Flishback: SunPower IPO, Wal-Mart Welfare

• T.J. Rodgers To Keynote Santa Clara University Event (May 26th) and I Like How This John Mackey Guy Thinks: Shameless libertarian capitalist Rodgers' bailout of solar cell producer, SunPower (SPWR), is paying off. The company, which has come up with a more efficient photovoltaic cell, IPO'd at about $25 per share.
  
  Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News: "Hot IPO for solar cell maker SunPower" (requires sign in)
  
  

  SunPower's cells were more efficient than older technology because it built scores of tiny black pyramids on top of six-inch silicon wafers. Those pyramids, about one-one-hundredth the width of a human hair, can trap light and convert it into electricity.




• Good Wal-Mart, Bad Wal-Mart (September 17th): On Tuesday, we attended a spoken word performance by Henry Rollins. He related his experiences, good, bad and surreal, with pulling his tour bus into Wal-Mart parking lots across the country for late-night discount shopping. "Shopping" isn't really the right word, Rollins pointed out -- at Wal-Mart you secure provisions. I realized that to truly verbally skewer a place like Wal-Mart, you have to put in some time there, absorbing the oddness of it all. I suspected that some of the audience members, good Bay Area liberals who scrupulously avoid ever setting foot in a Wal-Mart, couldn't relate to Rollins' story from their own experience.
  
  Here's a review of the new "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" documentary, that provides a good backgrounder about the scads of corporate welfare Wal-Mart receives:
  
  Greg LeRoy, Silicon Valley Metro: "Welfare for Wal-Mart"
  
  

  The subsidies for which Wal-Mart lobbies run the whole gamut: free or reduced-price land, infrastructure assistance, tax increment financing (TIF), property tax abatements or discounts, state corporate income tax credits, sales tax rebates, enterprise zone tax breaks, job training funds and low-interest tax-exempt loans. The most deals and dollars were found in Texas (30 deals worth $108 million) and Illinois (29 deals worth $102 million).

  
  
  That makes Wal-Mart one hell of a welfare queen.