Monday, April 07, 2014

Questions for Sean and Matt. Did Matt get paid or was it another Nienow deadbeat debt? And if Matt was paid, was it out of SBA money?

From Look Signs, Inc.'s Website:



My guess, and it is only a guess, Matt's smart enough to operate cash and carry. As to SBA, ask Nienow.

___________UPDATE_____________
Recent Nienow coverage at MN Progressive Project, here, "Nienow decides responding to lawsuit is optional, by Eric Ferguson on April 3, 2014." Ferguson speculates and asks the follow-the-money questions:

How do you blow through $650,000? How do you not answer when that question is coming from your lender? Sen. Nienow, where is the money? No one apparently can get an answer because they’re still trying to answer the question, where are you?

Just to clarify the issue, or rather what the issue isn’t, I don’t care that he ignored all the conservative rhetoric about government can’t and shouldn’t do anything and accepted the SBA loan. That’s what the SBA is for, and in January 2009, we were plunging into what looked like the Second Great Depression partly because no one could borrow any money. So it was a good thing the SBA was giving out loans. They were about the only entity doing so, and the stimulus was desperately needed. I’d wonder if Nienow thought stiffing the government was OK, but he stiffed a private creditor too, so sounds like he just couldn’t or wouldn’t pay his debts.

I also don’t care that his business failed, unless it turns out to have been a scam all the way along. Assuming Nienow really intended to consult on choosing summer camps, most businesses fail, even when the Republicans haven’t collapsed the economy again. So big whoop, in the sarcastic tone of the scandal sense. Plenty of businesses default on loans. Some can’t pay, and some find the costs of defaulting are less than the costs of paying so they default (e.g. American Crystal Sugar), which stinks but is legal.

What I care about is that he behaves like someone with something to hide by dodging creditors and courts. I care that it’s OK for him to stiff a government entity of $650,000, but a kid whose parents are a few dollars behind on the school lunch account should have his food taken away in a publicly humiliating manner. Not that Nienow necessarily approves of the public humiliation or of children going hungry. He just thinks fixing the problem for the whole state by spending an amount merely six times his one SBA loan is too high a price to do anything about it.

Or as I imagine Nienow putting it, “That’s just my opinion of government spending. So sue me!”.

[for linked items to follow, go to the original, complete MPP item]

AS SPECULATED IN THE CRABGRASS OPENING, ABOVE - If Nienow commingled cash from SBA lending to a corporation [not a real person despite Citizens United], toward the political ambitions and advancement of Sen. Sean Nienow [a person], then while being a real person Nienow has characteristics of a noxious weed. With weeding needed. Perhaps Nienow's reticence (a reticence and unavailability noted in Ferguson's MPP post) has to do with Fifth Amendment norms against self-incrimination. Commingling private, political, and corporate/personal money into one mish-mosh slush pot to where it cannot be sorted out; would that be a crime it that is what happened? (So far only the Nienow spouses KNOW as a certainty what happened to the cash.)

What in the world would you guess [given his reticence] Nienow's motivations - his intent - might have been in all this? Ditto, about his present reticence about it all. What's a voter to infer?

___________FURTHER UPDATE____________
On rereading the post - how some might read it --- I am not, not! NOT, inferring Matt Look has any overlap responsibility for what Nienow may have done with lent cash. Matt is an independent businessman. He is in business making signs and making cash flow from that activity. He prints items, folks pay set prices. Matt is NOT any part whatsoever of the interesting dimensions of the Nienow mystery. (The only interesting question for Matt, did he get paid, with it likely, since Matt's been around the block.)