Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 09/09/2011 10:06:28 PM PDT by neverdem
The president's address on jobs last night included some soaring phrases, but it left out one crucial word that epitomizes his approach to economics: Solyndra.
Fourteen months ago, the president was using his sonorous baritone to deliver soaring rhetoric about how his policies helped launch that now-broke company, which made cylindrical solar panels. The administration fast-tracked Solyndra's loan guarantee through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—i.e. the stimulus—perhaps because Solyndra's principal backers just happened to have donated huge sums to the Obama election campaign. Washington guaranteed more than a half-billion in loans to Solyndra on the promise of 4,000 jobs.
"This new factory is the result of those loans," the president said at the Fremont, Calif., facility—a facility The Washington Post termed a "signature project of President Obama's initiative to help create clean-energy jobs." The result of those loans now? Solyndra has shut its doors, its 1,100 former employees are jobless, and the taxpayers are on the hook for perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Viewed in isolation, the Solyndra story is mildly troubling. But it is nothing Washington has not seen before. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins wrote some crackerjack pieces about the return on investment that corporate sharpies used to get from their campaign donations to Republican politicians. The Solyndra story sounds like the same old, same old.
Except it isn't. The Solyndra story encapsulates a much bigger issue than mere crony capitalism, bad as that is. Because Solyndra is not alone. The Obama administration has sunk billions into loan guarantees for dozens of other renewable-energy companies as well.
This is known as the political allocation of economic resources, and it entails all kinds of problems. The first and most basic: It's wrong. Government should not be picking winners and losers in the marketplace...
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
No surprise here. Thats how utopian fascism works, one need look no further than the history of Europe in the first half of the 20th Century.
Barack Obama, the Quintessential Fascist:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html
He’s the last to know of these specatular grifters.
From Obama’s perspective the Solyndra subsidy was a success - his rich pals got richer and they will kick back a few million extra to his reelection campaign in various illegal ways.
GACK!!
Let's rewind that, shall we?
Fourteen months ago, the president was using his soporific voice with the odd clipped cadences, awkwardly placed and inappropriate inflections punctuated by strange whistling noises that no-one in the US has previously heard to prattle on about...
Now, that was good!
Indeed, I’ve heard better speaking by students at my kids’ college commencements. And yah, w/o teleprompters.
Whoever the hell signed off on this jerk’s oratory skills is clueless. There’s never a damn bit of substance, and he would fold like a cheap suit without those damn ‘prompters.
Excellent article. The problem is that market dislocations caused bygovernment involvement in business ventures has absolutely no meaning to people like Obama.
From a May, 2010 report, “Just building Solyndra’s factory and offices created 3000 union construction jobs and paid more than $ 90 million in wages”. And construction wasn’t even finished yet. Think of the 2012 election campaign money this crap will bring in from unions.
http://www.ibabuzz.com/politics/2010/05/26/about-the-worker-kerfuffle-at-solyndra/
Good observation Harold. I saw the two main buildings being worked on, and knowing the engineering realities of solar electric, knew, from another perspective, that it was a boondoggle. Then, as the months passed, and the parking lots never filled up, my suspicions were confirmed.
You won't hear it from the media, but Silicon Valley is a ghost town. Try Austin, or Shanghai, or Bejing to see what Silicon Valley used to look like. Every other building complex has “For Lease” signs, and the signs will remain. With our tas structure, our energy costs, guaranteed to “necessarily skyrocket,” and the housing costs still high, as sellers try to wait out the change, there will be no resurgence of the free enterprise which Silicon Valley epitomized.
Anyone who knows the reality of solar electic roi (return on investment) seeing a low-tech manufacturing facility being built in the middle of Silicon Valley (well-Fremont, the extension of the Valley), knows something is wrong with this picture.
Solyndra was just as absurd as the $100,000 electric Lotus being manufactured in the enormous Nummi plant, abandoned when even the blatant blackmail job perpretrated by Obama’s Transportation Safety Commission, headed by a self-described Marxist, cooked up the Toyota sticky accellerators, and later, the vagrant Toyota floor mats, to force Toyota to keep the only union Toyota union shop afloat at a loss. That would guarantee union money (money is all that counts in California, with its enormous illegal immigrant voting block, and its enormous number of SEIU employees. The SEIU employees can't lose their jobs to illegals, but the private small businesses, who pay the SEIU employee salaries, are now forbidden from even asking for proof of citizenship.
It is encouraging to see these leeches destroy themselves, but unfortunately, their destruction comes at the expense of our economy. Too bad the union employees, many of whom are skilled tradesmen, have been co opted by those whose founder told us “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need”.
Based upon Sarah Palin’s recent speech (which amazed even the NYTimes) she ought to jump all over this as “exhibit A” of crony Capitalism.
You forgot to mention his little pinchey-finger, "Listen while I dumb my exquisite intelligence down to the level of you morons," gesture.
Ha ha!
AMEN!!! This is just a SLUSH FUND!!! OUR MONEY is being HANDED to these THIEVES!
In 2010, the median household income was $52,026, meaning half of households earned less, half earned more.
With the loss of both $535 million and 1,100, we have a real-world metric for the cost of one green job: it costs about the same as the entire annual income of 20 median households.
The left loves to scold the rest of us about “sustainability”, yet none of their economic schemes are ever sustainable. Maybe because you can only spin a balance sheet so much, and when really run out of cash, the spin and hype are no longer sustainable.
In this simple example, we can see not only the folly, but the danger in the left’s claim that green jobs will lead us to prosperity. No, with deals like Solyndra, we are headed to penury faster than you can say high speed rail.
I believe the FBI raid on Solyndra was for the purpose of seizing records to make sure Obama is shielded from his filthy involvement. The records seized will never see the light of day. Obama feared those records would be demanded by a House oversight committee and revealed to the nation. We would have documented proof Obama is a criminal.
Bump
I would love to see a debate between Obama and Allen West.
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