Search Results for: solyndra

It’s Not Just Solyndra

Featured image This new Romney ad is absolutely sensational. Titled “Not Even Half,” it reviews the Obama administration’s failed “green energy” giveaways. It is beautifully produced, but what I like about it is that it highlights not just the waste but the cronyism of the Obama administration. That is the real key to the “green energy” issue. Cronyism hurts legitimate businesses and damages our economy even–maybe especially–when the companies that benefit from »

More from the Greenfail Beat: The Next Solyndra?

Featured image A couple weeks back I jumped the gun in lumping in A123 Systems, a car battery maker that received $279 million in Obama loan guarantees, on a list of bankrupt green energy companies.  I promptly corrected the post when the company flagged the mistake.  Yesterday my pal Robert Bryce, writing over at National Review Online, says it’s only a matter of time until A123 become the next Solyndra: Here’s my »

More On Keystone, Solyndra and Energy Policy

Featured image Barack Obama’s blocking of the Keystone pipeline project continues to draw criticism from nearly all quarters. At Energy Tomorrow, Mark Green writes: The fact is you can’t be for infrastructure and for jobs – and be against actual projects that create jobs. You can’t be for working men and women and then deny them and thousands of other Americans real jobs with real paychecks. Laborers’ International Union of North America »

Solyndra to Pay Bonuses!?!?

Featured image So says the Washington Times: up to $50,000 as “incentive” payments to top executives.  “Incentive” for what–burning up taxpayer dollars, with more taxpayer dollars? »

Solyndra Execs Leave With Cash. Yours.

Featured image At The Corner, Andrew Stiles notes a report from Green Technology that Solyndra’s executives substantial bonuses shortly before their company declared bankruptcy, having run out of your money. The taxpayers likely will be stuck with a $530 million bill. Here is where some of it went: Karen Alter, senior vice president of marketing, received two $55,000 bonuses on April 15 and July 8 of this year, on top of her »

Elvis Sings The Solyndra Song

Featured image Who is Barncat Jones? I have no idea, except that I recently started getting emails from him. This is his latest production–Elvis sings “The Solyndra Song,” to the tune of “Love Me Tender.” It is pretty funny, and not a bad Elvis impression, either: »

“Solyndra On Wheels”

Featured image Yesterday a guy whose name appears to be Andrew Fox happened to see a very cool car where he lives in the D.C. area, and took the trouble to investigate. As a result, he highlighted an Obama administration boondoggle that in some respects is worse than Solyndra. The car turned out to be a Fisker Karma–a gasoline/electric hybrid vehicle that sells for around $100,000: It’s a gorgeous vehicle, manufactured in »

Solyndra II, and More Green Jobs Failure

Featured image Emails released by a Congressional committee show, almost unbelievably, that the Obama administration was poised to lend Solyndra another $469 million loan during the summer of 2010, even as auditors “warned the company was in danger of closing due to its rapidly mounting debts and expenses.” Analysts in the Office of Management and Budget greeted the proposal for a second loan with gallows humor. One wrote in an email: Possible »

A Company “by the name of Solyndra”

Featured image In the course of following the unfolding Solyndra scandal there was one small detail that piqued my suspicions but which I hadn’t had time to chase down further.  It concerns the Obama donor and Solyndra investor George Kaiser, who made numerous trips to the White House while the loan guarantee was in process, meeting with senior White House staff. About what?, you may well ask.  Not Solyndra, Kaiser has said.  »

The Story of Solyndra

Featured image Video is a powerful medium. This short video by the Institute for Energy Research may not tell you, as a sophisticated news consumer, anything you didn’t already know about the Solyndra debacle. But it is a powerful summary of the Solyndra scandal, especially for those who don’t follow the news obsessively. So I’d suggest you share it with your friends! »

Solyndra Update

Featured image One of the points I make in my “President Solyndra” story in the Weekly Standard is that the loan guarantee program turned Solyndra from a $300 million mistake confined solely to stupid private investors into a $1 billion dollar mistake that took taxpayers for more than a half-billion, and that this is merely the largest (so far) emblem of the Obama administration’s economic philosophy that is wiping out lots of »

Is Solyndra A Fluke?

Featured image That’s what the New York Times editorial board thinks. In an editorial yesterday, the paper denounced what it called a “panic” over the collapse of Solyndra. In the view of the Times, all is really well on the “green energy” front: Solyndra made a bad bet, investing heavily in a new type of solar array just as the price of silicon, the main ingredient in competitors’ solar cells, was dropping. »

President Solyndra

Featured image My cover story in the Weekly Standard is out this morning: “President Solyndra and His Mean Green Wealth-Wasting Machine.”  Here’s the “nut graf,” as they say in the feature magazine trade: Even if the administration eventually escapes any finding of legal wrongdoing, Solyndra threatens to haunt the green energy campaign in much the same way that the collapse of Lincoln Savings became the emblem of the savings and loan industry’s »

Solyndra Pleads the Fifth

Featured image This morning, two top executives of Solyndra, CEO Brian Harrison and CFO W.G. Stover, appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigative panel. They didn’t testify, however. They declined to answer every question put to them on the ground that the answers might tend to incriminate them. The Fifth Amendment, which protects witnesses against self-incrimination, is pretty much an all-or-nothing thing. The witness can identify himself and perhaps answer »

From Enron to Solyndra

Featured image One of our more constructive critical commenters posed a challenge on my short Solyndra post on Tuesday, namely, did you folks get this worked up about Enron’s collapse? Short answer: Yes we did.  Longer answer: Starting before it collapsed in fact, and for much the same reason—its seduction into the politicized world of crony capitalism.  Enron’s collapse bears some striking similarities to Solyndra, namely, a business model that increasingly depended »

Quick Take on Solyndra

Featured image I’ve got a short squib up tonight about the Solyndra fiasco on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog.  I’ll have a much, much longer treatment of Solyndra coming out this weekend.  Stay tuned. »

Obama lied, Solyndra died

Featured image The Obama administration is joined at the hip to Solyndra, the company that in happier days manufactured solar panels. The Obama administration touted Solydra as a model. According to Obama, Solyndra pointed the way to the future. It served as the administration’s flagship example of using taxpayers’ money to boost clean energy manufacturing and create jobs. In late May 2010, when Obama was in California for his fourth fundraiser for »