The Green scam with OPM

OPM - Other People's Money.  It's amazing how many things are done with those three letters.  Solyndra was a scheme with OPM.  The GSA scandal - again, spending OPM.  People are never as careful with OPM as they are with their own.

Today's story via Human Events:

One of the big recent “green energy” epic failures is A123 Systems, which raked in $300 million from the “stimulus” bill, plus another $135 million in Michigan state funding.  They’re currently teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and just got slapped with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly “making false and misleading statements” about manufacturing deficiencies in their products.

One of those products was the electric battery used in the Fisker Karma, a $100,000 electric sports car that literally dropped dead when Consumer Reports took it for a test drive.  A123 Systems was betting heavily on Fisker’s success – so heavily that they pumped $20 million of their own equity and cash into the auto maker.

Fisker got $529 million of your money from the Obama Administration, producing 500 manufacturing jobs.  Unfortunately, those manufacturing jobs were in Finland, not America.  Fiskers executives were quite proud of their wise decision to keep those jobs overseas.

Confronted by this horrific embarrassment, Obama apologists pointed to the Fiskers plant in Delaware, the lovely state from whence our Vice President hails.  They bought an old GM factory (built when the “G” stood for “General,” not “Government”) and planned to build a much more affordable $50,000 car for the common man in their American facility.  It’s called the “Atlantic.”  It doesn’t actually exist, and it probably never will.

That’s because Fisker has begun laying off workers left and right at its Delaware plant, “because it ran out of government loan money,” as USA Today put it.  “Fisker had failed to meet production and sales milestones it had promised in the loan agreement with the Department of Energy, so loan cash was shut off last May.”  They’re up to 66 layoffs now.

Fisker can't make it without OPM propping it up.  A123 is all about taking OPM.  Read the whole story at the above link.

And there's more.  Think of politicians who tout local pork projects with lines like "And 90% of the funding will come from the federal government - we only have to provide 10%".  That 90% is OPM.  But it just doesn't appear from the ether.  Ultimately, with any of these government funding projects, it's the American people who, in one way or another, provide the money that someone else gets to use.

At its root comes the fundamental question:  Is it better for the individual or the central planners to decide how to spend your money?  Those who want central planning say they know better and can make wiser decisions.  Look in the mirror and ask yourself "Do I really believe that some bureaucrat or politician knows more about what's best for me than I do?"  If the answer is "NO!!", remember to vote in November.  If the answer is "Yes", why are you reading this blog??  (And by the way, remember to vote in December)