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Solyndra's High-tech Plant To Be Sold
Velcroman1 writes, quoting Fox News: "For sale: manufacturing and office facility with 411,618 square feet, state of the art electrical, air, and power distribution systems — and a troubled past. As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Solyndra is reportedly very close to landing a buyer for its mammoth, high-tech production plant in Fremont, Calif. The listing agent recently gave Fox News a tour of what the new owners will get for their multi-million dollar investment. Now the once-bustling offices, conference rooms, and cubicles are eerily quiet as the facility is 'decommissioned,' according to Greg Matter with Jones Lang LaSalle realty. One wonders about the conversations held, and emails written, in the corner office formerly occupied by CEO Brian Harrison."
About the only entity that would want the place and equipment would be a PRC-controlled entity.
While the bailout was bad, and I disagree with their funding, anything going out of the country would be worse.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"One wonders about the conversations held, and emails written, in the corner office formerly occupied by CEO Brian Harrison."
i'll give you the short version: "How can we milk the government for more money?!?"
What a failure, so many better things that we could have done with that money.
why can't the people in charge be forced to work themselves out of the whole. The whole bankruptcy concept seems way too much like a get out of jail free card.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
With a topic like Solyndra Poe's law should be in full effect on the threads to follow.
In this case the company got dumped on by the Chinese.
Investment is inherently risky. But we have to invest in our future. Some of those investments will go bust. The ones that don't , like the internet, pay for the ones that do many many many times over.
The only people making a whipping boy of this company are people who 1) reflexively hate anything the President has done or 2) work for oil and gas companies.
When something like this happens, I have to wonder if it isn't a shell game, to wit:
1) Company A builds a big expensive ultra modern plant, using investor and/or tax monies.
2) Company A is run into the ground, files for bankrupcy
3) Assets are sold at fire-sale prices to company B, which is ultimately, through very complicated and difficult-to-trace machinations, owned by the same people who originally owned company A.
4) The owners essentially get to keep what they've managed to squirrel away while the company was crashing, and then buy back their facilities for a song, just coincidentally free from any loan or investor obligations.
5) Profit!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Do you have any doubt that he will...?
Ummm.... No. China was, and is, doing the same to the solar panel industry that it did to the steel industry. It is massively dumping solar panels on the country at highly reduced rates because they are subsidized by the Chinese government at a far greater rate than the US is subsidizing the industry here.
Make no mistake about it. There is nothing the US government can do about Chinese dumping or Chinese manipulation of their currency because China holds so much of our debt. Armageddon is coming soon when the Chinese economy falters and the Chinese government calls in those loans. This is another reason the US needs to do something drastic to reduce its debt that China holds. But as long as there remains manipulation by the Chinese government, we will never crawl out of that hole.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
The right wingers are gonna be all over this one. After all any time anything Obama fails at is good for America. It must be nice that we have someone who's fault everything is.
Yes! When you have bad ideas and you fail at trying to implement them, that is a good thing. Why is that so hard for people to understand? When Obama succeeds with his policies, America loses. That is what the saying means.
And to be fair, it's not all Obama's fault. I'd say that very little of it is Obama's fault. Americans don't realize how little power the President actually has. The lion's share of the fault belongs to Congress. It was that way when Bush was president. It's that way now. The difference is that when Bush a Republican Congress, things went very well. When Clinton had a Republican Congress, things went very well. When D's took control of Congress in Jan, 2007, unemployment was at 4.7% and the deficit was about $250 billion. Two years after D control of both houses, the unemployment rate was 7.6% and climbing and the deficit was about $1600 billion. The only blame Bush and Obama deserve is for not vetoing every piece of shit bill that passed their desks. Although, Obama does share much of the philosophy with the Democratic Congress.
Fact is, it doesn't matter who wins the White House this November. What matters is which party gets Congress. God help us if it's a mixed result because then both houses will have to bribe eachother with our money to get anything passed!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Funny, seems to me that four years ago everything was Bush's fault.
What goes around comes around, as they used to say....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
From reasonable post to debunked bullshit (China doesn't hold a more then 12% or so of your debt, and that's not even the government itself) in a single paragraph. /. really is trying to become digg, isn't it?
Dear Mr. "O"....err, Mom and Dad,
Things are going great. Need money for food and rent...please send some soon,
Love Solyndra
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So the republican congress we are staring at is responsble for the weak economy? H wait, I bet you cant wait to join your friends and blame Obama.
Eat your words.
Its International Anti-Trust anticompetitive at its most obvious.... but we dont stop it with tarriffs.... why? International corps own us, too. No american citizen can get any respect close to a large financial entity.... Money is God in the USA... what a shame.
Actually, I think our economy is only afloat as much as it is because China holds so much debt. They have to prop up the dollar because, if the dollar collapses, all the debt that they hold becomes essentially worthless.
I know that's the Republican meme, that you were so horribly persecuted by unfair criticism of Bush that now they're entirely justified in doing the same thing...
But it's not true.
Study of US media bias, October 29, 2007 http://www.journalism.org/node/8197, looks at coverage of the early stages of the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
Newspapers have a pro-Democrat bias:
59 percent of stories about Democrats were positive. 11 percent were negative.
26 percent of stories about Republicans were positive. 40 percent were negative.
TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) have a pro-Democrat bias:
40 percent of stories about Democrats were positive. 17 percent were negative.
19 percent of stories about Republicans were positive
Well done! Now go back to the HuffPost to get more talking points.. (But next time, don't forget the crowd pleaser "Faux News")
Obama did inherit the inbox from hell - but this was not in the in-box. This mess was more or less created by the current administration. They were looking for some fast action and immediate results, so they failed to do some research and took a bit too much risk. If this was a private company - well - the investors knew what they were doing right? I hold the government to a higher, more conservative standard.
Look - judging a president on a single action is silly. But we have to put this one in the loss column.
So the republican congress we are staring at is responsble for the weak economy?
Wow! I don't believe I have to explain this. But, here we go:
Congress is made up of two houses: The House of Representatives and the Senate. The House members are supposed to be closer to their constituents and all of them are elected every two years. The Senate holds elections every two years, but each term is six years with 1/3 of the Senate up for election every two years. Of course, as you know, the President is elected every four years for a max of two terms.
Now, Republicans held the House of Representatives from 1995 until 2007. The Senate was more or less under Republican control through most of the Bush years, but during this time, Senators had a habit of switching sides to get what they wanted. This would either tilt control over the Dems or force a balanced Senate. However, in 2007, both houses of Congress, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate both fell under the control of Democrats. This continued through the final two years of Bush AND THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF OBAMA.
Then, in the most recent election held in 2010, Republicans took control of the House and Democrats maintain control of the Senate. When this happens, very little actually gets done. Bills must pass both houses of Congress before the President may sign them into law or veto them. If the president vetoes a bill, it does not become a law unless 2/3 of the Senate vote to override the veto. If the Senate the House can't agree on legislation, then nothing reaches the President's desk.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I assume you are either from another country and don't know how the US political system works, or you are simply a moron who was too stoned on Saturday mornings to understand the meaning behind School House Rock. The point being that you have have a basic grasp of the political system before you can understand what it means when I tell you...
wait for it...
Republicans only control the House of Representatives. Democrats still control the Senate and the White House.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I bet you cant wait to join your friends and blame Obama.
Um... Please allow me to quote myself from a the very comment you responded to:
And to be fair, it's not all Obama's fault. I'd say that very little of it is Obama's fault. Americans don't realize how little power the President actually has. The lion's share of the fault belongs to Congress.
Any questions?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The whole program that Solyndra got the loan guarantee from was over $16 billion. The Solyndra default is 3.3% of that. The program had a budgeted default rate of over 12%. So far there have been 2 defaults, Solyndra and Beacon Power that amounts to a total default rate is only 3.6%. 90% of the loan guarantees went to wind and solar projects that have contracts with utilities and are unlikely to default.
It's just a made up controversy being used to make political hay.
Fremont CA is home of the failed Solyndra plant, the failed NUMMI auto plant, the failed Sun Microsystems campus, the failed Apple Macintosh factory...
Actually, they can't call in that debt. But a faltering of the Chinese economy is still bad news for everyone however.
Life is not for the lazy.
What a failure, so many better things that we could have done with that money
Truth to be told - this is not the only failure that the American government has funded
Trillions and trillions of American Tax Dollars had been wasted in pet projects favored by politicians
Those precious tax dollars gone to cronies of those politicians
In other words, it's CORRUPTION in practice, but unfortunately, according to the American laws, it's not counted as "corruption"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Bankruptcy isn't just about "moving on" and "getting closure", though accountants do like to acknowledge such things as much as divorced New Agers do. A more significant concern is that when a person or business goes bankrupt, they've usually got some assets left, and multiple creditors that they owe money to, and bankruptcy law is fundamentally about allocating the assets fairly among the creditors. There's also some social policy (because we don't want people starving on the streets), and some incentive to the bankrupt party to cooperate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Dude, Pentagon pisses away $1.5B _a day_ these days. If you're looking to save some of "your" taxpayer dollars, this is where it needs to come from, not from forward looking investments that did not pan out because another country subsidizes their solar panels industry more.
A lot of those failures have been projects that were labelled as "Success!", because they worked out well for the people receiving the money, regardless of whether they did any good for the taxpayers. It's not just the bombs that didn't explode or the ships that sank or airplanes that couldn't fly, it's also the bombs that successfully blew up targets they shouldn't have been dropped on, battleships we didn't need, and airplanes designed to fight the Cold War.
This project really annoys me, though. My commute takes me right by the plant, usually at slow speeds waiting for the freeway exit, so I've been able to watch the construction from the beginning. At first there was no obvious work, just picketers complaining about non-union labor, then construction starting, then the building frame going up and the skin going on, and presumably work happening inside as well. And then instead of opening it's closed. I hope the potential buyers actually go through with it and do something useful with the factory.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A Chinese firm bought up an old car plant in the UK a few years back. Rather than taking over the site they just packed up all the equipment and assembly lines and moved them to China.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Actually, I think our economy is only afloat as much as it is because China holds so much debt. They have to prop up the dollar because, if the dollar collapses, all the debt that they hold becomes essentially worthless.
and that's the real joke on the chinese.
it's also why americans should just print more dollars, to devalue their debt measured in dollars.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Democrats still control the Senate and the White House
But as you mention, bills have to pass both houses. So all a party needs is just one of the House, Senate, and Presidency. With only one they can't really pass anything radical, but they can be obstructionist. They can be obstructionist very well.
And I don't really believe the "democrats control the Senate" line either. It's technically true, but doesn't explain the reality of the situation, which is that the Democrats are a pretty Big Tent party and have no sense of unity and cohesion. Obama can rarely get anything from his agenda through the Senate, which supposedly "his party" controls, to say nothing of the House!
It's a formula at the moment for gridlock, or notions so popular no one opposes it.
The lion's share of the fault belongs to Congress.
Given Congress's approval rating is typically well below the President's (any president), maybe the public has the right idea after all.
There is so much sun in California, there is water to clean panels, social stability to build large generators.
This failure, it does not sound right.
Ah, but proper, intelligent communication, both written and spoken, are.
No they're not. That is the delusion of conceited assholes who like to pretend they're better than other people.
Did your calendar list "idiolect" as your word for the day and made it so that you had to find any way at all to inject it into a conversation?
The term idiolect is a well-known, well established
term used in linguistics when discussing exactly this issue.
To quote one of my parent posters
The fact that so many are uneducated and ignorant does not invalidate the use of the term.
The irony of your effort to cast my using a technical term with a technical, specific, and appropriate meaning as somehow not being useful in a post claiming that artificial, technical, specific language is superior to natural language is not lost on me. It'd be amusing if I thought you'd done it on purpose.
Nice try though.
TL;DR: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Whoosh!
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
They had some interesting technology they just made a lot of mistakes.
They built in california... should have done it in a state that likes manufacturing. They allowed their company to get political. Never a good idea. And they didn't hedge against the price of silicon.
Big airlines buy oil futures to hedge against rises in jet fuel prices. It's just good business. if your business model is controlled by the price of silicon, then buy some insurance against that price going down. It's very easy to do this... I don't think you can buy silicon as a commodity but there are many businesses that track it's value. There are ways to hedge.
Anyway, very sad. I had hopes for those guys. Hopefully someone will buy their tech and implement it. It would be very sad if it just died on the factory floor.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, you are correct. Republicans are in a position to obstruct. But the GP said "So the republican congress we are staring at is responsble for the weak economy?"
Um... no. First, the economy was bad before the Repubs retook control the House. Next, it hasn't gotten worse since they took the House. So, no. They are not responsible for the weak economy.
As for controlling the Senate, it is true that you pretty much need 2/3 control to get absolutely anything passed. However, Obama had this for the first two years of his term. That's how his health care bill got passed. For two years, Obama literally had everything he wanted and there was nothing Republicans could do to stop him. So, blaming Republicans is a lie.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Obama wanted to announce the funding for the plant.. part of his "green jobs" bullshit. Thats why in spite of the DoE/etc already having vetoed the loan under Bush, suddenly found it in their heart to give Solyndra a chance.
Solyndra then ran out of money, the same month they were predicted to run out of money 2 years earlier by the DoE.
"His name was James Damore."
This reminds me of the greenhouse built in my area which would use 'waste steam' to power and heat the production of tomatoes. There was mucho federal dollars flying around for 'stimulus' back then just as now. Providing you had the right political connections. The unit was first built by a Dutch conglomerate with all kinds of federal and state grant monies. Bankrupt within 3 years. This greenhouse has since been reinitialized at least 3 or 4 times with federal grant dollars and has fallen into bankruptcy as soon as the grant monies are spent. HISTORY DOES REPEAT ITSELF. Will we ever learn. The local construction company I worked for at the time only lost about 50 large. Some local business's lost much more. No grant dollars for the local economy. It was not political hay back then and it isn't now. John
How much of the money from this sale does the governmnet get? After all we the people funded part of this company and thus the building. I don't care if the other creditors get their money. The people demand their money back. Like that will actually happen! /sarcasm
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
While the bailout was bad, anything going out of the country would be worse.
Perhaps you could elaborate? Why would we want to retain unprofitable business (nevermind that solyndra was undercut by massive government subsidies in china)?
The fact that something isn't profitable generally means that it won't produce... stuff. So why would we want to keep it around? What long term benefit would be gained, by competing in a market that has investors and developed products?
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Check out the installment of "This American Life" (the NPR radio show) on the history of NUMMI, and how GM completely failed to capitalize on it, long before their implosion. Seriously, it's a fascinating installment, and one that echoes lessons from business school, particularly in the areas of operations and strategic transformation. I really really recommend it.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
fox news is touring this old factory is because it helps further their agenda of demonizing the president and the democratic party
was dead on. Touring that old factory is simply partisan news. No one wants to see some empty warehouse. It's all about keeping Solyndra in the news.
Yes, this was passed by Congress during Bush and signed by Bush. Bush supporters are wrong when they roast Obama over the concept of these green energy loan guarantees under the mantle of "smaller government," because they weren't even his idea. They should look to their own party.
The idea -- wrong or right -- was to help boost this country's position in manufacturing these technologies. By law there was a process established that basically way mirrored the standard due diligence that any smart investor would do. Solyndra's application for funds started under the Bush administration using this process. But the program not being Obama's idea didn't mean he couldn't capitalize on it, making it the centerpiece of "his" green initiative.
But the problems did start with Obama. The government beancounters in charge of vetting applicants, the OMB, basically said that Solyndra was a bad deal as is. When pressed, they asked the administration for more time to do proper due diligence, refusing to sign off on the deal. But because Solyndra was a high-point of Obama's administration, he had approval rushed through over their objections. IMHO, right there some administration officials need to be going to jail.
But that's the innocent part, you could almost forgive them for being too fervent in their push for green energy. The problem is that crony capitalism and conflict of interest also permeate this deal. Billionaire Obama supporter and Solyndra investor George Kaiser helped push through the deal. An Obama official who was trying to push this through, his wife was a lawyer representing Solyndra in the deal. Solyndra execs and investors went to the White House several times before the approval.
For the icing on the cake, early last year Solyndra told the government it was about bankrupt. The OMB basically said good, let them go bankrupt, it would save taxpayer money. But the Obama admin pushed through an unprecedented refinancing and released another 60+ million in financing. Then the Obama-supporting execs took their fat bonuses and let the company go bankrupt.
We can debate subsidies and loan guarantees somewhere else, because when it comes to Solyndra, the only real issue is the corruption of this administration.
The administration was already pushing to up the guarantees to a billion dollars, but the company went bankrupt first. It was a bad deal according to the OMB. Pouring more money on it would have just meant more money for them to burn through. Sadly, Obama still says the Solyndra deal was a "good bet" when his accountants told him it was a financially unsound bet from the beginning.
It wasn't selective at all. Just cut and pasted the first several lines from a summary. I'm sure that it makes you feel better to believe that there really isn't a strong bias among journalists (and journalism schools) toward Democrats, but it has been shown to be there in study after study.
Your tendency to group people together stereotypically is telling.
Just another ignorant American.
I know how all of it works. The issue is that you use your 'argument' selectively, and yet in actuality it is irrational/nonsensical. You don't hear yourself saying two things at the same time right now? Oh wait, maybe you should point at one more spurious circumstance, claim it is absolutely responsible (without reference), and 'prove' your point one more time!
I'll wait while I laugh at how stupid you sound. You're just like Bill O'Reilly, ad hominems, worthless fallacy, some sort of 'appeal to authority' in your tone... What a joke.
You just spin it how you like and say its that way... lol. Too bad you probably vote, and also the ignorant peeps that surround you probably eat up your irrational arguments all day just like O'Reilly fans...
The goal was to funnel money to his big campaign donors who had heavy stakes in Solyndra.
Bush failed, because this program set up during his administration was designed to invest money in renewable energy technology.
They analyzed their own coverage from the 2008 election and found they had been heavily biased towards Obama. They admitted to more column inches and to more favorable stories for Obama as opposed to McCain. They admitted not looking into questionable aspects of Obama's past, such as Tony Rezko and his missing undergrad years. They admitted to allocating serious investigative resources to go through Palin with a fine-toothed comb as soon as she was announced, while doing nothing on Biden.
And this is one of the less liberal news outlets in the country.
However, Obama had this for the first two years of his term.
He didn't though, that was his biggest problem. Just because a senator is a Democrat doesn't mean that person will vote for Obama's proposals, nor will they cave under party pressure. The Republicans are good about whipping their members into line, the Democrats are terrible at it, and that's why the health care bill was an over-compromised mess that no one from either side is happy with.
The US has filed scores of WTO actions against China for dumping products, debt or no debt.
Solyndra failed because they had the spending habits of a 90s dotcom startup. The OMB knew it. The OMB even predicted the month they'd run out of money. But Obama insisted on investing the money in order to funnel it to his large donors.
1) Company A investors and execs seek to take advantage of a government loan program to fund the company
2) Investors and execs contribute heavily to the election campaign of a presidential hopeful
3) Thusly elected president rushes through approval of the loan over the objections of the beancounters who say it's a bad bet
4) Profit! as the investors rape the company for all its worth and execs give themselves fat bonuses as the company slides into bankruptcy
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
No, the program isn't much of a controversy, and Solyndra failing isn't a controversy either. As you say, some rate of failure was expected.
The controversy is that the financial backers of Solyndra were also some of the biggest financial backers of Obama's 2008 campaign. That in itself isn't evil, but the newly-installed Obama administration then rushed through approval of the loan guarantee over the objections of the OMB, who said it was not a financially sound investment. The OMB even accurately predicted the month and year that Solyndra would run out of our money and go bankrupt, and Obama didn't care. In fact, he gave them MORE of our money.
Basically, it was an Obama payoff of fat-cat campaign donors using our tax money. That is a legitimate controversy.
Their products used no silicon. A drop in price of silicon made their products less attractive, although not worthless. Overall, bad management killed the company.
so they failed to do some research and took a bit too much risk
You mean they didn't do the research where the government employee said that the company was going to run out of money in September, so they renegotiated the loan so that Obama's campaign donor would get paid back in a bankruptcy before the taxpayer, even though it was against the law sort of research?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It will be amusing to watch all of this stuff bought up, then shipped overseas. You are absolutely nuts if you want to actually start a business with all of these neat toys in the United States. One of my customers used to own a lumber yard, a single rookie OSHA inspector that didn't even know what the machines were called required them to make so many impossible 'fixes' that they just closed up shop and shipped everything to Costa Rica. It was cheaper to ship everything and start up in Costa Rica than it was to pay all of the fines and ‘fix’ the machines (which were not broken). Oh yeah, and before anyone says they were unsafe, 1 major injury and 3 minor injuries in 20 years, no deaths.
The country is in the hole due to four distinctly Republican policies. Namely, two unpaid for (and unnecessary wars), two mammoth tax cuts for multi-millionaires and a medicare giveaway (at least Obama's health care plan attempts to pay for itself). I don't think anyone with a brain larger than a walnut thinks Gore would have gone down any of those utterly disastrous paths. Now people are screaming for Bush II. Amazing...as always.
If what you say were true, the average deficit under Bush, with the Republican controlled Congress he had for the first six years of his term, would have been more than $250 billion. Instead, it was around $250 billion. Obama's average deficit is around $1250 billion. So it's not the wars. It's not the tax cuts. You are full of shit.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Namely, two unpaid for (and unnecessary wars),
Come now, the Democrats would have invaded Afghanistan too, don't think they wouldn't.
It's the closest the US has come to a "just" war since WWII.
It might have gone a lot differently though without the distraction of Iraq.
If what you say were true, the average deficit under Bush, with the Republican controlled Congress he had for the first six years of his term, would have been more than $250 billion. Instead, it was around $250 billion. Obama's average deficit is around $1250 billion. So it's not the wars. It's not the tax cuts. You are full of shit.
It's all of the above, plus the Keynsian notion that you spend your way of a recession/depression.
If what you say were true, the average deficit under Bush, with the Republican controlled Congress he had for the first six years of his term, would have been more than $250 billion. Instead, it was around $250 billion.
Are you saying that the extra military spending and Bush tax cuts somehow kept the deficit lower than it would have been otherwise? I find this hard to believe. What are your sources/reasoning for this?
Obama's average deficit is around $1250 billion. So it's not the wars. It's not the tax cuts. You are full of shit.
To be sure Obama (and Congress during his term) has been very fiscally irresponsible. He extended the tax cuts (after promising to veto them), and has continued the high military spending. I believe most of the increase in deficit under Obama was caused by the bailout/stimulus.