At the nation’s largest solar energy plant Wednesday, President Obama doubled down on his commitment to government subsidies for clean energy technology and green jobs — and deflected blame for instances when those investments have failed.
“Are you doing your ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy right if that’s what we have to show for it — Solyndra?” asked Kai Ryssdal, host of “Marketplace” on American Public Media, inan interviewwith Obama.
The solar energy start-up Solyndra, which had been the poster child of Obama’s initiative, went bankrupt in 2011, putting 1,000 employees out of work. It had received more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees through a Recovery Act program. The loan process is now the subject of a congressional investigation.
“Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt,” Obama said. “But understand: This was not our program per se.”
Per se...
Video bonus below --
Then:“We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra. Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot. But through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the result of those loans… Before the Recovery Act, we could build just 5 percent of the world’s solar panels. In the next few years, we’re going to double our share to more than 10 percent.” — Obama, remarks at Solyndra Inc., Fremont, Calif., May 26, 2010
Now:“Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand: This was not our program, per se. Congress — Democrats and Republicans — put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it’s easy to raise money for startups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help startup companies get to scale.”— President Obama, interview with American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” March 21, 2012
Uttering the name of the now-bankrupt solar energy equipment manufacturer/Stimulus beneficiary, conjures all sorts thoughts/imagery/throwing up in your mouth a little.
Now that more than half-a-billion simoleons has been thrown away on the it-would-never-work green company, Congress, the FBI, the State of California, and the Departments of Treasury and Energy are hot on the trail of false promises, cons, dodges and -- perhaps -- misappropriation of public funds and/or outright theft.
Among those in investigators' cross hairs: Oklahoma billionaire, Obama/Democratic fundraiser and big Solyndra backer George Kaiser -- see photo at top. (For the record, the very wealthy man from Tulsa claims to have invested nothing in the company...but his foundation had more than a third interest in the failure.)
Since the scandal broke, Kaiser has worked to keep his distance from the brewing crisis, but his connections to the company and interactions with the White House (attending 16 of the company's 20 meetings with administration officials) have belied his denials of trying to influence a $535 billion federal loan (from the Stimulus) to Solyndra.
Below is an interesting clip from one of Kaiser's speeches. (Brief transcript follows...) In it, he shares his views on "getting the money."
“There’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history, and probably never will be again, than in the last few months and in the next 18 months,” he says. “And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much as it for Tulsa and Oklahoma as we possibly can.”
George Kaiser cites his “multiple trips to Washington” and his ability to secure meetings with “all the key players in the West Wing of the White House.” He also touts his “almost unique advantage,” through his foundation, of being able to match public dollars with private funding. That way, Kaiser says, the Obama administration will know “we’ll watch over it because we don’t want to be embarrassed with the way our money is spent and so we won’t make you be embarrassed with the way your money is spent either.”
"Solyndra had been named one of the world's 50 most innovative companies and reported sales growth of 40% to $140 million last year. In 2006, the company applied for a federal loan guarantee. It underwent years of rigorous internal and external review before being approved--before the perfect storm of deteriorating market conditions."--Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman, op-ed piece, USA Today, Sept. 13
"The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company's factory, newly obtained e-mails show. . . . 'We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),' one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden's domestic policy adviser, concluded, 'We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.' "--news story, Washington Post, Sept. 14
An FBI raid yesterday on Bay Area-based Solyndra Inc., a solar-panel maker that failed after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. According to sources, this is just the beginning of an multi-level investigation that will look into the Obama administration’s clean-energy program, how Obama donors might have benefited from their ties to the company and the administration, and how Stimulus money was used and/or diverted.
In addition, there is a dispute over what the company’s CEO told members of Congress about the strength and viability of Solyndra.
According to a Bloomberg News report: “Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman ofCaliforniaand Diana DeGette ofColoradosaid yesterday that Solyndra Chief Executive Officer Brian Harrison assured them in a meeting less than two months ago that the company was in a ‘strong financial position. He did not convey to us the perilous condition of the company, and the committee should know why,’ Waxman and DeGette wrote in a letter yesterday to Stearns. 'At that time, he said the company was projected to double its revenues in 2011, there was ‘strong demand in theUnited States’ for its shipments, and the company was expected to double the megawatts of panel production shipped this year,” according to the letter. ‘These assurances appear to contrast starkly with his company’s decision to file for bankruptcy.’”
The DOE gave Solyndra the most federal backing awarded a solar manufacturer. The George Kaiser Family Foundation, a charitable organization based in Tulsa, OK, and backed by donations from billionaire Obama fundraiser George Kaiser, holds almost 39 percent of Solyndra, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Kaiser raised, or bundled, $50,000 to $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign, according to a list that had been posted on Obama’s 2008 campaign website. He gave $2,300 personally, according to theFederal Election Commission.
In the week before the administration awarded Solyndra with the first-ever alternative energy loan guarantee on March 20, four separate visits were logged. Kaiser, who has in the past been labeled a major Solyndra investor as well as a Obama donor, made three visits to the White House on March 12, 2009, and one on March 13. Kaiser has denied any direct involvement in the Solyndra deal and through a statement from his foundation said he “did not participate in any discussions with the U.S. government regarding the loan.”
White House visitor logs show that Kaiser had 16 meetings with Obama aides, 11 of them in 2009. His first recorded visit to the White House was March 12, 2009, when he met separately with Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to Obama, Pete Rouse, a senior adviser to the president, and Heather Higginbottom, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. The next day he met with Jason Furman, a member of Obama’s National Economic Council.
That month, the Energy Department awarded Solyndra the $535 million loan guarantee to commercialize its cylindrical solar panels.In June, Kaiser met with senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, policy adviser David Pope and then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. His most recent meeting covered by the White House logs was on April 11 of this year, with Rouse.
Obama supporter/fundraiser/Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser...
Kaiser’s firm, Argonaut Ventures and its affiliates have been the single largest shareholder of Solyndra, according to SEC filings and other records. Under terms of the bankruptcy filing, investors including Argonaut -- which led a $75 million round of financing for Solyndra earlier this year -- will stand in line before the federal government and other creditors to recoup its losses. Energy officials confirmed this arrangement, saying that after private investors including Kaiser recover $75 million, the U.S. government would have a chance to seek $150 million of its investment.
Agents for DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman, who has called the department’s clean-energy loan program lacking in “transparency and accountability,” joined in the search yesterday at the Fremont, California, headquarters of Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6.
The company borrowed $527.8 million from the U.S. Federal Financing Bank, a unit of the U.S. Treasury Department that’s its biggest lender. In January, the Energy Department agreed to let $385 million in taxpayer support for Solyndra take a back seat to funds from new investors in an effort to keep the company operating.
Folks -- this is just the beginning of this story.
(Huge h/t: Jim Snyder reporting for Bloomberg -- for much of this report)
Peter Suderman (Reason.com) takes a look at Investor's Business Daily'sexamination of "President Obama's promise to create five million "green jobs" over the next decade. So far, quite a lot of stimulus money has been spent attempting to encourage enviro-work. But there hasn't been a lot of progress, and in a number of cases, the money appears to have been blown on projects that are clearly wasteful or doomed to failure."
Some lowlights:
"Last week Obama toured to much fanfare a Johnson Controls plant in Michigan where $300 million in conservation grants produced 150 jobs — at a cost of $2 million per position."
Evergreen Solar Inc is a "Massachusetts company that the White House once said 'is hoping to hire 90 to 100 people' thanks to stimulus money has $485.6 million in debt. Evergreen closed a factory in March, reports the Boston Herald, and cut 800 jobs. A Michigan plant is to be shut down, as well, causing the loss of even more jobs."
"Green Vehicles of Salinas, Calif., which has burned through more than $500,000 in money 'invested' by the city, folded last month without having produced anything of significance. The company promised it would employ about 70 and pay back Salinas taxpayers with $700,000 a year in city taxes."
In Seattle, "a $20 million federal grant for home weatherization has, according to KOMO news, retrofitted only three houses and created 14 jobs in more than a year."
Suderman adds, "As the job-creation rhetorical wars reach threat level five in Washington, it's worth remembering that the problem with jobs initiatives, green and otherwise, is that creating sustainable, productive jobs—the kind of employment that lasts and adds to the nation's productivity—is a hard thing to do. And there's no reason to think government bureaucrats, torn by a mob of competing political interests, are going to be somehow better at it than private sector operators. If creating productive employment were straightforward, wouldn't the private sector already be doing it? After all, you don't see most companies turning down opportunities to profit. Which is one of the many reasons why these fantasy jobs initiatives dreamed up in Washington frequently don't hit near the jobs numbers they promise, and why, when it comes to stimulus spending, the administration ends up leaning on totally unverifiable job-creation estimates to justify its spending. Lots more from Reason on green jobs here, here, and here. "
So much for all those "green" jobsthat were going to save California...
Last month, my colleagues on the John Batchelor Show and I discussed how China - through subsidies and economic espionage - has destroyed the solar panel market for much of the rest of the world...especially here in California.
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) meets workers at Solyndra's Fremont-based facilities. Boxer touted her support of green jobs, like the ones being lost at Solyndra, as key to fixing what ails California...
Like most fantasies, this one is coming to a conclusion. It can now be said that we are seeing the beginning of the industry's end here in the Golden State. The worst part is that the federal government, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (CA-D) - who ran on this very issue as a key pillar in her recent campaign - did know/should have known this was happening.
China's now-burgeoning solar panel manufacturing industry benefits from years of economic espionage, illegal subsidies and no environmental regulations to speak of...
"Despite a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government, Solyndra, a maker of solar panels in the southeast San Francisco Bay Area city of Fremont, will close one of its manufacturing plants, lay off 40 permanent and 150 contract workers, delay expansion plans of a new plant largely financed with the government-guaranteed loan and scale back production capacity more than 50 percent. Despite the hype and tax money, Solyndra seems unable to compete with Chinese manufacturers, whose prices are lower. This is the latest bad news for the company touted by Mr. Schwarzenegger and President Barack Obama as one of the green industry’s supposed shining lights." – Editorial, The Orange County Register, November 11, 2010.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (center) helps break ground for the now endangered Solyndra solar panel manufacturing facility... (photo: Solyndra)
Not only is this news a hit on the industry and the over-hyped notion that green jobs would pull California out of the economic tailspin that it's now it, but it also was a hit on the president's much-touted Stimulus program.
President Barack Obama at Solyndra's Bay Area facility...
"...The US Government's $535 million deal is is the first loan of its type using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and also the first of its type from the US Department of Energy (DOE) since 1980," according to a report at Treehugger.com.
Just great! Not one but two taxpayer-financed fantasies gone bust...
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