The Glade 4.0

I still don't get it. Assuming Solyndra was doing very well, that would be 550million, for 1,100 jobs. WTF.

But putting all that aside, Bilbray is astonished that no one appears to have second-guessed the decision to build a new facility in the first place, which he calls “absurd.” With the number of Bay-Area start-ups constantly in flux, and with businesses “fleeing the state” in search of more favorable economic conditions, there is no shortage of facilities available to be rented or retrofitted to accommodate even high-tech companies like Solyndra.

Bilbray suspects that costs weren’t taken into account in this case because, as far as the administration was concerned, cost wasn’t an issue. “Part of the reason it was chosen was as more stimulus,” he says. “Which means we don’t worry about the cost-effectiveness. Throwing money at the economic crisis is an answer in itself. The taxpayer should be really nervous about that.”

What are your thoughts on the Gunwalker issue RD?

Billionaire philanthropist and entrepreneur George Kaiser has come under scrutiny for his possible role in a complex investment scandal involving California solar company Solyndra, the White House and two of Kaiser’s investment firms.

It’s a complicated story, and one that’s still unfolding.

The short of it: In 2009, Solyndra received $527 million dollars in loan guarantees from the Federal Financing Bank/U.S. Treasury. So when the firm filed bankruptcy on Wednesday, citing an inability to compete with its Chinese rivals, the FBI responded by raiding the company. From Thomson-Reuters:

The search comes amid intensifying pressure on the Obama administration, which championed Solyndra as being at the forefront of solar technology when President Barack Obama visited the company’s Fremont, California, facility in 2010.

“We are executing search warrants at Solyndra regarding a joint FBI and Department of Energy Office of Inspector General investigation,” Julianne Sohn of the FBI said in an email.

Here’s where Kaiser enters the picture. From MuniLand:

Two of Solyndra’s largest investors are Argonaut Ventures I, L.L.C. and the GKFF Investment Company, LLC. Both firms are represented on the Solyndra board of directors by Steven R. Mitchell (see Solyndra S-1 page 119). Both are investment vehicles of the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

According to the Daily Caller, Kaiser was present at the White House 16 of the 20 times Solyndra officials and investors visited.

The insinuation is that Kaiser, an Obama donor, may have had undue influence in convincing the Obama Administration to invest $500 million in an unproven upstart energy company.

To further complicate things: according to MuniLand, Solyndra’s financing documents were re-written in February of this year, re-prioritizing Kaiser’s Argonaut above the Department of Energy (as in, above the taxpayers) as the first in line to be repaid.

Kaiser, for his part, has denied any impropriety.

Yep.

This is why the private investment angle is problematic.

Would there have been private investment if the government did not toss its hat in?

Yeah, I read about that. I don't know if I'm a naif or a cynic, but I generally figure there's some baseline amount of extra access and influence that big money donors and/or business interests get, but that it rarely rises to the level of "Here's a big envelope of cash, Senator. Now, about those contracts...." For example, I have no doubt that Cheney's connections with Halliburton had an impact on Halliburton's level of access and thus its success in obtaining contractor work in Iraq; and I don't doubt that Paulson's Wall Street background influenced his decisions about how to handle the big banks with the TARP bailout. Likewise, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Solyndra had a better shot at securing government backing because Kaiser was able to bend the President's ear about this great new solar project he was working on.

I guess I just don't think of that sort of thing as "corruption", per se, as long as the ultimate decision that gets made is reasonable on its own merits. Even without their extra connections, Halliburton would have been on every shortlist for Iraq construction projects; Goldman Sachs would have received TARP funds; and Solyndra would have been in the running for DOE support. So, absent some pretty compelling evidence of true quid pro quo, I tend not to get too worked up about those sorts of defensible decisions.

Conceptually, though, the whole idea of government loans/guarantees is to fund things private lenders/investors are reluctant to get into and, ultimately, to draw that private debt/equity funding into the deal.

In this case, though, the private lending charge was lead by an individual who was pretty deep in bed, it seems, with both the administration and Solyndra, and who, less than a year after the gov't loan was made, got his investment prioritized over the gov't.

DOE's outside counsel (MoFo)

Hard to say. There's been some talk that government loans/guarantees can crowd out private lenders in some circumstances because the government has first priority in bankruptcy, so if the government wasn't there, maybe more private lenders would have come in, and we'd have ended up with similar levels of private equity investors as well. Alternatively, I've seen some reports that private lenders were staying away because they were wary of Solyndra's business projections, in which case, absent the government, there would have been no debt funding and the private investors probably would have stayed away.

Conceptually, though, the whole idea of government loans/guarantees is to fund things private lenders/investors are reluctant to get into and, ultimately, to draw that private debt/equity funding into the deal.

Sept 20 (Reuters) - Solyndra LLC's chief executive and chief financial officer will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions put to them at a Congressional hearing on Friday, according to letters from their attorneys obtained by Reuters.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.