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Romney a hypocrite on Solyndra

Puppycow

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Puppycow
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Romney Bashes Solyndra’s Loan as Solar Company He Backed Fails

Republican Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama last week for backing failed Solyndra LLC, just days before a solar-power company Romney supported when he was governor of Massachusetts went out of business.

Konarka Technologies Inc. filed to liquidate on June 1 after getting state and U.S. aid, a development that may blunt Romney’s case against Obama’s use of tax money to fund clean- energy innovation and muddy his attempts to use Solyndra to show Obama’s broader economic failures, a professor said.

. . .

Romney, a co-founder of Boston-based private-equity firm Bain Capital LLC, promoted state aid during a January 2003 press conference in Lowell, according to a statement from Ameresco Inc. (AMRC), a Framingham, Massachusetts-based company that also won state help. Romney took over as governor that month.

Romney gave Konarka a $1.5 million loan, part of $9 million in state financing to clean-energy companies. Romney also announced that a restructured green fund would provide $15 million in support for renewable energy in the state.
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Not a good counter, IMO. It smacks of buying into the Republican narrative and Romney can easily blame the other officials.
 
Believing business loans are legitimate roles of state government and not federal is not hypocritical.


Not that it is his excuse.
 
I was reading the latest issue of IEEE spectrum and it had an article on the status of coal gasification, both in China and here. Look like the cost overruns are in the billions, here and there. And since we are talking about utilities we are talking about direct costs to tax payers. The one here in Indiana having been under Republican supervision the entire time.

So the size of public money involved is pretty related.

And how is state and federal government loans all that different? They both represent the public tax payers.
 
Puppycow said:
Romney Bashes Solyndra’s Loan as Solar Company He Backed Fails
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A taxpayer-funded investment in a company that ends up failing isn't the main complaint when it comes to Solyndra AFAIK. Sure, there is plenty of gloating from the right about the failure of eco-weeny business models, but the main complaint about Solyndra concerns the Obama administration steering funds/loans towards his donors/supporters by exerting pressure inappropriately, which caused a large amount of $ to be given to a company which was already on shaky ground.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...nvestigation/2011/09/13/gIQAr3WbQK_print.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
 
mikedenk said:
A taxpayer-funded investment in a company that ends up failing isn't the main complaint when it comes to Solyndra AFAIK. Sure, there is plenty of gloating from the right about the failure of eco-weeny business models, but the main complaint about Solyndra concerns the Obama administration steering funds/loans towards his donors/supporters by exerting pressure inappropriately, which caused a large amount of $ to be given to a company which was already on shaky ground.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...nvestigation/2011/09/13/gIQAr3WbQK_print.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
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LOL
 
mikedenk said:
A taxpayer-funded investment in a company that ends up failing isn't the main complaint when it comes to Solyndra AFAIK. Sure, there is plenty of gloating from the right about the failure of eco-weeny business models, but the main complaint about Solyndra concerns the Obama administration steering funds/loans towards his donors/supporters by exerting pressure inappropriately, which caused a large amount of $ to be given to a company which was already on shaky ground.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...nvestigation/2011/09/13/gIQAr3WbQK_print.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
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Steering funds towards donors/supporters? Like Romney has promised to do?

Specifically, Romney attacks -- and pledges to undo -- two critical reforms implemented by the Obama administration: (1) reforming student loans and (2) holding for-profit colleges accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse.

In the recent bad old days, the big firms dominating the student loan business -- Sallie Mae, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, etc. -- got paid as if they were lenders, when in fact they were merely loan servicers; it was us taxpayers who actually took the risk of students defaulting on loans. These banks then used our money to hire lobbyists to protect their billions in unwarranted profits. The Obama administration stood up to them, and Congress, with nowhere left to cut spending, finally ended this absurd giveaway. There's absolutely no logical reason to restore this massive waste of taxpayer money. You would only do it if a central principle of your presidency was to hand out gifts to special interests who helped you get elected. Unfortunately it looks like Romney might want to be just that kind of president. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo employees are ranked Nos. 3, 6, and 10 among the top 2012 Romney donors.
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Did Massachusetts taxpayers move to the back of the line behind wealthy private investors (who just happened to be big Obama donors) when it comes time to getting repaid, like in the Solyndra deal?
 
WildCat said:
Did Massachusetts taxpayers move to the back of the line behind wealthy private investors (who just happened to be big Obama donors) when it comes time to getting repaid, like in the Solyndra deal?
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Is there evidence that happened for Obama? IIRC, most of the ground work was done under the Bush admin, and investigation found nothing substantive.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Is there evidence that happened for Obama? IIRC, most of the ground work was done under the Bush admin, and investigation found nothing substantive.
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But bush was in the pocket of Obama the whole time. He knew his job was to wreck the country so Obama could take over.
 
Romney a lying, slime ridden lying republicker????:rolleyes::eek::eek::eek:



OH, please say it ain't so.............(if you can do so with a fairly straight face)....
 
mikedenk said:
A taxpayer-funded investment in a company that ends up failing isn't the main complaint when it comes to Solyndra AFAIK. Sure, there is plenty of gloating from the right about the failure of eco-weeny business models, but the main complaint about Solyndra concerns the Obama administration steering funds/loans towards his donors/supporters by exerting pressure inappropriately, which caused a large amount of $ to be given to a company which was already on shaky ground.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...nvestigation/2011/09/13/gIQAr3WbQK_print.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
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The Indiana Economic Development Corporation is practically a PR arm of the Daniels administration. It also pushes for tax credits for companies that want to relocate to the state. It pushes very hard for approval of any major "job creation" plan because it gives the State admin a chance to do a major PR Media blitz, involving the Governor on live TV.

Romney is very much on the same boat as Daniels. They are both primary "business" interested but when push has come to shove, such as Daniels' response to State of the Union, they very quickly adopt the talking points of the right-wing fringe.
 
WildCat said:
...


Why yes it did [subordinate the government loans to other investors], and under Obama, not Bush. This is extremely unusual, the government almost always gets first dibs on any money owed in a bankruptcy. But not for Solyndra.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/News/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=9021
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This strikes me as a pretty big deal. I did notice that Wildcat's source was a House committee press release, which I suspect is politicized to the max. But still, on the surface this looks bad.

I think we need to see some sort of a response to this claim by the Obama administration before we know much about what went on here. Was Van Jones involved with the day to day negotiations on this loan? Was Steven Chu the main driver?

Although I would probably not have thought the loan was a good idea on ideological grounds, I can see the arguments for it and I am sympathetic a bit to the notion that conditions changed rapidly when Chinese solar cell manufacturers precipitously reduced prices, but for the US to have put up 575 million dollars in a loan without significant collateral and in a deprecated position to original investors looks pretty shady to me.

Right now, I am thinking it is a good thing that there is an opposition party, albeit one driven by its own self serving purposes, to push for a better accounting of what went on here.
 
Puppycow said:
Fact Checkers Debunk Romney's Solyndra Claim
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Interesting but doesn't quite go to the claim that the administration got a crappy deal with regard to position of the government in the event of a bankruptcy. Were the Obama officials rubes or did they make a reasonable deal that just turned to crap because of unforeseen circumstances?

FWIW, I am very skeptical of Democratic happy talk about green jobs. The fact is, IMHO, that the combined cost of labor and other expenses in the US is too high to compete effectively in many markets and nothing is going to fix that until costs are reduced in the US. The Democratic view that they are going to jump start a green industry in the US and that this is going to somehow overcome the fundamental problems with the US economy is, I think, unfounded.

So was the Solyndra failure the result of bad luck, bad ideology, corruption or incompetence? I tend to believe it was bad ideology with a dash of incompetence and bad luck. But I could easily change my mind.
 
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