Billionaire George Kaiser, a major fundraiser for Obama, got $535 MILLION from the Department of Energy for solar startup Soylyndra. As the CAO says no due diligence was done by the government, the taxpayers pick up the tab for this failed exercise in creating jobs via stimulus money.
“Before yesterday, I thought “Solyndra” was a food additive*. But now I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about that company:
President Obama faces political catastrophe in the form of Solyndra — a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology. It has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs.
During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory “is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world.”
It’s not his statements the administration will regret; it’s the loan guarantees. The President was celebrating $535 million in federal promises from the Department of Energy to the solar start-up. The administration didn’t do its due diligence, says the Government Accountability Office. “There’s a consequence if you don’t follow a rigorous process that’s transparent,” Franklin Rusco of GAO told the website iWatch News.
Brutal tone in the coverage, huh? Yeah, Ed Driscoll noticed, too: “Wow, which radical right-wing deathbeast Obama-hating Rethuglican Web site ran that headline? Err, NBC’s Bay Area affiliate.”
“You will be shocked to learn that Solyndra’s majority owner, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, was a major fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign,” observes Karl at Patterico’s Pontifications.
At the Moderate Voice, Logan Penza concludes:
If massive federal spending does actually succeed in permanently creating or saving large numbers of jobs (an assertion which is often long on rhetoric and short on evidence), it must rely on targeting companies based on their ability to compete rather than merely their participation in a political effort like “green energy.” If we are going to saddle our economy with huge new debts in the hope that we can stave off another recession, we really need to be more sure that the investments we make are cost-effective instead of merely politically convenient. The Obama Administration appears to have neglected that imperative the first time around.
At Michelle Malkin’s site, Doug Powers ties this development to the Big Obama Speech That Will Save the Economy: “During President Obama’s upcoming job speech, if you do a shot whenever you hear the words ‘invest in clean energy’ you’ll be asleep before the teleprompter’s internal cooling fan kicks into action. Not that it was necessary, but here’s yet another reason to be extremely wary of that repeated green clarion call.”
*Suggested slogan: Solyndra Green is people! It’s people!
