Chavez: Clean Energy Crash-and-Burn

Linda Chavez

Townhall - The biggest star in the Obama firmament of green-jobs companies has just imploded. Solyndra, a California-based firm that produced solar panels, declared bankruptcy this week, putting more than a thousand additional workers on the unemployment line. The Solyndra story tells you all you need to know about President Obama's ability to "create" jobs -- green or otherwise. Solyndra was no ordinary startup. When the company broke ground on its plant, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and California's then-governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, used a golden shovel to dig the first hole. And it wasn't just the shovel that was gold-plated. The company received over half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees for the project. But U.S. taxpayers will likely never see a dime repaid now that the company has gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The loan guarantees were controversial from the outset. The chief investor in Solyndra was George Kaiser, a major Obama fundraiser. The guarantees were part of a $90 billion federal program, but Solyndra was first in line to receive the largesse. House Republicans have subpoenaed White House documents and are now investigating whether Solyndra received favorable treatment because of its political ties. There seems to be more than a whiff of old-fashioned corruption here, but only a thorough investigation will tell.
One thing is certain: The president and secretary of energy made repeated trips to Solyndra's Silicon Valley plant over the last couple of years, using the facility as a backdrop to deliver clean-energy agitprop. The president's most recent trip there occurred in May 2010, not long after a government audit questioned whether the company could even survive. Read full column here: News New Mexico

Chavez: Clean Energy Crash-and-Burn