September 14th, 2011 | 
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Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending – Washington Post
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Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending
Washington Post The Washington Post reported earlier this month that e-mails showed that White House officials pushed federal reviewers for a decision on the Solyndra loan as they sought to schedule a press announcement with the company and Vice President Biden. … |
Obama's Solyndra Scandal Reeks of the Chicago Way | Just Piper
Those of us from Chicago know exactly what the Solyndra scandal smells like. And It doesn't smell fresh and green. Kudos to John Kass,. Chicago Tribune is a.
Publish Date: 09/18/2011 20:45
http://justpiper.com/2011/09/obamas-solyndra-scandal-reeks-of-the-chicago-way/
The ongoing probes into the collapse of Solyndra could spell a lot of trouble for Team Obama in 2012
Until now, and in spite of all the ongoing failures that can be attributed, at least in large part to the Obama administration, Obama until just a few weeks ago remained personally liked by a large swathe of the population.
Why Is Obama Still Personally Liked?
I personally believed Obama to be a charlatan back in October 2008 when I wrote a piece entitled, Obama And The Missing Paper Trail, but right now we’re talking about how people in general still feel about him, and not me personally, so let’s move on.
Obama has so far earned those high personal-quality ratings by avoiding any meaningful scandal, and his Cabinet and White House staff have similarly offered no reason to suspect any misdeeds.
It has in fact been one of the quietest White Houses on the scandal front in recent memory but that may be about to change.
It might have changed because of the implosion of a politically-connected green-tech firm in Northern California, called Solyndra, and the apparent disappearing act of more than $500 million in taxpayer funds.
And "Yes" Obama Was Very Much Personally Involved
In his 2009 stimulus plan, Obama both sought and received billions of dollars to subsidize a promised explosion in "green jobs" and the White House needed to demonstrate that the U.S. could quickly make use of alternative energy sources to replace the hydrocarbon-based energy that presently meets the needs of the massive U.S. economy, and Obama and his administration chose Solyndra as its poster child.
The White House fast-tracked approval for taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and the company received $535 million from the Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank to build a new manufacturing facility.
Obama later appeared at Solyndra touting his green-jobs initiative and Solyndra insisted, until at least late as this summer that their financial status was strong.
The Collapse
Suddenly and without warning Solyndra collapsed, and over one thousand employees showed up for work on August 31, only to discover that the company had shut its doors.
The company’s stock price had been falling almost continually over the previous two years because of questions about about Solyndra’s real competitiveness and financial strength.
The Money Trail And George Kaiser
When Solyndra initially applied for taxpayer subsidies, auditors at the Department of Energy were already questioning Solyndra’s viability, so why did the Obama administration fast-track Solyndra’s application?
One fairly obvious reason might be, that one of the chief investors in Solyndra was George Kaiser who was one of Obama’s campaign bundlers in 2008, and he raised between $50,000 and $1000,000 for Obama’s campaign.
The Very Low Interest Rates
Solyndra executives visited the White House more than twenty times between March 2009 and April 2011 and the company was give an interest rate from the feds at one-fourth the going rate for green-jobs projects.
And Who Got Repaid First?
The collapse of Solyndra also led to a somewhat strange arrangement for repayments to creditors.
Despite having put up $535 million in taxpayer loan guarantees, the Obama administration didn’t insist on putting taxpayers in the most senior position for creditors if Solyndra failed, but instead, Kaiser will get repaid first on a $75 million investment, before taxpayers see a dime.
Sounds Fishy?
Last week, in response to an investigation by the DOE’s Inspector General, the FBI raided Solyndra, seizing its business records, and federal agents also raided the homes of Solyndra executives and seized additional computers files.
What’s more, Congress, which had already opened an investigation into Solyndra’s loans, will undoubtedly press for access to this material for its own probe.
This Will Damage Obama Personally
ABC (a strong Obama supporter) just reported that DOE officials sat in on Solyndra’s board meetings for months before the collapse, and that despite having this unprecedented access, the Obama administration did nothing to alert Congress that Solyndra might fail, and in fact, failed to respond when Solyndra executives misrepresented the status of the company to members of Congress.
There have been several minor controversies and suggestions of impropriety in the Obama administration, such as Operation Fast and Furious in the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) office in Phoenix and the Department of Justice, but Solyndra is the first controversy that has the potential to directly stain Barack Obama himself.
The Dems lost a NY precinct today that had been in Dem hands for close to a century and yesterday it was announced that poverty is at it highest rate since the ’50s.
Update Septemeber15, 2011
* The Treasury Inspector General’s Office said Wednesday night that it too, is now investigating the loan, because it was processed by Federal Financing Bank, a government lending institution that falls under the Treasury’s control.
* “A half a billion dollars that was not supported in January under the Bush administration was then conditionally recommended in March". Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas
Rick Perry and Mitt Romney must be licking their chops right now!
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Bush turned down Solyndra for a loan.
Obama didn’t.
That makes Bush smarter than Obama.
The Energy Department has been busy handing out more loan guarantees in the past few weeks — $150 million to 1366 Technologies of Lexington, Mass. (73 percent for Obama in 2008), 80 percent of $344 million to Solar City of San Mateo, Calif. (72 percent for Obama in 2008). Will one of them be the next Solyndra?
The real scandal is the “green jobs” loan guarantee program itself. And the ones getting scammed are American taxpayers.
O’Bama HOW could you, and other Democrats, have accepted a CAMPAIGN Contribution from Solyandra, a company you were giving $528 MILLION in tax payer stimulus to?
It was WRONG…CLEARLY WRONG…OBVIOUSLY WRONG!
EXPLAIN YOURSELF NOW!
WASHINGTON — Solyndra officials were intensely pressuring Bush administration officials in early January 2009 to approve a government loan for the solar company before the Obama administration took power, according to just released emails.
On Jan. 12, 2009, Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet sent an Energy Department official an email marked “urgent” expressing outrage that Bush officials had decided a few days earlier that while the loan application had “merit” it needed further study before officials could move forward with a taxpayer-financed loan.
The Bush administration never did approve the loan but
in an August 19, 2009, email, Obama officials approved the loan to Solyndra, with Vice President Joe Biden attending the company’s ground-breaking via satellite.
The bankruptcy of solar-panel maker Solyndra neatly encapsulates the economic, political and intellectual bankruptcy of Barack Obama’s Big Idea.
It was the president’s intention back in 2009 to begin centrally reorganizing the U.S. economy around the supposed climate-change crisis.
To what end?
Well, Obama claimed his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.
But that was just the cover story.
At its core, Obamanomics is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income.
Government spending on various “green” subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits.
Solyndra’s lobbyists corresponded frequently and met at least three times with an aide to a top White House official, Valerie B. Jarrett, to push for loans, tax breaks and other government assistance.
Energy Department preliminary loan approvals—including the one for Solyndra were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects.
The company spent nearly $1.8 million on Washington lobbyists, employing six firms with ties to members of Congress and officials of the Obama White House. None of the other three solar panel manufacturers that eventually got federal loan guarantees spent a dime on lobbyists… Solyndra’s loan guarantee was the highest of the four companies…
Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra’s behalf, including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader.
Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009…
Solyndra and its lobbyists continued to provide assurances to the White House and the Energy Department, which still could have stopped the flow of federal money…
The GOP-led House committee probing Solyndra, is expanding its investigation to include all communications between the White House and Solyndra.
The committee stepped up its investigation after newly released emails showed administration officials had been concerned about the company’s finances.
New emails show that an Energy Department adviser and former fundraiser for President Barack Obama pushed for California solar company Solyndra to receive an additonal half-billion federal loan.
Steve Spinner apparently did this despite pledging to recuse himself because his wife’s law firm represented the company.
Energy Department officials were warned that their plan to help a failing solar company by restructuring its $535 million federal loan could violate the law and should be cleared with the Justice Department, according to newly obtained e-mails from within the Obama administration.
The e-mails show that Energy Department officials moved ahead anyway with a new deal that would repay company investors before taxpayers if the company defaulted. The e-mails, which were reviewed by The Washington Post, show for the first time concerns within the administration about the legality of the Energy Department’s extraordinary efforts to help Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt Aug. 31.
What is most disturbing about the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the California solar-panel manufacturer to which the government gave a $535 million loan guarantee, is not that Solyndra was a disaster, or that it blew so much money building itself, on one of the most expensive swatches of land in the universe — an area where no factory has been built in at least a decade — a tech temple whose conference-room walls magically changed colors, whose spa-like showers featured LED temperature readouts and whose robots hummed Disney tunes.
President Obama tours government-backed solar company Solyndra in 2010, despite warnings.
President Obama tours government-backed solar company Solyndra in 2010, despite warnings.
The real mistake was funding Solyndra, and companies like it, in the first place, because the US Government should not be involved in dolling out venture capital.
If the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Obama’s California campaign co-chair, the former California state treasurer, were trying to put the brakes on the Solyndra enthusiasm, who had his foot on the gas?
Could the answer have been merely Steven J. Spinner, who is a senior Energy Department adviser, a major fundraiser for President Obama and a Silicon Valley investor tasked with helping the government invest in clean-technology companies.
He had an ethical conflict!
His wife worked for Wilson Sonsini, a California law firm that represented Solyndra, the solar-panel maker, in its applications for the government loan.
Spinner is now a senior fellow at the Obama-adjunct Center for American Progress, where as recently as July he was writing, “Even the most controversial loan guarantee recipient, Solyndra, a solar manufacturer, is seeing an operational turnaround”, in an article pushing for continued funding of the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program.
But he’s not the sole source of the enthusiasm for “green energy” and stimulus spending, which obviously went to the top of the administration.
The latest figure to emerge in Soylndra green-jobs scandal is David Prend, a co-founder of the Boston-based venture capital firm Rockport Capital, who used his role as a green energy adviser to the Obama administration to push for a half-billion-dollar subsidized loan for Solyndra even though his company was a major investor in the solar-panel manufacturer.
Emails obtained by congressional investigators show that Prend was perhaps the first to push for Solyndra inside the administration, touting the company in a February 2009 meeting with Carol Browner, President Obama’s former global warming and energy czar. At the time, Prend’s firm held a 7.5 percent stake in Solyndra.
Prend also pushed for Solyndra to be included in a Navy contract as part of the administration’s plan to switch the military to green energy.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Navy effort came in the spring of this year, long after it was clear that the company was kaput.
The Navy seemed to be on the cusp of including Solyndra in the $1 million pilot project, but had to drop the well-connected firm as bankruptcy approached in September.
WASHINGTON – Treasury Department officials testified Friday that they’ve never in their careers seen the government handle a loan quite like the Energy Department handled the $528 million in taxpayer dollars that was lent to failed solar firm Solyndra.
At a tense hearing on Capitol Hill, two Treasury officials acknowledged that the government’s restructuring of the loan earlier this year was unusual, if not unprecedented.
Through that process, Solyndra investors and not taxpayers, were put at the front of the line for recovering money in case of bankruptcy.
Here We Go Again!
Another Energy Company Goes Bankrupt Despite Federal Loan
Beacon Power Company, which benefited from a $43 million loan guarantee through the same federal program that backed Solyndra, has filed for bankruptcy.
This clean energy corruption nevers stops!
The technology is just not ready and no matter how much Obama pushes it won’t make a difference.
It is pizzing in the wind!
You’re 100% right and thankfully not left ;_)
The OweBahMah administration is a conflict of interest with America and its traditional American values.
The latest Solyndra documents show grave doubts were aired earlier this year about Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s ability to foster job creation, which offers Republicans a ready opening for criticism since Chu will testify on the loan scandal next week.
A February email from an ex-campaign operative for President Obama explained at length why Chu should be demoted and replaced with a new team of energy leaders.
Dan Carol, also a prominent clean-energy activist, complained about rising gas prices and said department resources were not being put to good use.
“These job creation bean fields are not being watered right now”, he said.
Carol described Chu, a Nobel Prize winner as,
“wonderful and brilliant but not the perfect fit for the role he’s in”.
Carol suggested making Chu “chief scientist” at the department and bringing in somebody else as secretary.
He also warned that Solyndra’s finances would be a looming storm of controversy for the department.
“Believe me it will come”, Carol wrote.
After receiving a generous federal loan guarantee and then filing for bankruptcy, the Fremont solar company still owes American taxpayers half a billion dollars.
And as if that weren’t enough, it would appear the Solyndra scandal has now taken a turn for the worse.
A San Francisco-based CBS affiliate just released a shocking video of Solyndra employees destroying millions of dollars worth of parts.
“At Solyndra’s sprawling complex in Fremont, workers in white jumpsuits were unwrapping brand new glass tubes used in solar panels last week”, CBS San Francisco reports. “They are the latest, most cutting-edge solar technology, and they are being thrown into dumpsters”.
Solyndra paid at least $2 million for the specialized glass, according to the CBS report and the solar energy company still owes the German manufacturer of the tubes close to another $8 million.
Why would a company that owes a fortune to creditors indiscriminately destroy millions of dollars worth of assets?
Solyndra isn’t commenting, but court documents reveal the company received permission from the bankruptcy trustee to abandon the high grade glass, and the court agreed that it was of, “inconsequential value, because the cost of storing it exceeded its value”.