This reminds me of the Mel Brooks movie/play “The Producers”.
Get a bunch of people to “invest” in your play. Make sure the play is a bomb. Keep all the money when the play shuts down after the first night.
It's an old scam in Silicon Valley. Driving by the enormous Solyndra buildings regularly it was noteworthy that, unlike the expensive heardquarters buildings along HW 880, the Solyndra parking lots appeared never to have more than a skeleton staff's number of cars. In the glory days venture money paid startup executives royally, until the company closed the doors. The investors were generally ignorant about what did or didn't happen inside. But investors are often very smart, and politcally savvy.
Kleiner Perkins, which invested in Al Gore's abiity to sell global warning so they could get rich on the carbon credit scam, are clearly politically savvy. The supposed Solyndra investors were major Obama supporters. The enormous campus in Silicon Valley was for show - photo ops. It was obvious, to someone who has looked for commercial real estate for expanding companies, a scam from the outset. It was “optics.” No genuine venture fund, looking at the profitability of the solar electric industry, would invest. Startups begin in low-rent industrial parks. Solyndra began with space age buildings with enormous signage and what appeared as hundreds of thousands of square fee for manufacturing. Hardly anyone manufactures in Silicon Valley, and those for very high margin and usually sophisticated assemblies. Iphones and IPads are manufactured in China. Solar panels are not as sophisticated at LCD display panels, and those are all manufactured in Asia.
Progressives control the banks and the justice department. Solar energy, along with wind energy, is an old scam dependent upon the ignorance of the public, ignorance guaranteed by the complicity of state-run media and state-run educational system.
Some investors may think that if the left, Obama’s cadre, can only cut off all other sources of energy, these technologies will become profitable. If we prevent drilling everywhere, prevent pipelines from Canada, prevent Alaska from tapping new sources so that the Alieska pipeline is irreparably damaged by the low flow, then solar and wind generators will become profitable. That is either naive, or sabotage - probably some of each. Remember, Holdren and his minions have never veered from his openly stated belief that the world has four or five billion too many people. These are would-be revolutionaries. Everything they say, or fund, should be scrutinized.
Even the vaunted Wall Street Journal is feeding from the trough slop provided by the political left, with subtle propaganda in most every issue, paid for with our taxes, participating in the shrill campaign against nuclear power enabled by the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima. The Japanese government must, in order to stay at the trough, not argue with the nonsense being propagated. All the while the perfect safety record for commercial nuclear power continues - no carbon emissions, no injury from radiation for commercial nuclear power, with four core meltdowns in sixty years(Chernoble was not a commercial nuclear plant, but still killed far fewer people than its coal replacement).
It is reminiscent of the war by the left on DDT, which saved more lives before Rachel Carson's acolytes forced us, based upon false rumors and manufactured data, to doom twenty to forty million youngsters in Africa to horrible death from malaria. Of course our pretty co-eds and their partners didn't know they were condemning millions of African children to death, but that is the power of political propaganda. The “renewable energy” campaign is purely an attack on capitalism.
The solar business is just such a scam, except that the government is providing the venture money - our money - and the principals are kicking back political donations. We have another one in The Valley which tickles elites, Tesla. Of course, who can say that the few remaining private sector workers won't stand in line to buy a $100,000 electric sports car which may drive 100 miles and even carry a passenger? Tesla has a beautiful and empty showroom in tony Menlo Park, and the cars themselves look like Ferraris. Obama should buy a few Teslas to keep at Martha's Vineyard for his drives to the golf course. Of course his handlers know that the 'optics' might be a bit too obvious. Besides, to provide the power to charge the Tesla would require covering a significant portion of Martha's Vineyard with heliostats (solar collectors) or the less efficient solar panels. Perhaps Marth's Vineyard would tolerate, unlike Holdren's and the Kennedy's Cape Code neighborhood, being surrounded by ocean-based wind turbines?
We saw the wind turbine scam fifteen years ago. The enormous field of dead windmills is a monument to graft and tax breaks for the wealthy on the Altamont pass. Farmworkers over the mountains paid for those subsidies while the wealthy used the turbines as tax write-offs.
Every advertisement (just count the tax subsidized marketing on radio and television) is siphoning our productivity to insure that the media only survives with government funding, and, naturally, reports what it's masters dictate. Because the left produces nothing, they are parasites who will milk our productivity until there is nothing left.
These little dictators are bright, like John Holdren, just not bright enough to compete with honest scientists and engineers. Being a Utopian dictator can be very profitable. A scientist of no accomplishment has become quite wealthy, much more financially successful than most physicists, by never doing an experiment, but producing political polemics - a community activist to inhibit the productivity of capitalist engineers. The numbers are not obvious, particularly since our media are controlled, and most reports are provided by outright propagandists. The place to begin is with the relatively minuscule energy density of solar energy (flux density). There are a few high value applications which will ever make economic sense for a low density energy source. Swimming pool heating is one application which does makes sense, but if someone can afford a swimming pool, he can save money by heating it with solar energy, and should invest because it makes economic sense. Solar electric should never be subsidized, and is likely being used by our current rulers to destroy capitalism - Cloward Piven at work!.
The unions, whose leadership is dominated at the top by self-described Marxists, will consume the source of jobs for their workers, who are more useful idiots.