Crime and Yet No Punishment

Al Gore’s auto company has determined the cause of fires in the flaming Fisker. Their Karma model has had two auto ignitions. One in Huston Texas and one in Woodside California. Fisker has now determined that the cause of the fires is not the lithium ion battery pack but rather a cooling fan that was improperly designed and is subject to causing fires in their Dogma Mobile.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/18/fisker-karma-idUSL2E8JI1RH20120818?feedType=RSS&feedName=marketsNews&rpc=43





Fisker will recall each and every of the some 2,400 cars they delivered or have in inventory, and will install a new and different fan that is not a fire hazard. I am glad that Leonardo De Craprio and Just Born Bieber will now have cars that the tax payers subsidized that do not end up as ashes.



Talking of cooling fans, I spent a couple of days in Houston, Texas and that place is one sweltering location in late August. Being from the San Francisco bay area I had forgotten the misery of extreme heat and humidity. Even in Houston gasoline prices are now much higher. I filled the rental car with regular grade gasoline for $3.69 a gallon. Cheap by my local standards where mid-grade costs me $4.35 a gallon.



There is some news that the president wants to release some the strategic petroleum reserves to counter high prices. Of course this has nothing to do with the election that will be held in less than three months and is purely a move to unshackle the American motorist from high gasoline prices that are still a problem the president inherited from GW.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/strategic-oil-likely-tapped-gas-prices-rise-stephen-120641832.html





On the plane to Houston from Oakland I sat next to a young woman who was entering her senior year in high school. Nothing has changed for poor high school seniors they are still forced to read long novel during the summer break as required reading. Her required book that should be used as a door stop was Crime and Punishment. This long winded book from Russia hardly contributes to the real education of a 17 year old but it is required to tame the young and the restless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_and_Punishment



Her book got me thinking of my next book I will soon write. My book will be titled “Crime and yet no punishment.” The plot could easily be about Wall Street but actually my plot will deal with the Venture Capitalist and their crony politician friends who are responsible for the likes of Fisker, Solyndra, BrightSource, Tesla, Bloom, A 123 and the myriad other Betamax green technology companies the department of entropy funded and the VCs promoted. The crime of wasting public money is unpunished. The VCs who funded Kior, Amyris, Gevo, Codexis, Solarzyme, A 123, Tesla, and several other startups that went through a public offering of their stocks did cash out and the new investors are left holding the Betamax Bag. But the US DOE was left holding an empty burlap sack.



The mainstream media is not full of the call for investigation into these startups that went public. The one that got some bad press was Solyndra, but the initial financier behind Solyndra also lost a bundle of dough together with the DOE. I do not thinking funding Solyndra was a bright idea (get the pun on solar) but at least the investor in the company also suffered some hurt in its demise.



In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment the crime is the murder of a pawn broker that yields the thief very little fortune yet gives the murderer much anguish and eventual penal servitude in Siberia for the crime. In the case of Crime Yet No Punishment there is no anguish in the minds of the real pawn brokers, the VCs, and of course no penal servitude for the guys who live on the most crooked street in the world Sand Hill Road.



Now that Green Tech is Gangrene, they will concoct the next About Face and Book Profits and simply pocket many more billions of dollars selling hope and expectation that the next perfect Apple has been created. I doubt Mr. Obama will ever sit down to dinner again in John Doerr’s house with Mark the Zukker seated next to him and let official White House photographs be taken.