**Written by Doug Powers What’s a week without more suspicious Solyndra news? This should be enough to get us by until the inevitable almost weekly document dump that could come tomorrow. From the Washington Times : Fast running out of money, solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC last summer sold off nearly $60 million worth of inventory for less than $20 million in cash to a newly formed corporate entity closely tied to the company’s biggest investors, records show. Backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees but burning through the little cash it had left, Solyndra made its first sale in late July to a corporate entity that had been formed just a day earlier. Three more transactions followed over the next few weeks with the same buyer, Solyndra Solar II. Todd Zywicki, bankruptcy professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said it’s not unusual for troubled companies to sell off assets to improve liquidity. But he said the inventory sales figure cited by Solyndra — $58.1 million in inventory for $17.5 million in cash — seems unusual. “The test under the bankruptcy code is whether the sale was for reasonably equivalent value and selling inventory at such a huge discount raises real concerns,” he said. “If Solyndra Solar II is owned or controlled by any insiders or anything like that, then it becomes even more suspicious.” No word on how much the whistling robots were re-sold for. Would the aforementioned bankruptcy professor consider these to be “insiders”? Solyndra Solar II was formed in Delaware by affiliates of Solyndra’s debtor in possession lender — investors Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners — as well as other debt holders, bankruptcy and government records show. Another special-purpose entity, Solyndra Solar LLC, was formed to purchase the company’s accounts receivable. Argonaut is the investment arm of a foundation headed by billionaire Oklahoma businessman George Kaiser. Madrone Partners has ties to Wal-Mart’s Walton family. The real test is to wait and see if Solyndra Solar II (Electric Boondoggleoo) sells that inventory for which they paid $17.5 million back to the government for ten times that amount so the Department of Energy can offer it to the next clean energy upstart taxpayers will be on the hook for and thus complete the “green jobs circle of life.” Obviously glass tubes used in solar panels must have not been in demand during the resale process. Your tax dollars at work : **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
See original here:
Report: Solyndra Sold Assets Cheap to Entity with Close Ties to Investors
**Written by Doug Powers Fisker Automotive, which was granted a $529 million US Dept. of Energy loan guarantee and then announced they would assemble the first line of cars in Finland , has announced layoffs at a Delaware plant that has yet to produce a single car: The company says 26 Fisker employees have been let go from the Delaware factory where renowned automotive engineer Henrik Fisker promised to one day begin producing affordable electric sedans. A Delaware newspaper also reported that subcontractors working on the car venture have been let go. “It’s temporary,” said Roger Ormisher, a company spokesman. “We’re being prudent and sensible as a company.” Because the initial phase sounds like it’s been such an unqualified success, the company is asking for terms of the federal loan to be altered so the company can have faster access to their line of time-released taxpayer-backed credit: Accompanying the layoffs was an announcement that Fisker has approached the Department of Energy about revising the targets it had to meet in order to continue drawing money from the federal loan. Whether the Energy Department agrees to alter the terms, and invest more taxpayer [money] in the Fisker venture remains unclear. To date, Fisker has received $193 million in government funds, according to a company statement. Back in October, the company acknowledged outsourcing Karma assembly to Finland, but said that the bulk of its government funds would be used to launch a second-generation electric vehicle, still under wraps, that would be assembled in a shuttered General Motors plant in Delaware. Some of those hired to prepare the Delaware plant for that effort were among those let go. “We have temporarily delayed work at the plant based on ongoing discussions with the DOE regarding funding for the Project Nina program,” the company’s statement said. “As a result, we have laid off 26 people.” This all sounds too familiar, doesn’t it? But since Leo DiCaprio, Al Gore and Colin Powell must not be denied warranty coverage , it’s important for the DoE to help keep Fisker afloat. Related madness: Obama’s green robber barons Eleven other Solyndras Stimulus-backed “green” bankruptcy of the week: Ener1 **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
Read this article:
Fisker Auto Announces Layoffs; Requests Expedited Access to Full Dept. of Energy Loan Guarantee
AP
Visit link:
Iran Vows to Hit Back at Any Country That Stages an Attack
As potential opponents have spent the better part of the last year at each other’s throats, the Obama campaign has been quietly building up their war chest. POLITICO reports that the President’s reelection campaign raised $40 million in the last three months of 2011, ending the year with $82 million in the bank and $3 million in debt. A separate joint fundraising committee supporting Obama’s reelection and the Democratic National Committee, reported raising $24 million in the fourth quarter, spending $23 million and finishing the year with less than $1 million on hand. The Obama campaign also released a list of 450 major bundlers who combined to collect at least $74.4 million for his campaign and the DNC. Some on the list of big money bundlers live up to the stereotype from Obama’s critics of who most supports the President; entertainment elites living in Hollywood and New York. Top fundraisers include movie producer Harvey Weinstein, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eva Longoria, gay power couple James Costas of HBO and former White House interior decorator Michael Smith, and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Wintour is the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Shamed investor and former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was also on the list individuals having raised over $500,000 for the Obama campaign. AP notes that list includes two fundraisers linked to Solyndra LLC, the California solar company that received a $528 million federal loan and then later declared bankruptcy, prompting a federal investigation. Steve Spinner, an Energy Department adviser, raised at least $500,000 and Steve Westly, a venture capitalist who was an unpaid adviser to the department, raised between $200,000 and $500,000.
Originally posted here:
Obama campaign clocks in $82 Million for 2011
This an amazing post at Watt’s Up With That, ” Legal exemplars cited in Michael Mann’s UVA email case “: The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”. PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research. In PE-22, Mann alludes to his “dirty laundry” which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results. PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee — impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA — to “treat this email as confidential” though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author’s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann’s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA. Continue reading . PREVIOUSLY : ” Evidence Does Not Support Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming .”
Read the rest here:
Michael Mann’s Emails
AP – Riding a positive but unpredictable wave, President Barack Obama is returning to two states that are important to his re-election, Nevada and Colorado, to promote his energy agenda and grab some of the political spotlight ahead of his Republican adversaries.
I’m seeing this ad campaign pretty often, so I checked it out. Here’s the homepage, Vote 4 Energy .
Visit link:
Who Owns Big Oil?
Last weekend’s Boston Globe Magazine featured a gargantuan, 3600-word homage to rabid environmentalism in the form of a profile on 350.org founder Bill McKibben. The piece and President Obama’s disastrously short-sighted decision last Wednesday to reject permitting for Transcanada’s Keystone XL pipeline are both symptomatic of a much larger ailment plaguing liberal politicking in general and the Obama administration in particular: a continual willingness to sacrifice the well-being of the majority for an elite, hypocritical minority. The Keystone project, a 1,700-mile pipeline that would bring crude from Alberta’s oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast, has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect decent-paying American jobs and reduce our dependency on the oil of despotic, anti-western nations with questionably sane leaders. But radical environmentalists like McKibben – a second-generation jailed protestor and disciple of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry – seem either not to know or else don’t care what real poverty looks like. And McKibben is among the leaders of the voting contingent to which our president is pandering, purely for political reasons. The Harvard-educated McKibben, who was among the 1,252 people arrested during protests against the pipeline outside the White House last year, is on a mission to “end the tyranny of oil” and coal. Along with his worship of the false god of climate change, McKibben, like many leftist elitists, is committed to “social justice,” according to the Globe piece. What McGibben and his ilk overlook is that real social justice begins with a job, the dignity of work and the ability to care for and feed one’s own family. McKibben & Company’s quest is anti-jobs, and therefore anti- social justice. According to analysis released this month by the Brookings Institution, child poverty has risen 4% in the past five years. That’s an addition of 3 million impoverished kids, most of them added in the time Obama has been in office. The state with the highest rate: Mississippi, in the Gulf Coast – the very region in which many of the Keystone XL’s quarter-million jobs would have been created, and where the Obama administration’s six-month deepwater drilling moratorium cost Americans tens of thousands of jobs. T.V. talk show host – and Obama supporter – Tavis Smiley said recently, “Many of the ‘new poor’ are the former middle class.” Obama claims to be all-in for domestic energy production and job creation, but when handed a no-brainer like Keystone, he chooses to side with a radical minority. Why? As Michael Brune, the head of the Sierra Club said recently, “It shores up the base, definitely.” On Capitol Hill there has been almost universal silence from congressional Democrats on the matter. What does that say about what agenda really drives the Democratic Party? According to a “top Democratic fundraiser” has said the issues driving party donors are “Keystone and gay marriage.” But Obama and the Democrats may soon grow to regret the Keystone decision. There are about 25 million Americans unemployed or under-employed. If you’re out of work or struggling to get by, a politician focused on killing jobs and promoting gay marriage probably doesn’t sound like one with your best interests at heart. Besides all the jobs we now stand to lose out on thanks to Obama’s decision, we also face a considerable new security challenge in the form of a bolstered China. As Rep. Steve King ofIowa said this week: “ If we block [the pipeline] that oil will certainly go to China. It will enrich their economy.” Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper has no intention of waiting for the United States to reverse this wrongheaded move; his goal is to see Canada at the forefront of the energy game. Harper will travel to Beijing next month, where he will likely take part in talks on selling his country’s vast oil supplies to the Chinese government. And China is serious about quenching its thirst for oil. “Chinese firms aren’t just buying stakes, they’re buying whole operations,” reads a piece this month in Canada’s daily Globe and Mail. “It’s a new phase of China’s step-by-step Canadastrategy. It will change not just the oil patch but Canada’s foreign policy. And a game of international energy politics is afoot in Canada’s West.” When Obama finally turns around for a gander at his fellow Washington backers on this latest political choice, he will see he has precious few. Bob Beauprez is a former Member of Congress and is currently the editor-in-chief of A Line of Sight, an online policy resource. Prior to serving in Congress, Mr. Beauprez was a dairy farmer and community banker. He and his wife Claudia reside in Lafayette, Colorado. You may contact him at: http://bobbeauprez.com/contact/
Continued here:
The cost of Obama’s ‘green’ appeasement
