Video: Rep. Pete Stark's 'Guam might tip over' moment

Yet another in a long line of symptoms that demonstrate why our government is so collectively inept, corrupt, and in some cases, downright wicked. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) discussed Solyndra's product line. Uh, yeah, I know. They're bankrupt and don't have a product line but when they did, it was solar panels, right? Well, did you know that they are currently producing electric cars? I didn't either but Pete Stark thinks so. They Solyndra "S" is going to cost between $60k-$90k.

Via the Chronicle:

CA East Bay Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark, 80, identified Fremont-based Solyndra — perhaps the nation’s most notorious solar energy firm and a lightening rod in the 2012 election — as a car manufacturer in his editorial board meeting this week with the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Stark’s comments appear to confuse Solyndra — which went bankrupt last year after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee — and Tesla Motors, a Fremont-based manufacturer of upscale electic cars now located at the site of the former NUMMI plant.

Asked about his views on new policies regarding Silicon Valley and high tech, including Solyndra, the Congressman said: “I wish I had enough expense allowance to get one of those new “S’s” that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car..my 10 year old  (son) is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an “S” sedan,’ Stark said. “They sound wild. They run $60,000-$90,000.”

The Congressman now seeking his 20th term never acknowledged his error: It’s Tesla Motors, also based in Fremont, and not Solyndra, that makes electric cars, including the”S” sedan as part of its lineup of toney electric cars.

Watch for yourself. I'll bet Rep. Hank Johnson might be able to convince Stark that Guam might tip over if it became too overly populated.



h/t Weasel Zippers

Solyndra is Seeking to Pay Bonuses (yes, you read that right)

Forget the fact that Solyndra squandered more than $500 million of taxpayer dollars; forget the fact that it restructured the loan and placed those taxpayers at the back of the bus when new investors showed up, in an attempt to keep the company afloat. The attorneys for the now bankrupt, taxpayer subsidized train wreck of a company, wants to incentivize remaining employees with bonuses.

Via Washington Times:

Now seems an unlikely time for handing out bonuses at bankrupt Solyndra LLC, but that’s the plan of company attorneys intending to dole out up to a half-million dollars to persuade key employees to stay put.

Nearly two dozen Solyndra employees could receive bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 each under a proposal filed by Solyndra’s attorneys in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

The attorneys say the extra money will add motivation at a time when workers at the solar company have little job security and more responsibilities because so many of their colleagues have been fired.

The names of the bonus-eligible employees are not disclosed in the court filings that outline the bonus proposal. None of the employees is among the so-called corporate “insiders” — top officers or members of the board of directors, records show.

The proposed bonus recipients include nine equipment engineers, six general business and finance employees and up to two information technology workers.

The biggest bonus, for $50,000, would go to a Solyndra employee whose job title is listed as a senior director with a base salary of $206,499 per year. Two senior managers stand to receive bonuses of $30,000 and $32,500.

Bankruptcy attorneys said the so-called “key employee incentive plan” aims to keep important personnel from leaving the company.

This is what we call 'unmitigated gall,' boys and girls.

h/t Fox Nation

How Badly will this Video Harm Obama in November?

The Washington Post has posted a refreshingly very honest piece. The bad news? It was published on Christmas Day. Nonetheless, it seems to conclude that the White House decisions relative to Solyndra were political all along. Among those decisions was the one that led to a video posted to the White House website in May of 2010.

Via the Post:

Like most presidential appearances, Obama’s May 2010 stop at Solyndra’s headquarters was closely managed political theater.

Obama’s handlers had lengthy e-mail discussions about how solar panels should be displayed (from a robotic arm, it was decided). They cautioned the company’s chief executive against wearing a suit (he opted for an open-neck shirt and black slacks) and asked another executive to wear a hard hat and white smock. They instructed blue-collar employees to wear everyday work clothes, to preserve what they called “the construction-worker feel.”

Apparently, according to the Post's findings, this is a video the administration would like to have back. This should give the Republican Party an something to exploit. Whether they will or not remains to be seen but there seems to be sufficient concern among team Obama that this was a very bad decision.

Via GWP:



There is also a surprising number of futile attempts made by the Post to get comments from individuals who might be able to help with the story:

White House e-mails suggest that the original idea for “POTUS involvement” originated with then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago, did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.

Well beyond the details of the factory photo op, raw political considerations surfaced repeatedly in conversations among many in the administration.

Just two days before the visit, Obama fundraiser Steve Westly warned senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett that an appearance could be problematic. Westly, an investment fund manager with stakes in green-energy companies, said he was speaking for a number of Obama supporters in asking the president to postpone the visit because Solyndra’s financial prospects were dim and the company’s failure could generate negative media attention.

It is interesting that the decision to publicly align Obama with Solyndra was pushed by Emanuel, who left the administration a few months after that May 2010 video. He also claims to be ignorant of the Solyndra deal.

Read it all.

Solyndra: Rahm Emanuel, Emails, and Energy Secretary on Hot Seat

For those who are eagerly awaiting the December 8th grilling of Attorney General Eric Holder by members of the House Judiciary Committee - of which Rep. Darrell Issa is one - there is another hearing tomorrow that may tide you over a bit. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will be testifying in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on November 18th about his role in the Solyndra scandal. Two days before the scheduled hearing, the White House released emails that show Solyndra was pressured by the Energy Department to delay layoff announcements until after the 2010 elections and the committee is combing through them.

Via Washington Post:

The Obama administration, which gave the solar company Solyndra a half-billion-dollar loan to help create jobs, asked the company to delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress, newly released e-mails show.

The announcement could have been politically damaging because President Obama and others in the administration had held up Solyndra as a poster child of its clean-energy initiative, saying the company’s new factory, built with the help of stimulus money, could create 1,000 jobs. Six months before the midterm elections, Obama visited Solyndra’s California plant to praise its success, even though outside auditors had questioned whether the operation might collapse in debt.

As the contentious 2010 elections approached, Solyndra found itself foundering, and it warned the Energy Department that it would need an emergency cash infusion. A Solyndra investment adviser wrote in an Oct. 30, 2010, e-mail — without explaining the reason — that Energy Department officials were pushing “very hard” to delay making the layoffs public until the day after the elections.

The announcement ultimately was made on Nov. 3, 2010 — immediately following the Nov. 2 vote.

E-mails describing the events were released Tuesday as part of a House Energy and Commerce Committee memo, provided in advance of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s scheduled testimony before the committee’s investigative panel on Thursday. As a result of the 2010 elections, that committee is now controlled by Republicans, whose aggressive nine-month investigation into Solyndra has focused partly on whether politics played a role in the company’s selection to receive a federal loan.

It isn't just Chu's Department that is implicated in these emails either. Former Obama Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel is as well. In fact, he should be called to testify about what he knew at some point because his lack of memory relative to Solyndra may be more suspicious than Eric Holder denying any knowledge of Fast and Furious until a "few weeks" before May 3rd.

Unlike Holder, there are emails that apparently implicate Emanuel directly in the decision to press the president into publicly announcing the Solyndra loan. What makes this even more explosive is Emanuel repeatedly pleading ignorance when it comes to his role.

Click HERE to hear Emanuel say in September of this year that he doesn't "know" or "remember" the Solyndra deal. WLS confronted Emanuel again relative to these new revelations in emails that named him. Click HERE.

h/t Michelle Malkin

Solyndra: The latest Friday Night Document Dump

If nothing else, I'll say I'm slightly surprised at the degree to which the mainstream media - Washington Post and ABC - is covering the Solyndra scandal. The latest news involves a Friday night document dump that shows someone by the name of Steve Spinner may have had a significant conflict of interest at a time when he was leaning hard on the Office of Management and Budget as a 'stimulus adviser' for the Department of Energy (DOE). It looks like he was applying pressure to OMB at the behest of the White House. The conflict of interest? His wife worked for Wilson Sonsini, the law firm retained by Solyndra to represent the company during its application for the loan. Spinner apparently did not recuse himself until after he was done with the heavy lifting.

Via WAPO:

The records provided Friday by a government source also show that an Energy Department stimulus adviser, Steve Spinner, pushed for Solyndra’s loan despite having recused himself because his wife’s law firm did work for the company. Spinner, who left the agency in September 2010, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

The documents offer new evidence of wide disagreement between officials at the Energy Department and officials at the Treasury Department and Office of Management and Budget, where questions were raised about the carefulness of the loan vetting process used to select Solyndra and the special help it was given as its finances deteriorated. Energy Department officials continued to make loan payments to the company even after it had defaulted on the terms of its loan.

The Solyndra controversy has escalated with each new release of documents to a Republican-led House energy subcommittee investigating the matter. President Obama defended the Energy Department in a news conference Thursday, saying its decisions were made by career professionals. Also Thursday, the head of the embattled loan program announced that he would step down, although Energy Department officials said he was not doing so because of the Solyndra matter.

As Republican committee leaders moved to get more information about warnings from Treasury and the OMB, an Energy spokesman, Damien LaVera, said agency officials had listened to Treasury’s advice to consult the Justice Department on the loan restructuring but felt it was appropriate to move forward.

“Ultimately, DOE’s determination that the restructuring was legal was made by career lawyers in the loan program based on a careful analysis of the statute,” he said.

I found it interesting that exactly one week after the White House released documents that made Attorney General Eric Holder look very bad relative to his role in Fast and Furious, another document dump takes place that looks DOJ look pretty good while making the White House look conspicuously bad.

The e-mails show that Mary Miller, an assistant Treasury secretary, wrote to Jeffrey D. Zients, deputy OMB director, expressing concern. She said that the deal could violate federal law because it put investors’ interests ahead of taxpayers’ and that she had advised that it should be reviewed by the Justice Department.

“To our knowledge that never happened,” Miller wrote in a Aug. 17, 2011, memo to the OMB.

Not saying there's anything conspiratorial at work here but it is interesting that last week, DOJ looks very bad after the Fast and Furious Friday night dump and this week, it's the White House that looks bad while DOJ is portrayed as the entity that attempted to do everything above board.

Earlier this year, Solyndra appeared to double down on its shady behavior when it solicited the investment of Obama donor George Kaiser, who apparently demanded access to Solyndra assets before taxpayers already on the hook, if bankruptcy ensued. In essence, the loan you and I are responsible for granting to Solyndra was subordinated to Kaiser's loan.

There's more. Remember last month when Rahm Emanuel told WLS radio in Chicago that he didn't 'remember' or 'know' anything about Solyndra? That assertion isn't supported by the facts:

In an Aug. 19, 2009, e-mail, an aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel asked Spinner if he could discuss any concerns among the investment community about Solyndra.

Spinner dismissed the idea that Solyndra had financial problems.

“I haven’t heard anything negative on my side,” he said.

A day after a discussion about possible problems at Solyndra, Spinner forwarded to the chief of staff’s aide a list of Solyndra’s main investors and attached a published profile of Kaiser.

As if you needed another reason to think less of Rahm Emanuel.

Read it all.

Video: OMB Director Confronted About Solyndra, Goes back Inside

As Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jack Lew walked out of an office building, he was confronted by a Washington Times reporter and asked about the decision to loan so much money to Solyndra, which went bankrupt after two short years. As is typical with politicians, there is usually a lackey on-hand to run interference. Predictably, Lew did not even acknowledge the reporter but perhaps the best part of this video is where Lew sought refuge from him - in the same building he moments earlier exited from. I guess he could make the argument that he only went outside to get some fresh air but that's such a tough sell, he'd be better off saying nothing, I guess.

Watch this video to see the closest thing to real life whack-a-mole you'll probably witness in a while.

GET BACK IN YOUR HOLE!

Via Washington Times:



h/t Hapblog

BrightSource: Is this Solyndra X's Three?

One of the things that makes the Solyndra scandal so potentially explosive is the likely probability that there were other very similar deals. After getting $535 Million in federal loan guarantees, the solar panel company went bankrupt in two years - and even required additional funding to prevent bankruptcy sooner. What if Solyndra is jus the warm-up act to a much bigger scandal? Aaron Klein is reporting that, like Solyndra, BrightSource is a solar panel company that received guaranteed federal loans. Unlike Solyndra, however, BrightSource received guarantees totaling $1.37 Billion, nearly three times more than Solyndra.

Via WND:

President Obama's nominee for Commerce secretary served as chairman of the board of a solar energy company that recently received a $1.37 billion federal loan guarantee – the largest the Department of Energy has ever given for a solar power project.

Now that company, BrightSource Energy, is attempting to build the world's largest solar power plant amid concerns such ventures may be too risky an investment for the federal government.

In June, BrightSource Chairman John Bryson was nominated by Obama to head the Commerce Department.

WND reported in June that Bryson co-founded an environmental activist group that is a member and funder of the controversial Apollo Alliance.

Apollo is run by a slew of socialists and radicals, including Jeff Jones, a founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization. Jones himself boasts of doing work for the environmental group founded by Bryson, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Bryson served until June as co-chairman of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a globalist organization whose members can be found throughout the Obama administration.

The massive loan guarantee to BrightSource is meant to build an expensive California desert solar plant known as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.

So Obama's nominee for head of the Commerce Department was a Chairman with the solar panel company that received the largest federal loan guarantee from DOE; and the Apollo Alliance, which helped to write the stimulus bill, consists of a group that Chairman founded.

What are the odds that BrightSource is heading down a road identical to the one Solyndra is on? Is BrightSource simply taking longer to run out of money because it had more to begin with? If and when the BrightSource shoe drops, it will shake the Obama administration to the core. We could look at the entire Democratic Party go into survival mode for 2012.

On another note, Bryson has not yet been confirmed so anyone on the committee responsible for confirming him should be digging into this.

Read it all.

Video: Solyndra Execs Plead the FIF

Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison and the company's CFO Bill Stover thoroughly embarrassed themselves by invoking their Fifth Amendment rights at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. Isn't it amazing how guys like this hide behind the Constitution when it suits them but apparently worked intimately with an administration that has demonstrated such thorough disregard for our founding documents? In this first video, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) attempts to get each man to answer questions that, on their face, should not implicate them at all. Yet, both Harrison and Stover cite the Fifth Amendment anyway.

I can't think of a time when silence has so implicated two men.

Via Fox Nation:



Kinda reminds me of this:

Video: The Solyndra Scandal in less than Two Minutes

The Scandal that is Solyndra, more than perhaps anything else to date, is a massive pie in the face of an administration that has touted a green jobs economy. It's also vindication for those of us who insisted the push for such an economy was all a sham. Why? Because Solyndra's executives are large Obama donors and made countless visits to the White House in order to get $535 Million in loan guarantees to launch their solar panel plant in 2009. This video from Institute for Energy Research sums it all up quite nicely with a montage of clips from Obama and Biden singing the praises of a company that got more than half a billion dollars of your money and squandered it in two years.



h/t Hot Air

Solyndra: A Case Study in Economics and Corruption

Imagine having a great idea, starting a company, and then being given $528 Million to launch it. Then imagine declaring bankruptcy in two years. If that money was given to you by private investors who demanded accountability, you'd be arrested. But, what if that $528 Million was given to you by an entity that sets the rules, an entity that isn't accountable to anyone and doesn't really want to hold you accountable because it's not really their money? The answer is that recklessness thrives when accountability is absent. That's exactly what happened at Solyndra. The unaccountable entity is the Barack Obama administration and the money was yours.

Via Washington Post:

Former employees of Solyndra, the shuttered solar company that exhausted half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, said they saw questionable spending by management almost as soon as a federal agency approved a $535 million government-backed loan for the start-up.

A new factory built with public money boasted a gleaming conference room with glass walls that, with the flip of a switch, turned a smoky gray to conceal the room’s occupants. Hastily purchased state-of-the-art equipment ended up being sold for pennies on the dollar, still in its plastic wrap, employees said.

As the $344 million factory went up just down the road from the company’s leased plant in Fremont, Calif., workers watched as pallets of unsold solar panels stacked up in storage. Many wondered: Was the factory needed?

“After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right,” said former Solyndra engineer Lindsey Eastburn. “Because we were doing well, nobody cared. Because of that infusion of money, it made people sloppy.”

Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. Within a week of getting a loan guarantee commitment from the Energy Department, Solyndra applied for another, worth $400 million. It never won final approval.

On Friday, company executives are scheduled to appear before a House committee investigating how Solyndra obtained its loan and whether the Obama White House rushed its approval for political reasons. Chief Executive Officer Brian Harrison and Chief Financial Officer Bill Stover were supposed to face a grilling about the company’s spending and collapse, but they announced Tuesday that they would assert their Fifth Amendment rights because of a criminal probe of the company by the Justice Department.

Wait, who heads the Justice Department again? Oh, yeah, Eric Holder. Makes you wonder how much of what the FBI removed from Solyndra offices was more about covering this thing up than in actually investigating what happened.

An interesting side note here is how scathing this WaPo article is. The Obama administration is not supposed to be treated like this by the mainstream media.

h/t Weasel Zippers

Rahm Emanuel Pleads Ignorance on Solyndra

At some point, plausible deniability becomes undeniably implausible. If ever there was a case in point, it's with former Obama Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel who is now denying any recollection of Solyndra's $535 million government loan. There are some denials that leave one wondering but this isn't one of them. The Obama administration's mantra as it pushed the stimulus bill was green energy. Now, Emanuel would have us believe he doesn't remember giving half a million to Solyndra, despite a groundbreaking ceremony that included vice president Joe Biden, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Via Daily Caller:

Chicago mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said he doesn’t recall anything about the Obama administration’s $535 million loan to the recently bankrupt solar company Solyndra.

Speaking to Chicago radio station WLS 890AM at a news conference about a new wellness initiative, Emanuel said he didn’t remember anything about the failed investment loan by the Department of Energy, which critics say was fast-tracked to fit the White House’s political agenda.

“Ya know, I’m focusing on a major announcement today for the City Of Chicago,” Emanuel said. “I don’t actually remember that or know about it. So, what I’m dealing is with what I’m dealing with here today.”

Emanuel was Obama’s chief of staff during the administration’s green energy initiative in 2009, when the Solyndra loan was finalized.

E-mail communications from the White House obtained by the House Energy and Commerce Committee point to more involvement in the deal than perhaps Emanuel would care to remember.

There comes a point when claims of plausible deniability should be met with charges that you should have known. This is a quintessential example.

Until people like Emanuel face a greater backlash when claiming ignorance than when they accept responsibility, people like Emanuel will continue to pretend we're stupid.

DC

White House Emails show Concerns Solyndra Would Harm 2012 Election Prospects

Isn't it amazing how virtually every single promise made by the Obama administration has failed to come to fruition, yet ominous predictions made inside the administration seem to be spot on when it comes to the Solyndra scandal. Emails apparently show that in addition to severe concern that Solyndra would be a failed enterprise, the timing of its failure would start to happen as the 2012 election season would be kicking into gear.

Via CBS News:

WASHINGTON - White House officials discussed the political ramifications of a possible default by a troubled solar energy company that received more than $500 million in federal loans, newly released emails show.

Emails released Thursday night show the Obama administration privately worried about the effect of a default by Solyndra Inc. on the president's re-election campaign.

"The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad," an official from the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Jan. 31 email to a senior OMB official. "The timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up."

That message has turned out to be a fairly accurate prophecy of Solyndra's failure haunting President Obama's 2012 campaign, even before the end of 2011.

In remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., argued that Solyndra's bankruptcy this month was just another reason to fight against the president's jobs plan, reports CBSNews.com's Lucy Madison.

"This place was supposed to be the poster child of how the original stimulus would create jobs. Now it's bankrupt and most of its 1,100 employees are out of work," McConnell said.

Remember, the Stimulus bill amounted to $787 billion. Solyndra's woes account for $500 million of that stimulus package, which is only about 6% of the entire stimulus. As Solyndra-gate continues to heat up, there is another question that needs to be asked and that is: How many Solyndras are out there?

Something tells me there are several more and that Jay Carney will not continue to issue absurd denials like this very much longer.

h/t Weasel Zippers