While everyone watches Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his next cringeworthy pronouncement, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton goes about her daily business in a way that should make anyone considering her candidacy – especially those in her party – wince just as often.
What she says and what she does, after all, are two different things.
Clinton’s rhetoric says she is not beholden to wealthy donors, but Friday she went to Tulsa, Okla., to solicit fresh cash from top Solyndra investor George Kaiser. Guests in the sold-out, two-hour event were asked to pony up the $2,700 maximum in exchange for a “photo with Hillary.”
Solyndra, for anyone who has forgotten, was the California-based solar panel maker that walked away with more than $530 million in federally backed loans as part of President’s Obama’s failed 2009 stimulus program. Kaiser’s Argonaut Private Equity was the largest private investor in Solyndra, which promised the green energy the president covets, but the company went bankrupt in 2011 and was unable to pay its loan. The taxpayers, of course, got stuck with the bill.
Kaiser, meanwhile, drew at least 16 visits to the White House, and his associates found contracts with administrative officials, before Solyndra folded.
A report earlier this year by the Department of Energy’s inspector general found that Solyndra misled investors, including the government, and that the administration failed to ask enough questions.
But Argonaut and other private investors had engineered a deal that would benefit them if the company went bankrupt. The deal allowed the investment firm to use Solyndra’s “net operating losses,” estimated by the Obama administration to be as much as $350 million, to reduce their future taxable income.
“This is the way things are nowadays,” Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, told the Washington Times. “The more government is involved in things, the more largesse they can bestow on their friends. [Clinton] is tied up with people who made out like bandits when Solyndra went down, and the taxpayers ended up paying for it. It’s really sad, to be honest with you.”
Meanwhile, Clinton said last week “the maneuvers that powerful corporations are using to game the system and leave everybody else holding the bag are just offensive to me.”
How does she look in the mirror in the morning?