Solyndra, ATF, LightSquared, Gibson Guitar

[sees_all1]

For those of you not familiar with current events:

 

[hide=Solyndra]

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/middle-class-guy/2011/sep/17/solyndra-audacity-failure/

http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/08/solyndra-officials-made-numerous-trips-to-the-white-house-logs-show/

California based company that manufactured solar panels applied for government loans during the Bush administration. The Bush administration did not accept the deal because they predicted Solyndra would go belly up in 2011. The new President gets elected, and 500 million dollars is loaned out.

One of the investors in Solyndra is George Kaiser, a billionaire that raised campaign money for Obama. Kaiser also visited the White House four times in the week leading up to the granting of the loan.

One of the curious things about the loan is that it is structured so the tax payers get their money last, even though their money was put in last which is a break from traditional business rules.

 

Similar to Solyndra,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-green-tech-program-that-backed-solyndra-struggles-to-create-jobs/2011/09/07/gIQA9Zs3SK_story.html

The administration has spent 17.2 billion dollars in order to create 3,545 permanent green jobs - a cost of more than 4.8 million dollars per job.

[/hide]

 

[hide=ATF]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious

http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2011/110831/frontpage-gunrunner.html

 

Created a thread for this a while back. Basically the ATF allowed the purchase of 2,000 weapons by straw buyers, only to be later sold to drug cartels in Mexico. Only 600 weapons have been recovered, and as time goes on more and more are turning up at crime scenes, including at the murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents.

As more and more information comes out, it seems that the Attorney General Eric Holder knew about Operation Fast and Furious and may have done his best to cover it up.

[/hide]

 

[hide=LightSquared]

http://nlpc.org/stories/2011/09/16/lightsquared-scandal-explodes

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/planned-4g-network-draws-fire.html

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iDnySF8vFJpV_MMu-4zZx9XmEjdA?docId=CNG.8406293260e81e47562c0d8c46ce3272.e71

 

Someone in the administration pressured a general to change his testimony to Congress to say that LightSquared wouldn't affect GPS as much as it would. Despite the fact that 31 of 33 precision GPS devices are affected by LightSquared's network, the FCC is allowing the plans to proceed.

LightSquared is backed by Philip Falcone, a billionaire Obama supporter.

[/hide]

 

[hide=Gibson Guitar]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/regulation/story/2011-09-17/gibson-guitar-wood-raid/50417242/1

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/07/does-white-house-want-to-ship-jobs-overseas/

 

Gibson Guitar has been raided twice by feds over the wood it uses in Guitars. The thing is that if the wood blanks were finished in the country they were imported from, it'd be "perfectly legal"

Now here’s the rub. While the feds say the wood – as imported – is illegal, had it been ‘finished’ by workers in India, it would have been perfectly legal to import. The wood itself was not banned, just the manufacturing process – or lack of it.

 

The other thing is that

Gibson feels it has been unfairly targeted. “We are being singled out. Very much so,” says Mitchell. “Every music instrument company in the United States uses rosewood fingerboards. Period. And they’re in the same state – they’re buying from the same suppliers, they’re using the same shippers.”

 

The possible scandal comes from

Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s CEO, is a Republican, who has contributed to Republican candidates (as well as some Democratic candidates). Other guitar companies, which have not been targeted, are led by Democrats.

[/hide]

 

My questions are:

-How many of these scandals have you heard of, how often do you keep up with US news?

-How likely is it that President Obama has had a hand in any of these? How likely is it that President Obama was completely oblivious while these events went on?

-Is this a pattern of corruption or crony capitalism by Obama's administration, or just unrelated incidents?

 

My thoughts later.

 

Editing this instead of bumping.

 

Obama looks like he's neck deep in Solyndra, knee deep in LightSquared, has his feet dirtied from the ATF, and has virtually nothing to do with Gibson.

Reasons for this are

-Obama visited Solyndra's factory. Solyndra visited the White House something like 19 times before the loan was passed. Everyone recommended against the loan (DoE, OMB), yet somehow it still went through. Someone had to trump their recommendation, and Obama looks like he's it.

The bigger part of the scandal is that the loan puts all the other investors before Uncle Sam, which is against the law. Apparently this occurred when the loan was modified right before Solyndra went belly up. It'll be hard to prove that Obama was directly involved in the loan modification, but I wouldn't put it past him.

 

-Not too much is known about LightSquared, other than it's been rammed through the FCC despite everyone's warnings. The only thing we know that ties the administration to LightSquared is the general who said that someone from the administration pressured him to change his testimony. All the other donor connections are fuzzy ties, no more no less. If the media does its job properly I think we'd know much more about the facts, but until then...

 

-ATF is a whole different beast. The only thing I can blame Obama for is not outright dismissing Eric Holder and those responsible for this massive cluster.

That's different than blaming him for Fast and Furious, but it takes quite a bit of a conspiracy theory to prove why Obama would want guns in the hands of criminals.

 

-I have no idea why the fed hates Gibson Guitar so much, but I'm guessing it's a misguided middling trying to follow the letter of the law to the t, without much common sense. Very little to blame Obama for.

 

EDIT2:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/rep-issa-reveals-investigation-of-white-house-regarding-solyndra-lightsquared/

[magekillr]

Oh man, this will be lots of fun (and I'm sure I'll get a few warnings from this post, too)...

 

1.) There is no Solyndra scandal.

 

David Roberts: Solyndra is the next ‘Climategate’

The truth behind the episode isn't entirely clear yet. Apparently the Obama administration really did push way too hard to speed up the application. Then again the Bush administration pushed too. I've heard from people that Solyndra's tech was crazy and doomed from the beginning, that it was brilliant and could have triumphed with more support, and that Solyndra was undercut by heavily subsidized Chinese solar companies. Exactly what mix of factors was involved will probably take months to unwind and the truth is unlikely to satisfy any of the parties to the present debate.

 

Jared Bernstein: Solyndra, Risk, and Risk Aversion

But if this episode, amped up by the intense private market ideology of our time, leads us to become totally risk averse in terms of government’s investment agenda, to shut down our efforts to foster innovation in clean energy, for example, we will deeply undermine our economic future.

 

Solyndra’s potential edge was that the company figured out a way to make solar panels without polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar panel construction, and one whose price looked high and volatile through the mid-2000s, making the Solyndra investment an interesting and potentially useful hedge.

 

But as this NYT article points out, the price fell steeply and the decline appears to have largely occurred before the loan was finalized:

 

“…the price drop meant that before Solyndra had received a single DOE loan guarantee dollar, a major part of its cost proposition had been undermined, if not erased.”

 

2.) Just another failure of the Drug War. What do you expect? Everything they'll try to do will be a failure. Oh, btw, Issa knew about this, and said nothing (Issa is easily one of the most corrupt members of the entire Congress anyway).

 

 

3.) Winners and Losers

 

So the White House allegedly asked Shelton to to say (1) that he supports commercial wireless broadband and (2) that he would seek to expedite the Pentagon's review of the technology used by LightSquared.

 

So Republicans are pissed off that the Obama administration might be trying to fast track the regulatory approval process. Uh, isn't that exactly what they have been demanding ever since President Obama took office? A day doesn't go by that you don't hear some Republican or another demand that President Obama lift the regulatory burden on America's "job creators."

 

4.) Heh, this one is really funny. Gibson Guitars breaks the law, and now they're all upset. Boohoo:

 

I won’t go into the fact that Marsha Blackburn voted for the very Lacey Act expansion that has tripped up Juszkiewicz, or the fact that no other major American guitar maker seems to have this much trouble following this law, which Gibson’s now been busted on twice. (For more of the facts on both actions against Gibson, click here.)

Boehner’s Bedfellow: There’s a Reason Gibson’s CEO’s Name’s Pronounced “Jerkowitz”

 

They raided Gibson because they were suspected of using illegally harvested Madagascar ebony, not because they hate Gibson guitars.

 

/yawn. You need to try harder. As much as this administration is full of a bunch of corporatists, they're as clean as can be when it comes to outright corruption (relatively speaking). Wake me up when the rightwing cares about actual issues where the administration has been downright criminal...like civil liberties.

[obfuscator]

Wasn't really aware of any of those, but I don't see how that reflects on the current administration much. Every government makes its mistakes, and I imagine Obama has more important things to do than demand a raid on a guitar manufacturer.

[sees_all1]

Wasn't really aware of any of those, but I don't see how that reflects on the current administration much. Every government makes its mistakes, and I imagine Obama has more important things to do than demand a raid on a guitar manufacturer.

That might be correct, but we know for certain that Obama was involved with Solyndra.

 

Solyndra manufactured solar panels, that cost them $6/sq foot. They then sold them for $3/sq foot. What they lacked in profits they made up for in volume.

Obama was not in the White House when the proposal to back the company initially appeared in Washington, but two weeks before President George W. Bush left office an Energy Department review panel unanimously recommended against making the loan. Even after Obama opted to champion the proposal, career employees at the Office of Management and Budget cautioned against doing so before a final decision was made.

 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/09/solyndra-scandal-exposes-lie-government-investment#ixzz1YJkKcaTb

 

Not only did Obama go against the recommendations of the Energy Department and OMB, but

Under terms of the February loan restructuring, two private investors — Argonaut Ventures I LLC and Madrone Partners LP — stand to be repaid before the U.S. government if the solar company is liquidated. The two firms gave the company a total of $69 million in emergency loans. The loans are the only portion of their investments that have repayment priority above the U.S. government.

 

Argonaut is an investment vehicle of the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, Okla. The foundation is headed by billionaire George Kaiser, a major Obama campaign contributor and a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama's 2008 campaign, federal election records show. Kaiser has made at least 16 visits to the president's aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

 

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/obama-admin-reworked-solyndra-1182334.html