Alex Brandon/AP
President Obama and Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet checking out a solar panel during a tour of the company's plant in Fremont, California on May 26, 2010.
President Obama has been traveling around the country heavily promoting his American Jobs Act. But one jobs issue now threatens to negatively supersede the White House's agenda: green jobs.
The Department of Energy program provides start-ups access to low-cost government-backed loans in order to spur innovation in green technology. The Obama administration's loan guarantee program for clean energy companies is coming under heavy scrutiny after one of its beneficiaries, solar-panel maker Solyndra, recently filed for bankruptcy.
Solyndra's collapse could end up costing taxpayers as much as $527 million. Democrats and Republicans on the House Energy and Committee have assailed the Solyndra loan decisions and are investigating correspondence within the administration to track this misjudgment and whether there are seedier reasons behind the fallout.
Jon Stewart humiliated the White House by covering the scandal on The Daily Show last night. The public embarrassment has tarnished President Obama's long-standing effort to create jobs through such measures that also combat global warming and ensure the United States leads in innovation and technology.
Yesterday's Washington Post lead front-page article blasted the lack of jobs created by this program. The White House quickly fired back with a lengthy blog post claiming the article's assertions were "incomplete and inaccurate" and listing the important value and results of the program. Media Matters is also calling out the Post for its "fuzzy math."
Setting the foundations for a clean energy industry is tantamount to confronting climate change and growing the U.S. economy. The chance of a flourishing green economy is being diminished by these controversies and the overwhelming refusals to invest in green energy by the tea party-controlled Congress.
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In my heart I am quite sure that our President did what he felt was best for the Nation. But it crushes my spirits knowing how the Republicians will use this against us. It is a shame what our nation is fast becoming, the days of being able to believe even what you hear on the news are fading. My biggest wish as a 66 year old lady is, fight back, Please fight back, we cannot afford these people to get into office. They want to destroy everything we stand for.
One difficulty with environmental businesses is that managers may fall victim to ideology that interferes with profitability.
Ideology can interfere with success.
It is an absolute necessity to implement a risk management plan to recognize and establish business process controls that put R&D projects on a profitable footing at the earliest possible opportunity.
Things don't go right just because you want them to.
Things go right only because you force them to.
Government loans that exceed threshold dollar amounts need to come with certain regulatory constraints that require management forcing mechanisms that reduce the risk of failure.
That kind of oversight obviously did not happen with Solyndra.
Oversight is common with government contracts but rare with government loans.
This whole 'big deal' wouldn't have anything to do with all the Exxon Mobil ads on this website would it?
The big deal is that a new company was formed to create green energy..It was subsidized by the US government by half a billion dollars. It was out subsidized by CHINA'S 30 billion dollars...China sells solar panels at a net loss to maintain its 80% world market share..Lets beat up the president for this one and never build another solar panel in the US. Eventually, we the US will be able to manufacture nothing. China will manufacture everything, and will not sell at a loss when they do..
Mayflower- please tell us your solution isn't to increase the subsidization?
rusty and jeff p,
in reading your posts in this blog, i have to agree wwith mayflower.
everyone is saying that that the solyndra loan guarantee was rushed through by Obama. the solyndra loan guarantee has been in the works since the W. bush administration launched it in 2007.
is this fact something that you all are overlooking and lying about, or do you not care to find out the real facts?
in listening to the media, and especially fox news which loves to cover only half the story, especially where W. is involved, you would never know that W. tried to approve the solyndra loan (just before President Obama took office) because the bush administration wanted to show that it was doing something to promote renewable energy. the bush administration took solyndra before a DOE credit review BEFORE OBAMA IS INAGUARATED.
there are other points to this story, but i am concentrating on the ones that involve the republicans, because THEY are taking themselves completely out of this story and blaming President Obama, just as with the individual mandate.
in march of 2011, the republican party is complaining that DOE funds are not being spent fast enough (republicans fred upton, house energy and commerce committee chairman, and cliff stearns, house oversight and investigations subcommittee chairman).
now that solyndra has closed its facility, lays off over 1,000 workers and files for bankruptcy, this has been touted as a failure of the Obama Administration and the loan gurauntee office. as of sept. 12, the DOE has issued or closed committments of 37.8 billion to projects in the united states. the 535 million is 1.3% of the DOE's loan portfolio. i wish this loan had been successful, too.
and now, of course after complaining that funds were moving too slowly, upton and stearns are now saying that the Obama administration was pushing the funds too quickly.
critics (republicans, fox news) need to mention this;
the solyndra deal is more than 3 years old.
it was started by the bush administration which tried to conditionally approve the the loan BEFORE THE PRESIDENT TOOK OFFICE so they could take credit for "propping up" green energy.
rather than "pushing funds out the door too quickly", the Obama administration restructured the loan to try to protect the taxpayers investment.
Actually, the info I've read on this has come from MSNBS and Yahoo.com. Suzette, the problematic situation, as I see it, is when Obama allowed the loan to be re-structured in a way that gave more protection to his fundraiser at the expense of protection to the taxpayer. This seemingly was after numerous warnings to Team Obama about a total lack of oversight.
You are focusing on the front end. During the initiation phase, there are lots of possible solutions. None are right and none are wrong. The next phase is "due process" where the decision is made to go forward or not. If you remember, Team Obama told everyone there were all of these "shovel ready" jobs out there to invest in, and they pushed this one through. No problem, yet. Everything is still proper.
Flash ahead- Team Obama now directs every Federal Agency to get tough on regulations, letter of the law type stuff. OSHA, EPA, NLRB, etc. Trust me on this- I have some real life examples of ludic governmental behavior I am living through right now. So- here, where oversight may be needed, ensuring Federal $ are accounted for and well-spent? Team Obama ignored numerous warnings and actually moved the taxpayer down the list in case of default at the request of one of his fundraisers.
Even liberals are saying that this stinks. I'm surprised you are being an apologist on this issue.
T
rusty-
point taken, you can get "fair and balanced" news EVERYWHERE except fox.
i do agree with mayflower and her comments about china, that had/has an affect.
of course the bankruptcy of solyndra fits right in with the republicans feelings about green energy in general. because this company filed bankruptcy, they can now say that investment in green technology is a bad idea, and that we should just stick with fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
you may have already read this, but here is a list of republicans in washington who get alot of money from nuclear and fossil fuel industries.
cliff stearns, FL; steve scalise, LA; tim murphy, PA; fred upton, MI (1,290, 928); joe barton, TX (3,571,595); lee terry, NE; john sullivan, OK (1,060,278); michael burgess, TX; marsha blackburn, TN; sue myrick, NC; brian bilbray, CA; phil gingrey, GA; cory gardner, CO; morgan griffith, VA; mike pompeo, KS.
the republicans complain about subsidies that must go to solar companies, but defend the subsidies for nuclear, oil, coal and gas, including the $11,184,096 subsidy that the above mentioned republicans received in their campaign contributions. of course since republicans don't believe in global warming, and if they do not see the damage that nuclear plants do if there is an accident or disaster, there is absolutely no need for regulation.
except of course when it comes to women's health and who marries who.
with their hatred of regulations, one would think that the republicans in power would be against all regulations. you are not the only one dealing with regulations. the republicans want to regulate women's health and gays and lesbians into oppression. at abortion clinics in virginia (?) they have tried to regulate them out of business.
they are against corporate regulations, but when it comes to personal freedoms for women and gays, they don't care.
they are for regulations that don't affect them and their rich donors.
one more thing, the republicans cannot resist an investigation for oversight on any democrat, especially a democratic president, when they are guilty of doing the same things themselves. i cannot help but think of the slew of cheating republicans who tried to bring president clinton down for lying about a blow job.
an investigation that should have occured was with the bush administration for taking us into an expensive war, both financially and in loss of life.
the democrats can't take a piss without being investigated by the republicans. they love this sh!t.
One of the headlines that showed up on a google search was that Nuclear Industry political donations tilted toward Democrats. I wold suspect plenty of Democrats have taken donations from petro as well. In fact, try watching a clip on MSNBC.com without petro clip. So I don't think you can point to either side as being more or less "guilty" of taking donations. Unless, if you are trying to mislead and make it look like only the other guys are?
Regulations? Perhaps you forget that, at least before Obama, the President with the most additional regulation was Bush II. I don't know how Obama stacks up to Bush II, though. The single largest regulation to date on business was under Bush II (S-Ox). And, lest we forget that one of the largest de-regulation bills, and the one that many liberals point to as most causative of the great recession was under and signed by Clinton after a 90-8 vote in the Senate- (Gramm-Leach-Bliley). So I think it is a little misleading to pose Rs as you do. Both sides love regs.
Rusty
Invest or perish
logging in
Obama could care less about the tax payers 500 million flushed down the toilet . He is more worried about the optics. Why won't he address the issue? Is it corruption or incompatence?
Jeff- Team Obama is currently rolling out several test messages on what happened to see which will have the best effect on re-election efforts. Once those tests and polls are completed, we will find out what the story is.
I'm starting to see more clearly why we need Stimulus II passed, and passed without change and passed without scrutiny or negotiation. Or debate. It needs to be done very quickly so that these issues don't get discovered to prevent Republicans from using this incompetence against Obama so that he can get re-elected.
The only other clink, besides incompetence, that is evident is the Campus age youth are starting to figure out they will not get the jobs, but they will be allowed to make payments on them for years to come.
I am also curious to see how MSNBC talking heads spin the restructuring of the loan to place Obama's fundraiser ahead of the government- not that it will matter- sounds like it was such a poor "shovel ready" investment that there will be nothing left to distribute.
But, as a positive, it was done fast and without discussison before anyone had a chance to read or learn about it.
rusty, as i wrote above the solyndra deal has been in the works for 3 years. it started with W. bush. i hope you will read my post above, not that you will believe any of it.
there has been much discussion about solyndra for over three years, starting with W. bush and other republicans.
is 3 years too quick???
Suzette- I can post the quotes from both Biden and Obama where they were taking full credit for Solyndra about a year ago, if you can't find them yourself.
Interesting how people on these blogs will give Obama credit for "saving the auto industry", yet shift blame to Bush II for Solyndra, etc. With your argument on Solyndra, then you should credit Bush for the Auto bailout.
You must remember- the Left doesn't really want what the Left claims it wants, and the Right doesn't really want what the Right claims it wants. Neither side is consistent with their own arguments. Wait until the next time the Left proposes an increase in minimum wage and just listen to their arguments and how silly they will sound compared with the arguments for Obama's new jobs plan. You've already pointed out inconsistencies in the Rights arguments elsewhere.
The only thing Obama can do for our economy is to resign. Biden may not be any better, but Obama's reputation is anti business and anti success! He need to help this country by resigning!
Biden was the best insurance Obama could ask for. As backwards as Obama is, wow! Has anyone really listened to Biden????
President Obama is NOT anti-business.
we see what happened when wall street was deregulated. like spoiled children, the rich on wall street and big oil want to do whatever they want with other peoples money, and they don't want to share, even after being bailed out.
President Obama is NOT backwards.
Yeah- you could be right. It's usual to turn on TV and see business leaders extolling Obama for his pro-business policies.
What's funny is that business leaders are accused of being profit driven (duh) and greedy. The accusers will then speak the next topic as business leaders not doing this or that merely to make Obama look bad. Isn't it kind of hard to believe that all of the businesses in USA are willingly taking less volume than is available to make a political point?
I guess the sad part is that the real problem with regulation is that the situation we are in now was driven by housing. Both sides of the aisle were driving chaos on this. You should read "The End of Wall Street" by Lowenstein and you will learn what really happened to cause this crisis. The solution, btw, isn't more regulation on producers. And it could be said that regulation requiring more low income lending for housing, etc, started the ball rolling- from there, unmitigated greed took over. And yes- Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Chuck Shumer, et al were right there with Bill Clinton and Bush II and Greenspan and Bernanke to let it happen.
Solution has to involve regulations preventing financial systems from hiding hiding quality of assets, but not handcuffing manufacturing.