For those of us who still have jobs, I suspect you look at your paycheck and cannot help but notice the amounts taken out in taxes. You have absolutely no choice in the matter nor do you have any say in where your dollars are going to go. You cannot send a little note to the IRS and say something like “To Whom it May Concern, I would like $100 to go towards the senior up the street with the infirmity and the rest put in Washington High School.” It would be nice but impossible. The only thing that changes how much money gets taken from you and where it goes is found in your voting booth. That’s where you effect change.
So, let’s take a look at one of those places that took our hard-earned dollars and squandered it away. The company was called Solyndra and the amount they squandered or lost is $535 Million dollars!!! That’s HUGE!!! To make it even more sickening, they lost our money in 1 year. One year and they blew through the whole lot declaring bankruptcy the first of this month. To me, that would be like giving your 15-year-old kid $100,000 in cash and turning your back. There would be nothing left in a year. There might not be any left at the end of the week.
Solyndra was a large solar energy business that employed over 1,100 people. Back in 2006 they applied to the Department of Energy under the Bush administration for funding. But, it wasn’t until 2009 that the Obama administration saw an opportunity to tout green jobs and employment opportunities. Obama had been very vocal in his speeches about the need for green jobs and America’s need to break the dependence on fossil fuels. It seemed like a win-win. But, like my mother always told me, if something looks to good to be true, it probably isn’t.
But, politicians love a good photo shoot. Especially if it touts the agenda they love. I don’t begrudge them that. I’m just mad about my lost tax dollars. The Department of Energy fought for the Solyndra loan and said that it was a model for building up the “green energy” industry and that it would create jobs. They were so overjoyed with the prospects of this that they wanted to have Obama personally announce it. And what could make that better? Send Obama himself to the manufacturing plant in California.
What we know now however, is that the DOE jumped the gun a bit. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) had not even finished vetting the company. We also now have emails that were being sent by Obama administrative officials complaining about the impending deadline they were facing as well as worrying about the flags the Office of Management and Budget had put on the deal. As we begin to dig more we find out that the auditors said the Energy Department had “treated applicants inconsistently, favoring some and disadvantaging others.”
The GAO has taken the DOE to task, stating that before DOE makes a conditional commitment to guarantee a loan, its “procedures call for engineering, financial, legal, and marketing reviews of proposed projects as part of the due diligence process for identifying and mitigating risk.” Franklin Russo, an analyst with GAO, went on to say “There’s a consequence if you don’t follow a rigorous process that’s transparent.” “It makes the agency more susceptible to outside pressures, potentially.” Russo, went on to say, “If you don’t have really strong processes in place, and if you’re under pressure to get a lot of these dollars allocated, you can make unproductive decisions and ones that ultimately put taxpayers’ dollars at risk,”
At this current time, the Obama White House is taking a blame Bush stance. They are saying that the grant request came in under Bush’s administration and that the DOE under Bush was in the process of green lighting the money. I am so sick and tired of hearing that everything that goes wrong with this administration is somehow Bush’s fault. Let me be clear, President Bush and I had our differences in a big way. He made me mad too with some of his policies and ideas. However, with that being said, evidence is really stacking up that this is Obama’s screw up. He needs to own it.
Let’s look at the evidence. Obama announced the Solyndra loan guarantee two months into his administration and the DOE boasted and crowed at its speed. Secretary Chu is quoted in the press release as saying, “today’s announcement significantly outpaces that aggressive timeline.” The press release went on to say, “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.” Okay then, so who was pushing this deal? It clearly wasn’t Bush.
The FBI is now looking into criminal activity and they have raided the facility. I should hope so! That’s a big theft of our money!! Congressional hearings have also begun to investigate who knew what and when. I will keep you all abreast of the information.
As a final note, let us not forget that Obama has just asked for another $500 Billion. Really?!
For more information:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/solyndra-blame-bush-obama-officials/story?id=14513389
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/15/MNAL1L4G4G.DTL
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/obama-administration-solyndra/story?id=13640783
Coffee N Chat 
Sep 30, 2011 @ 15:11:52
Keep working ,remarkable job!
Sep 15, 2011 @ 12:13:12
We need more citizen investigator’s like yourself to continue to dig into these corrupt practices. Your documented opinion will give the folks a side of the story that the liberal mainstream media sweeps under the carpet. Keep at it.
Sep 15, 2011 @ 03:53:18
Oh for heaven’s sake. Just as I was finishing this up, I came across another article of abuse. Have a look at this:
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/sep/14/clean-energy-official-succumbs-to-power-of-green/
Basically, the CEO of a different green company that received money from the DOE, has been lining his pockets with it. Nice!