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Poster Child for Crony Capitalism
Posted on 09/25/2011 2:08:26 PM PDT by jazusamo
House Republicans made it crystal clear this week that they’re not going to let the ongoing saga surrounding the bankruptcy of an Obama administration-backed solar firm fade away.
The company, California-based Solyndra, declared bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers this month just two years after receiving a $535 million stimulus-law loan guarantee from the Obama administration.
“Well, you can run, but you can't even hide,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said on Fox Business Network this week. “We've got a good e-mail trail. We've got a number of professional investigators interviewing people. There'll be more witnesses. There'll be more hearings.”
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have launched an investigation into the Solyndra debacle and they hauled the company’s top executives before the committee’s investigative panel Friday morning.
The executives – Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison and Chief Financial Officer W.G. Stover Jr. – refused to answer lawmakers’ questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights 20 times during the hearing.
Despite the silence from the Solyndra executives, Republicans nonetheless used the hearing to bash the White House.
“Congress and the American taxpayer have a right to know whether this loan guarantee was rushed out the door before it was ready for prime time, whether the administration doubled down on a bad bet after knowing of the company’s dubious commercial prospects or, even worse, whether $535 million taxpayer dollars were wasted on false or incomplete information,” Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee, said.
Republicans warned that Friday’s hearing, a media spectacle that got major coverage even as lawmakers struggled to approve a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown, is just the beginning.
“Let me just warn you and the other folks involved in this taxpayer rip-off,” Upton told the executives Friday. “We’re not done. No, we’re not.”
Republicans on the panel received tens of thousands of documents from the White House, Energy Department and other agencies involved in reviewing the Solyndra loan guarantee in recent months after issuing a subpoena in July.
A handful of emails released by the committee appear to show that the White House tried to rush a final decision on the company’s financing so that Vice President Biden could publicly announce approval of the loan guarantee at the September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s new factory.
This week, the lawmakers requested more documents, sending a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu seeking all communications between DOE and the White House and Treasury Department on the loan.
After Friday’s hearing, Upton said Republicans would consider issuing another subpoena if the administration doesn’t continue to cooperate with the investigation.
“We are going to continue pursuing this and if folks refuse to answer questions or appear, then we’ll issue another subpoena if we have to,” Upton said.
“At the end of the day we have to figure out what happened to this taxpayer money – half a billion dollars. We have more interviews to conduct and we are not going to conclude this until we get all the answers.”
It’s not just the House Energy panel that’s getting in on the action. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said this week that he would probe federal loan programs in light of the Solyndra incident.
Following a hearing Thursday in which Issa and other Republicans on the panel slammed the administration’s “green job” projections, Issa warned that taxpayers could be responsible for billions of dollars if other solar companies collapse.
“We could potentially have every solar panel company go out of business, and that’s multiple Solyndras that we’re going to find ourselves on the hook for,” Issa said.
But Issa said he has no immediate plans to hold hearings on the administration’s loan programs because the committee has a tight schedule.
Meanwhile, in another indication that Solyndra is becoming a rallying cry for Republicans, House GOP leadership cut $100 million from the Energy Department’s loan guarantee to offset the cost of emergency disaster aid in a stopgap spending bill approved by the chamber early Friday morning. An earlier version of the legislation that did not include the cut to the loan guarantee program failed Wednesday, but a slew of Republican defectors voted for the new version of the bill Friday.
The White House and Democrats in Congress have been aggressively pushing back against Republican allegations, while at the same time criticizing Solyndra for painting a rosy picture of its finances during a July meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“To date, the Committee has received no documents indicating political favoritism played a role in the decisions involving the loan guarantee for Solyndra,” a memo released by Democratic staff on the House Energy and Commerce Committee ahead of Friday’s hearing said.
The White House, for its part, has denied any wrongdoing related to the Solyndra loan guarantee. And administration officials have argued that the incident shows that the United States must continue investing in clean energy in order to compete with countries like China, which have invested billions of dollars in low-carbon energy sources.
Rep. Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, echoed the administration’s sentiments Friday.
“The future will belong to the countries that recognize reality and invest in clean energy,” he said.
The LightSquared scandal is waiting in the wings.
Those vehemently opposed to this company are very concerned that it will totally mess up GPS usage.
What part of the American Military does NOT depend on GPS?????
Henry Waxman trying to poo-poo the Solyndra problem tells me that there is alot more hiding from the public in the energy department.
Exactly, and God bless Air Force General Shelton for speaking out and telling it like it is with LightSquared. Both the harm it does to our GPS system and telling the Congress Obama people tried to influence his testimony.
Amen to that, Waxman is nothing more than a commie.
There's a phrase that rings true no matter which way you parse it.
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Poster Child for Crony Capitalism
Good catch and you’re right, though I wasn’t thinking of that. :)
There already is a loan subordination law that appears to be violated in the bankruptcy. Investors are not supposed to get preferential treatment versus taxpayers in a bankruptcy. Sound similar to the Chrysler bondholders that lost to the unions.
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