Clipping blog |
- Who is to Blame for Solyndra’s Bankruptcy? Oh, You Won’t Believe This One…
- All I Know of SolyndraScam is Now Yours
- So, A Terrorist, A Drug Dealer, and an Under-Reported Story Walk into a Bar…
- Clearing the Browser Tabs – Thank You Monday Edition
| Who is to Blame for Solyndra’s Bankruptcy? Oh, You Won’t Believe This One… Posted: 19 Sep 2011 07:40 AM PDT
Take a moment and let that sink in. The Labor Department wants to blame Chinese government subsidies for sinking a company that, so far as we can tell, was propped up by American government subsidies. And it wasn’t just Solyndra that was getting big money from Washington. The entire solar energy industry received more than $1.1 billion in tax incentives and direct payments in 2010. So, really, the administrations biggest complaint is that China played the big-government game better than we did. That’s no surprise. China is a fully socialist government with what amounts to a slave labor pool of billions while we still bitterly cling to freedom and capitalism. Drat that Constitution.
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| All I Know of SolyndraScam is Now Yours Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:00 AM PDT
On August 31, a company called Solyndra announced that it was bankrupt and let go about 1,100 employees. This wouldn’t have been big news except for two things: 1) Solyndra was one of the companies touted by President Obama as a shining example of how “green jobs” would revitalize our economy, and 2) the company had recently received a $535 million dollar loan guarantee from the federal government for a planed expansion. The company scrapped the expansion plans shortly thereafter and fired 150 employees. That move aroused the curiosity of Republicans in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who began to investigate the loan in July. After the bankruptcy announcement, and the publicity it brought to the loan itself, things started moving a lot more quickly. The FBI, at the request of the Department of Energy’s Inspector General, raided Solyndra’s offices for purposes not immediately clear. Back in Washington, The House Energy and Commerce committee released a series of e-mails that showed the White House put heavy pressure on the Office of Management and Budget to give Solyndra its fiscal stamp of approval, even though the OMB said outright that it had serious doubts about the company’s viability. Indeed, the White House seemed insistent that the loan go through so that Vice President Joe Biden could use it as a political prop when he attended the ground-breaking ceremony for the company’s new plant.Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the time the White House rammed the loan home, said he didn’t remember the loan and knew nothing about it. Are you getting some very “Watergate” vibes from this story yet? Well, we’re not done. You might be asking yourself why Solyndra got so much personal attention from both the President and Vice President. We don’t know the answer for certain, at least not yet, but we do know that the company spent quite a bit of money on lobbying efforts to get a chunk of the sizable pot of money available for “green job” loans and that one of its chief investors was a leading Obama campaign “bundler” who had visited the White House a few times before the loan went through.We also have a report that the administration restructured the loan after Solyndra canceled its expansion plans so that the company’s investors would get paid back before the taxpayers. By the way, the guy who wrote the article I just linked carried quite a bit of water for the administration and Solyndra when the Congressional investigation began. One might be tempted to call his work propaganda, but surely that would be an act of rank cynicism, wouldn’t it? The entire “green loan” program seems to be a big bust, at least for we taxpayers. According to Justin Hart, Solyndra only managed to create 14 legitimate jobs with the hundreds of millions of our dollars it raked in. Other efforts have not worked either, as the government itself reported the $38.6 billion-dollar program has created less than four thousand jobs (including those lost when Solyndra went under). In fact, the whole notion of “green jobs” has been as big a bust here as it has been in Spain and Denmark. So, what now? The investigations in Congress and the conservative blogosphere continue apace, though not all the MSM seems quite so interested. We’ll have to see how things shake out, and who is willing to take a few shots for the President. However, the White House has not slowed its efforts to spend your money where it thinks you should spend it. The administration is now scrambling to close 15 other “green” loans before the end of September as well, and we have yet to learn anything about those companies or their connections to the administration. We have also learned about another company called LightSquared, which received White House intervention in a couple different ways, one of which reportedly involved an attempt to suborn false testimony from a four-star General. That may involve an investigation as well, though if you consider that the House is already looking into Solyndra and Operation Fast and Furious, you’ll understand if they let that one sit for a little while.
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| So, A Terrorist, A Drug Dealer, and an Under-Reported Story Walk into a Bar… Posted: 19 Sep 2011 05:20 AM PDT Q: Did you hear the one about the rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and several packages of explosives found by the US/Mexico border (via memeorandum)? A: No. I only get my news from CNN, MS-NBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Q: How about the one about how we border a country in which Hezbollah has been working closely with the narco-terrorist drug cartels? A: No. I only get my news from CNN, MS-NBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Q: Wow. Okay. Well maybe you heard the one about the country just to our south where the narco-terrorist drug cartels have gotten hundreds and hundreds of weapons courtesy of our own government? A: No. I only get my news from CNN, MS-NBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Q: Oh. Well carry on then!  |
| Clearing the Browser Tabs – Thank You Monday Edition Posted: 19 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT If I don’t say “thank you” to everyone who reads The Shack and listens to The Delivery, it’s not because I don’t feel gratitude. Quite the contrary. I suppose I feel a bit like Stacy in this regard. I’m pedaling very hard toward a level of success that remains just a fingertip out of reach, or so it seems, and I am a little bit afraid to stop pedaling and extend all the gratitude I should. For that I will need to continue to ask your continued indulgence. I have a couple other projects in the works (yes, they’ve been in the works for a while, but there are details I didn’t quite anticipate and I’m learning on the fly here) that will take up some more of my time. When I finally release them into the open, though, I think you will be pleased and willing to plonk down a buck or two to collect all the goodness you can.Believe it or not, that buck-plonking will help fund a couple much-needed upgrades around these parts, most notably to the blog design here, which has become a little bit too constrained for what I’m doing around here. We — and by that I mean all of you who have become true fans — have helped me build something I didn’t quite expect to have seven years ago. I know that sounded cryptic, but I hope to have more revelations for you soon. You know how I work around here. I’m as transparent as I can be, even to the point where I overpromise (which is a bad habit I need to stop right away). Really, the whole point here is to say that I am grateful to you for the time you take to read my blog and listen to my podcast and for the donations and Amazon purchases that help out. My thanks goes with you, each and every day, even if I forget to say the words as often as I should. And now, links!
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I’m pretty sure that if someone invented a Gall-O-Meter and pointed it toward Washington, the resulting overload explosion would leave a Chicxulub-sized crater. The Department of Labor, headed by 
I had planned a comprehensive post on the growing SolyndraScam story but I have to admit failure. Things are moving so quickly and in so many different directions that it’s hard for me to fix one particular narrative in the time I have during the day to write blog posts. Instead, let me put together a series of links, more or less in chronological order, that should give you all the big points and a few of the more interesting details.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Sundries Shack To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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