Verum Serum has a breakdown of Obama’s latest pet green project scandal.
Solyndra, a California business which manufactures solar panels, has shuttered and is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This comes just over a year after the company was touted by the President as an example of public-private partnership and the bright future of green energy.
Solyndra received over half a billion in loans from the Treasury at extremely low interest rates, allowing it to build a new manufacturing facility. Congressional investigators have caught a whiff of scandal as the rates given the company were extremely low and neither Treasury or OMB will provide documents to justify them. We’ll get to that part of the story in a moment, first here is Obama visiting Solyndra last year. Watch the first 30 seconds or so:
So it must come as a blow to the President that today Solyndra has shuttered its doors and announced it is filing for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, questions have arisen about the nature of the loans given to Solyndra. Just yesterday Bruce Krasting at Wall Street Pit noted the extremely low interest rates given to Solyndra (notes in red are his):
Congress requested documents related to the Solyndra loan from the Office of Management and Budget. After three months and zero documents produced, a hearing was scheduled. An OMB deputy director was asked to attend but didn’t show up, claiming a scheduling conflict. Finally, OMB allowed that congressional staff could view some of the requested documents on site, but when they arrived in mid-July not all the documents were available and some that were made available had been redacted. Specifically, the information on risk ratings had been lined out. Given that this was exactly the information congress had been looking for the entire exercise was becoming a waste of time. At this point the committee held a hearing to consider issuing a subpoena for the documents. The argument seems to have broken on partisan lines with Rep. Waxman arguing against a “fishing expedition.” Now hat Solyndra has gone belly up, perhaps a little fishing is a good idea.
Evergreen Solar Inc., another taxpayer-subsidized green project, just filed for bankruptcy last month.
Obama is funneling millions of tax dollars into scatterbrained ‘eco-friendly’ schemes, with disastrous consequences. Just like the rest of his Keynesian economics.