PHOENIX, March 22, 2012—President Barack Obama today once again thwarted honesty to claim that the failed solar energy company, Solyndra, was not the administration’s program, “per se.”
In an interview with Marketplace.org, the president pivoted from taking the blame for the failed Solyndra deal and instead blamed its rupture on Congress.
“This was not our program, per se,” the President said, “Congress—Democrats and Republicans—put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it’s easy to raise money for startups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start up companies get to scale.”
What Obama left out of that interview was the immense payday Obama campaign bundlers and investors received from the Solyndra loan deal—something that the Obama administration had huge participation in.
At the time of its announcement, the Solyndra loan was a disgusting and unethical smokescreen designed to propagandize the American electorate into thinking Obama was serious about job creation and lowering the cost of gas via new energy solutions.
However, when you look deep behind the scenes into the Solyndra loan, you see a much different story, a story of blatant crony capitalism.
The first instance in which the cronyism began, was the months prior to the approval of the Solyndra loan by the Department of Energy in March of 2009, when top Obama bundler and liberal billionaire, George Kaiser, visited the White House numerous times to “check up” on the pending loan guarantee.
Kaiser held the biggest stake in the now defunct and FBI-raided Solyndra.
Additionally, White House logs revealed that top Solyndra executives and investors held at least four separate visits to the White House, the week before Solyndra received your taxpayer dollars.
All of these meeting took place while White House budget analysts warned in an email that, “this deal is not ready for prime time.”
Simultaneously, emails obtained by The Washington Post show that officials from the Office of Management and Budget felt like the White House put too much pressure on them to approve the Solyndra loan.
“We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews,” the emails read.
In conjunction with White House pressure, Steve Spinner, a major Obama 2008 fundraiser and now an advisor for the Department of Energy, wrote in an email about the final decision urging them to approve it, “how f*cking hard is this?”
Coincidentally, Spinner is married to a partner at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini, which represented Solyndra in its loan application process.
After being under the gun from numerous top officials and ignoring these copious warnings, on March 29, 2009, the Department of Energy announced that it had approved a loan to Solyndra for $535 million. This loan guarantee made Solyndra the poster child of the “green stimulus.”
Obama visited the Solyndra plant on May 26, 2010, boasting about the loan saying, “the true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” He praised Solyndra as a Recovery Act (stimulus) success story.
Of course, it all went downhill after Obama’s visit.
In the beginning of 2011, top Solyndra executives disclosed to the Obama administration that they were on the brink of liquidation. The administration immediately helped by refinancing the $535 million federal loan, allowing the government to release another $67 million in taxpayer dollars to Solyndra.
Should Solyndra be liquidated, $385 million owed to the United States would be subordinated to the $75 million invested this year by investors, including, of course, George Kaiser.
However, the refinancing failed and on September 6, 2011, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy resulting in the layoff of all 1,100 workers.
Two days following its bankruptcy filing, the FBI raided Solyndra’s headquarters in California and later a Congressional investigation was announced.
Today that investigation is still ongoing and no new developments have arisen.
However, since the Solyndra disaster, it has been confirmed that well over $3.9 billion in federal funds went to 21 “clean-energy” companies that have strong ties to top Obama officials. To put that into perspective, the Solyndra loan was only $535 million or 13.7%.
So when Obama today claims that Solyndra was not his “program, per se,” you can clearly see that he is trying to run from his outright failure.
President Obama was warned on numerous occasions that Solyndra simply wasn’t ready to receive this huge sum of taxpayer dollars and that it would result in utter failure. However, he knew he had to help out his buddies that helped get him to the oval office.
It is clear that the Obama administration’s ‘green energy’ policy has basically become a campaign bundler payback program.
Solyndra isn’t the only company that has fallen victim to Obama’s bundler ‘payback’ program. Just recently we’ve seen it in Solazyme, a green algae company that received $25 million in federal grants and has close ties to top Obama bundlers.
Email Henry D’Andrea at writedandrea@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter (@TheHenry)
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