As the Solyndra scandal continues to develop and we discover the crony capitalism aspect of the Obama administration, I started to wonder:
The electric car company that Delaware taxpayers generously bought the GM plant for, Fisker Automotive, also got $500 Million from Obama. A big Obama donor, George Kaiser was the chief investor at Solyndra. Is there a Friend Of Barack (FOB is not a Friend of Bill anymore) involved with Fisker? Hmmm.
The answer is Yes. His name is John Doerr. He is a wealthy investor in “green companies” and was appointed to Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board along with GE’s Jeff Immelt. Check this from the GreenTechMedia website:
The occasionally lachrymose but always compelling John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins has been a longtime and vocal advocate of all things green, both in Silicon Valley as well as in Washington, D.C., where he is an advisor to President Obama. Doerr has invested in some of venture capital’s most famous successes (Google, Amazon, Sun) and in some less than successful efforts (GO Corporation, MyCFO, Segway).
He has spearheaded KPCB’s investment efforts in greentech to create a team of about 20 investment professionals and a portfolio of more than 20 greentech start-ups including Silver Spring Networks, Fisker Automotive, Bloom Energy, Alta Devices and Solexel.
Yup, Bloom Energy too. But it does not appear that he has arranged any federal money for Bloom yet. I guess that they just pay other people to buy Bloom’s junk.
What happens to all that money if they go broke before building a single car? I don’t count buying cars from some Scandinavian car maker as building one. Do we then own the GM plant? Probably not, I imagine that we just get to watch more and better campaign commercials.
Update
Some further Googling (ironic, this guy was a big Google investor too) has revealed that ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity published a story about this several months ago. Here is the link to the ABC News story. And I was so proud of myself for thinking about it. At least I probably scooped the News Journal on the local aspect of the story.
[…] investors in the company are also major donors to the Democratic Party. And here’s information on John Doerr, an advisor to President Obama who is also a major investor in Fisker Automotive. Can you say, “crony […]
[…] on the list of major investors is Obama advisor John […]