Nothing to see here: Bill Richardson and the Import/Export Bank

Noth­ing to see here

The Naked gun 1988

Some inter­est­ing things going on at the US Import/​Export Bank:

The Ex-​Im first made a $78.6 mil­lion direct loan in Decem­ber 2012 to Aben­goa, the Seville, Spain-​based firm that spe­cial­izes in green tech­nolo­gies, then approved a sec­ond loan worth $73.6 mil­lion Agengoa’s Palmatir S.A., wind farm in Cuchilla de Per­alta, Uruguay.Ex-Im pres­i­dent Fred Hochberg said the loans will sup­port “approx­i­mately 510 Amer­i­can jobs.”

Loan­ing out $298,431.37 of tax­payer backed money per “Amer­i­can Job sup­ported” is odd, loan­ing over 150 Mil­lion of tax­payer backed money to green com­pa­nies after the fiasco of green com­pa­nies drop­ping left and right in the US these loans is odder.

But what doesn’t seem odd to me is this:

For­mer Demo­c­ra­tic New Mex­ico Gov. Bill Richard­son sits on both the Aben­goa Inter­na­tional Advi­sory Board and is cur­rently listed on the Ex-​Im bank’s web­site as a mem­ber of the advi­sory com­mit­tee that helps guide bank policy.

The idea of insid­ers get­ting insider mak­ing insider deals with tax­payer money, that’s not odd, that’s busi­ness as usual.

What is odd is that a for­mer Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and promi­nent gov­er­nor being on both sides of tax­payer backed loans to for­eign gov­ern­ments is a story that is news­wor­thy to the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con and the Wash­ing­ton Exam­iner but pro­duces no results when you do a search of the New York Times for “Bill Richard­son”.

Then again con­sid­er­ing that for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and gov­er­nor has a “D” next to his party affil­i­a­tion maybe the dis­in­ter­est of the MSM isn’t that odd after all.

Noth­ing to see here, move along.