Dartboard Vetting

If you aren’t furious, you aren’t paying attention. In case you’ve missed it, your money has been the fodder for some of the most poorly vetted investments ever, and not by Wall Street or the banking industry.

Thanks in part to this article by Doug Stewart ( @dmatthewstewart on Twitter) and further conversation on the growing list of failed Green energy investment projects during a recent interview , I have become completely convinced that vetting, if any, for funding potential Green energy products was performed by a few guys eating pizza and throwing darts at applications taped to the wall.

While not the first project to fail miserably, even after an injection of stimulus funding, Solyndra is probably the the poster child for failed vetting and cronyism, that are apparantly the norm for deciding where to spend taxpayer dollars. Add in Shepherds Flat ( which, we don’t even *need* to fund since GE HAS the capital!) , SunPower’s PAC action win , the EPA approved TR Auto Truck Plaza mess, The failed job delivery and inanity of the Fisker Motors investment, the likely march of the Chevy Volt into both fiscal and progressive failure, and the likelihood that Doug is correct about Alstom, and you have a laundry list of failures that exceeds anything that can be pinned on the private sector. Each of these investments inherently contained an easily verifiable history of risk that should have been a red flag for any review panel, if they had bothered to check into them at all ( or hadn’t been told to ignore the flags) I’d be willing to bet that the woodwork is crawling with plenty more evidence of the complete waste of taxpayer money due to non-existent vetting processes.

Johnathan Silver, the Energy Department’s loan program director, has stepped down, most certainly as a sacrifice to the indignant, but there needs to be full on public rage at this outright failure and deception by our government to even attempt responsibility with our economy. Silver’s resignation is an appeasement offering, and I am not appeased. It’s time to take the dartboard away and for us to get more involved in keeping an eye on our money. I have an idea of a replacement past-time..