Solyndra goes bankrupt, taxpayers wasted $500 million

[Plantagenet]

Documents show that the Obama administration pressured OMB regulators to approve Solyndra scam.

White House pressured OMB to approve Solyndra scam

Will Obama and his White House staff pay the taxpayers back for the half billion dollars they channeled to Obama's cronies at Solyndra?

[PrestonSturges]

All I know is that Dana Perino (sic?) ...

Yup.
All you know is what Dana Perino says. That sounds about right.

As I said she's notoriously dishonest and an astonishing idiot, so don't ask me to choose between you.

[Plantagenet]

Preston has been trying to blame the Solyndra scandal on Bush. This lie from Preston is even more stupid then the typical Preston lie.

The Bush administration turned down Solyndra's request for a loan when the regulators at DOE said the numbers didn't add up. Then when Obama took over, his administration pressured regulators to approve the scam deal.

Bush administation turned down Solyndra for a loan when regulators said no----when Obama took over, his administration pressured and overrode the regulators and rushed to get the money to Obama's cronies at Solyndra

Why not stop the lies and admit the truth, Preston.

[Plantagenet]

Is Solyndra the "tip of the iceberg"?

We know that Obama presured the regulators to allow half a billion dollars of his stimulus to go to his cronies at Solyndra----money that is apparently lost.

NOW investigators are starting to look at the rest of Obama's stimulus spending----almost a TRILLION dollars. How much of that money went to democratic party operatives, green fraudsters, and bankrupt scammers?
is Solyndra the tip of the iceberg....how much of the Obama stimulus spending was skimmed off by democratic party bigwigs?

[Sixstrings]

Treasury Inspector General Opens Probe Into Obama's Solargate

In the latest installment of what is rapidly becoming Obama's Keynesian Solargate, we learn that the Treasury Department's Inspector General has opened an investigation of the now defunct $528 million government loan to Solyndra which has no chance of getting repaid, following what will be a pennies on the dollar liquidation of the company, especially since it is primed by a $75 million term loan to George Kaiser, a documented Obama "bundler" as was documented previously.

Per the AP, "A spokesman said Thursday that the inspector general is reviewing the role and actions of the Federal Financing Bank, a government corporation supervised by the Treasury Department. The bank provided the low-interest loan to the Fremont, Calif.-based company." The "concern" is that Obama has pushed levers to get the investment in a venture controlled by a "friend" on a fasttrack, with the White House Office Of Management Supervision urging the DOE to release the funds without proper diligence.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/treasury-inspector-general-opens-probe-obamas-solargate

"Pennies on the dollar" liquidation.. what a fiasco. I suppose another Obama donor will swoop in and buy this robot factory.

This is crony capitalism at work. To be fair, Perry is a crony capitalist too. One administration after the other we get this same old fraud over and over. Clinton with his Chinese high rollers in the White House and sending all that tech to China. Bush / Cheney and their Haliburton buddies. Now Obama and his green energy boondoggles.

[peeker01]

You should hear my wife go on and on about the boondoggles in the former Yugoslavia. The
Socialists invented cronyism and greed.

[Expatriot]

It looks like Solyndra violated the WARN Act:

Are you being serious or sarcastic? They went bankrupt. What are you going to do? Fine them?

[Sixstrings]

It looks like Solyndra violated the WARN Act:

Are you being serious or sarcastic? They went bankrupt. What are you going to do? Fine them?

That's not my opinion it was a letter from the local congressman and a news article.

A company of this size doesn't just "go bankrupt" and lock the doors one day without any warning. They knew well in advance, that's why there's a law called the WARN Act in the first place.

[dohboi]

Can we have just a tiny bit of perspective here.

Bush and company got us into two wars for no very good military reasons.

They are costing us more than a billion dollars every week.

That is the corrupt expense that is destroying America (along with the fact that the 400 richest Americans now control more wealth than the 150 million least wealthy Americans).

China is vastly outspending us in supporting their solar industry.

Investment go bad all the time. The problem isn't that we invested in this company, its that we didn't invest in fifty other companies as well.

But there is only one thing that repugs want to do

over

and

over

and

over

And that is to bash Obama.

It really gets tiring, folks.

Give it a rest.

[peeker01]

Not a chance

[careinke]

Can we have just a tiny bit of perspective here.

Bush and company got us into two wars for no very good military reasons. And three years after Obama took over, we are still there.

They are costing us more than a billion dollars every week. That is over 138 Billion Obama has spent on these wars since taking over!

That is the corrupt expense that is destroying America (along with the fact that the 400 richest Americans now control more wealth than the 150 million least wealthy Americans). Then why hasn't he fixed it yet?

China is vastly outspending us in supporting their solar industry. If we were a communist country, we could do that too

Investment go bad all the time. The problem isn't that we invested in this company, its that we didn't invest in fifty other companies as well. The problem is he went against the warnings and paid off his cronies

But there is only one thing that repugs Dems want to do

over over

and and

over over

and and

over over

And that is to bash Obama. And that is to blame Bush

It really gets tiring, folks. It really gets tiring, folks

Give it a rest. Give it a rest

[Sixstrings]

And that is to bash Obama.

It really gets tiring, folks.

Give it a rest.

I just posted this because Solyndra is energy related. People were more than welcome to talk more about the broader issue of solar power and why Solyndra failed.. one guy upthread from Germany had good info. Something about this Solyndra design being no good, leaves get stuck in it or something.

I can't help it what direction people want to take a thread..

I'm not an energy expert.. if people want to talk solar I'd like to read it.

[Plantagenet]

Obama promised in 2008 to create millions of "green jobs.----Instead in one of his first acts as President his administration steered hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus funds to one of his closest political cronies. Instead of creating green jobs, Obama wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on green scams like Solyndra.

YES---the US and the world need to switch to alternative energy.

NO----the US doesn't need incompetent politicians like Obama who give alternative energy a bad name by diverting precious dollars that should be used to develop the alternative energy industry in the US to hopeless uneconomic scams like Solyndra.

[Outcast_Searcher]

By the way.. I haven't heard this mentioned on either CNN or MSNBC. They really should be more objective and not totally pro-Obama.. this should have been reported, if they carried every photo-op Obama did at Solyndra they should have covered this.

Yup. If FOX News omitted some coverage about a big negative story about some GOP heavyweight -- then there would be all kinds of screaming from the left and the MSM.

Yet MSNBC behaves like this, and then WITH A STRAIGHT FACE claims they're not biased, unlike FOX News.

(I hate both channels BTW). And lately, watching things like "Your Money" on CNN gets pretty sickening with how anti-GOP the staff talking heads clearly are. There is clearly PLENTY of idiocy in the GOP -- I just want the reporting to be either reasonably objective -- OR the source to openly admit their political leanings.

Yeah, like that will happen... At least with the internet you can get many slants on a given story.

[Pops]

Lets try to move this toward peak oil a little...

The whole idea of "prepare 20 years before PO" pretty well means that government must make an investment because obviously the market isn't going to. Alternative energy is called that because it can't compete with FFs in the marketplace - so who is going to do the required investing in a money losing business?

China is spending $30B/yr to develop PV according to an NPR story and the US is spending how much? China and the EU are heavily promoting other alt power as well all the while the US is busy goring Al Gore and yelling 'Drill Baby Drill" and "gimme tax breaks"

No doubt government is not good at handling money, especially when the spending needs to happen fast, a report just out said $60B went to waste and fraud in Iraq so obviously this isn't a partisan problem. When there is a lot of money involved some is gonna get siphoned off and I'm sure some more is just squandered.


So O has his tit in the wringer on this and he should take responsibility but the bigger question to me is what exactly is the option to the US government doing the backing when any sane investor would run?

[Oakley]

The whole idea of "prepare 20 years before PO" pretty well means that government must make an investment because obviously the market isn't going to. Alternative energy is called that because it can't compete with FFs in the marketplace - so who is going to do the required investing in a money losing business?

...

So O has his tit in the wringer on this and he should take responsibility but the bigger question to me is what exactly is the option to the US government doing the backing when any sane investor would run?

When a business uses more value than it creates, i.e., when it loses money, there is a net loss of resources. If it is an individual or business that makes the wrong decisions, the loss is his and his creditors; if the government steps directly into the role of business or indirectly by subsidizing or making loan guarantees, and that turns out to be the wrong decision, we all must bear the burden of this bad decision. When you place the burden of bad decisions on innocent bystanders rather on those who make those bad decisions, you create a disconnect between cause and consequence. You create mal-investments. You punish the wrong people. You do not discourage bad decisions.

Wouldn't you and I be better off if we were not burdened with the consequences of the poor decisions of someone else? We would have more of our own money to follow our own paths in dealing with the end of the oil age.

Your argument that government should do what no sane person would do does not make sense to me. You are attempting to substitute your own judgement about what does or should have economic value for the collective judgement of the market place. You are attempting to burden others to implement your own view of the world, when it is the collective judgement of us all as expressed through the market place that brings us what we want. There is no perfect economic system, but there are those which history has demonstrated are less effective than others, and centralized planning has repeatedly failed. If one were to look closely at the current economic problems, I think he would find that the rigging of the markets by corporate/government collusion has a lot more to do with it than free markets. Politicians and bureaucrats do not have the ability to know what investments should or should not be made to solve the energy problem, if it even does have a solution; they are principally motivated by their own best interest, and cannot possibly know what the best allocation of resources is.

So the bigger question is if we are better off having where resources are invested dictated by politicians and bureaucrats (a dictatorship so to speak) or are we better off being free to privately decide what risks we judge worthy or risking our wealth and what is insane. If there is a solution to the energy/resource scarcity problem, I can pretty much guarantee that it will no arise from the minds of the dullards who occupy the seats of power.

[careinke]

So O has his tit in the wringer on this and he should take responsibility but the bigger question to me is what exactly is the option to the US government doing the backing when any sane investor would run?

Why do you want the government to back insane investments? All those govt bean counters, who warned this was not going to pencil out, just to be overruled willy nilly in favor of cronyism should be let go. After all, if you don't listen to them anyway, why do you need them.

To answer your question, the govt option should be to run. Just like any sane investor.

[AdTheNad]

if the government steps directly into the role of business or indirectly by subsidizing or making loan guarantees, and that turns out to be the wrong decision, we all must bear the burden of this bad decision.

When you decide to sit on the side lines and let the free markets act, and those free markets burn through precious finite resources that are then no longer available to anyone else - we all must bear the burden of that bad decision.

Yes governments make bad decisions, but they also make good ones. The free market answer to peak oil is ignore it, and hope for some future miracle while you keep burning finite resources as quickly as possible. Don't ration it. Don't attempt to charge a price that reflects its real value. Just burn for whatever frivolous reason you can think of. The free market has people driving to their marketing job, to convince other morons to buy SUVs, so they too can burn ever more finite resources. How can you look at the world and think it would be better with even freer markets?

You're clearly an eloquent and pretty smart guy. Do you really believe you couldn't come up with a better system than we have at the moment? Do you foresee a crash coming? Do you not think the crash could be managed better than by running at full speed doing what we are currently doing?

If a system isn't being run sustainably, then all the externalities are not being fully paid. It's as simple as that. Free market systems try to avoid as many externalities as possible and pass them onto other people, and even the future. This is not sustainable and clearly is not optimal for human welfare.

Lets try and put this into the Easter Island analogy to see what would have worked best there:
Do you think that if Easter Island had completely free markets they would have staved off collapse? I think they would have cut down ever single tree just as they did do. The trees could not be priced high enough in a free market system to make the cost higher than the discount rate applied to the future.

How could Easter Island have worked out better for maximum societal welfare?
The trees should have been priced at a level whereby they were only used at a sustainable rate. This is clearly far higher than the cost of simply cutting down a tree. The additional cost, lets call it a "sustainable added tax" could then have either been redistributed evenly amongst the population giving everyone a chance at being able to buy the sustainably available trees, or invested in ways to try to increase the total sustainable goods available.

Easter Island didn't have to collapse. Commodity pricing by free markets couldn't have stopped it.

[Expatriot]

A company of this size doesn't just "go bankrupt" and lock the doors one day without any warning. They knew well in advance, that's why there's a law called the WARN Act in the first place.

Are you kidding again? Or are you being serious? If it's wit, it's very dry humor.

Of course they knew well in advance. All businesses that fail have advance warning.

I'm guessing that you are unfamiliar with how bankruptcy works.

Regarding WARN, it's got nothing to do with Chap. 11 or Chap. 7 cases. It's about layoffs, not bankruptcy.

Surely you don't believe that the WARN act was implemented to force companies going bankrupt to issue a 60 day warning to the world so that there can be a massive creditor pile up at the court houses?

[Expatriot]

Can we have just a tiny bit of perspective here.
Bush and company got us into two wars for no very good military reasons.
They are costing us more than a billion dollars every week.

You Republicrats with your red/blue bickering are freaking hilarious.
When Bush was in office your team blasted him for 8 years.
Now your guy is in office and their team is blasting him.
But you don't think you do the same thing they do. Hilarious.

Are you honestly suggesting that Obama is not responsible, currently, for the wars? Are you honestly suggesting that it's not his active choice to 1. Spend the money. 2. Continue the wars. 3. Expand them into Libya (and probably soon beyond that). Are you actually attempting to argue that Obama is bound to continue the wars, and has no choice?