Current Quarter Expenses.
Posted on 11/20/2011 8:48:43 AM PST by Kaslin
President Barack Obama likes to brag that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, won a Nobel Prize in physics. You would think that means that Chu is a brainiac who makes shrewd decisions and is extremely aware of whatever is happening around him. But as his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on Thursday revealed, there's a world of information that escapes Chu's notice.
The subcommittee is investigating Chu's decision to make Fremont, Calif., solar power company Solyndra the first recipient of a federal energy program loan in September 2009. Two years and $528 million later, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, and it looks as if taxpayers will not see a dime of it. The Nobel Prize winner's pet pick was a bust.
Thursday was supposed to be Chu's moment to take responsibility for this high-profile bad "bet" -- as Obama once put it. Chu did say, "The final decisions on Solyndra were mine." Yet by the end of the hearing, Chu was using the passive voice and putting the onus on other people. As he looked back at the whole thing, Chu said that "competent decisions were made by the people in the loan program," that green energy is important and that everyone knew "there were risks."
If the White House was pushing for the Solyndra deal because Obama campaign contribution bundler and frequent White House visitor George Kaiser owned an equity firm that backed Solyndra, it was news to Chu. Ditto on communications between Solyndra backers and top White House operatives. Who knew?
The Nobel laureate was "not aware" of staffers' predictions that Solyndra would go broke, even run out of cash in September 2011.
In September 2009, Chu approved the Solyndra loan. He clearly missed the Office of Management and Budget staff's recommendation that the deal be "notched down" in light of "the weakening world market prices for solar generally." When he showed up at Solyndra's groundbreaking, Chu announced, "If you build a better solar panel, the world will beat a path to your door."
As Rick Perry would say, "oops."
In March 2010, PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that Solyndra's recurring losses and negative cash flows raised "substantial doubt about (its) ability to continue as a going concern."
And still, Chu was a booster. In May 2010, Obama appeared at a Solyndra event, chatting up Chu's Nobel history and proclaiming, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra."
A month later, Solyndra canceled a planned $300 million public offering.
This might be a good place to mention that shortly after winning its first loan guarantee, Solyndra applied for a second, this one for $400 million. To its credit, the administration did not approve the loan.
By October, CEO Brian Harrison had informed the Energy Department that the company was about to lay off workers. According to an email from Kaiser's investment fund, "the DOE ... requested a delay until after the election (without mentioning the election)."
Voila. Solyndra announced it would shutter one of its plants and lay off 40 workers Nov. 3, the day after the election. Chu testified he would not have approved such a political request.
Now Chu admits he approved a deal that allowed investors to put $75 million into Solyndra in order to give the company a chance to survive. He acknowledged that the second deal included a sweetener that put investors ahead of taxpayers in the payback line that follows bankruptcy.
Sadly, when that expensive (for taxpayers) gambit failed, Solyndra laid off 1,000 workers.
Chu rejected the notion that incompetence and politics may have been factors in this half-billion-dollar blunder. "It's extremely unfortunate what happened," said Chu, "but the bottom fell out of the market; it was totally unexpected."
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., came to Chu's defense. "We have lost the money," he announced. "It's unfortunate, but there's no scandal there."
No scandal? In February 2009, former Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet was so sure he'd get the loan that he set 10 conditions for the administration to meet to help him raise another $147 million. No. 9: "Fundraising support after conditional commitment: Steven Chu visits Solyndra with press interviews (target by end of March)."
Just who worked for whom?
Obama is proof that it doesn’t take much to get a Nobel prize...it’s far more important to be of the correct political persuasion.
The term Nobel prize doesn’t do anything for me. It’s just another “award” like the Oscars and Grammys that communists give to other communists. Artsy fartsy stuff. The chief of the Navajo tribe went to Oslo a few years ago to pick up an award from the Nobel hippies after declaring the Navajo reservation a Nuke Free Zone. LOL!
It must be true there isn’t one person in the Obama tribe that can do anything right.
Stooges the entire lot of them.
Chu may be a somewhat good scientist who is a rabid believer in global warming but he is no business guy.
Chu was the perfect patsy for Obama to bring in while Obama and his Chicago robbers busted out the US Treasury. Chu is now going from being a patsy to the fall guy.
We? We have lost the money? I beg to differ. Well Golly Waxman, we should just chalk it up to 'lesson learned, no harm no foul' then, eh? Perhaps I'll try that method with my finances.
I lost all respect for the Nobel Prize when Arafat got one. When one of the most notorious terrorists on the planet wins the Nobel all credibility is destroyed. It hasn’t improved much since.
Just above the post about Chu was a post referencing Gladwell’s explanation that superior intelligence is not a good indicator for success. I’ve known this for years. MENSA membership is obtained with an IQ of 140 or so, but a actual MENSA meeting is a robust gathering of underachievers. Chu can’t be described as an underachiever, but it’s easy to imagine that a gathering of highly intelligent progressives would resemble a MENSA meeting, i.e., too deep in thought trying to save the world to notice that someone pulled the fire alarm.
doot doot doot...another falls under the bus
doot doot doot...another falls under the bus
and another one falls...another one falls
another falls under the bus...
Well what do you expect from Henry Nostrilus Waxman? He’s as dumb as they come
Maybe the barking moonbat libtards that vote for Nostrilitus Waxman ought pay the rest of the country back by paying that $528 million to us out their district.
Go ahead Cryboehnor, dare you to hold that vote on the house floor.
Here is a problem with Obama and Chu on this whole Solyndra thing.
They don’t understand how ideas become industrialized. They don’t understand all the things that have to come together to get something new to work. Since they don’t understand it, it seems random to them and they start talking about risks as if they are probabilities.
So, like buying a lottery ticket, they think that to win they have to play. They have to put down money on a whole lot of projects and some will come up winners and some will come up losers. Randomly. They think the reason private investors don’t invest in these new technologies is because they are “risk adverse” and “only interested in profits.”
The truth of the matter is that after the fact, the way investors and technologists dissect it, it’s readily apparent that the new thing was doomed from the start. It’s not random. It just wasn’t known. So investors and technologists spend a lot of time figuring out what they know and don’t know about a technology. It’s not aversion to risk. It’s aversion to not knowing and making dumb mistakes.
Chu doesn’t realize that he decided to NOT know. He decided that since he didn’t know, no one could know. He was wrong of course but his ego will never let him admit that.
“Chu was the perfect patsy for Obama to bring in while Obama and his Chicago robbers busted out the US Treasury. Chu is now going from being a patsy to the fall guy”
Explains why everyone in the administration is an academic. They have no clue and can plead ignorance.
“I’ve known this for years. MENSA membership is obtained with an IQ of 140 or so, but a actual MENSA meeting is a robust gathering of underachievers. “
Gosh do I ever agree.
I dated a very nice lady in SE Kansas. She was a member of MENSA. She was an editor of a tiny paper in Pittsburg Kansas and happy with her position. She convinced me to go to a meeting at Pizza Hut with her peers. They were just run of the mill folks but were very impressed with their MENSA status. They weren’t impressed with the fact that I had two masters degrees in the hard sciences, several patents and well published. I wasn’t MENSA, I somehow had cheated. Their entry pamphlet was silly ass puzzles. I referred them to “Fermats Enigma” and how it got solved by Simon Singh. They looked at me like I was speaking left handed Swahilli. I am just a pretty average guy for an engineer but I could follow Singhs’ proof. In fairness it is easy when you have the answer. What worked for me was a good engineering base and lots of practice and ambition.
Just my thoughts
the dozer
back to Pats premium home made gin
My eldest son is the classic overachiever. I have never classified him as my smartest child, but he has been on auto-pilot since the second grade. He kept bugging Harvard until they admitted him, at the age of 29, to get his second degree. He is paying for it himself, with money he has earned since his FIRST graduation. I’m sure MENSA couldn’t use him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.