CBS News’s Sharyl Attkisson, the reporter who originally broke the Solyndra story, notes that 11 other failed clean energy companies besides Solyndra received approval for $6.5 billion in taxpayer monies.  Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, Eastern Energy, and Solyndra have all gone bankrupt.   Others, such as Nevada Geothermal Power, a company that was personally touted by Sen. Harry Reid, is facing serious financial problems and warned of “multiple potential defaults” in its new SEC filings.  Still, despite the fact that the company had already been struggling to “pay the bills,” Ms. Attkinson reports that Nevada Geothermal Power received $98.5 million in Department of Energy loan guarantees.

The CBS report also cites First Solar, a company that Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer reported on extensively in his bestselling book, Throw Them All Out, as having been approved for billions in government loans.  In 2011, First Solar won the inauspicious title as having been the biggest S&P loser in 2011.  Moreover, First Solar has strong ties to Mr. Obama’s top fundraisers.  As Mr. Schweizer reported for Breitbart News, Obama bundler Bruce Heyman was with Goldman Sachs which, along with billionaire Ted Turner, are among the largest investors in First Solar.  So far, Mr. Heyman has already raised $366,884 for Mr. Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.  And Schweizer’s says in 2008, Mr. Turner’s companies donated more than $1 million in campaign contributions to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.  Whether these political contributions helped First Solar land its whopping $4.7 billion in loan guarantees, the appearance at least of cronyism is certainly strong.

According to CBS News, the Department of Energy also knew that Beacon Power, a “green energy storage company,” was an all-but doomed investment that had received an embarrassing “CCC-plus” rating from Standard and Poor, making it little more than a “junk bond.” Economist Peter Morici told CBS that investments with that kind of rating have roughly a 70 percent chance of failing over the long term.  Still, despite knowing how poor an investment Beacon Power was, the Obama Administration dumped $43 million of taxpayer dollars into it.

Mr. Morici told CBS that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu lies at the heart of the problem:

Tasking a Nobel Prize mathematician [Chu] to make investments for the U.S. government is like asking the manager of the New York Yankees to be the general in charge of America’s troops in Afghanistan. It’s that absurd.

Unmentioned in the report was the fact that the men Mr. Obama put in charge of deciding which companies would receive the Department of Energy’s loans and grants were not scientists at all; rather, they were instead Mr. Obama’s top fundraisers, such as Steve Spinner who was on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was a bundler himself.

Perhaps that explains why the Department of Energy refused CBS News’s interview request.

Since the failure of the company, Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-
technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.

The documents reviewed by The Post, which began examining the clean-technology program a year ago, provide a detailed look inside the day-to-day workings of the upper levels of the Obama administration. They also give an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically connected clean-technology investors.

They show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the “optics” in Washington and the impact that the company’s failure could have on the president’s prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-
energy technology.

“What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse. What they are talking about is ‘How are we going to manage this politically?’ ”

The administration, which excluded lobbyists from policymaking positions, gave easy access to venture capitalists with stakes in some of the companies backed by the administration, the records show. Many of those investors had given to Obama’s 2008 campaign. Some took jobs in the administration and helped manage the clean-
energy program.

Read more here.

Consider the sweetheart deals and contracts that have come the way of some of President Obama’s biggest fundraisers:

• Financier David Shaw has raised $1.08 million for Obama’s reelection so far.  Shaw’s firm D.E. Shaw is heavily invested in two wind projects that received taxpayer money:  $115 million for First Wind,  and $117 million for Kahuku Wind.
• Financier John Rogers is a board Exelon board member has raised $1.2 million,  and Frank Clark, an executive Exelon,  has raised $153,000 thus far.  Exelon has been approved for $646 million in Department of Energy loan guarantees for a project called AV Solar Ranch One.  They also received a $200 million Department of Energy cash grant through a company they own called Peco Energy for smart-grid work.
• Financier Steve Westly has raised $302,000 so far.  Westly has held large investment stakes in numerous companies that have received stimulus grants,  including Amyris Biotechnologies ($24 million), Tesla Motors ($465 million),  as well as Edeniqu and Recyclebank.
• Bruce Heyman of Goldman Sachs, who has had three energy projects approved for taxpayer money  Cogentrix ($90 million),  First Solar ($4.7 million), and U.S. Geothermal ($96.8 million) has already raised $366,884 for the Obama 2012 reelection campaign.
• Daniel Weiss of the Angelino Group has raised $39,000 so far.   Weiss’ firm is a major equity holder in Powerspan,  we received a $100 million cash grant for smart grid projects.
• Steve Spinner has raised $31,900 to this point.   Spinner is a green energy investor who worked at the Department of Energy as a “strategic advisor” to the loan program.

Other recipients of energy stimulus money have continued cutting checks.  Ian Cumming of Leucadia,  which has had several large projects approved,  has given $10,000 so far to Obama for America and the Obama Victory Fund 2012.

Others are not serving as campaign bundlers,  but are rainmakers on an entirely different level. Financier John Doerr has held a series of held a private pow-wow bringing together big financiers to meet with President Obama,  including a February 17, 2011 dinner at his home with the late Steve Jobs,  Zuckerberg of Facebook,  and John Chambers of Cisco Systems.  Doerr and his firm have investments in sixteen green energy companies that have received taxpayer grants and loans.

The cronyism continues, and only outrage from the American people can stop it.

Solyndra, you may recall, filed for bankruptcy in September, leaving 1,100 workers without jobs and American taxpayers on the hook for a half billion dollars due to an Obama administration stimulus loan guarantee. Thanks to some good work from the House Energy and Commerce Committee along with some thorough reporting by The Washington Post, we now know that not only was this loan a horrible “investment,” but it was also rife with corruption.

And yet, rather than coming clean and releasing all records related to the Solyndra deal, the Obama administration continues to stonewall and obfuscate.

For this reason, JW filed separate lawsuits against the Obama Department of Energy and Office of Management and Budget to obtain records regarding the taxpayer funded Solyndra loans. Here’s what we’re after, pursuant to our original September 6, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent lawsuits:

1. Any and all records regarding, concerning or related to the issuance of loan guarantees to Solyndra LLC, Solyndra Inc., Solyndra Fab 2 LLC, and/or 360 Degree Solar Holdings Inc.
2. Any and all records of communication between any official, officer, or employee of the Department of Energy and any official, officer or employee of any other government agency, department or office regarding concerning or related to Solyndra LLC, Solyndra Inc., Solyndra Fab 2 LLC, and/or 360 Degree Solar Holdings Inc.
3. Any and all records of communications between any official, officer or employee of the Department of Energy and any official, officer or employee of the following entities [Solyndra investors] regarding concerning or related to Solyndra LLC, Solyndra Inc., Solyndra Fab 2 LLC, and/or 360 Degree Solar Holdings Inc.:
   

   a. Argonaut Private Equity LLC

   b. Madrone Capital Partners LLC

   c. U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) LLC

   d. Rockport Capital Partners LLC.

Both agencies have acknowledged receipt of Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests.

The Department of Energy provided two compact discs on October 7, 2011, that contained a partial response to the request while noting that “[a]dditional responsive documents exist and are being reviewed in preparation for public release.” However, to date, no further response has been received.

The Office of Management and Budget has failed to produce any records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request or demonstrate that responsive records are exempt from production. It has not indicated whether or when any responsive records will be produced. The statutory allotted time for responses to both requests has expired, prompting Judicial Watch’s lawsuit.

Let’s review what we already know about the Solyndra “loan.”

We know, courtesy of The Washington Post, that “the White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision” on the loan “so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory.” The Washington Post also reported that Department of Energy officials asked Solyndra to delay announcing lay-offs until after the mid-term elections in 2010. (Energy Secretary Chu denied any improprieties in his testimony before Congress.)

We know Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, who reportedly raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is Solyndra’s top financial backer. The Obama administration claimed that Kaiser never discussed Solyndra with White House officials. A lie. Emails obtained by The Washington Post show that Kaiser, who was a frequent visitor to the White House in 2009 and 2010, discussed Solyndra during a White House meeting as recently as last year.

Kaiser evidently wanted another “emergency loan” from the Obama administration to keep the struggling company afloat. The administration refused, prompting Kaiser to invest his own cash and consummate a deal to move ahead of taxpayers in the repayment schedule (in violation of the law and the initial agreement to put taxpayers first in the line of creditors in the event that Solyndra failed).

With all of the controversy swirling around the massive Solyndra bailout this is no time for the Obama administration to ignore FOIA law. The moment the Obama administration decided to “invest” a half billion taxpayer dollars in Solyndra, they owed the American people the truth about how and why these funds were allocated.

Our new FOIA lawsuits show the Solyndra scandal is heating up and that the Obama administration is in cover-up mode. The American people are set to lose $535 million dollars and want to know why it happened. The Obama administration’s lies and potential criminal misconduct by high-ranking government officials make this a scandal of the first order.

Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, who is also a Breitbart editor, reveals the full extent of the DOE scandal in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out. The book is featured in this week’s Newsweek, and was the subject of 60 Minutes this past Sunday, Nov. 13.

Schweizer’s research reveals that of the $20.5 billion in the DOE’s 1705 Loan Guarantee Program, $16.4 billion in taxpayer money–roughly 80% of all loans in the program–went to green enterprises “either run by or heavily owned by Obama financial backers–individuals who were either bundlers, members of Obama’s national finance committee or large donors to the Democratic Party.”

In 2009, President Obama had promised that the allocation of all federal stimulus monies would be nonpartisan, ethical, and fair. “Let me repeat that: Decisions about how Recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists,” Obama said.

However, Schweizer alleges, the Obama administration may be guilty of “the greatest–and most expensive–example of crony capitalism in American history.”

The details of how the DOE loan scheme was apparently conducted are almost as shocking as the billions bagged by Obama’s backers.

Instead of appointing a team of scientists or engineers to direct the DOE’s loan program office, Schweizer contends, the Obama administration placed some of the president’s biggest fundraisers in control. For example, Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was himself a top bundler, was tapped as the “chief strategic operations officer” for the DOE’s loan programs. Spinner was joined at DOE by another Obama fundraiser, Sanjay Wagle, and by Democrat donor Jonathan Silver, who would serve as executive director of the program.

With the scientists and engineers effectively out of the way, and the President’s top backers at the levers of the DOE’s loan program, the Obama administration was able to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars back to green energy companies associated with the President’s political and financial patrons.

For members of Obama’s national finance committee, the returns on investing in Obama’s 2008 campaign were incredibly lucrative, according to Schweizer. For every dollar committee members raised, they received $24,783 in return in the form of DOE sweetheart loans, on average.

Other top winners in the Obama campaign donor giveaway included several familiar billionaires. For example, a company indirectly owned in part by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the founders of Google (Sergei Brin and Larry Page) landed a loan almost three times as large as the Solyndra loan, at $1.4 billion. And Ted Turner and Paul Tudor Jones snagged a jaw-dropping $4.7 billion loan for their green company, First Solar–a sum almost nine times as big as the controversial loan given to Fisker Automotive.

The Government Accountability Office red-flagged this apparent–and historic–pattern of crony capitalism in its March 2011 report, which found that the DOE’s loan and grant programs had doled out federal monies through a process that appeared “arbitrary,” lacked proper documentation, and that “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.”

In Throw Them All Out, Schweizer writes that untangling and uncovering every instance of Obama’s crony capitalism would “take a large team of investigative reporters.” Moreover, according to Schweizer, despite the fact that some successful companies were among the beneficiaries, the DOE loans and grants appear to have failed to create any significant short-term job gains.

“The true short-term effect of this money,” Schweizer concludes, “has been to enrich cronies of the party in power.”

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Lachlan Markay to discuss the latest developments in the Solyndra scandal, get a preview of Steven Chu’s testimony before Congress today, and one of the next Solyndras, Fisker Automotive.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Chu to defend Solyndra loan to House panel
House GOP Poised to Grill Energy Secretary Chu at Solyndra Hearing
Solyndra: Energy Dept. pushed firm to keep layoffs quiet until after midterms
Fisker’s Political Connections
Coffee and Markets: Obama Doubles Down on Solyndra
Lachlan Markay at the HEritage Foundation

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It’s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out.

The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle.

Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.

From an objective vantage point, investing taxpayer monies in BrightSource was a risky proposition at the time. In 2010, BrightSource, whose largest shareholder is Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, was up to its eyes in $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million on its paltry $13.5 million of revenue.

Even before BrightSource rattled its tin cup in front of Obama’s DOE, the company made it known publicly that its survival hinged on successfully completing the Ivanpah Solar Electrical System, which would become the largest solar plant in the world, on federal lands in California.

In its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, BrightSource further underscored the risky nature of the Ivanpah venture and, more broadly, the company’s viability:

Our future success depends on our ability to construct Ivanpah, our first utility-scale solar thermal power project, in a cost-effective and timely manner… Our ability to complete Ivanpah and the planning, development and construction of all three phases are subject to significant risk and uncertainty.

Ironically, in 2008, Kennedy wrote a CNN article praising Obama as reminiscent of his famous father and uncle.  The article, titled “Obama’s Energy Plan Would Create a Green Gold Rush,” proved prophetic. However, the “green gold rush” came in the form of $1.4 billion of taxpayers’ money flowing into the pet projects of rich venture capital investors like Kennedy, not average citizens.

What’s more, BrightSource touted the Ivanpah project as a green jobs creator.  Yet as its own website reveals, the thermal solar plant will only create 1,400 jobs at its peak construction and 650 jobs annually thereafter. Even using the peak estimate of 1,400 jobs, that works out to a cost to taxpayers of $1 million per job created.

As Schweizer writes in Throw Them All Out, “A billion dollars in taxpayer money being sent to wealthy investors to bail them out of risky investments—does this sound familiar to anyone?”