solyndra (11)

4063622086?profile=originalBenghazi isn’t the only White House cover up being exposed through leaked emails. State Department staffers aren’t the only career officials being blamed for President Obama’s inexperience, questionable judgment, and obvious cover up. A similar saga has just been exposed in the latest chapter of the green-energy crony-corruption scandal.

On October 30, The Daily Caller ran a feature titled: As many as fifty Obama backed green energy companies bankrupt or troubled. The piece cited the work Christine Lakatos and I did in our three-part “green-energy failures” series released in October. Immensely popular, the DC article was picked up by numerous sites, including Fox Nation and GOPUSA. That night, Newt Gingrich was on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Sustren. After discussing the incriminating Benghazi emails, he pointed to another possible “October surprise.”

Gingrich teased: “The other big story, I think, that is going to break, is on corruption and extraordinary waste in the solar-power grants and direct involvement by the Obama White House, including the President, in the solar-panel grants involving billions of dollars, and I suspect that’s going to break Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”

His sources were dead on. The next day, Wednesday, October 31, at 1:30PM ET, we received a tip regarding the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s release of more than 150 mails, equaling hundreds of pages of convicting evidence, accompanied by a five-page “Memorandum” with the following subject line: “Update on Committee’s Oversight of the DOE Loan Guarantee Program: New Emails Show President Obama, Senior Administration Officials Misled American People about Role of President and White House in Program.”

Through the research and writing we’ve done, Lakatos and I were confident that there was direct involvement, after all, of the 26 loans (of which the majority were "junk" rated) issued through just the 1705 Loan Guarantee Program to 21 firms, virtually all of them had meaningful political ties (bundlers, donors, supporters, etc.,) to the White House and other high-ranking Democrats. Despite the obvious connection, President Obama has repeatedly denied any involvement. As it has done with Benghazi-gate, the White House, this time through Senior Advisor David Plouffe, while on Meet the Press (October 30, 2011), shuns responsibility for something politically uncomfortable: “decisions about the loan program were made by career officials in the Department of Energy on the merits.”

steven-chu-solyndra.gi.top.jpg

Likewise, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, while testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in November of 2011, stuck to the talking points when, referencing the Solyndra debacle, under oath, he said: “I am aware of no communication from the White House to the Department of Energy saying to make the loan or to restructure.” More recently, March 2012, before the House Oversight Committee, Chu claimed: “we looked at the loans on their own merits.” At that same hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), pressed Secretary Chu on nine of the firms that received loans, revealing their political connections. Chu countered that the loans were based on “merit.” Yet Jordan was perplexed, “so if you weren’t helping your buddies, and you were basing your decisions on the merits of the loan, how do you explain the fact that 23 of 27 recipients of the loan guarantees were rated as junk status investments?” Jordan concluded, “If it wasn’t your political buddies, it had to be incompetence.”

Also under oath, in the July 18, 2012, Oversight Hearing specifically addressing Abound Solar (now bankrupt and under investigation for securities fraud, consumer fraud and financial misrepresentation), former Executive Director of the Loan Program Office (LPO), Jonathan Silver stated, “Because I am no longer at the department, I do not have access to the analysis done for the Abound project. As a result, I cannot comment in detail about the transaction, but what I can do however, is give you a flavor for what we try to do on this, and every project… The loan would have gone through multiple reviews independent of the loan program’s office, including detailed reviews by career credit professionals at DOE, and career staff at OMB, Treasury, and the National Economic Council.”

Silver then emphatically informed the Committee, “This loan––like all the loans underwritten by career professionals, supported by outside specialists –– it was reviewed by career professionals from multiple executive branch offices.” “It was not rushed, the review took place over several years.” “It was not given to friends –– indeed no one in the Loan Program had any idea what individuals were involved in this [Abound] or any other transaction, nor did we care.” The questioning continued. Silver was asked if he saw any evidence of pay-to-play during his tenure. Silver’s response: “None whatsoever, sir—as I say, almost nobody that I am aware of in the Loan Program even knew who the individuals were who had invested, either directly or indirectly, into these companies.”

During the October 11 Vice Presidential debate, when Paul Ryan challenged him on the oversight of the “$90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors,” Vice President Biden sang the same tune: “His colleague runs an investigative committee, spent months and months and months going into this. Months and months. They found no evidence of cronyism.”

Just last week, October 26, 2012, President Obama continued the ruse, when he told a Denver, Colorado news anchor that decisions made in the loan program office are “decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy, they have nothing to do with politics.”

Clearly the stories were coordinated, and were contrary to the obvious conclusions a thinking person would draw—which prompted the Oversight Committee to probe further. However, until the leaked emails were made public on Thursday, we had no proof. We needed the smoking gun.

The tale-tellers, at the least, “misled the American people,” behaved unethically, and may well be guilty of perjury.

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy

The emails revealed that Secretary Chu may well have perjured himself—though as Jordan implied, he may just be incompetent. We’ve written extensively on the interaction of decision-makers in the Administration and its “buddies.” In the March 2012 hearing, Jordan asked specifically: “Did the White House call you about, talk to you about any of these…did someone from the White House talk to you, the Chief of Staff, someone from the White House, talk to you about these respective companies, involving these individuals?”

Our research shows involvement of then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley in the BrightSource loan—one of the projects Jordan was asking about.

The new emails show Chu personally issued orders to prioritize a project favored by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer—Unistar.

Email #13 shows that Silver wrote to Chu’s Chief of Staff in a December 10, 2010, email: “since Aldy [White House staff Joe Aldy] personally promised the edf management group [one of the sponsors of the Unistar loan guarantee project] that he would lead an interagency review of this topic, we should tell him that he should be the one to call and deliver the news.”

Email #14: “there has been a commitment from S1 [Secretary Chu] to Steny Hoyer on this.”

Email #15: “Just came down from the Secretary’s office. He is adamant that this transaction is going to OMB by the end of the day.”


LPO Credit Advisor Jim McCrea (possibly the source of this massive email leak, as his name is one of the most consistent in the email text), had hesitation about the project, stating in Email #16: “Ordinarily, over an issue like this, I would refuse to sign the credit paper and refuse to send it to OMB tomorrow but given the direct order I was personally given by S1[Secretary Chu]…”

Didn’t someone say the loans were not politically motivated and were based solely on merit? Oh, yes, it was the President who said: “they have nothing to do with politics.”

 
jonathansilver-cropped-proto-custom_28.jpg

Jonathan Silver, Former Executive Director of the Loan Program Office

Silver (reported to be an Obama bundler and Democratic donor) resigned in early October 2011, amidst the Solyndra scandal. His claim that loan reviews took place over “several years” and that loans were not “given to friends” is perjurious.

First, the loans couldn’t have been reviewed over “several years.” Obama wasn’t President until January 2009. The Stimulus funds were made available in February 2009. And, the Solyndra $528 million loan guarantee (September 2009) was the Obama administration’s first, as part of the 2009 stimulus package. Solyndra was also the first company to go bankrupt in September 2011. Clearly, there was no “several years” in there.

While logic and simple math tell us that the loans were not reviewed over “several years,” the emails prove the rushed process. In the 350+ page Appendix II, the very first email is from McCrea to Silver (dated June 15, 2010)—subject line: 28 day clock. In it he complains about things being rushed. He opens with “I do not have a good sense of why the DOE and OMB agreed to a 28 day clock following Solyndra...” Though by the end of the page-long email, McCrea seems to concede: “I am not sure that the 28 day process is really as much of a constraint as it might appear at first glance.”

Again, we covered Silver’s involvement with many key players including John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy. Silver is very well connected, having served in the Clinton Administration, he parties with Al Gore, was a frequent White House visitor and participated in meetings with Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Silver used his personal email account to conduct DOE business. But there is no hard proof there.
  
The following eight paragraphs is a revision from our original post with additional information

Also found in Appendix II, early on (December 2009), way before the DOE finalized the $1.6 billion loan guarantee for BrightSource Energy (April 2011), we find that there was a strong push by Silver and others  inside and close to the energy department in getting this loan approved . 

 

We find a very suspicious email exchange about BrightSource that included CEO Woolard, Joshua Bar-Lev, Vice President, Regulatory Affairs for BrightSource, and the lobbying firm representing BrightSource, McBee Strategic Consulting  –– as well as some unknown "energy-Democrat-tied participants": 

We discovered that in 2009, Steve McBee alerted the masses with the following...

 "Wanted to let you know that the BrightSource application appears to moving apace at OMB and has a fighting chance of getting over to DOE..." "DOE is another story. We are hearing that despite a strong push by Silver, Spinner, Rogers and others internally, the process is getting sideways by any number of bureaucratic hold ups and there is now real potential for consideration of the project to slip until next year...[or"redeployed to China]" "ANYTHING you guys would be willing to do with DOE in terms of moving the process would be deeply appreciated."
Joshua Bar-Lev in response says, "Do you all think we should have vantage point insist on mtg with chu or silver or rodgers? Should John and I try to fly out for something similar? Looking for some game changer but perhaps we’ve done all we could. Is dc shut down by the snow or is there some impact we could make? Joshua"


NOTE: We've covered Silver, Steve Spinner and Matt Rogers (all former DOE advisors) in previous posts, as well as Silver's "shady email practices." The “DOE Insiders," where plenty of “VC Guys” and “Gore Acolytes” held key positions –– a dozen on my radar, where at least a dozen on the "green corruption" radar, including these three. 

Time out for a minute...as noted during Silver's testimony this past July, he made this denial: “...as I say, almost nobody that I am aware of in the Loan Program even knew who the individuals were who had invested, either directly or indirectly into these companies.” 

So the question remains, if Silver nor anyone else knew, why would anyone seek help from Vantage Point? Who knows? But what we do know is that Vantage Point Partners is the majority stakeholder in BrightSource, and Sanjay Wagle was a principle. Wagle just so happens to be the “renewable energy grants adviser” at the DOE under Secretary Chu.

While we know that Silver had cozy relationships with quite a few of those seeking green-energy funding (like Al Gore and Woolard), the following emails confirm that lobbying the White House and the Vice President’s office achieves results, not only with getting a loan approved, but clearing obstacles with the Department of Interior (DOI) that put their entire billion-dollar project at risk.

Email #5, drafted by Bright Source CEO John Woolard for then-Board Chairman John Bryson to send to then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley: “This project is now at significant risk due to delays in permitting at the Department of Interior…”

Email #6, from Wollard stated: “we are making good progress in DC. Whitehouse [sic] does seem to be very focused on this issue, in fact it is being elevated through the office of political affairs as well as VP Bidens- so we are starting to get them focused on the massive political risk- it helps that Bloomberg called Ivanpah ‘Obama’s energy project’ so it does have their attention.”

Email #7, two weeks later, BrightSource got what it wanted: “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued their revised Biological Opinion, prompting the Bureau of Land Management to issue a new notice to proceed allowing continued construction at Ivanpah units 2 and 3.”

The BrightSource case reeks of political connections, yet we are supposed to believe the loans “had nothing to do with politics.”

Joe Biden, Vice President

Biden’s denial comes from his one debate of this campaign season, about which Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes for Real Clear Markets: “In Thursday's vice presidential debate, Joe Biden denied any ‘cronyism’ in the award of Energy Department grants and loan guarantees to encourage the development of renewable energy. Plus, he asserted that government-assisted green energy projects had a better ‘batting average’ than do projects backed by investment bankers. Just one problem: Neither of Biden's assertions was true. Plus, the Vice President himself had a role in the cronyism.”

Email #6, proves her point: “…It is being elevated through the office of political affairs as well as VP Bidens…”
Then there is Email #4: “Pressure is on real heavy on SF [Shepherds Flat] due to interest from VP.” Additionally, as we addressed, though not revealed in the emails, Bernie Toon, who served then-Senator Biden as his Chief of Staff, became a lobbyist for BrightSource Energy.


The White House and President Barack Obama

President Obama did keep himself somewhat isolated—having made fewer denials and being involved in fewer emails, however, he cannot be omitted from the discussion, as he was clearly party to the loan approvals. Plus, the emails show that DOE officials were pressured by the political interests at stake.

Email #1, from McCrea to Silver: “I am growing increasingly worried about a fast track process imposed on us at the POTUS level based on this chaotic process that we are undergoing…by designing the fast track process and having it approved at the POTUS level (which is an absolute waste of his time!) it legitimizes every element and it becomes embedded like the 55% recovery rate which also was imposed by POTUS.”
Email #2, from David Schmitzer, DOE LPO Director of Loan Origination to McCrea: “Jonathan just said at our staff meeting that, opposite the message received on Thursday, AREVA is now a ‘go” (seems on Friday POTUS himself approved moving it ahead).”
Email #3, from Silver to McCrea, encouraging him to remind a Treasury official of White House interest in now bankrupt Abound Solar: “You better let him know that WH wants to move Abound forward. Policy will have to wait unless they have a specific policy problem with abound.”


Despite Obama’s claim that the decisions regarding the loans had “nothing to do with politics,” it is clear that they had everything to do with politics—and not just his own. Loans were used to bolster Senator Reid’s re-election chances in the tight 2010 race.

Email #8, McCrea wrote: “Since this is not going to go into the DOE, and just to be clear, the translation is: Reid may be desperate. WH may want to help. Short term considerations may be more important than longer term considerations and what’s a billion anyhow?”
Email #9, Silver wrote: “I need some stats on how many projects we have funded or have in DD [due diligence] as a percentage of totals.  Reid is constantly hit at home for not bringing in the federal dollars.”


If all of this were a novel, or better yet a dramatic feature film, we’d find it most entertaining. We’d leave the theater shaking our heads at the gall of the movie’s starring actor. Instead, this full-color story (White House, green energy, Silver connections) leads to red ink—money borrowed from China that the US taxpayer will be paying back for generations. 

The coercion, corruption, cronyism and, cover up of the President's pet projects is really a horror flick, after all, the emails were released on Halloween. Each one of us is a victim of an expensive trick.

Article first presented at Townhall.com written by columnist Marita K. Noon, Busting Open Energy's Den of Deception, November 4, 2012 –– as a follow up to our BREAKING this story on October 31, 2012:

Research by Christine Lakatos THE Green Corruption blogger.

Read more…

My reflection of both the Republican and DemocraticNational Conventions, from Tampa to Charlotte, with even the fact-checkers having to be fact checked, has been focused on green: renewable energy and taxpayer money.


Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan "slammed President Barack Obama over Solyndra during his acceptance speech." Not surprising considering the ads coming from the Romney camp, hammering away at the Obama administration's failed energy policies along with the crony capitalism charges leveled, a compelling case which the mainstream media is hell bent on either ignoring or shielding the president from.

Ryan declared, “It cost $831 billion –– the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government,” referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was sold to the American people, guaranteed by the Obama administration; as a means to stimulate a dying economy and create jobs. “It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst,” Ryan reinforced.

Conversely, President Obama made a series of energy claims, including renewable, during his acceptance speech, framing his energy policies as a success, and doubling down on his commitment to invest in clean energy.

Additionally, Obama denounced corporate welfare for oil companies at a convention that according to The Center for Public Integrity, was funded by “deep-pocketed corporate donors,” and one year to the day after Solyndra declared bankruptcy.

Steve Spinner: Obama Bundler and Former DOE Loan Programs Advisor 4063582204?profile=original

More amusing perhaps is the fact that the DNC rolled out the red carpet for the president's buddy, Steve Spinner, Obama bundler and former top advisor at the Department of Energy (DOE). Spinner, well known for his involvement and influence (ongoing investigation and internal emails prove) to the ill-fated, politically connected Solyndra, was spotted on the DNC stage, yet bolted for the exit as ABC news made several attempts to interview him.

Over the past two years, it has become perfectly clear that the Solyndra saga, once the poster child for the president's clean energy initiative, has morphed into the template for Obama's green corruption scandal: political payback. Yet, as most concluded a while ago, Solyndra is only the tip of the iceberg.

While this saga warrants an entire chapter, Spinner's part has been widely reported, including the fact that his wife's law firm was representing the California solar company, In October 2011, ABC News reported, "Allison Spinner's law firm, Wilson Sonsini, received $2.4 million in federal funds for legal fees related to the $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee to Solyndra."

Further, it is generally known that George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire and another Obama bundler, was a 35 percent owner of Solyndra. In 2009 (at a Rotary Club event), Kaiser admitted  he, "...was trying to get as much of Obama's giant stimulus payout as possible." It turns out that Mr. Kaiser made multiple visits to the White House in the months before the company was granted that huge September 2009 DOE loan. Also, top Solyndra officials made their fair share of visits to the White House (20 visits between March 12, 2009, and April 14, 2011), as reported by The Daily Caller in August 2011.

An insulting aspect came when we found out that then-CEO Chris Gronet bragged, “The Bank of Washington continues to help us!” –– reports The Heritage Foundation this year. However, Solyndra executives didn't have much to say two years later, as they invoked their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and did not answer any questions asked by the House Energy Committee.

What most don't know is that Fitch rated the Solyndra loan non-investment grade back in 2009, as revealed by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in March 2012. Even so, Solyndra was not the only excessively risky loan doled out by the DOE. Through the DOE’s 1705 Loan Guarantee Program, over $16 billion of taxpayer money was used to fund 26 alternative energy projects; of which 23 were junk rated.

In a twist of fate, the DOE’s junk bond portfolio is where you’ll discover that 90 percent of these firms representing these projects have meaningful ties (bundlers and donors) to President Obama (at least 16) and other high-ranking Democrats; or both, with four to Senator Harry Reid alone.

But the Solyndra saga continues...

As Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, pushes for more Solyndra emails, the high-powered list of players caught up in this drama, from inside the DOE all the way to the White House, is already long and the details are so convoluted that I can only anticipate a reality show to air soon.

What started as an unworthy investment, snagged a 2010 White House endorsement, only to become a PR nightmare that included a loan restructuring (an apparent violation of the law) and even a plot to hide their troubles from the 2010 midterm glare. Solyndra became a cautionary tale of sorts: a failed Obama green investment, one of the first to go kaput, unethical executive bonuses included, leaving in its wake FBI raids, and a trail of resignations and damning emails, all evidence that Obama's "clean" energy is dirty.

Solyndra was a client of Goldman Sachs, and is credited as the “exclusive financial adviser,” Bloomberg notes. Goldman Sachs, as I discovered long ago, has their DNA all over this green-energy crony-corruption scandal. Goldman Sachs was the number two top Obama Donor that gave more than $1 million dollars to his 2008 campaign. Furthermore, two Goldman executives sat on Obama's 2008 finance committee and two were bundlers for his 2008 campaign.

In addition to Spinner, Kaiser, Solyndra executives, and Goldman Sachs, we can add David Mann, a lobbyist and Obama Super Pac donor, who lobbied for Solyndra, to this saga. Recently The Washington Free Beacon (a great source for this scandal) uncovered that Mann was granted significant access to the White House, “He met with White House officials four times in under two years between 2010 and 2012.” The Beacon goes on, “Solyndra is the most prominent of Mann’s failed clients, but it is far from the only one.”

Moreover, GOP substantiated research informs us that, "every Obama Chief Of Staff, staffers across numerous agencies, government watchdogs, even Solyndra investors knew that the risks were too high for taxpayers."

Solyndra, which came from humble junk beginnings, now has its place in history: an art exhibit at the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, at the price tag of half a billion taxpayer dollars.

Steve Westly, Founder and Managing Partner of The Westly Group: Obama Bundler Serving on Energy Secretary Chu's Advisory Board
 
4063582136?profile=originalNow, it's unclear why former Vice President Al Gore's presence was missed at the DNC (climate change drama possibly), especially since he was a strong Obama supporter in 2008. Also, Gore's firm, Kleiner Perkins, along with his friend and partner, billionaire John Doerr, considered "a very big-ticket Obama donor" by New York Magazine, who in February 2011 hosted a star-studded billionaire Silicon Valley dinner for the president, raked in billions of stimulus money for their clean-energy investments. The conflict runs deeper, as Doerr sits on the president's job council, and early on ultimately shaped what went into the energy section of the 2009 Obama stimulus package.

Kleiner Perkins is a firm that I began to unravel in 2010, stressing that over fifty percent of their Greentech Portfolio secured all kinds of loans, grants, and special tax breaks; yet it’s a firm to eventually revisit, because since 2010, they have tripled their green investments and there is much more to expose.

Stay tuned...

Read more…

White House Tells Lies (Repeatedly) To Win

The White House re-election campaign has denied any knowledge of an abhorrent, misleading Super PAC ad that wrongly blames GOP challenger Mitt Romney for the death of a steelworker's wife from cancer.

Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded by saying: "We have nothing, no involvement, with any ads 4063554824?profile=originalthat are done by Priorities USA.  We don't have any knowledge of the story of the family."  Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter stated: "I don't know the facts about when Mr. Soptic's wife got sick, or the facts about his health insurance."

The problem for the Oval Office and its hope for re-election is; Soptic told the story on May 14, 2012, in a conference call hosted by the Obama campaign.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-camp-denies-knowledge-cancer-tale-told-may-195237581.html

This is from someone who condemned PAC attack ads running in favor of John Edwards during the 2008 campaign.  This is from a candidate who attacks Super PACs that are on Romney’s side, but never utters one peep about the PACs that are aligned with him, launching slanderous attacks against Romney on his behalf.

Apparently for “progressives”, civility remains a one way street.

Evidence shows how the White House’s assertion that political appointees were not involved in Energy Department loan decisions is a flat out lie.

Documents and sources knowledgeable of the situation show that disagreement between administration officials over approval of a $1.4 billion loan to another project was resolved by then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.

4063554846?profile=originalLast summer the Oval Office occupier was briefed personally about a federal loan program aimed at helping clean-energy companies.   The briefing took place a mere two months before failure of the solar company Solyndra.  Solyndra was trumpeted by the White House as the poster child for solar power success in America.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/energy-dept-e-mails-on-solyndra-provide-new-details-on-white-house-involvement/2012/08/08/668dc042-e162-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_story.html

It is easy to understand why Romney and his supporters justifiably lament the cheap, two-bit, Chicago thug style, dirty, lying, lowlife, bottoms scraping, scumbag, “progressive”, Alinsky tactics being used daily by the current White House occupant’s re-election campaign.  But to remain stuck in lament or defense mode plays right into their hands.

The best option is to stick to the truth and use the abundant available evidence to successfully portray the current administration and its “progressive” political allies for what they are.  So incredibly inept at governing that their own failed leadership and flagrant incompetence has forced them to lie, cheat and resort to character assassination in order to misrepresent themselves and their opponent.

Then paint the portrait of a viable alternative to failure: A proven leader who has achieved the American dream through pursuit of happiness.

Follow that with a series of questions.

Who would you rather have leading the United States of America; someone so inexperienced, inept and incompetent that Americans are resorting to Welfare, Disability and Food Stamps for survival?  Someone who must resort to blatantly dishonest tactics in an attempt to salvage their own failed, sagging political4063554785?profile=original career?

Or would you rather have America led by a competent, successful and experienced businessman of good moral character who has plans to revitalize the American private sector economy and put Americans back to work?

America deserves better than having an inexperienced, incompetent, inept liar as President of the United States.

You deserve better.

http://mjfellright.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/white-house-tells-lies-repeatedly-to-win/

Read more…

 

 

 

               You’ve heard of “Honest Abe” and “Gorgeous George” – let’s introduce you to “Sly Steven” Chu, American Energy Secretary.  And while we’re at it, move over Solyndra, Chevy Volt and Ener1, Inc., according to documents uncovered by the House Oversight Committee it appears Arizona-based Obama-supporting business leaders of First Solar, Incorporated received at least $3.1 billion of its total of $4.5 billion in loan guarantees based largely upon “adjustments” made to First Solar’s loan application by Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s personnel suggesting falsification of documents and/or corner-cutting by the Energy Dept. itself was required to get the loans approved.  According to an ABC News story, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (a Republican from California) accused the Department of Energy of “manipulating analysis, ignoring objections from career professional scientists and business people and strategically modifying” loan evaluations in order to “force project funding out the door.”   The Energy Dept. vehemently denied the charges, “The Department backed loans for two innovative solar projects that will support hundreds of jobs and provide clean power to tens of thousands of homes,” according to spokesman Damien LaVera.

          The roughly 3,250 permanent green energy jobs created in three-plus years across the whole nation by the Obama administration’s green-tech emphasis has thus far cost taxpayers $38 billion or more than $1.15 million for each permanent job, 90% of which pay less than $15/hr.

          Energy officials insisted to ABC News that the department followed a rigorous process to evaluate each applicant, and the two projects being scrutinized by Issa's committee are some of the most exciting solar ventures underway in the United States. If successful, the massive generating facilities would be by far the largest of their kind in the world -- comprised of more than five million solar panels and 35,000 metric tons of steel.  Note the confusion between newness and excitement and solid business decision-making.  Meanwhile Issa and his committee say they sifted through tens of thousands of pages of internal records turned over by the Energy Department in response to their requests.  The granting of multiple loans to First Solar, a solar energy giant based in Arizona to create Agua Caliente in Arizona and the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch in California and then turn these facilities over to utility companies is unusual (First Solar also received a separate $1.5 billion loan).  The standard for the loans was not “viability” and not “potential profit” but rather merely providing evidence that the projects “would employ new and innovative technologies to generate energy.”  It appears that Energy Dept. officials “adjusted” First Solar loan documentation to fulfill this requirement.  It appears that First Solar did not qualify even upon this narrow requirement.  Among the documents the Oversight Committee cites is an email from a top technical expert inside the department, written well before the loans to First Solar were approved, in which the scientist argues one of the supposed advances -- use of a "single axis tracker" -- was actually not new at all.

          "Be clear this is not an innovation," wrote Dong K. Kim, the director of the loan program's technical division. "The record will show we did not grade this as an innovation."  Kim also wrote that "someone keeps changing" internal documents to hold out the tracking technology as innovative. And he warns that "whoever continues to make this change needs to understand that Technical does not support” emphasis of the trackers as an actual innovative component the Energy Department itself has identified their use in over 200 units in Europe, according to the internal documents.

          "These facts make clear DOE substantively failed to fund innovation, and instead gambled with $3 billion taxpayer dollars on a single firm, First Solar," said Becca Watkins, an oversight committee spokeswoman.  Meanwhile despite the positive spin put upon matters by company officials, First Solar is not proving profitable and only the huge government loans so far have kept the company afloat.  .

          First Solar, Inc. officials say they are forecasting more than $3 billion in revenue this year (revenue, NOT profits, you’ll notice) but acknowledged the company has suffered along with the rest of the solar industry. The company's stock has been sliding, and has become a favorite for so-called stock market "short sellers" -- investors who are betting on the company to fail.  While this Solyndra story might serve as a case-study in venture-socialism, this January’s failure of once highly respected Ener1, Inc., a huge maker of automobile batteries intended for green vehicles, provides a much more significant cautionary note.  Ener1’s financial collapse appears to have occurred NOT because their product is lacking in technological merit, but rather because there is no market for the recipient’s of Ener1’s batteries:  ultra-expensive, low-performance green autos. 

*          *          *

           In related news and relevant background:  Energy Sec. Chu, of course, who has come under attack for a long and repeated history of advocating letting American gasoline prices rise to European levels, last week on Capitol Hill, Chu said he “no longer” believes that way; President Obama, for his part has embarked upon a nationwide “gas-price-apology tour” aimed at denying any and all responsibility for gasoline price rises of $2/gallon (national average $1.83 in January, 2009; $3.85 today) and rising since he took office.  And even though the mainstream media won’t hold you accountable for it, you and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar were informed three weeks prior to the BP Gulf spill that big problems were in the works at the Deepwater Horizon site and were still ready to present BP with a national safety award . . . and then POUNCE!  Your opportunity came with the BP oil spill and you shut down drilling EVERYWHERE and put into effect a shameless foot-dragging policy of grudging approvals where you had no choice. 

           When I was a college student, one of the psychological principles I learned about was called “word magic.”   No, I’m not referring to the two magic words “Please” and “Thanks,” but rather to the childish use of words and labels (positive and negative) to seek to affect and change the world to our liking rather than dealing with it (the world) in a more adult fashion.  Mr. Obama used word magic in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 which was never run (it’s still on the paper’s website and now found all over the internet, however) by the Chronicle or any other mainstream media (MSM) in which he pledged to “bankrupt the coal industry” and bragged that “under my environmental policies and cap and trade, electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket.”  Mr. Obama seems to believe that merely by saying “green energy” his words will create a viable reality.  Sorry, Mr. President but algae won’t make my car run presumably anytime in the next couple centuries.  The two top green energies are hydro-electric power and wood-burning just as they were back in 1940.  Wood-burning, of course, is renewable and not particularly clean . . . nevertheless, wood-burning provides 2.5% of America’s energy which is more than solar, wind, geothermal, and cold fusion combined.  Face the facts; you’re saying that oil is the “energy of the past” doesn’t make it true.  And your equating drilling to create lower gasoline prices with “snake oil” is a monstrous lie.  The only ones selling snake oil to the public is you, Barack Obama, and your progressive sycophants.

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

Read more…
 
 
 
 
                “The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility . . . .” Ken Salazar Interior Secretary
 
“How exactly did SunPower qualify to receive a $1.28 Billion loan when it was operating $820 million in the red; announcing three weeks before the loan that it was moving a huge amount of its jobs south of the border to Mexicali, Mexico; its stock has lost 94% of its value in the last four years; and it was being attacked by numerous shareholder lawsuits? How did such an obvious lemon receive more than twice the government handouts that Solyndra received?”
 
 
SunPower Stock Plummets 94%
Green Co. Gets $1.2 Billion Loan
Each SunPower Permanent Job
Costs$80 Million
 
            As you might remember, the Obama administration’s green-tech jobs initiative was supposed to create five million brand new jobs. As you also might know, for almost three years Rajjpuut has been comparing Obama’s idea for America to the green jobs program in Spain that took that country’s economy from #1 in Europe at 4% unemployment to Europe’s second worst in 2010 with a whopping 22% unemployment after a dozen years. In that Spanish study each subsidized green job cost 2.2 real jobs lost from the real economy (five million Obama green jobs would translate to losing eleven million real jobs) and only one Spanish green job in ten proved permanent (translating to only half a million permanent green jobs created in America).  
You’ve also recently heard about Solyndra Corp. getting $535 million in loan guarantees before going bankrupt last month putting 1,100 workers out on the streets; as well as hearing about a grand total of 3,500 green jobs created in almost three years at an average cost of almost $11 million per job.   Well, the embarrassment for Obama’s green tech initiative is growing worse by the day: the new Obamanation and corruption, like Solyndra, also originates in California with another solar panel company SunPower Corp. (SPWR-NASDAQ). 
How exactly did SunPower qualify to receive a $1.28 Billion loan when it was operating $820 million in the red; announcing three weeks before the loan that it was moving a huge amount of its jobs south of the border to Mexicali, Mexico; its stock has lost 94% of its value in the last four years; and it was being attacked by numerous shareholder lawsuits? How did such an obvious lemon receive more than twice the government handouts that Solyndra received?
SunPower’s planned photovoltaic “electricity ranch” project was so deep in the hole that it had announced it was already building its new panel manufacturing plant in Mexicali when the loan came through. Creating jobs in Mexico? When did that become worth nearly $1.3 Billion in government help? Three key voices put SunPower into the “winner” category for Obama’s energy department and got them the loan: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; California Democratic Representative George R. Miller III; and SunPower lobbyist George Miller IV, the Representative’s son. 
SunPower, operating in a refitted Ford plant in Richmond, CA, was the scene of an October 14, 2010 tour of the plant choreographed by Rep. Miller (the elder) in which its CEO, Thomas H. Werner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar saluted SunPower’s future. “The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility,” said Salazar during the tour. Miller (the younger) is accused of drumming up campaign contributions for his father from SunPower. Salazar continued, “The work that comes from these facilities transforms renewable energy ideas into a reality.  When renewable energy companies continue to invest in places like California, the realization of a new energy future is within our reach.”
Rep. Miller the Elder added his own smoke . . . “We’ve worked hard to make renewable energy a priority because it represents America’s future economic growth.  Today, businesses like SunPower are moving forward, hiring 200 people for good clean energy jobs in the East Bay.” According to the SunPower PAC filings in the 2010 midterm election campaign cycle, SunPower donated $15,650 donated to House and Senate candidates, $14,650 went to Democrats, with the top recipient: $4,000 to Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrats Senate Majority Leader. Sunpower also gave Miller, the Elder, $500 and gave his son a job.
            The loan guarantee was earmarked to create 350 temporary and 15 permanent jobs at the California Valley Solar Ranch (CVSR) in San Luis Obispo County. One wonders if the 15 permanent jobs are for panel-dusting janitors. The math works out to $80 million for each SunPower job, about seven times higher than the $10.88 million average cost per Obama green job. How bad an investment is SunPower? The tiny company was listed as the “ninth-most-shorted solar stock in either the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ markets.  Short sellers are betting that a stock price will go down, as opposed to those who buy long, who expect a stock price to up. 
In early December, 2007, SunPower sold for $133 per share. Earlier this month the company was selling for $6.60 per share; it is now selling in a range between $8-$9 per share. The company has been accused of numerous accounting irregularities purportedly to deceive its stockholders; and at present several lawsuits have been filed in California courts relating to allege gross mismanagement, breach of fiduciary responsibility, unjust enrichment and abuse of control.  The first of these lawsuits was in November, 2009, and so far no suit has yet been resolved.
 
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
Read more…
 
“Mexican attorney general, Marisela Morales, now estimates at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons -- among them, a powerful Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle that downed a Mexican federale helicopter.   Morales calls OFF a ‘betrayal’ of her country. In a Los Angeles Times story she said she first learned about Op Fast and Furious from news reports. American officials never briefed their Mexican counterparts on it, Morales says. Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Marisela, Eric Holder and the Obama administration has been quite calculating on stonewalling the world on this one.”
 
 
AG Eric Holder Caught in OFF Lie
By Earlier-Dated Memos
 
            It’s an oft repeated truism of political life that the “crime” might get you; but it’s the cover-up that always nails the lid on the case . . . so let it be for scurrilous Obama administration bad-boy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Here’s just one more story that the mainstream media (MSM) has been hiding from you for months now as Eric Holder has been playing a rearguard, stonewalling hand for three months now . . . the facts keep slowly dribbling in to Darrell Issa . . . just last week a third gun from “Bordergate” was implicated and has now been linked to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, whose death in Arizona last December at the hands of Mexican bandits created the crack now threatening to break the scandal wide open and destroy the career of Eric Holder and his so-far “mum” underlings.
Holder -- who’s denial of knowledge about Operation Fast and Furious (OFF) in July of this year (OFF is the rogue and ill-conceived Obama administration offshoot of the Bush Administration’s less well-known Operation Gunrunner), is plastered on internet videos all over the world – the AG received at least two e-mails updating OFF information nine months prior to stating that he’d only recently learned of OFF in October, 2010 and even before that in July, 2010 and . . . worse luck for the AG, both memos indicate prior knowledge can be assumed since they are operational updates not presentation memos.
            The denials by Holder and the recent revelations, of course, spurred California Representative Darrell Issa to ask for a special (outside, non-DOJ) prosecutor to look into OFF and the involvement of Holder’s Justice Department. The festering mess known as “Bordergate” in some circles took an ongoing and successful Bush sting program to capture illegal gun sales and went two giant steps too far by deliberately seeking to sell automatic weapons (34,000+ so far) to members of Mexican drug cartels and then, instead of making an arrest . . . just allowed the guns to cross the border. So far about a hundred of those guns have turned up at crime scenes including the death of two U.S. Border Control agents and several dozen Mexican citizens.  Tidbits of information suggest great involvement by the Homeland Security Office and by the Whitehouse itself.
            It seems also that Holder’s DOJ manipulated knowledge so that FBI information about the identities of the gun buyers was kept away from Department of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives and Tobacco members who had been running Bush’s Operation Gunrunner for several years. Many ATF agents who have become “whistle-blowers” tell stories of their great upset when they found that guns sold to known Mexican criminals were being deliberately allowed to cross the border. Several ATF agents and administrators have already lost their jobs as Holder’s DOJ casts about wildly for scapegoats. Mexican officials meanwhile have been conducting their own investigations of American gun-supplying to drug cartels. 
To say that the stench in Washington is getting stronger is to repeat the obvious. Besides OFF; Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform committee is also investigating the Solyndra and Light-Squared scandals . . . but it’s hard to imagine that either of those corruptions will catch up to OFF’s reeking stupidity and malfeasance. The insanely idiotic idea was to trace cross-border arms trafficking, and allow the gun-hating Obama administration to then prove the oft-repeated claim that 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexican drug war zones originate in the US.  Well, their efforts DISproved it; the actual statistic is closer to 17 percent. But, as Issa’s committee continues its investigation a major international scandal has been born.
Mexican attorney general, Marisela Morales, now estimates at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons -- among them, a powerful Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle that downed a Mexican federal helicopter.   Morales calls OFF a “betrayal” of her country. In a Los Angeles Times story she said she first learned about Fast and Furious from news reports. American officials never briefed their Mexican counterparts on it, Morales says.
Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Marisela, the Obama administration has been quite calculating on stonewalling the world on this one. Eric Holder’s DOJ has inflamed Issa’s committee -- turning over subpoenaed documents only ultra-slowly and heavily redacted (sometimes only words like “the,” “a,” “and,” “an,” and “that” NOT being blacked out in long memos turned over to Issa) and also making witnesses unavailable and transferring or retiring implicated officials such as former “temporary” ATF head Kenneth Melson. Issa has publicly accused Holder , et. al of “gaming” congressional investigators. “There is an ongoing cover-up of a pattern of wrongdoing,” Issa noted last week. “Even though I have subpoena ability, I don’t have the ability to lock people up for contempt until they fess up and give us what we want” hence the call for a special prosecutor.
As noted in a blog two weeks ago, there have now been 76 serious Obama administration scandals about which Rajjpuut has informed his readers . . . and now the MSM is finally covering three of them. The only other one of those 76 scandals touched lightly upon by the MSM so far in the first two and a half years under Obama was their pseudo-journalistic expose of problems associated with environmentalism related to the Gulf Oil Spill (they deliberately missed the whole scandalous part of the story that Obama himself and Interior Secretary Salazar both knew of critical problems with Deep Horizon up to two weeks before the explosion). Now the MSM is really looking hard at Solyndra and Light-Squared and trying NOT to get involved with OFF, but slowly, slowly they’re finding themselves dragged into Bordergate as the evidence mounts and the circle of corruption** expands.  
Solyndra, of course, is a story of monumental incompetence and crony-capitalism that’s already cost the taxpayers $535 million.   Malfeasance is still a very strong possibility as the Obama administration agreed to a deal in which last-minute Solyndra investors would be paid first in case of bankruptcy, before the taxpayers.   The Light-Squared scandal involves the Obama administration seeking to pressure and change a Four-Star Air Force General’s testimony about the dangers of a communication invention sold by an Obama supporter’s broad-band company which mal-affects other battlefield communications and global positioning and thus would have made in-close bombings and artillery very risky for our soldiers in the field. Yes, the “hits” do keep coming . . . and finally the MSM is starting to play them.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
** We feel like a broken record here, but about a dozen FAR more serious scandals from 2009, 2010 and earlier this year have all gone totally UNreported by ABC, NBC, CBS, and Cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Headline News. Only FOXNews is looking into Obama’s corruptions. Whole books someday will be dedicated to the “Journ-O-List" scandal; the Carbon-Trading Scandal known as CCX which even FOXNews barely covered; and whole encyclopedias can be filled up with the “Cloward-Piven to Wiley to ’73 Crash to NYC bankruptcy to Rathke to CRA ’77 to ACORN to Clinton to Obama to meltdown” scandal . . . . Rajjpuut (who was once a pretty fair country feature writer and also his J-school’s Academic Excellence Award winner lo’ these many years) blames 97% of the country’s present horrific state and ongoing predictable future financial problems on the MSM which is picking winners and losers in politics and refusing to do its time-honored job in keeping the country aware of government corruption, incompetence and malfeasance.
Read more…

  

Obama Ignores “Going Concern Doubt” Analysis
Before Cheerfully Subsidizing Solyndra
 
 
                Did you know that the recently bankrupt Solyndra, green-tech firm propped up with $535 million federal assistance wanted to go public? That they wanted to go public and sell stock in the company even before Mr. Obama began touting them? That the planned initial public offering (IPO) was abandoned. That one of the steps required before any IPO is an audit of the company finances and an examination of their business plan for the future? That the solar-power panel company’s finances were so awful that two months before an Obama visit to Solyndra the accounting firm of Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLC warned investors that Solyndra had financial problems so deep that they “raised substantial doubt about it ability to continue as a going concern?” Did you know that the standard wording from audits which use the word “doubt” and “going concern” in the same sentence is known in the business world as the “Kiss of Death” letter and means that over 80% of the firms so described will NOT be in business a year from now?
            Did you know that a day before Solyndra went belly-up that the Energy Department turned down a request to renegotiate the loan agreement because another “restructuring was not feasible.” Did you know that one month before that . . . Solyndra executives were allegedly telling California representative Henry Waxman that everything was going great and the company expected to “double revenues in 2012?  Does that mean they expected to lose twice as much money as well? Could it be they hoped Rep. Waxman would take their threat** as a promise? Did you know Solyndra spent more than $480,000 on lobbying in Washington in the last 365 days? Could it be they hoped Congress and the Obama administration could be cajoled into helping them endlessly?
            Three more questions?   Would you have been as cheerful knowing the financial status of the company as President Obama and Vice President Biden were during their many Solyndra photo op visits? Do you believe, as your blogger Rajjpuut does, that Mr. Obama’s proclivity for throwing money at problems (a mere cash infusion will make everything okey-dokey at Solyndra right away) blinded him to the reality that Solyndra was a losing proposition, a reality that any sensible person should have seen? Would Obama have invested HIS money as recklessly as he did YOURS? Does the FBI routinely raid bankrupt companies? Oooops, that’s four questions.
            On his May 2010 photo op when Obama told America that the Solyndra California factory he was visiting, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers displayed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith.” Despite the two month lead time to read over and understand the Pricewaterhouse financial analysis, it appears certain that Mr. Obama did believe that throwing money at Solyndra’s way would “turn the ugly duckling into a swan.” Mr. Obama also seems to be ignorant of the fact that good money can be sent after bad, but never should be. The inevitable abandonment of the IPO; the whole history of Solyndra’s existence (never once showing a single profitable quarter in five years); and then allowing a last-minute effort to refinance with taxpayers (the most important investors) taking a back seat to the new investors . . . none of these obvious red flags seemed to alarm the president about OUR money. Mr. Obama refused to accept what was obvious to anyone who chose to open their eyes and their mind.
            Eric Shultz, a Whitehouse spokesman, thinks we’re all stupid and that it’s still possible to pull the wool over our magnifying glasses and fool us about Solyndra and Obama’s green-tech initiatives. Schultz said in an e-mailed statement that selection of companies to receive U.S. backing are “merit- based decisions made by career staffers at the Department of Energy. He added that the process for this particular loan application had begun under President George W. Bush, not mentioning that the loan was denied for three consecutive years by the Bush administration.  “Every project that receives financing through the Energy Department goes through a rigorous financial, legal and technical review process.” WOW, really??? Really??? Let’s see now? 
The Obama $787 Billion stimulus was supposed to create jobs. So far the green-tech initiatives (Mr. Obama promised to create five million new green jobs in his first term) have created roughly 3,500 jobs total at an average cost of $10.88 MILLION per green job taking an average of 1.4 years to create each job. Solyndra just laid off 1,100 workers when it filed for bankruptcy. Exactly how “rigorous” is this financial, legal and technical review process anyway?  Could it be that government playing “venture capitalists” is a very bad, indeed ruinous idea? Could it be that the 72% of the Obama stimulus was aimed at Obama cronies and Obama campaign supporters without regard to ethics or financial reality?
Of course you’ve probably heard that Energy Secretary Steven Chu made a public commitment to “speed up the approval process” of green-tech applications for federal loans and subsidies. How wonderful!
Bottom line: Solyndra disclosed the “going concern” warning by PricewaterhouseCoopers, its accounting firm, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on March 16, 2010.  So it’s quite possible that Solyndra’s execs up until the time they told Rep. Waxman that everything was going great, etc. were dealing an honest hand . . . which makes the Obama administration criminally negligent with the taxpayer’s money. The warning read:
“The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit,”
In June 2010, the month after the President Obama visit mentioned above, Solyndra executives withdrew their planned $300 million IPO.   Solyndra’s business model was based upon a supposedly strong competitive advantage employing thinner panels that could be used on virtually any roof and because they used less of the expensive silicone it was felt that the cost of their more expensive technology could be somewhat balanced by the lower cost of resources. Silicone prices have fallen recently and fell another 30% in the last year evaporating any hope of the company ever becoming competitive in the marketplace. Problems and temporary solutions for Solyndra kept taxpayer money slipping down a rat-hole after that. 
In February of this year House Republicans began investigating Solyndra’s loan-guarantee program and sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chu announcing their actions. The investigations so far point to crony-capitalism and a surprising new twist: socialist venture capitalism as the Obama administration sought to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace with foolish infusions of money into failing concerns in favored industries. The Republican investigations showed that Obama campaign fundraiser George Kaiser’s foundation (George Kaiser Family Foundation based in Tulsa, OK) owns 37% of Solyndra. Mr. Kaiser made 16 visits to the White House since 2009 according to visitor logs. 
Besides the statements allegedly made to Rep. Waxman that Solyndra “was in a strong financial position” a July 13 letter from Solyndra to the Energy Committee said revenue had increased to $140 million from just $6 million in 2008 and was projected to almost double in 2012.    Could it be that the Energy department doesn’t understand that if you’re selling more product but losing money on each sale . . . that doesn’t mean too much. The idea is to make a GASP “profit.” Yes, yes, we know that’s considered an ugly word in the liberal, progressive and socialist lexicon . . . but such are the facts of life.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
** Rajjpuut strongly suspects that the good congressman may be throwing Solyndra’s execs under the infamous bus. Mr. Waxman is purportedly part of the gang that was pushing so hard for Solyndra to get the federal dough. It’s also possible he’s merely stupid. An awful lot of people do NOT actually listen too well . . . instead they tend to hear either what they fear; or what they want to hear. Being told revenues have gone up 23 times in three years and that revenues would almost double again in 2012 . . . is clearly NOT the same as being told that PROFITS have gone up 23 times and would almost double . . . sad but true but politicos seldom can be expected to sympathize with nor understand business jargon. So, Friend, what questions would you have asked here? Perhaps something silly like, “Wow, that sounds impressive, so how much money are you guys making? Perhaps the progressive politicians being in “over-their-heads” when dealing with business explains why it’s been 900 days since the Democratically-controlled Senate passed a budget? Or why the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives didn’t pass a 2011 budget?  It could explain a lot.  The fact is that despite Hollywood's eternal enthrallment with "lovable losers," in politics as in the rest of life:  incompetence (unlike absence) does NOT make the heart grow fonder.
Read more…
                “Think of it as ‘pathological science’ or ‘wishful-thinking energy.’ We’ve had ‘green energy’ for thousands of years in the form of water-wheels in some form or other and windmills have served for centuries to grind grain and other such tasks . . . the failing of green-technology isn’t that it doesn’t work. Much of it does work marvelously. The failing of green-tech is that RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW it can NOT be harnessed in such a fashion as to replace carbon-fuels. In fact after six decades of devotion to the ‘lovely idea and sweet promise of green energy evolution’ the largest and most reliable renewable energy source right here and right now in America is still the wood burning stove which generates 2.5%** of our nation’s energy. Today, 2011, coal still accounts for 48%.”
 
Solyndra, Bird-killing Windmills^^ or Cold Fusion:
Green-tech Still Leaves America ‘out in the Cold’
 
            The Solyndra stimulus money and its ensuing bankruptcy form a classic case-study highlighting crony-capitalism and the dangers of the federal government picking winners and losers in the not-so-free market.  Latest information reveals Solyndra was one of 18 companies receiving more than $10 billion in total backing from the Department of Energy several others are also reportedly in financial difficulty.  The $535 million given as part of President Obama's 2009 stimulus program and his campaign promise to “create five million green-tech jobs” was clearly an abuse of American taxpayers. Since even before the Solyndra bankruptcy each of the 3,500 green-tech jobs so far created within the Obama $787 BIllion stimulus cost an average of $10.88 million dollars or a total of over $38 BIllion; and since Solyndra got more money from the federal coffers in 2009 than 35 of our states did, it’s NOT surprising that some of the biggest names in liberalism are running for the hills to avoid questions about the controversy.  Some of the less well-known names as well, the leadership at Solyndra, are running for the hills.  While protesting their innocence mightily to the mainstream media (MSM) and saying they “did nothing wrong,” the Solyndra honchos have revealed that they will as a group “avail themselves of their 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination” and remain silent when they get to Capitol Hill. Privately Solyndra execs tell the MSM that the “falling price of ordinary solar panels” doomed their company.   More on this in a few paragraphs.
UNmentioned, by the way, in the president’s latest waves of attack on the “tax loopholes for the rich” is the fact that General Electric paid $0 taxes on $14 Billion in profits largely because of the tax loopholes favoring businesses regarded as “green” by the Obama administration and progressive politicians. This is one reason that GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immeldt was named Obama Jobs Czar even though 80% of his firm’s jobs are located outside this country. 
Obama’s Energy Department meanwhile faces a September 30th deadline to give fourteen companies final loan guarantee approval totaling more than $9 billion. House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders Tuesday wrote Energy Secretary Steven Chu voicing concerns about rushing the approval process just to meet that deadline.  Back to Solyndra . . . Congressional subpoenas for Solyndra execs are likely to come to naught . . . the nothing we’ll learn from them is dwarfed, however, by the nothing the Obama administration understands about business or the free markets. 
Here’s a  fact for you: despite all the presidential and vice-presidential ballyhoo about its promise; and the White House creating a Solyndra propaganda video . . . Solyndra never once showed anything close to even ONE profitable quarter in its five years of existence and their so-called “advanced designs” offered little more than a 12-15% greater efficiency for double or triple the money. Two weeks ago the FBI and Energy Department officials raided the Solyndra headquarters in California after claims that as little as six weeks ago the top company officials had sworn to California Rep. Henry Waxman (former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) that things were “looking up” and that the company expected “to double revenues in 2012.” 
Rajjpuut takes that clever tongue-in-cheek “report” to mean that the Solyndra officials actually were telling the truth-expecting to lose twice as much money in 2012 . . . hence their September, 2011 bankruptcy filing. I remember a Lieutenant JG that once told our ET gang that we’d have “three times the liberty (time off)” we’d recently been given when the ship got to Hong Kong. Of course we all knew that since we’d been at sea for 46 straight days (a.k.a. recently), he wasn’t promising much since 3 X 0 = 0.
The Obama administration’s shocking lack of a clue when it comes to the verities of business came to light when the Energy Department official in charge of the loan program that subsidized Solyndra, Jonathon Silver, responded to a question about the Obama administration using stimulus money “to pick winners and losers” this way.
“The agency is not trying to pick winners or losers in the private sector” but merely “trying to assist companies that have already received substantial support from venture capitalists.”   Mr. Silver’s naïveté aside, he, of course sounds like he’s discussing a green-tech version of “too big to fail.” Mr. Silver, venture capitalism is very high risk investment. Typically 5/8 or over 62% of all venture capitalism endeavors lose money. The venture capitalist is looking for NOT the 38% of such efforts that make money, but for the 7% that make “a killing in the marketplace.” The federal government should not be gambling OR doing venture capitalism with taxpayer dollars . . . particularly after three straightforward warnings from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to the White House warned that backing Solyndra was NOT a wise move. 
IF and WHEN a green-tech company run by a 21st Century version of Thomas Alva Edison actually produces viable mass-market green technology . . . the government won’t need to be involved at all.  Even the nutcases who “produced” muon-catalyzed fusion were offered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of start-up dough until their methodology was deemed fraudulent. Yet even today twenty-two years after that revelation, when Rajjpuut types in “cold fusion” in his web browser he gets 10,400,000 hits.  Green tech is a lot like high school in that being popular is no guarantee of lifelong success. The mere highly-attractive nature of an idea (like green energy or radical environmentalism) might be a selling point for science fiction writers but real science ain’t done that way. As Edison rued:  “science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” . . . and the Obama administration has not done its homework on either green tech or global warming (radical environmentalism). 
They have also been utterly UNforthcoming when it comes to the reality of green-tech's effect on the environment.  For example we can't irrigate vegetables in California creating 40% UNemployment in some areas because tiny fish (the delta smelt) might get sucked into the piping; but the large electrical-generating windmills kill tens of thousands of birds and we hear not a peep (pun intended).  They don't dare tell us of the environmental cost of their ridiculous "Cash for Clunkers" program that drove the average cost of a used car today up by $1,900.  They don't tell us that hybrid "green" cars are about eight times more toxic in the manufacturing process than normal ICE (internal combustion engine) ones.
Think of Solyndra and other such frauds as ‘pathological science’ or ‘wishful-thinking energy.’ We’ve had real ‘green energy’ for thousands of years in the form of water-wheels in some form or other and windmills have served for centuries to grind grain and other such tasks . . . the failing of green-technology isn’t that it doesn’t work. Much of it does work marvelously. The failing of green-tech is that RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW it can NOT be harnessed in such a fashion as to replace carbon-fuels. In fact after six decades of devotion to the lovely idea and sweet promise of ‘a green energy evolution’ the largest and most reliable renewable energy source right here and right now in America is still the wood burning stove which generates 2.5%** of our nation’s energy. 
Coal meanwhile still accounts for 48%. However, some groups claim that coal today only accounts for 23% of all our energy. The same groups claim that hydroelectric energy generates 7.3% of our renewable CLEAN energy and is our largest source of renewable. Since coal-generated electrical power is often used at peak use times to pump water to produce hydro-electricity  . . . Rajjpuut will stand with the coal companies’ stats until some definitive study is done. 
You do recall that candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 that his energy policies “would necessarily make the cost of electricity skyrocket” and that they’d “bankrupt the coal companies.” Where Rajjpuut comes from that’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Despite all the raps on America by environmental excessivists, the United States is only the 2nd largest consumer of energy in the world (China is #1); and ranks only #7 in the world in per capita energy use (Canada is the only large country ahead of the U.S. and Norway is the only medium-sized country where their individual citizens use more energy on average they we do here in America). Meanwhile the United States has discovered far and away the largest oil repository in the world (the Bakken Fields) but cannot use it because of environmental regulations so except for a few companies allowed to drill on North Dakota Indian reservations we get nothing. We also have the largest natural gas resources in the world but they’re being assailed by the environmental Nazis.   And in Western Colorado (where Rajjpuut once worked for a weekly newspaper lo’ so many years ago), Utah and Wyoming has enough keragen (a.k.a. marlstone or more incorrectly: “oil shale”) to provide energy for the entire planet at today’s consumption rates for the next seven and a half centuries . . . but Mr. Obama says, “NO! And his EPA is closing down coal plants; and his Interior Dept. is obstructing oil drilling offshore. But, by God, we can sure as hell put $535 million into Solyndra.
 
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
**            Because of smoke and emissions and spotted owls and snail darters and endangered ferrets the radical environmentalists running the Oval Office and our president do NOT consider wood either “renewable” or “green.” They hate logging operations almost as much as they do coal mining.
^^          Actually, we just heard that someplace around the San Joaquin Valley, CA that ELF (the Environmental Liberation Front) was squawking about bird deaths in a windmill valley claiming that endangered raptors were heavily victimized.  It's a shame that elves don't fly.
Read more…



 

In Tank for Obama, MSNBC Silent
On OFF; Solyndra; $10.88 Million
Cost for Each Obama Stimulus GREEN Job
And “Light-Squared Gate” Scandals
 
            Once again the Media’s refusal to do actual journalism is the big story this week . . . but quite surprisingly, the focus of that big story is that the Mainstream Media (the “MSM” who did much better on George W. Bush, believe it or not even inventing a few scandals where they didn’t exist) is actually starting to cover Obama’s screw-ups somewhat fairly, even though the MSNBC cable channel continues to protect the “Anointed One.”  
After Obama Scandal #76 uncovered by Rajjpuut in 34 months, the Mainstream Media (MSM) has offered up exactly six of these stories as worthy fodder for their viewers’ and reader’s brains (but only two of them received fair and thorough coverage) – with a total of exactly ½ of one Obama scandal showing up at MSNBC, home of Chris (“I get a thrill up my leg every time I hear him speak.”) Matthews’ infamy. For those of you keeping score, Rajjpuut has generously given the MSM partial credit points for even sort of covering Obama’s corruption . . . for example:
 
MSNBC Cable coverage of Obama’s
Corruption during his first 34 months:
 
FAR less than ½ of Obama administration’s complicity in the Deep Horizon oil spill
For a total score of ½ point of 76 available points by Rajjpuut’s generous scoring method. The rest of the Mainstream Media (MSM) does much, much better . . . .
 
 

Total MSM Obama Scandals
Covered in Barack’s 34 months:
 
Solyndra Crony Capitalism (some call it Solargate)
$10.88 million paid for each Obama green job created
FAR less than ½ of Black Panthers’ voter intimidation story
FAR less than ½ of Obama administration’s complicity in the Deep Horizon oil spill
Far less than ½ of Operation Fast and Furious (OFF) selling 34,000 weapons to Mexican drug cartels and refusing to “track” them resulting in the deaths of at least two American border patrol agent and presumably thousands of Mexican citizens as every one of these weapons crossed the border.
Less than ½ of story showing Obama administration seeking to get a four-star Air Force general to change his sworn testimony before Congress to favor a faulty intelligence system produced by an Obama fund-raiser’s company which would have regularly scrambled GPS readings and made coordinated close-in bombing to protect our troops IMPOSSIBLE and DANGEROUS. Some call this corruption the Light-Squared Scandal or “Light-Squared Gate” named after the company involved.
                   0% of the story on the $105 billion outright theft of Obamacare   funds written into that law; 0% of Obama and Chicago Climate Exchange’s (CCX’s) proposed rape of America to the tune of $10 TRillion annually in association with their Cap and Trade Bill which never got passed (since Rajjpuut and the conservative press began covering the story, CCX has been dissolved and the 60 or so guilty parties including many Obama cronies all disappeared quickly from the crime site with only Al Gore still active through his London holding company) in a vast and insidious corruption; and 0% coverage of 67 other such Obama administration scandals well-documented by Rajjpuut and others.   Overall a rather amazing dereliction of journalistic duty. $$
For a total MSM score of just 4 points of 76 available points by Rajjpuut’s generous scoring method. This is still 8X better than MSNBC. The big story, however, is much, much more positive. The MSM is suddenly disenchanted with Obama and has begun to cover his corruption with something like real journalistic fervor scoring 2.5 of a possible three Obama scandals (the one covered in the blog you’re reading; and Solyndra; and the Light-Squared Gate Scandal) in just the last two weeks . . . amazing!  Let’s talk about the latest Obama administration scandal . . . “his $11 Million stimulus payment for each green job created since 2009.”
 
Three years ago when Rajjpuut heard Candidate Obama first promise to create “five million new green-energy sector jobs” all your favorite-blogger could say was “Uh-oh!” because he’d just recently re-read Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson** and revealed the Broken Window Fallacy**  again to loyal readers.
Later he became familiar with a Spanish economics professor’s study of precisely such a program undertaken in Spain: the Universidad del Rey Juan Carlos study by economist Gabriel Calzada which verified all Rajjpuut’s fears about creating another full-scale government spending/government interference boondoggle. Calzada’s survey was particularly important since in 1998 Spain had Europe’s most powerful economy with a mere 4% unemployment rate; but today roughly 13 years later, Spain is suffering many of the economic malaises found in countries like Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Ireland and has the second highest unemployment rate in Europe at 22%.   But in April 2009 when Rajjpuut’s Folly revealed the facts of the study . . . it seems that Rajjpuut actually gave his readers bum dope and underestimated the damage done to the Spanish economy by the subsidies and energy cost hikes.
            In that first blog the Spanish cost per new green job created was listed at $774,000 each one. However, a more careful reading of the study in its original language by Rajjpuut shows that $774,000 per job was only the cost to Spanish energy consumers but did NOT include the cost of Spanish subsidies to green companies by their central government.   The recent revelation of the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal (which cost 1,100 jobs) alone would be a good reason to revisit the Spanish figures. However, even more apropos is the subject of today’s Obama scandal revelation:  that a recent study of the Obama $38.6 Billion stimulus payments to green tech companies resulted in an average cost to taxpayers of $10.88 million for each one of the roughly 3,500 total green-energy jobs created here in the United States.
 
Since the Spanish study showed also that:
1.       Each Spanish green job cost the loss of 2.2 real free-market jobs.
2.     Only 10% of all the green jobs created proved to be permanent.
3.     The average pay for a subsidized Spanish green job was $12 per hour.
4.     The average green job lasted less than eight months and many lasted six weeks or less.
 
And since extrapolation of the Spanish study onto President Obama’s promised creation of five million new green-tech jobs would see this country:
1.       Drive 11 million real jobs from the real economy.
2.      Only result in 500,000 permanent green-tech jobs being created.
3.     Pay roughly $13.80 per hour for green jobs in America.
4.     And see the government counting three-week jobs of equal value to permanent jobs created (and permanent jobs lost by green energy subsidization with taxpayer money).
Clearly all American s have a right to demand far better from their government. The most corrupt administration in history (one leftist site lists 401 Bush scandals^^ listed in eight years and 277 Obama scandals in 34 months so far averaging to almost 100 per year on the lefty site with 277 divided by 2.83 years) – Obama’s Marxist/Socialists continue to not only get it wrong but to also rack up a list of ultra-ultra-serious scandals that Rajjpuut believes will shock future generations of American historians unless we as a nation join Obama in full-scale Marxism (when history can, of course, be conveniently changed).
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
**
 
^^
In fairness to both presidents Bush II and Obama, these two connected sites have listed scandals where Rajjpuut sees none; seem to look upon the world through Marxist jaundiced eyes; and to always give the sitting president the blame for ongoing long-running government scandals that just show how boondoggly a huge government can be and have no necessary relationship to the present occupant of the Oval Office. The two leftist  scandal list sites are included just to show Rajjpuut’s readers that even “ultra-lefty” websites are not enthralled by Obama even in comparison with their kicking-boy George W. Bush (Bush averaged 50 scandals yearly in this site’s eyes compared to almost a hundred per year by Obama so far. It’s worth mentioning that the Obamascandal website list only includes seven of the 76 scandals that Rajjpuut found in the Obama administration and does not show: Solyndra; Light-Squaredgate; the $10.88 million per green job abomination; Operation Fast and Furious; etc.; etc.; ad nauseum.
$$ One scandal Rajjpuut has covered without labeling it “a scandal” is that the U.S. Senate has not passed a budget of their own in almost 900 days. The Senate is, as you know controlled by Obama’s Democrats. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed 22 major bills since they assumed the power there in January including two serious budgets. The Senate did vote on three major bills since January 1st (the Bush tax-cut compromise with the Republicans was passed after the 2010 election in the lame-duck session and does not count for this new Senate . . . so they’ve passed the debt-ceiling compromise and a compromise “spending-cut enabling budget” with the Republican House. 
Their third vote, however, was the shocking 0-97 dismissal of Obama’s personal budget plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) put off voting on Obama’s bill for parts of three months and only at White House insistence took the matter to a vote in May where the incredible 0-97 refutation of Obama’s policies occurred in the Democrats’ own Senate. Meanwhile some 19 serious bills aimed at fixing the economy and creating jobs from the House Republicans sit on Reid’s desk and will never see a vote. The MSM knowing that most Americans are ignorant has blamed all this on a “do-nothing Congress.” This is a travesty. The Republican House (most voters incorrectly call the House of Representatives “Congress” when Congress is actually a term for the combined House and Senate) is getting lambasted when the trouble lies with the do-nothing-by-design Harry Reid Senate. Don’t expect the MSM to explain all this and run that story anytime soon!

Read more…

 

“Creating” a Green-Tech Winner
Obama Backs a Monstrous Loser
 
 
            President Obama now touts a whole new STIMULUS for the ailing American economy (the American Jobs Act, AJA). Some are calling his AJA, “Son of Stimulus,” and pointing to a nasty scandal within the first $787 Billion Obama stimulus – a scandal which is being nicknamed “Solargate.”   While adding the suffix “gate” is no guarantee of real coverage and fairness by the nation’s mainstream media, it does show a deepening of interest by we mainstream Americans who so deeply distrust our politicians and the media that protects them. What, then are the facts about Solyndra, Inc.?
            1. Solyndra was a solar-cell manufacturer which from its origins has NOT been able to compete successfully against both American and foreign rivals (most notably the Chinese solar-power industry).
2.  Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 6, 2011.
3.   Solyndra has served as Obama’s poster-child for green-tech job creation.
4. Solyndra laid off virtually all its 1,100 person workforce on August 31st.
5. Solyndra first applied for the loan in 2006, under President George W. Bush.   After three years of applying, the loan application was tentatively approved in March 2009 by the Obama administration.
6. Solyndra received its much-ballyhooed $535 million federal subsidy as part of Obama’s green-jobs initiative. He promised to create five million new green-tech jobs during the presidential campaign.
7. Solyndra first came to the wider nation’s attention during a September, 2009, Joe Biden speech at their company headquarters in Fremont, CA. Their facilities and main plant have been visited by the President and Vice-President six times for photo- and speech-ops.
8. The owners and CEO and top investors in Solyndra are all enthusiastic supporters who contributed and also raised a lot of money for the Obama-Biden campaign.
9. California Representative Henry Waxman said he talked with Solyndra’s CEO and other top officials a month ago and said he was told that everything was going well and that they expected to “double revenues” in 2012.
10. After multiplying the number of loan-approval employees in one government office almost sixteen-fold from 15 to 250, the Obama administration over-ruled the already established bureaucracy’s recommendations to investigate the green-scheme known as Solyndra, Inc. fully rather than just giving them the $535 million. In a sentence:   despite at least two cautionary e-mails from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) the Obama Administration pushed for an immediate loan for Solyndra. How did this company then fail?
11.  In February, 2011, seven months before the company went bankrupt, the Energy Department restructured a “loan” to the company despite the OMB’s clearly expressed doubts about the company’s future viability and the company’s very dubious fiscal prospects.
12.  Somewhere close to 76% of these loans and or grants under Obama Stimulus One were granted to businesses run by Obama contributors** located in heavily Obama supporting districts.  For example Obama carried the Solyndra-surrounding district with 71% of the vote.
Today, Wednesday September 14th, a congressional investigative committee questioned officials from two of the agencies that backed the $535 million loan package to Solyndra Inc. The Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations sought to know why the Energy Department approved the Solyndra loans in 2009 and then restructured the loan this February despite clear evidence that the company was struggling financially and in danger of going under.
Solyndra was hailed by President Obama in 2010 as a great example, an innovative company that would use stimulus money to create jobs and lead the economic recovery. When it laid off most of its 1,100 workers August 31st  and announced it would cease operations an immediate howl went up from green-energy doubters and conservatives. When next the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 6th, the howls became a crescendo of anger and scorn.
Two days later, agents with the FBI and Energy Department's inspector general served a search warrant at Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., headquarters. The Solyndra bankruptcy and the criminal investigation have raised questions about the administration's decision to pour billions of dollars into clean-energy programs. Cheer up, Solyndra, you can always serve as a very bad example!
Representative Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., the subcommittee's chairman, pressed Energy Department loans director Jonathan Silver on Wednesday to explain how the agency could approve more than half a billion dollars in loans despite questions about the company's financial health.
He also cited internal emails that he said show White House officials appeared to be pressuring Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget to speed up approval of the Solyndra loans.
"You should have protected the taxpayers and made some forceful actions here," Stearns said.
Under questioning Silver noted that Solyndra had first applied for the loan in 2006, under President George W. Bush. He said the loan was tentatively approved in March 2009 by the Obama people. The hearing, which lasted more than four hours, focused significant attention on emails showing the White House encouraging the Energy Department and budget officials to speed up and to approve the Solyndra loans. Why? It’s called “Crony Capitalism” and Rajjpuut says this haste was done to make an impactful photo-op for Joe Biden and to push the green-jobs initiative regardless of consequence and fiscal-prudence.  
Virtually all of the Obama Stimulus that so recklessly shuttled $787 Billion worth of taxpayer money to favored left-wing industries and Obama supporters is finally becoming more and more transparent every day and the revelations are disgusting all thinking Americans. The lesson here is that government involvement in industry is 100% the same as government involvement in tax loopholes . . . it all amounts to the feds deciding who wins and who loses; who is the “teacher’s pet;” and it all works to destroy free enterprise, jobs, the dollar; and America’s self-respect.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 

**     It's almost impossible for Rajjpuut not to comment upon the mainstream media's (MSM) incompetence and willful cover-up of Barack Obama's scandals.  Now after Rajjpuut has personally written blogs exposing 74 such MAJOR scandals . . . the MSM is finally on board for exactly 1 1/2 of the most recent of them.  There has been some slight coverage of OFF (Operation Fast and Furious) a scandal so nasty (we, the United States are arming Mexican drug cartels, for crying out loud) that it reeks to high heaven and now Solyndra.

 

      A few weeks ago a very leftist academic who calls himself a "political scientist" made news by saying that he could already predict the winner of the 2012 presidential race with virtually absolute certainty:  Barack Obama.  Many pundits on conservative radio and FOXNews attacked Lichtman's methodology and showed that clearly rather than being an extremely objective technique for predicting presidential elections, Lichtman's work was a statistical scam.  Some items on Lichtman's list were clearly subjective and chosen after the historical "facts" were all in.  Case in point:  Solyndra.  Rajjpuut has covered 74 Major scandals in the Obama 2.6 years;  Lichtman listed "an absence of major scandals" as the strongest point favoring Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.  Of the 74 Major scandals under Barack Obama, Solyndra might NOT even rank among the top 50.  But Solyndra was the very first company chosen to receive a loan guarantee as part of the 2009 stimulus package.

 

     That being the very first Stimulus money handed out and the fact that OMB memos and White House memos have been found showing that the White House Obama and Biden were very interested in "rushing this through" on their very first one and all the photo ops, etc. makes Solyndra so symbolic that even the MSM has found it difficult to ignore this particular Obama scandal.  

     Solyndra was, Vice President Biden said, "exactly what the Recovery Act was all about." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, said Solyndra would help "spark a new revolution that will put Americans to work."  Obama said on one of his visits, "It is here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter, more prosperous future," he said. Hailing the green jobs loan guarantee program, he went on, "We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra."   But most importantly . . . . 

 

      The White House went so far as to prepare a propaganda video about the company, a slick public relations quality product designed to convince the MSM that green jobs were obviously the wave of tomorrow (not next year, tomorrow), Obama was super competent and involved himself with super competent folks like those at Solyndra.  Reality and propaganda seldom jive.  The Washington Examiner's David Freddoso reported, an audit of the company performed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers two months before Obama's visit showed Solyndra had accumulated losses of $558 million in its five years of existence.   

      Solyndra's audit showed the company "has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders' deficit that, among other factors, raises substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern."   That didn't impress the MSM.  The most damning factor in the eyes of the MSM (the Washington Examiner is considered a slightly conservative mouthpiece unlike the NY Times and Washington Post) was this:  original Solyndra investor, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, a major contributor to Obama's 2008 election campaign, and others provided an additional $75 million in financing to Solyndra. They did so on condition, approved by the Energy Department, that THEY receive priority over previous creditors, including the government.   And there was the fact that not only the Republicans on the oversight committee were on Solyndra's case, but Henry, the weasel, Waxman a California Democrat protecting the interests of California investors was involved in seeking truth about Solyndra. 

      On Aug. 31, while Obama played golf at Matha's Vineyard, Solyndra filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy papers.  On the day Obama made his "pass this bill now" AJA speech, the FBI was raiding Solyndra's offices.  Even without "provable malfeasance" the decision to loan money to Solyndra was so clearly incompetent that even IF everyone in the administration acted with good faith . . . Solyndra is still a huge scandal.  Very shrewd venture capitalists lose money on most of their investments and win huge on a few, and keep on winning. But when THEY lose, it's their money, not ours. 

      The green jobs scandal is still with us, since the Energy Department handed out more loan guarantees in the past few weeks.  According to a contributor at the Rasmussen Reports website, these loans all look tainted:  "$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)."  The article asked the question, "Will one of them be the next Solyndra?"  Rajjpuut would suggest that the extent of political largesse and corruption by this administration; and its corruption is far closer to his figure:  74 major scandals and a whole lot of incompetence and philosophical (Marxism) sabotage.

Read more…

 

 

 

 

“Showcased” Obama-Endorsed Green Company

Wasted $ 390 Million in Stimulus Funds

 

     

            Here’s one more story the mainstream-lamestream media won’t cover. Is that thirty-six or thirty-seven major scandals or lies within Mr. Obama’s corrupt administration we’ve been spared?***

            As the country once again moves toward $4 a gallon gasoline, this time with an anti-oil administration running the Oval Office which swore to create five million green tech jobs and begin the end of oil dependency, do you remember that $787 Billion Obama stimulus that was supposed to keep unemployment below 8%?   A green-tech company that raised huge amounts of  money for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which then became the poster-boy for  his green-tech initiatives and the first company to receive  Obama stimulus money, Solyndra, Inc. of Fremont, California, has it turns out wasted at least $390 million of $535 Million of federal Stimulus funds.  

          Solyndra, which received three ringing TV appearance endorsements personally from Vice-President Joe Biden and two from Obama himself, is now the subject of a congressional investigation into waste, fraud and abuse by the House Energy and Commerce Committee which has revealed that the company was not eligible for a loan guarantee which the company stated would help them create 3,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent green jobs in the manufacture of solar panels. Solyndra is also closing plants instead of opening new ones. The oversight committee has also revealed details of an $800,000 ad campaign designed to promote good eating habits which might have created 2.5 advertising jobs, but did nothing seriously to fight unemployment. While the advertising company did turn a profit from the stimulus, Solyndra has never turned a profit during the six years of its existence despite being a pet project for Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser who did a better job as a major campaign fund raiser for Obama-Biden 2008 then he did running a green-tech company.

           Mattie Corrao, government affairs manager with Americans for Tax Reform, said the Solyndra loan shows how hollow Obama’s promise to “keep close track over how stimulus money has been spent” has proven itself. “They (the Obama administration) are trying to pretend we’re creating jobs and hoping the taxpayers are dumb enough and blind enough to believe the lie,” Corrao said. “After two years of unemployment about 9 percent, people aren’t going to believe it anymore.” Because of the close personal connection between Kaiser and Obama, Corrao says the loan should never have been considered in the first place. No Solyndra officials would speak with conservative reporters about the story.

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

 

***          Let’s count backwards, OK? But first, when you go to:

http://conservativeamerican.org/obama-administration-scandals-list/page-one-1-50/

 

You’ll find a 40-page list of the stories that the mainstream media has refused to cover or investigate about president Obama’s administration; their associations; their lies; their failures etc. Stories which, if a conservative were involved, would have each rated about two weeks coverage . . . judge for yourself. It begins with him seeking 1995 political endorsement in Chicago from the coalition (of ACORN and the union SEIU) which called itself:  the “Marxist New Party.” Obama at the time was an ACORN attorney browbeating and shaking down lenders to get them to comply with the deliberate-bad-loans requirement of the CRA-77 legislation that led to the subprime crisis that eventually bankrupted the country and caused the financial meltdown in late 2007.   His rant on “White Folks Greed” is actually a quote of Jeremiah Wright (the pastor he says he never listened to while spending 20 years in his church) which Obama put in his own book “Dreams from my Father” . . .  runs through 175 appointment scandals (44 Czars never vetted by the Senate or FBI include at least 35 with acknowledged communist ties) . . . etc., etc.  How can the mainstream media refuse to show this guy’s true stripes?

Here is a list of ten key stories taken at random by Rajjpuut that 95% of Americans have never heard about because the liberal press refuses to bring this guy’s very suspect record up for examination. He’s their darling and they will protect him. Here are the stories and the nature of the scandal involved:

10.    Solyndra: stimulus money goes to firm of major Obama fundraiser. $390 million of the $535 million stimulus money is wasted and 4,000 promised jobs are NOT created.        CRONY-CAPITALISM

9.  Third revelation of General Motors and Chrysler closing down profitable car dealerships owned by Republican donors so that nearby failing or barely profitable dealerships owned by Obama 2008 supporting dealerships benefit from near monopoly status.       

MALFEASANCE and CRONY-CAPITALISM

     8. Two things here . . . . a) Not only was President Obama lying when he said his plan (Obamacare) would allow you to “keep your present plan, if you like it;” and he failed to tell the public that an “interim final rule” filed as regulations by three agencies (among the 390+ agencies created within Obamacare) made it against the law for your plan to make certain changes required to keep them compatible with Obamacare, so these plans (including plans specifically ‘grandfathered in’) are non-compliant and you can’t keep using them. And b) you’ll remember that Obamacare passed first by reconciliation in the Senate so that the 60-40 majority wasn’t required to allow a vote; and then Obama had to sign a last minute piece of paper guaranteeing that no federally-funded abortions would be allowed under Obamacare. This got him 12 last-minute anti-abortion Democratic votes led by Michigan’s Bart Stupak. Over 100,000 federally-funded abortions have already occurred under Obamacare; indeed they were made the very first covered Obamacare operations.         HHS (sometimes called the “Dept. of Health and Abortion Services”) run by Kathleen Sebelius has also not been in compliance with the federal government’s financial management laws so it’s impossible to trace exactly how widespread this federal-funding of Obamacare abortions really is and literally cannot account for hundreds of millions of dollars.  LIES, DOUBLE-DEALING, and DELIBERATE MISUSE OF FEDERAL FUNDS 

7.   Remember all those promises of openness and square-dealing that Obama would insist upon as he dramatically changed the “climate in Washington?”  The Obama administration has on at least 40 occasions denied release of information under the Freedom of Information Act by claiming that “such-and-such report is still in draft form” and therefore exempt from the FOIA and somehow the final form is never ever completed. Most recent case of this broken promise game: The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) promise made in federal court that they’d be forthcoming and release an internal memo detailing their investigation into how and illegal alien known criminal was never deported and allowed to stay in the country long enough to kill a Virginia nun in a drunken-driving incident. When did she get killed?  August, 2010. The latest missed date on this case: January 18, 2011. And, yep, the report is still in “draft” form.

                                DOUBLE-DEALING; OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE; LIE related to OPENNESS

6. You know all those continuing resolutions (CRs) that are passed so that the government continues to operate? Why isn’t any permanent “fix” ever passed? Obama sneakiness. Virtually every permanent spending bill Barack Obama has tried to get passed has been full of freebies and other goodies for his union supporters. One that caught my eye was back in September last year when one bill turned out to contain a $20 Billion list of add-ons benefitting the unions with taxpayer money. For example: the $1.9 Billion “Race to the Top” grants supposedly aimed at rewarding better-performing schools . . . was, it turned out, merely  $1.9 Billion so that school districts could hire $1.9 Billion worth of new UNION teachers . . . the bill discriminated against teachers who would not join the teachers’ union.

PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR BHO SUPPORTERS; DISCRIMINATORY LAWS

 

5.   You’ve heard of the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case in Philadelphia that was already won which the Obama DOJ chose to drop? Well this one is much, much more serious. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) boss Andy Stern, according to White House logs has been the most frequent single visitor of the President over the first two+ years of his administration. SEIU was the biggest contributor to Obama-Biden 2008. The Federal Election Commission under the Obama DOJ has dropped an election violation case against the SEIU union that was also won. The union required local affiliates of SEIU to contribute to the union’s political action fund violating federal election laws.   Of the $9 million war chest the SEIU amassed how much might have gone to Obama’s Democrats? 97%? More? SEIU is now squeezing its local workers for the 2012 elections. How often do you hear of prosecutors with already won cases dropping them?

ELECTION FRAUD: PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR SUPPORTERS; OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE

 

4. Goldman-Sachs company is sometimes called “Government-Sachs” because of all their political connections and their ability to come out smelling like a rose no matter how scandalous their behavior.   You’ll recall that G-S earned several billion dollars acting on behalf, supposedly for AIG, in the federal bailout of AIG.   You’ll also recall that G-S was forced to make restitution to thousands of clients for double-dealing when it sold them with glowing reports virtually worthless security options. Now it turns out that a)  Goldman-Sachs “minted” most of the horrible real estate investments that got AIG in trouble and that Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner helped them to hide that information. Geithner is a former Goldman employee as is his chief of staff, Mark Patterson.  According to web watchdog Bloomberg.com: “When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got the most attention. Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a cover-up… Representative Darrell Issa,…placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG. These were the deals that pushed the insurer to the brink of insolvency — and were eventually paid in full at taxpayer expense. The New York Fed, which secretly engineered the bailout, prevented the full publication of the document for more than a year, even when AIG wanted it released.”  By the way, Geithner also once ran the NY Fed Reserve Bank. The Obama Administration has obstructed a proper accounting of what went wrong in the financial crisis. More from Bloomberg: “The public can now see for the first time how poorly the securities performed, with losses exceeding 75 percent of their notional value in some cases. Compounding this, the document and Bloomberg data demonstrate that the banks that bought the swaps from AIG are mostly the same firms that underwrote the CDOs in the first place. The banks should have to explain how they managed to buy protection from AIG primarily on securities that fell so sharply in value… Professor James Cox of Duke University School of Law says: “They may have been trying to shield Goldman — for Goldman’s sake or out of macro concerns that another investment bank would be at risk.” —

ConservativeAmerican.org points out there are numerous Goldman Sachs pals of Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner who now work for the Obama Administration. They include: Adam Storch, Neel Kashkari, Geithner himself, Mark Patterson, Gary Gensler, Gene Sperling, and Jide Zeitlin.

COVER-UP; MALFEASANCE; OVERSIGHT FAILURE and CORRUPTION

3. A story that got absolutely NO coverage in the mainstream press was the dissolution of CCX. Funny, over the nine years of its existence the Chicago Climate eXchange’s very existence was dubious; at least the lame-stream mainstream media saw no reason to tell the taxpayers and voters they existed.    Based upon Al Gore’s dubious premises about global warming now proven only supported by corrupt “scientists,” in the background,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece

http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php

http://www.prisonplanet.com/medieval-warm-period-rediscovered.html

 

Progressive Democrats (including Gore, Kerry, both Clintons and Obama) have been trying to sell Americans for the last nine years on the need for cap and trade legislation. In 2001 based upon money illegally diverted from federal homes programs by Franklin Raines, a patented computer program for carbon-trading was created. A group of about 100 progressive insiders including Gore, Obama, Raines, Goldman-Sachs officials, George Soros, and numerous self-declared Marxists from the sixties established CCX. If Cap and Trade law had ever been passed carbon-trading would have changed the American economy overnight from a $15 TRillion economy to a $25 TRillion one without creating a single new product or service . . . in effect an overnight 67% inflation ($10 TRillion cap and trade charges divided by $15 TRillion REAL economy) as the holder of the patent and owner of CCX this scandalous progressive consortium would have extracted huge commissions on every carbon-trade that ever occurred for the next twenty years and beyond making virtually every member of the group a hundred-billionaire. When Conservative news gatherers like FOXNews caught the scent several participants sold out their shares. When Cap and Trade failed again and a largely Republican House was voted in – CCX dissolved and the participants moved to England where’s Gore’s shell company is still hoping for Cap and Trade to become global.

                SIMPLE PURE CORRUPTION . . . LIES . . . Cover-up’

 

2. We have a tie for the #2 spot. a) After conservative press and bloggers got wind of the connections behind Obama’s 44 Czars showing that most of them were self-admitted Marxists and other radicals the mainstream media (MSM) refused to cover the stories of these Czars’ background. When two of them made their outright communism evident (Anita Dunn (praising Chairman Mao killer of 58 million Chinese in peace time) and Van Jones (several of his speeches calling for “revolution” got out across the internet), the MSM still ignored the stories. Finally, it came out that Van Jones’ radicalism included being  a “9/11-Truther” who claimed the U.S. government had conspired to create 9/11’s devastation . . . after the conservative press carried the story for three weeks, Van Jones quietly “resigned” and Dunn as well. Total coverage by most of the MSM: two minutes. b) Obama’s plan to seize over ten million acres of land in nine western states using an obscure clause of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate all the land as “monuments” went totally uncovered by the MSM. For those of you who don’t know it, the vast majority of federal land is already owned in the west with Nevada, for example, belongs 55% to the Feds rather to its own citizens and in Alaska even a larger percentage is federal land. This proposed law misuse much like the cap and trade scandal was so egregiously corrupt that even with large majorities in both chambers of Congress, the measure was defeated handily when S.C. Senator Jim DeMint of TEA Party fame exposed the facts on the Senate floor. ZERO Coverage by the MSM. 

                                                   POWER-GRABBING UNETHICAL USE OF INAPPLICABLE LAWS

 

1.  One of the bigger untold stories by the MSM is the absolute idiocy and corruption and total INCOMPETENCE involved in Obama’s energy policies. We’ve already mentioned Solyndra; already mentioned CCX and cap and trade . . . but things get much, much worse very quickly . . . .

       a) During a 2008 campaign interview with the San Francisco Chronicle Barack Obama admitted his policies would bankrupt the coal industry and “necessarily make the price of electricity skyrocket” his own words. The Chronicle sat on the story and the MSM has deemed it unworthy of print for 31 months now. If all Americans were aware of that story, how much credence would Obama’s confused and contradictory “energy plan” have?

     b) You can thank the FOIA for this little gem. The “success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs” frequently touted by candidate and President Obama was disproven by two studies that outright refuted his claims. Immediately Obama turned to progressive multi-billionaire George Soros and his own Department of Energy and former CEO Cathy Zoo of Al Gore’s company to begin massive lobbying efforts on behalf of wind energy legislation despite the fact that more Freedom of Information Act efforts are being thwarted to reveal documents showing that Wind Energy may be fined for pumping water or running a mill here and there, but it does NOT work on a large scale. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is still filing requests for FOIA information still being withheld by the Department of Energy. How many people do you know who are aware of this story?

C. Recent surveys show that only about 8% of Americans have heard this and 82% of those who know about it say they were “unpleasantly surprised” when they learned of it. Mr. Obama has repeatedly promised/threatened to create “five million new green-tech jobs” in America.    Spain which saw its economy go from #1 in Europe and 4% unemployment in 1996 to one of the most fragile economies and 21.3% unemployment now was the leader in the green movement beginning in 1997-98. Mr. Obama frequently cites Spain as an example of a great green success although those unemployment figures make that lie hard to swallow. A study of the Spanish green debacle by a noted Spanish economist gives us these details: 1) government subsidies of Spanish green technology cost 2.2 jobs in the REAL free-market economy for every single green job created 2) cost of the average green job was $676,000 each 3)some of those green jobs lasted less than six weeks but they were counted the same as the permanent green jobs 4) only 10% of all the green jobs proved permanent 5) Spanish green jobs typically paid only $10-$14 per hour which was less than the average REAL job lost ($16) . . . . OUCH! So let’s extrapolate Obama’s promise of creating five million green jobs here in America:   the cost would be eleven million REAL free market jobs for creating the subsidized green jobs; given rising prices, the cost would be around $840,000 to create the average green job; some of those green jobs would still last only six weeks and they’d still be counted as if they were “permanent;” only 500,000 permanent green jobs would be created and they’d be moderate-paying at best . . . in sum 22 REAL jobs would be lost to create one permanent Obama green-tech job.

 

Read more…