I agree with you regarding any company which did not receive government money.
Actually they have been refusing to take repayment of the TARP money from banks....
Here's a true story first reported by my Fox News colleague Andrew Napolitano (with the names and some details obscured to prevent retaliation). Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic.
Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.
Didn't Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner say that it was not the administration's intent to control private companies? Then why is it reportedly reluctant to accept TARP repayments from some banks?
If it has indeed declined to accept $340 million in payments from banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California, the administration is tacitly admitting that it wants to control those banks as well as others that will try to pay back the taxpayers' money they took in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. By refusing repayment, the government can keep the leverage it bought with the bailouts. Banks that still "owe" would not be in position to reject the administration as a "partner."
Thug politics at its finest.