In an attempt to shame and insult the people who were revealing unsavory stories about Bill Clinton a generation ago, Democrat campaign consultant James Carville famously said “Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
Charming, isn’t it, learning how the Democrats really feel about the American public.
But there may be a reason they think so little of people: perhaps it’s because the people Democrats really do hang out with actually are a bunch of low-lifes, so they naturally assume that all people are.
An interesting example surfaced this week as electric vehicle maker Canoo finally gave up the ghost, its long-expected collapse finally making the business pages on January 17, even before President Trump signed executive orders revoking the unconstitutional directives propping up the economically indefensible “EV” model of automotive manufacture.
The value of the President’s effort to save the auto industry and the American economy notwithstanding, such an order was bound to have a few losers, chiefly the bureaucrats who live by such micromanaging directives, and the unsustainable businesses that sprint up as soon the government offers to subsidize them.
So it has been that for the past few years, a number of automakers-in-name-only have taken advantage of the popularity of this nascent technology, the addiction of certain branches of the investment community to dive into that end of the pool, and the government’s insistence on mandating such products, whether the technology is ready for prime time or not.
By now, we all know the challenges of the EV space. While Elon Musk’s Tesla is an amazing Cinderella story, it’s a niche product, only sustainable as a small share of the economy and objectively desirable to a limited market.
Converting this type of product to the mainstream, considering high prices and a literally impossible draw on the power grid, was always going to be an impossibility. But that didn’t stop the climate hoax’s true believers from joining forces with the 15-minute-city crowd that believes in restricting human movement, and mandating this concept as the eventual sole form of transportation. Cars, buses, trucks and tankers; big or small, public or private, the ideologues insist that the EV is the only moral option.
In a quixotic attempt to fake it until we make it, the government introduced subsidies, not just in one place, but in many. Subsidies for EV manufacturers, subsidies for EV buyers. Government grants for school districts, cities or counties that would buy a few, government grants for the companies that make parts, such as the labor-intensive and dirty rare earth mineral mines or the incredibly heavy and dangerous batteries. Subsidies for the charging stations. Tax breaks at every level for anyone who smiles at the things.
To the shock of far too many observers who inexplicably couldn’t see this coming, when the mandates and subsidies started to run out, all of a sudden, these overpriced products lost their glow, suddenly no longer desirable to people or businesses who simply can’t justify paying twice the price for an unproven product that’s a challenge to charge, has surprisingly limited range, can’t handle hot, cold, or wet weather, requires a battery replacement after a few years that costs as much as a new car, and, oh yes, by the way, just might spontaneously combust in a literally unquenchable fire one day.
Canoo is a perfect example of the kind of startup virtually created by a government grant program in this environment.
Canoo was founded in 2017, with R&D in Michigan, offices in California and Texas, factories in Oklahoma, and debts all over the room.
They immediately inked supply agreements with NASA, Walmart, the U.S. Post Office, the U.S. Department of Defense, the state of Oklahoma, and others, and dreamed of selling fleets of passenger and cargo vans to companies and governments that would be drawn to their products, not for their quality or cost-efficiency, but for their ability to check off an ESG box at company headquarters.
“What has Transportation done to fulfill our EV goals?” a CEO might demand at a board meeting.
“I haven’t bought any yet, sir, because they’re all overpriced and won’t meet our needs” would be the right answer in a sane world, but in a modern ESG-governed woke conglomerate, that answer might get the vice president of transportation fired.
What’s the right answer?
“I ordered 4500 EV delivery vehicles from Canoo, sir” was imagined to be the right answer at Walmart, in this context, even though Canoo never managed to make those 4500 working vehicles, and Walmart finally, quietly, gave up on them last year and switched to Chevy.
These kinds of commitments and news releases – publicly stated and proudly touted, were good for collateral on enough loans to keep Canoo alive for almost eight years, even though Canoo burned through enough cash to start scaring Wall Street early on.
As a publicly traded company, their books were visible, and some of their spending practices raised more than a few eyebrows. Last spring, for example, it became known that the company spent about twice as much money on CEO Tony Aquila’s private plane as it brought in, as revenue, in all of 2023.
In a free market environment, this irresponsible spending and lack of successfully produced product would scare investors away, and of course it eventually did.
But in this environment, they could postpone such a day of reckoning. Canoo lasted nearly eight years living this way, collecting and burning through both investments from companies happy to use this company to meet their ridiculous ESG commitments, and grants or anticipated future grants from governments run by people like those at the US Department of Energy, who believe that the tax dollars of hard-working Americans ought to poured down a sinkhole, in the noble service of their beloved climate cult.
Canoo was established on the remains of Arrival automotive, an earlier defunct EV manufacturer from Britain. Its founders were executives from Deutche Bank and BMW, the kind of businessmen who are perhaps better at developing a money source than they are at developing a working vehicle.
Perhaps these businessmen might have been more successful at making traditional cars and trucks; perhaps they should never have gone into business at all. We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that they built this company specifically to attract funding that was based on a political philosophy rather than a cost-effective need in the marketplace.
The government has been creating more and more such businesses for decades, really, ever since the Welfare State ratcheted up in earnest with LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s. Government creates a grant program; a businessman creates a storefront to apply for that grant. Government creates a SNAP card; a businessman opens a shop that accepts that card in payment. Government creates a mandate to use this new, unproven, but politically-correct technology; a businessman opens a business delivering just that exact technology.
This strange dance has become a subset of our economy, not a black market or grey market, but perhaps a powder blue market, consisting of sponges specifically developed to absorb grant money and ESG contracts.
It’s a costly, inefficient, wasteful subset that we need to eliminate.
Because “when you drag an ESG policy and a government mandate through a research park, you never know how many gold-diggers with grant-application-writing software you’ll find.”
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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