[StBernard] 'Obama put $535 million into the place -- where'd it go?'

[Westley Annis]

'Obama put $535 million into the place -- where'd it go?'

6:00 AM, September 1, 2011 ι Abby W. Schachter

"They laid me off at 6 a.m.," said a worker who gave his name as James.
"When I showed up for the early shift, they said, 'Report over here' and
sent us to a halfway constructed, big open room. The CEO got up and said,
'We ran out of money, and we're filing Chapter 11.' Everybody was totally
surprised. Just yesterday, we'd started up new equipment."

Employees were not offered severance and were told their final checks will
be mailed to them, James said. "Usually you get a notice and time to
prepare," he said. "I've never applied for unemployment in my life, but I
will do it now."

He added: "Obama put $535 million into the place - where'd it go?"

A good question from a former employee of a bankrupt California company
called Solyndra , which made solar cells. James is asking what happened to
the money the federal government poured into his former employer's pockets
in the form of loan guarantees, which were a central part of President
Obama's green jobs agenda.

The thinking was that picking winners and losers from the supposedly
wonderous new green economy would "stimulate" job growth. President Obama
and then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger both toured the company to tout their
"investment" in the future. It was all supposed to be so great: Here was
money spent by the federal government to "invest" in green companies, which
were going to provide our safe, carbon-free energy future and the money
would "stimulate" the company to hire more people.

For a very short while that's what it seemed like, too.

Now the same hope of the future, Solyndra, has filed for bankruptcy. And all
the company's 1100 or so jobs are gone.

Let's assume this was not exactly what President Obama was hoping for,
having another 1,000 people on unemployment. But this is what happened and
the sad part is that with Obama set to come out with a new jobs plan, it is
highly unlikely that the failure of Solyndra will have any impact on his
thinking.

He insists on repeating the same lines over and over again and since he
insists on sticking to the same theories and prescriptions -- like the one
about how the future is all in clean energy jobs, or the one about the need
for the federal government to invest in certain markets and industries (aka
picking winner and losers), both of which have proven wrong -- he doesn't
actually seem capable of learning from his mistakes.

So look forward to more of the same on jobs and don't be suprised if still
more businesses that were propped up by federal "investment" go down the
toilet like Solyndra. What won't be going down anytime soon, however, is the
unemployment rate.





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