Trump Is Doing Exactly What Republicans Screamed About for 18 Months Under Obama. Nobody Will Be Held Accountable.

Solyndra Is Back. It Just Has a Different Name.

Let me take you back to Solyndra. Solar panels. $535 million in federal loan guarantees. Two years to bankruptcy. And a major donor to Barack Obama sitting at the top of the investor list as the largest institutional backer. I said it on the radio at the time: giving money to Obama was the greatest investment a connected billionaire could make. Dollar in, government dollars out in spades.

Republicans were furious. They made Solyndra a household name. They subpoenaed the White House. They pulled executives in front of Congress. Some of those executives invoked the Fifth Amendment on live television. The hearings ran for 18 months.

Result? Nothing. Zero. Absolutely nothing happened.

The Trump Version Is Bigger and Nobody Is Talking About It

The current administration has taken equity stakes in 41 companies using your tax dollars. Forty-one. This is not a footnote. This is not a minor policy detail. This is the government of the United States directing taxpayer capital into specific private companies based on political calculations, not market fundamentals.

Call it what it is. This is not capitalism. This is crony capitalism, and both parties have perfected it.

• Republicans screamed about Solyndra for 18 months and then did the same thing larger
• Democrats will launch their own show hearings when they take power, and those will go nowhere too
• The investigations are not about accountability, they are about leverage and television
• You, the taxpayer, absorb the losses while political insiders capture the upside

Congressional Hearings Are a TV Show. Stop Watching Them Like They Are News.

I want to be direct with you because nobody else will be. The hearings you watch on cable news are not oversight. They are programming. Both parties understand that if you raise enough hell about the other side’s cronyism, you buy yourself cover to do the exact same thing when it is your turn.

Republicans figured out during Solyndra that directing government capital is a tool they would want when they had the keys. So the investigation went nowhere by design. Democrats will figure out the same thing with Trump’s 41 companies. Watch the hearings if you want. Just do not confuse them with accountability.

What You Should Actually Be Paying Attention To

Here is the practical takeaway that the financial media will not give you:

• Government-backed companies carry political risk, not just market risk. When the administration changes, the support can evaporate.
• Artificially inflated sectors driven by government capital eventually correct, and those corrections can be brutal
• Price discovery breaks down when politics rather than fundamentals determine which companies get capital
• The consultants and narrative managers who navigate this system for corporate clients, the people writing op-eds about cronyism while they make a living off of it, are part of the same machine

The Bipartisan Scam in Plain English

The Solyndra investigation was a show. The upcoming hearings on Trump’s 41 companies will be a show. The outrage is real only until the outraged party gets power, at which point it becomes their turn to play the same game.

What never changes is who pays for it. You do.