We need a Green Energy Loan Moratorium; Plus: “The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad”
Reader Scott sent this letter to his congressman about the dangerous Solyndra sinkhole. You should send one, too:
How about a Green Energy loan moratorium? The White House instituted an off-shore drilling moratorium over “safety concerns” and to prevent reoccurrence.
Isn’t ensuring tax dollars are not wasted on risky green energy companies important enough to review all proposed loans?
Same logic the President used last year.
Yep. And as I pointed out on Wednesday, Solyndra is the tip of the green iceberg. Know your Big Green Boondoggles, folks.
Fact: “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show. The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.”
Fact: “To date, The Washington Post reports, the Energy Department loan guarantee program from which Solyndra benefitted has created one new permanent job for every $5.5 million spent.
Contact Speaker Boehner here.
Send a message to him on Twitter here.
And be sure to report yourselves to Attack Watch!
***
Your latest Solyndra news round-up:
1) The White House was worried:
Emails released Thursday night show the Obama administration privately worried about the effect of a default by Solyndra Inc. on the president’s re-election campaign.
“The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad,” an official from the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Jan. 31 email to a senior OMB official. “The timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up.”
That message has turned out to be a fairly accurate prophecy of Solyndra’s failure haunting President Obama’s 2012 campaign, even before the end of 2011.
Finally, a White House economic prediction that came true.
1)a – Solyndra-White House relationship has digital legacy it can’t escape. WaPo downplays cronyism even as it highlights the crony closeness of Solyndra and Team Obama.
2) GOP Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, leading the House investigation of Solyndra, says the White House chief loan officer should be fired.
Fat chance. Given how things operate, he’ll be getting a promotion next week.
3) Solyndra employee: “You wonder where all the money went…” Yes, this is on CBS News:
4) Yes, Solyndra employees are applying for government assistance. Via Adam Bitely at NetRightDaily:
Solyndra, the solar panel firm that recently filed for bankruptcy, and the firm that is quickly becoming the focal point of the Obama administration’s first scandal after accepting federal loans that were possibly based on bad data, is becoming an even bigger drain on taxpayers as the employees of the failed solar panel maker are applying for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) benefits according to a source within the federal government.
TAA benefits were established under the Trade Act of 1974. The TAA is meant to provide benefits to people who lose their jobs due to foreign trade. The TAA is a program that is overseen by the Department of Labor. Simply put, TAA benefits are just another type of welfare.
In the case of Solyndra, former employees are most likely applying for benefits based on the fact that China has a comparative advantage at producing solar panels thus leading to Solyndra’s ultimate failure.
Former Solyndra employees would be eligible for worker retraining (presumably away from ‘green jobs’ which are unrealistic), relocation assistance , job search help, income support, and unemployment services. This is a program that is above and beyond receiving the usual unemployment benefits.
5) Solyndra: A few new facts, a few new questions from a blogger sifting through the loan documents.
6) Stimulus Fatigue Stymies Obama in Rounding Up Votes for Full Jobs Package
7) When you’ve lost Jon Stewart…
8.) Lachlan Markey at Heritage: The green jobs myth is finally dead. Dead. Good riddance.
9) Here is the feeble response from the Left: Solyndra failed because politicians aren’t courageous enough to enact a massive carbon tax!
10) A WaPo blogger lays out his “five myths” about Solyndra. Bottom-line liberal media admission: Yes, this scandal is a big deal.”
11) Surprise. Solyndra doled out $2 million in lobbying cash to the bitter end…
About $1 million of that was earned by the company's two in-house lobbyists, Joseph Pasetti and Victoria Sanville, over an 18-month period from 2010 until this year. But Solyndra has also had several big-name lobbying shops on its payroll, including established powerhouses Dutko Worldwide and Holland and Knight, which began representing the then-fledgling company in 2008.
While Holland and Knight helped the company with renewable energy tax credit issues, Dutko was brought aboard, according to its filings, to "identify decisionmakers and to assist with the client's loan application" through the Department of Energy.
...By 2009, Solyndra was finished with Dutko and Holland and Knight and was working with well-known energy lobbyist, McBee Strategic Consulting, whose clients have included the Applied Materials Inc., a semiconductor and solar panel equipment manufacturer; Babcock & Wilcox; BrightSource Energy Inc., a solar developer; Google Inc.; Better Place Inc., an electric-vehicle charge station developer; Honeywell International; and Tesla Motors Inc., a developer of electric cars.
McBee was brought on to monitor how the new American Reinvestment and Recovery Act would affect the solar industry. The group specifically reported on lobbying forms that its issues included the DOE loan guarantee program, through which Solyndra eventually received $527 million in funding before it went bankrupt.
Behind Solyndra's own lobbyists, McBee was the shop that made the most off the company, taking in $360,000 over a two-year period.
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I’ll go Scott one better; how about a complete Obummer-spending moratorium? He’s already demonstrated that he can’t be trusted to handle money.
Perhaps, but why so quick to fire that one person. It would seem that it would make more sense to follow the trail all the way to the end. If you only trap one rat from the nest the nest will still exist, far better to eliminate all the rats in the nest.
Even where companies do create jobs, they do so at such exorbitant cost that the effort cannot reasonably be considered a success. To date, The Washington Post reports, the Energy Department loan guarantee program from which Solyndra benefitted has created one new permanent job for every $5.5 million spent. Lend that kind of money to a private business in an industry that doesn’t rely on taxpayer support, and it will put hundreds if not thousands to work.
The Dems on the committee investigating Solyndra said we need to spend even more to compete with China in the solar industry.
Big problem
Even if you could get the material and production cost of the panels down to zero the overhead for wages,taxes and regulation compliance alone would still not allow us to match their price.
actually that number could be wrong, since more of these green companies could go into the red, and more layoffs might happen. once the dust settles, the number will be a very low number, possibly less than zero! why? because for all the money taken out of the economy to fund this boondoggle, how many actual jobs might have been slashed to pay for these green jobs?
Right now they are trying to push through 15 more loans under the program which has a drop dead date of September 30th to fund loans.
What could go wrong?
Michelle used the “Obama as Icarus” comparison several months ago. How prophetic was that when now, a bonafide scandal emerges that the MSM actually acknowledges, that involves a company named “Solyndra”…..
MM called it a long time ago.
No wonder the left thinks that just paying welfare is a bargain.
Errah, I wouldn’t entrust this administration to handle ice cubes at the north pole, they’d somehow screw that one up too!
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/09/16/16greenwire-solyndra-spent-liberally-to-woo-lawmakers-unti-81006.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/09/13/congressional-investigator-more-solar-bankruptcies-to-come/
The program, which guaranteed a $535 million loan to Solyndra before the company declared bankruptcy last week, still has $8-10 billion in authorized funding that has yet to be spent. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said he had called on the administration to hold off on awarding more loan guarantees from the program.
“The question is: how many Solyndras are out there?” Stearns said. “I’m convinced based upon what I’ve seen on this kind of industry and solar panel, that there’s more that are going to go bankrupt, and I think the president’s unwise to continue this idea of funding through taxpayer money industries that are not viable.”
You know the elephant in the room (or rather, the jackass, in this particular case) has to be pretty big if even the Blamestream Media is having to say something about it.
It never ceases to amaze me how dense some people can get inside the beltway. This bureaucrat was more concerned about how something might look in a political campaign than in doing the right thing with taxpayer dollars.
Because it’s easier to get rid of a political appointee than it is a Gov Service bureaucrat.
Solyndra? Isn’t that an ointment to use on flaming hemorrhoids?
Fear not.
The MSM will spare no journalistic effort or investigative resource to ignore and minimize this story.
Yep, them bad ice cubes really can screw up a career. A bad ice cube was the cause of Chappaquiddick, don’t you know.
http://biggovernment.com/rweiss/2011/09/15/solyndra-not-the-only-company-to-benefit-from-democrat-ties/
Lying within that massive federal loan was a number of sub-awards to other vendors, 40 payments of which were greater than $25,000 each. The largest sub-award went to another administration favorite, CH2M Hill, to the tune of $9.6 million for their construction engineering services. The company is a $6.3 billion consulting, engineering, and construction firm, and shares some similarities to the failed Solyndra. In fact, CH2M used the nearly $10 million sub-award to design Solyndra’s solar manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. Besides that amount, CH2M is also a major beneficiary of the stimulus, having been awarded four of the top ten contracts from stimulus funding last summer – to the tune of $1.2 billion. As of this April, the company boasts of $1.6 billion in contracts from the Recovery Act
That’s not being dense.
That’s just being old-fashioned bad, evil, amoral, money & power-lusting,….
Okay, so they weren’t perfect. As they say, perfection is the enemy of the good.
I heard our annoyingly obtuse and Hollyweird-centric KABC radio morning show host Peter Tilden arguing that this will be forgotten in two weeks because “Hey, that’s just how Washington works and everyone does it! It’s how they make the sausage! No story there!”
It’s the old “everyone does it” defense. Then why have any laws at all?
It will get worse. This administration knows no fear and has no concern for its citizens.
Zero Hedge also points out that Government Sachs was the investment advisor to Solyndra for securing the $535 million loan.
The cancer just continues to spread unabated. I’d like to see who the major shareholders were once you work through to the end of the ownership trail.
Yes indeed, to include all travel. He can do all this campaigning via go to meeting or any number of other video linking programs.
Note to Michelle…love the “green” text in the thread title…lol
The “optics” of a Solyndra default are bad only if you have your eyes open, which eliminates the greenie-lib crowd. For them, it’s not about what you accomplish; it’s about feeeeling that you did something good.
How about a moratorium on just about everything Barky does.
No kidding at this rate it would be cheaper to send the Obama’s on a vacation for the next year and a half.
It would be cheaper to make the Obamas the figurehead royal family of the US, build them a castle, and purchase a collection of jewels and cars for them to play with, than to continue to let him govern.
“The feeeeling you did something good.”, from the “greenie-lib crowd”, comes from knowing they didn’t use their own money.
Errah, If it had stayed solid I could of just walked away. So much for my dream of owning my own Search and Rescue.
Scotch on ice okay; Scotch and water not so good . . . Wish I had a cube or two down here right now!
Nameless faceless backroom dealers passing out taxpayer money to friends and colleagues is nothing new. That doesn’t make it right, and it has become out of control. When these jerks were passing out a million here, and a million there, and we had a near balanced budgetit was tolerable. Today we are running 1 1/2 trillion dollar deficits per year, and these folks are passing out 1/2 a billion and a billion dollar party favors. What is the payoff for Buffet for bailing BAC and who will pay it?
Big deal…that’s only like the cost of one day of Moochelle’s vacation….. (look for me on Attack Watch later today)
Loans????? This is a total money laundering scheme.
This example is exactly why Lobbying should be a TREASONOUS offense punishable by the maximum penalty, Death!!! Lobbying is precisely why there is so much wrong with Washington at virtually every level. BOUGHT AND PAID FOR politicians is what has totally corrupted our entire system of government, also at every level. Just take one look at the 72,000 page tax code. Lobbied tax breaks for the connected. No wonder the feds don’t have enough revenue!?! Think about it, politicians go to Washington in most cases, poorer than church mouses, and “retire” wealthy. All of the above should be subject to TREASON because NONE of it does anything truly worthwhile for the common good. So ask yourself, America, how long has your guy been in office? Don’t you think it’s time to fire Washington, ALL of it, including the current RULING bureaucrats???
When does someone go to jail? The answer…never! Rep. Cliff Stearns is conducting an investigation. Why? They’ll be a lot of speaches, poking fingers into the air, but in the end, no one is ever going to jail. They can’t even conduct investigations on their own (Waters, Rangel, etc.). What makes anyone think anything will come of this?
The absolutely only thing that changes the system is for people to PAY for their actions and that includes having the handcuffs put on and led off to a federal penitentiary.
Switzerland? The Caymans?
Wow, but no surprise. I think Obama himself was a shareholder in the company before it changed names. He sold out (doesn’t he always) but “hmmmm” comes to mind…
Well he does resemble a tan Prince Charles and is about as clueless.
Wait a minute- The White House has a chief loan officer? When did they become a bank?
It’s called the Bank of Obama…where they make loans with other peoples money and you pay the loan back by donating to the Democrat coffers.
In other words, his stash.
Is it too early to start using the moniker “Solyndragate”?
Maybe I should review the loan to that Green offshore drilling project in Kansas…
I knew it wouldn’t take medical science long to develop a way to eliminate Al Gore.