Solyndra's High-tech Plant To Be Sold 233
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."
Re:but... (Score:3, Informative)
Contrary to what Mitt Romney thinks, corporations are not people. The whole point of a corporation is to shield the owners (People) from losing everything they own if the company fails. There are benefits to this like not losing your house if your business goes under and negatives, like double taxation (The company pays taxes and then the owners pay taxes on their cut).
The corporation should get investors to help get the company off the ground, but they don't have any liability in doing so. The Corporation assumes all the liability if it fails.
Re:but... (Score:5, Informative)
Without bankruptcy society would have no way of cutting losses and moving forward. Much more resources and labor would go into paying off debts that have no hope of ever getting repaid. There would be much less incentives to take risks on new ideas and innovations, and less money to do it with as the majority of money earned would be used for servicing debt. When someone or some entity is so in debt that they'll never be able to repay it all, the best thing for society as a whole is to wipe the slate clean and then not loan any more money to that entity for a time.
It seems we only apply the last part to natural persons of the working and middle classes.
Re:this makes me itchy (Score:4, Informative)
I can find a lot of real life examples of this. However, you have to find places of weak corporate governance and / or government officials you can bribe. I am thinking modem day Russia or America's Gilded Age of stock operators (1870 to 1920).
Today, most bankruptcy sales are either public auction or a court appointed official - the official being selected by the debit holders. The only modern day case in which the politicians interfered with a bankruptcy was G.M. (The banks don't count - that was a bail out.)
Re:but... (Score:3, Informative)
I differ on this. The fact that so many are uneducated and ignorant does not invalidate the use of the term.
Of course not, but it does place it in a different register or dialect (depending on the remoteness from the reader's idiolect). The phrase "technically correct" is meaningless in linguistics. A phrase is either understood or not. If it is not, then it is either incorrect in the speaker & listener's shared dialect (I are fast) or it is not part of their shared dialect (Marunong ka bang mag-Tagalog?). There is no such thing as "technically correct" because languages are not constructed in anything resembling a technical fashion.
Re:Fun fun fun (Score:5, Informative)
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 [youtube.com]. 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.
CORRUPTION !! (Score:4, Informative)
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"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Investing is inherently risky (Score:3, Informative)
Try ABC news, jackass. [go.com]
"Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget were repeatedly questioning the wisdom of the loan. In one exchange, an Energy official wrote of "a major outstanding issue" -- namely, that Solyndra’s numbers showed it would run out of cash in September 2011."
""This deal is NOT ready for prime time," one White House budget analyst wrote in a March 10, 2009 email, nine days before the administration formally announced the loan.:
This is members of the administration, not Fox News, reported by ABC, not Fox News. The DoE etc said this was a bad deal, and predicted when it would fail. The White House insisted that Solyndra get the money anyways, because Obama was pushing "green jobs" while paying off his campaign contributers at Solyndra.
Why don't you know this?
Obviously everyone involved knew that it wasn't a good deal, and everyone paying any attention at all knows that what you are calling lies are actually facts reported by the mainstream media, with Fox News nowhere in sight. Facts which apparently got right by you somehow amazingly, even though you profess to being enough of an expert on the subject to declare the deal a good one.
Now we both know that you have no fucking idea what you are talking about, yet here you are acting like an expert and having it handed to you so simply and trivially. The shit you are saying doesnt even pass a simple google search, which would have taken you all of 3 seconds. Anonymous coward must be right, you ARE sucking on the democrat sausage because you couldnt even be bothered to do a simple Google search while you knowingly just made shit up out of nothing to support your beloved party.
It was a Bush program (Score:4, Informative)
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.