This one was actually a two-fer of government social engineering, green and “uniquely designed to meet or exceed Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines.” Ah yes, the wheelchair-accessible way to save the planet. I can just see Pavlovian grins stretching ear to ear on progressive faces everywhere.
Another alternative vehicle company that received a federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration has quietly closed its doors and laid off all its employees after it failed to meet financial benchmarks required to keep getting taxpayer dollars.
Vehicle Production Group CEO John Walsh said that the company has stopped production and laid off about 100 staff.
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The company was given a $50 million loan guarantee by the Obama administration in 2011 to build the MV-1– a six-passenger, wheelchair-accessible van that would run on compressed natural gas. The vans went on sale in 2011 at a starting price of $39,950.
But there is more, note this bit of intrigue.
However, The Washington Post raised questions about the loan in 2011, pointing out that VPG was part of a portfolio of companies under the investment firm Perseus. Perseus vice chairman James Johnson was an adviser and fundraiser to President Obama.
Johnson is not just another adviser and fundraiser to the Lightworker. He is one of THE MOST tapped-in Washington insiders evah, and the single most responsible individual (if you had to point to only one) for the sub-prime housing crash.
The disaster would not have been possible, the authors make clear, without the early efforts of James Johnson, Fannie Mae’s chief executive in the 1990s and one of the Beltway’s most connected figures—at one time or other the chairman of the Brookings Institution and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as well as a member of Goldman Sachs’s board of directors.
As an assistant to Vice President Walter Mondale, Mr. Johnson had little background in financial markets. When he was chosen to head up Fannie Mae, in 1991, he quickly grasped that the key to Fannie’s success, and to his own astronomical bonuses, was persuading Congress to maintain Fannie’s implicit government backing while preventing any bank-style regulation to interfere with the company’s operation.
