Solyandra

[Lyion]

It'll be interesting if anything comes of this as it's a pretty sleazy deal.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/08/solyn ... logs-show/

Not only does the now-bankrupt solar energy firm Solyndra have a cozy financial relationship with the Obama administration, company representatives also made numerous visits to the White House to meet with administration officials, The Daily Caller has learned.

According to White House visitor logs, between March 12, 2009, and April 14, 2011, Solyndra officials and investors made no fewer than 20 trips to the West Wing. In the week before the administration awarded Solyndra with the first-ever alternative energy loan guarantee on March 20, four separate visits were logged.

George Kaiser, who has in the past been labeled a major Solyndra investor as well as a Obama donor, made three visits to the White House on March 12, 2009, and one on March 13. Kaiser has denied any direct involvement in the Solyndra deal and through a statement from his foundation said he “did not participate in any discussions with the U.S. government regarding the loan.”

But the countless meetings at the White House seem hardly coincidental. Kaiser, in fact, is responsible for 16 of the 20 meetings that showed up on the White House logs.

In the meetings on March 12, Kaiser met with former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Austan Goolsbee at 11 a.m., Senior Advisor Pete Rouse at 3 p.m., and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council Heather Higginbottom at 6:30 p.m. On the 13th, Kaiser met with Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Jason Furman at 9 a.m.

Other Solyndra officials that made the trek over to the White House include Chairman and Founder Christian Gronet on September 22, 2009, at 9:30 a.m.; and Board Members Thomas Baruch and David Prend.

Baruch went to the White House May 7, 2010, and September 20, 2010, at 8:40 a.m. and 1 p.m., respectively. Prend visited on September 21, 2010, at 9:15 p.m. (RELATED: Bankrupt solar company with Fed backing has cozy ties to Obama administration)

The visitor logs also show that a number of members of the administration though a loan guarantee for Solyndra was pressing enough to take meetings. Former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel and Adviser Valerie Jarrett even took meetings with Kaiser.

As TheDC previously reported, Solyndra officials, including Kaiser himself, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Barack Obama.

Kaiser personally donated $53,500 to Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. Ben Bierman, executive vice president of operations donated $5,500 to Obama, and Karen Alter, senior vice president of marketing gave $23,000, just to name a few.

In 2009, Solyndra secured a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Treasury to produce solar panels. But on August 31, 2011, the company shut its doors and announced its intent to file for bankruptcy.

The revelation came after President Obama visited the plant in May 2010 and touted it as a shining light for the future of green jobs and a green-energy economy.

“The promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith — not anymore,” Obama said at the time. “The future is here.”

The future was bankruptcy.

To put it in pictures:

[Tossica]

I smell a rat. I also assume there's more to the story that isn't presented in this article.

[Lyion]

It's all over the news, and the FBI has raided the Solyandra leaders.

Don't take my word, head over to Google News, Bloomberg, or other outets that are reporting on it,

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-0 ... -says.html

FBI Raids Bankrupt Solyndra as Lawmakers Question Panel Maker’s Finances

An FBI raid on Solyndra Inc., a solar-panel maker that failed after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Energy Department, may signal the escalation of a probe into the Obama administration’s clean- energy program.

Agents for Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman, who has called the department’s clean-energy loan program lacking in “transparency and accountability,” joined in the search yesterday at the Fremont, California, headquarters of Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6.

Republicans critical of the program stepped up their attacks following the raid, and two House Democrats questioned the integrity of the company, indicating a potential political crisis for the president. A foundation headed by an Obama campaign contributor was a principal investor in Solyndra.

“The FBI raid further underscores that Solyndra was a bad bet from the beginning and put taxpayers at unnecessary risk,” Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said yesterday in a statement. “President Obama’s signature green jobs program went from a darling of the administration, to bankruptcy, to now the subject of an FBI raid in a matter of days.”

Friedman, a watchdog within the Energy Department, said in a March report that a lack of adequate documentation for loans “leaves the department open to criticism that it may have exposed the taxpayers to unacceptable risks associated with these borrowers.”

Obama Contributor

The Energy Department gave Solyndra the most federal backing awarded a solar manufacturer. The George Kaiser Family Foundation, a charitable organization based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and backed by donations from billionaire George Kaiser, holds about 35.7 percent of Solyndra, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kaiser made 16 visits to the president’s aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Solyndra, bureau spokeswoman Julie Sohn said in an interview. Sohn said she couldn’t provide details about the investigation. Solyndra, which shut its factory and fired 1,100 people, said in its filing for bankruptcy protection that it had liabilities of $783.8 million.

‘Misleading Claims’

Investigations by the panel over six months were frustrated by “misleading claims on Solyndra’s viability by administration officials, company executives and congressional Democrats,” Upton said in the statement with Representative Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican who heads the committee’s oversight panel.

Dave Miller, a Solyndra spokesman, and Debra Grassgreen, the company’s bankruptcy attorney with Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones LLP, didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment on the raid. White House spokesman Eric Schultz declined to comment on the raid, referring questions on law enforcement to the Justice Department and on loans to the Energy Department, which also declined to comment.

Selection of companies to receive U.S. backing are “merit- based decisions made by career staffers at the Department of Energy, and the process for this particular loan guarantee began under President George W. Bush,” Schultz said in an e-mailed statement on Sept. 1.

“Every project that receives financing through the Energy Department goes through a rigorous financial, legal and technical review process,” Schultz said.

Republicans had questioned the loan guarantee to Solyndra even before the inspector general’s report in March, which criticized Obama’s loan program for poor documentation and record-keeping without singling out specific decisions.

‘Smelled a Rat’

“We smelled a rat from the onset,” Stearns and Upton said in a statement on Aug. 31, when the company announced its intention to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Diana DeGette of Colorado said yesterday that Solyndra Chief Executive Officer Brian Harrison assured them in a meeting less than two months ago that the company was in a “strong financial position.”

“He did not convey to us the perilous condition of the company, and the committee should know why,” Waxman and DeGette wrote in a letter yesterday to Stearns.

“At that time, he said the company was projected to double its revenues in 2011, there was ‘strong demand in the United States’ for its shipments, and the company was expected to double the megawatts of panel production shipped this year,” according to the letter. “These assurances appear to contrast starkly with his company’s decision to file for bankruptcy.”

The Energy and Commerce committee yesterday asked Harrison to testify at a Sept. 14 hearing on Solyndra in Washington.
Obama Contributor

In a Sept. 1 letter requesting all documents on White House communications with Solyndra, its board and investors, Upton and Stearns said “a major investor in Solyndra, George Kaiser, was a bundler for President Obama’s 2008 campaign.”

Kaiser raised, or bundled, $50,000 to $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign, according to a list that had been posted on Obama’s 2008 campaign website. He gave $2,300 personally, according to the Federal Election Commission.

White House Visits

White House visitor logs show that Kaiser had 16 meetings with Obama aides, 11 of them in 2009. His first recorded visit to the White House was March 12, 2009, when he met separately with Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to Obama, Pete Rouse, a senior adviser to the president, and Heather Higginbottom, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. The next day he met with Jason Furman, a member of Obama’s National Economic Council.

That month, the Energy Department awarded Solyndra the $535 million loan guarantee to commercialize its cylindrical solar panels.

In June, Kaiser met with senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, policy adviser David Pope and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. His most recent meeting covered by the White House logs was on April 11 of this year, with Rouse.

Christian Gronet, the chairman of Solyndra, met with Greg Nelson, from the White House office of public engagement on Sept. 22, 2009. The visits cited in the White House logs were reported yesterday on the Daily Caller website.

The George Kaiser Family Foundation said in an e-mailed statement on Sept. 1 that George Kaiser “is not an investor in Solyndra and did not participate in any discussions with the U.S. government regarding the loan.” The foundation said it “invests in a globally diversified portfolio across many different asset classes.”

Solyndra has said it failed because it couldn’t compete with larger rivals in other countries as prices for solar panels plunged and demand slowed.

The company borrowed $527.8 million from the U.S. Federal Financing Bank, a unit of the U.S. Treasury Department that’s its biggest lender.

In January, the Energy Department agreed to let $385 million in taxpayer support for Solyndra take a back seat to funds from new investors in an effort to keep the company operating.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Snyder in Washington at jsnyder24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net

[Zanchief]

Funny because the federal department I work for is likely the Canadian equivalent of the Energy Department. Snero's actual job is picture three as he works for a sector that pays grants to energy companies. It's not all the cloak and dagger, let's get Obama, you think it is. Any wrong doing is likely either because the company defrauded the government or because they're terrible at running their business. Not sure how Obama is complicit here.

[Lyion]

If an oil company gave your conservative Prime Minister 100s of thousands of donations, and steered millions more to his party's elections, and then that company was given 500+ million government loans which it used for a lot of political purposes, and then promptly went bankrupt without even paying it's workers severance, I bet you'd be singing a different tune. This is the most over the top hardcore regulatory administration in the history of the US, and they can't do a little due diligence before handing half a billion out? It screams crony capitalism and favors for friends.

[Arlos]

Corporations donate large sums to political parties.

Said corporations get sweetheart treatment from the government.

Oh yeah, that has *NEVER* happened before... Honest...

Raise your hand if you are shocked, SHOCKED that such a thing might happen!


Thought not...

-Arlos


(PS: See: Enron and Lay's close friendship with Bush, and what it enabled Enron to pull off for a far worse case. Or hell, Wall street in the lead up to the 2008 collapse with, well, the entire government...)

[Lyion]

This continues to get worse for the current administration. I doubt anything will happen, but they will have egg on their face here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... print.html

Solyndra loan: White House pressed on review of solar company now under investigation
By Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig,

EXCLUSIVE | The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget.

The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.

Solyndra collapsed two weeks ago, leaving taxpayers liable for the $535 million loan.

One e-mail from an OMB official referred to “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” Another complained, “There isn’t time to negotiate.”

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

White House officials said Tuesday that no one in the administration tried to influence the OMB decision on the loan. They stressed that the e-mails show only that the administration had a “quite active interest” in the timing of OMB’s decision.

“There was interest in when a decision would be made because of its impact on whether an event involving the vice president could be scheduled for a particular date or not, but the loan guarantee decision was merit-based and made by career staffers at DOE,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

Solyndra spokesman David Miller said he was unaware of any direct involvement of the White House in securing or accelerating the loan.

The e-mail exchanges could intensify questions about whether the administration was playing favorites and made costly errors while choosing the first recipient of a loan guarantee under its stimulus program. Solyndra’s biggest investors were funds operated on behalf of the family foundation of Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser. Although he has been a frequent White House visitor, Kaiser has said he did not use political influence to win approval of the loan.

The White House has previously said that it had no involvement in the Solyndra loan application and that all decisions were made by career officials based on the merits of the company.

It is not clear from the e-mails whether the White House
influenced a final decision to approve the loan guarantee.

The Sept. 4, 2009, groundbreaking event went ahead as scheduled, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu in attendance and Biden speaking to the gathering by satellite feed.

Republican investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is holding a hearing about Solyndra on Wednesday, concluded that the White House set a closing date for the OMB approval even before the OMB review had begun.

The White House pressure may have had a “tangible impact” on the OMB’s risk assessment of the loan, the congressional investigators concluded.

In one e-mail, an OMB staff member questioned whether the review team was using the best model for determining the financial risk to taxpayers in evaluating the Solyndra deal.

“Given the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra, we don’t have time to change the model,” the staffer wrote.

Solyndra was a favorite of the administration until two weeks ago, when the company abruptly shuttered its factory and filed for bankruptcy court protection, leaving 1,100 people out of work and taxpayers on the hook for the loans. Last week, FBI agents searched the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in a raid that Miller said appeared linked to the loan guarantee.

In one e-mail, an assistant to Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, wrote on Aug. 31, 2009, to OMB about the upcoming Biden announcement on Solyndra and asked whether “there is anything we can help speed along on OMB side.”

An OMB staff member responded: “I would prefer that this announcement be postponed. . . . This is the first loan guarantee and we should have full review with all hands on deck to make sure we get it right.”

In another message, a White House staff member wrote that officials were “walking a fine line with Solyndra needing to begin notifying investors to fly in” for the groundbreaking. It stressed that “this OMB piece” of the review was not final and pointed out that if word of the groundbreaking leaked to the public prematurely, that would “leave us in an awkward place.”

The e-mails also raise questions about whether the administration should have foreseen financial trouble. In August 2009, e-mail exchanges between Energy Department staff members pointed out that a credit-rating agency predicted that the project would run out of cash in September 2011. Solyndra shut its doors on the final day of August.

The House committee has been investigating Solyndra’s dealings with the Energy Department for six months. In July , subcommittee members subpoenaed White House documents related to the guarantee.

Questions about the selection process were first raised in a July 2010 audit by the Government Accountability Office. It concluded that the Energy Department “lacked appropriate tools for assessing the progress” of the loan program and that the department treated applicants inconsistently, “favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.”

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of that panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee, said last week that the FBI raid confirmed their belief that the “darling” of Obama’s green-jobs program was a “bad bet” from the beginning.

“Solyndra was the hallmark of the President’s green jobs program and widely promoted by the administration as a stimulus success story, right up until its bankruptcy and FBI raid,” Upton and Stearns said in a statement on Tuesday. “Let’s learn the lessons of Solyndra before another dollar goes out the door.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and Rep. Diana DeGette (Colo.) — Democrats on the committee who had once defended the choice of Solyndra — last week also questioned whether they had been misled. In a letter, they wrote that Solyndra chief executive Brian Harrison “did not convey to us the perilous condition of the company, and the Committee should know why. ”

[brinstar]

on the one hand i think that if BO was actually trying to get away with something then it's pretty disappointing - he knew going in that he'd be on a short leash with most Rs watching him like hawks for a screwup to be made

but on the other hand i do see a lot of partisan modifiers in the language of that article which caused the skepticism alarm to go off

in the end i guess i'd rather see our govt wasting half a billion on green energy that never pans out versus blowing the same amount on a fossil fuels pipeline that never gets built

[Narrock]

This is yet another example of the "Hope and Change" we got with failprez barry.

[Narrock]

Hey Arlos, I was down in your neck of the woods today. Brought a load to Gilroy, close to where the Garlic festival is, and on my way back I took 101 to 880 and passed right by the HUMONGOUS (Now empty) Solyndra building lol

[Arlos]

Odd. I was up in yours on Saturday, in Roseville, at a card game tournament.

-Arlos

[brinstar]

I was up in yours

that's funny i was up in his wife's

[Narrock]

I was up in yours

that's funny i was up in his wife's

That made me kind of lol

[Narrock]

Odd. I was up in yours on Saturday, in Roseville, at a card game tournament.

-Arlos

Thunder Valley casino? I won 800 bucks there a couple years ago on that huge wheel of fortune slot machine. Only reason we went was to try to win one of 5 brand new Dodge Challengers they were giving away. /fail

[Menelvir]

Only reason we went was to try to win one of 5 brand new Dodge Challengers they were giving away.

I kind of got the impression that you disdained anything non-Chevy.

I picked up a 2011 R/T in May, and I have to admit, I'm loving it.



vroom vroom

[Narrock]

Only reason we went was to try to win one of 5 brand new Dodge Challengers they were giving away. /fail

I kind of got the impression that you disdained anything non-Chevy.

I picked up a 2011 R/T in May, and I have to admit, I'm loving it.



vroom vroom

Fucker. That's a badass ride! No, I've been anti-GM for as long as I can remember.

[Menelvir]

The only downside to the model year 2011+ is that Dodge has "encrypted" the PCM, which effectively curtails any aftermarket modding aside from a CAI, headers, and maybe a catback - the computer effectively can't be tuned for more HP-intensive mods (blown, stroked, bored, etc.).

Someone may find a workaround or some type of piggyback solution (if it's really encrypted, I don't think it'll be broken by brute force), but it is still pretty kick-in-the-pants right out of the box.

I don't believe Ford and Chevy have yet followed suit with their ECMs, but they may eventually be forced to if EPA restrictions tighten, or if they're threatened with lawsuits or other sanctions. It seems this might truly be the swan song of anything resembling the American muscle car of a bygone age.

[Narrock]

Get an aftermarket PCM... Then you can do whatever you want lol. Nah, better not... They'd just void your warranty.

[Gaazy]

slick vehicle man, i like it