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LA Times editors want to know the details of how bankrupt Solyndra got its $500 million loan from the ”smart” administration.
When Solyndra, a Bay Area maker of industrial solar panels, announced plans to file for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, it wasn’t just a blow for the company’s 1,100 laid-off employees or the investors who have pumped millions into the venture. It called into question the Obama administration’s entire clean-energy stimulus program.
Solyndra was the first company to be awarded a federal loan guarantee under the stimulus, worth $535 million. Taxpayers are likely to end up on the hook for much if not all of that amount, a highly embarrassing development for President Obama because he was among the company’s biggest cheerleaders. He visited its Fremont plant in May 2010 even though PricewaterhouseCoopers had weeks earlier raised doubts about its plans for an initial public offering by questioning whether it could continue as a going concern.
That’s especially troubling because Solyndra is backed by one of Obama’s key fundraisers, George Kaiser of Tulsa. …
ABC News actually had the story in May.
… When the Obama administration announced financing for Solyndra in 2009, the company was only four years old, Solyndra in 2009, the company was only four years old, and had been shipping solar panels for about a year. Officials said the administration was eager to stimulate the economy and encourage green energy start-ups. Energy Secretary Steven Chu promised Solyndra’s package alone would create more than 4,000 jobs.
One year later, in March 2010, the signs were not so encouraging. “The Company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” is how Solyndra’s accountant, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, assessed its financial status in an audit being prepared for an initial public offering. Those factors, it stressed, “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
Solyndra has since boosted revenues, though some analysts remain skeptical about its long-term prospects. …
… “Secretary Chu credited the Department’s loan team for their work accelerating the process to offer this conditional commitment in less than two months, demonstrating the power of teamwork and the speed at which the Department can operate when barriers to success are removed,” …
… “If anything, they’re still swimming upstream in a very competitive market,” said Shyam Mehta , senior solar analyst at Greentech Media Research.
Mehta has long raised questions about the company’s manufacturing costs in a world market where China offers stiff competition. He said Solyndra has focused on cutting those costs, but that there’s no assurance the company — or the government loan guarantee — will prove successful.
“There’s a lot at stake here, not just for Solyndra,” Mehta said. “This is going to be held up as a cautionary tale if things don’t work out for Solyndra. People are watching very closely from all angles.”
NBC and MSNBC manage to ignore Solyndra bankruptcy. NewsBusters has the story.
As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, a solar company that was given over a half a billion dollars in stimulus funds declared bankruptcy this week.
Although most news outlets did at least give this story some coverage, two organizations owned by the same company with intricate ties to the Obama administration completely ignored it.
Yes, that would be NBC News and MSNBC who according to LexisNexis didn’t mention Solyndra once after the Wednesday announcement.
Not once. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on Solyndra.
.. But the Solyndra situation is emblematic of a much larger issue for the president: He appears to be in over his head. The White House and loyal pundits have struggled mightily to convince Americans that Obama’s agenda was moderate and that the raft of new regulations (from the new consumer protection agency to Dodd-Frank), the car company bailouts, the huge spending sprees and Obamacare are modest steps. The electorate didn’t generally buy that, and indeed the backlash spawned the Tea Party movement. But something that Democrats, Republicans and independents can all agree is that he’s failing. His pet green company goes into bankruptcy. His speech rollout was a mess. The jobs picture is bleak. In big and small ways the theme is driven home: He’s doing a lousy job.
If all that doesn’t make you sick, how about learning Yale University, with a $16 billion endowment got money from the stimulus program? Michael Rubin in Contentions;
According to Yale University’s 2010 endowment report, Yale has upwards of $16 billion in its investment portfolio. While that’s not $16 billion the university can spend—Yale lives off the interest of its investments and its donations—it’s still a sizeable chunk of chump change which gives the university a lot of flexibility to determine what it wants to spend, where and how.
With so much money in the bank, it is somewhat outrageous that the university appears to have been receiving federal stimulus spending (in addition to other federal aid). According to the Yale Daily News: …
James Pethokoukis was in Commentary asking and answering the question. “Did Obama make it worse?”
What if the president of the United States hadn’t proposed an $800 billion stimulus plan back in 2009—but one twice as large? That is the question haunting the intellectual left, led by the economist and columnist Paul Krugman, especially since the economy is mired in what might charitably be considered the doldrums. It slowed to a near-total halt in the first quarter of 2011 with a growth rate of 0.4 percent before climbing to a comatose 1.3 percent rate in the second.
For Krugman’s opposite numbers, the question is the reverse: Might the U.S. economy actually be stronger today if Uncle Sam had done nothing and just let the business cycle play out? And what might have been different had John McCain been elected the 44th president instead of Barack Obama?? Would he have acted differently? Would the result have been different?
The what-if debate is not merely an intellectual exercise. It will have some effect on American policy going forward. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was Barack Obama’s signature achievement in dealing with the most worrisome set of economic conditions since the Great Depression. It was how Obama, to use a pair of his now seemingly abandoned metaphors, sought to drag the economy out of the ditch while the Republicans were standing around sipping Slurpees. …
… Did Obama make it worse? It is certainly the case that he only deepened a long-term trend that threatens American prosperity more than any other. The events of 2008–2009 exposed a truth about the U.S. economy from which we had shielded ourselves: economic growth has been slowing in a worrisome way throughout the decade. The nation’s GDP has averaged 3.3 percent annual growth for the past half century. But from 2001 to 2007—before the recession hit—it averaged only 2.6 percent. Going forward, growth might be even slower due to the aftermath of the financial crisis and the aging of the population. The Congressional Budget Office?, for instance, pegs long-term growth at just 2 percent or so.
But that downshift isn’t fated. The McKinsey Global Institute thinks a higher retirement age and smarter immigration policy could make the labor force grow more quickly, while smarter tax and regulatory policy could boost worker productivity. Replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, for instance, would likely make the economy grow faster over the long run by increasing investment.
These are the sorts of ideas that are likely to be a central part of the political discussion going forward in a way they never have been. The two-party debacle that was the debt-ceiling debate and the disgusted national reaction to it suggest that the American public is likely to be more open to new remedies for the nation’s ills—remedies that have not been stained by their association with the failed policies of the past four years.
We’re stuck for now with an anemic and debt-laden economy that may muddle along for years. But it didn’t have to be this way. The one thing we can all say for certain is that we could have made it better.
Just another case of federal foolishness. This time from North Idaho via Pajamas Media.
A North Idaho man killed a grizzly bear that was threatening his family. Now he could face jail time if the Obama administration has its way.
Rachel Hill looked out her bedroom window on the evening of Mother’s Day and saw three grizzly bears attacking the children’s 4H club pigs’ pen. The Hill children had been outside practicing basketball a half hour earlier, so seeing the bears concerned her and her husband, Jeremy Hill. After calling for his kids and hearing no response, Jeremy grabbed his daughter’s rifle. After once more calling for the kids, fearing they were in danger, he shot at the closest grizzly bear, which was about 120 feet away.
The other two grizzlies fled while the wounded bear began to run off in the same direction, but then turned and came towards the house. Hill shot the bear a final time due to the danger a severely wounded grizzly bear posed to his family and others. Hill called two officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They came out, investigated, and unsuccessfully tried to capture the other two grizzly bears by placing bear traps on the property.
Regardless of the danger to Hill’s family, grizzly bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, thus the federal government is prosecuting him. If convicted, Hill could face up to one year in prison and a $50,000 fine. …