer that received $535 million in taxpayer-funded loan
guarantees and went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

Obama has declared that all of the projects received funding “based
solely on their merits.” But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter
Schweizer reported in his book “Throw Them All Out,” 71 percent of the
Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to “individuals who
were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large
donors to the Democratic Party.” Collectively, these Obama cronies
raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for
grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion. Obama said this week that
it’s not the president’s job “to make a lot of money for investors.”
Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money for
investors in his political machine.

The cronyism and corruption are catching up with the administration.
According to Politico, “The Energy Department’s inspector general has
launched more than 100 criminal investigations” related to the
department’s green-energy programs.

Now the man who made Solyndra a household name says Romney’s record at
Bain “is what this campaign is going to be about.” Good luck with
that, Mr. President. If Obama wants to attack Romney’s alleged private-
equity failures as chief executive of Bain, he’d better be ready to
defend his own public-equity failures as chief executive of the United
States.

Marc A. Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post.

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