Beam me to Planet Gore !
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.
Yeah, we've seen y'all cave to this administration before. Heck, there shouldn't have been this administration if you had vetted the usurper.
Ping!
A very crucial point is being missed here. Solyndra’s auditors had issued a “going concern opinion” which should have brought everything to a screeching halt. A going concern letter is the kiss of death in business as it basically says that the company will not survive. No bank in its right mind would lend to a company in this condition.
When the IPO was withdrawn, the Feds still did nothing. The icing on the cake is that a major Democratic fund raiser was given a sweetheart deal to get his money out before the taxpayers. This whole affair could not provide a better lesson as to why government should not try to pick winners and losers.
The existence of China lays waste to the myth that green jobs are the future for America. They are for China, not for the US. Solyndra is a perfect example. We innovate here. They build there. For the same reason that manufacturing is a dying employment sector here,permanent green jobs in solar and wind which are manufacturing intensive will not take root here.The innovative Solyndra can testify to that. Once the technology is developed here, the permanent manufacturing jobs will wind up in China. In all fairness China. as its primary beneficiary, should be funding Obama’s green jobs stimulus fantasy, not the US taxpayer.
between this and gun walker, we definitely have them on defense and off balance and that’s no way to win a fight.
Thanks for your post, good info!
We will see many more defaults on big loans made to Obama cronies who scammed the taxpayers. There have already been quite a few that have already happened that have not hit the news. There will be more.
We will see a lot more stolen/wasted stimulus grants and money like the one in the Pacific Northwest where “community organizers” at ACORN affiliates took millions of dollars for “Green Weatherization Retrofits” and only finished a hand full of completed projects to the tune of $500,000 or so per job.
The finished work on many of these few completed projects will be found to be shoddy, defective, and in some cases dangerous and destructive to the homes.
Fast and Furious is going to really be a big issue with over 400 Mexican nationals, about 4 confirmed US nationals including LEOs (and no one has really been looking until the last few weeks so there could be many more) and murdered SO FAR with F&F weapons and less than 10% accounted for. F&F was a joint effort between the Dept of Justice, DHS, Dept of State, Dept of Interior, and who knows who else. This means it goes straight to the President because he is the only one who coordinates entire Executive Branch Departments
The true cost and damage of the Obama Care legislation is starting hitting home and it will soon be clear just how big a disaster it's going to be.
The consequences of Obama’s “Leading from Behind” and “Aggressive Diplomacy” are going to hit home as the violence and chaos begins around the world. Much of the gains in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East are going to erased as Radical Islam takes power and the Palestinians drive the region to war
Americans will find they voted for change they will come to regret
Well said and sadly probably all too true.
that’s why I’ve been saying that even if Obama wins the whitehouse in 2012, he still loses because he will be up against a heartless GOP house and senate (I’m confident that we’re gonna take the senate). So he’ll be extremely unprotected and vulnerable at that point. That has to be in the back of his mind.
If we take the Senate, then we'll take the White House as well. All the GOP needs to do is win Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire, and all of Nebraska. Five of those seven states also have Senate races, and four of the five are currently held by Democrats. Defeat Jim Webb, Sherrod Brown, Bill Nelson, and Ben Nelson, and Obama goes down in defeat as well.
Congress controlled by Democrats and if I remember correctly Nancy P jumped the shark and signed off on him before it could be done correctly
I don’t know a thing about Musk but the link I posted at #7 shows Solar City getting $344 Mil and Tesla getting $465 Mil.
“The icing on did nothing. The icing on the cake is that a major the cake is that a major Democratic fund raiser was given a sweetheart deal to get his money out before the taxpayers. This whole affair could not provide a better lesson as to why government should not try to pick winners and losers.”
This is the part that gets me. Losing the money is one thing but this is criminal.
“The icing on did nothing. The icing on the cake is that a major the cake is that a major Democratic fund raiser was given a sweetheart deal to get his money out before the taxpayers. This whole affair could not provide a better lesson as to why government should not try to pick winners and losers.”
This is the part that gets me. Losing the money is one thing but this is criminal.
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