Solar Company Sells To Itself - Subsidesed By Taxpayers

Discussion in 'Politics' started by pspr, Mar 19, 2012.

  1. pspr

    pspr

    Isn't it time we put an end to this crap?

    byTimothy P. Carney

    First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama's insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare.

    Here's the road of subsidies these solar panels followed from Perrysburg, Ohio, to St. Clair, Ontario.

    First Solar is an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels. In 2010, the Obama administration awarded the company $16.3 million to expand its factory in Ohio -- a subsidy Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland touted in his failed re-election bid that year.

    Five weeks before the 2010 election, Strickland announced more than a million dollars in job training grants to First Solar. The Ohio Department of Development also lent First Solar $5 million, and the state's Air Quality Development Authority gave the company an additional $10 million loan.

    After First Solar pocketed this $17.3 million in government grants and $15 million in government loans, Ex-Im Bank entered the scene.

    But the buyer, in this case, was First Solar.

    A small corporation called St. Clair Solar owned the wind farm and was the Canadian company buying First Solar's panels. But St. Clair Solar was a wholly owned subsidiary of First Solar. So, basically, First Solar was shipping its own solar panels from Ohio to a solar farm it owned in Canada, and the U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing this "export."


    http://campaign2012.washingtonexami...ells-solar-panels-itself-taxpayers-pay/434251
     
  2. Lucrum

    Lucrum

    And the sheeple chanted: "hope and change...hope and change..."
     
  3. I just have to wonder how prevalent this is elsewhere in the economy. So much smoke and mirrors, who knows where all of this begins and ends.

    Sort of a sophisticated version of "make work". How long until we start paying people to "dig ditches", fill them back in, only to dig them out again....only to count this as some type of "growth" and "employment"?...