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Politics : The Solyndra Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Wayners who wrote (462)5/15/2012 9:41:44 PM
From: joseffy  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1400
 
New book: Jarrett’s ‘Chicago connections’ led to Obama’s Solyndra visit

Mahlon Mitchel May 14, 2012
dailycaller.com

Revelations from a new unauthorized biography of President Obama called “The Amateur,” continue to trickle out. The latest involves White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

According to the book, written by former New York Times Magazine editor Edward Klein, many of Obama’s most liberal and costly political mistakes stemmed from Jarrett’s advice.

Jarrett reportedly hatched the idea of Obama flying to Copenhagen to “make a dramatic presentation to the International Olympic Committee” for Chicago’s Olympic bid — and also encouraged Obama’s visit to “the Bay area solar company Solyndra” — despite the protestations of Lawrence Summers (who in 2009 warned against the loan guarantee) and others.

Klein implies Jarrett’s pro-Solyndra position was a result of her “Chicago connections” and

especially her close ties to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which controlled 35.7 percent of Solyndra. The foundation had made a sizable donation to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett once served as chairwoman and where one of Obama’s best friends, Eric Whitaker, is currently executive vice president. Billionaire George Kaiser, one of Obama’s top 2008 campaign fundraising bundlers, visited the White House no fewer than sixteen times, and Jarrett herself met at least three times with Solyndra lobbyists, who pushed for government assistance.

But Jarrett didn’t always get her way.

Regarding the killing of bin Laden, Klein writes that,

she privately urged the president not to send in a Navy SEAL team. She told Obama that the raid could turn out to be a replay of 1980’s Desert One, when President Jimmy Carter’s effort to rescue American hostages in Iran backfired so badly that it doomed the Carter presidency.

The book casts former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as a pragmatic adviser, who was frequently overruled by the more liberal Jarret. “[A]t almost every turn,” the book says, “Emanuel was thwarted by Jarrett, who functioned along with David Axelrod as Obama’s ‘political brain.’”

Axelrod and Jarrett were charter members of the Cult of Obama; they had drunk deeply of the Obama Kool-Aid. They made certain that the president remained true to his roots as a big-spending, big-government liberal,” adds Klein.



Read more: dailycaller.com



To: Wayners who wrote (462)5/22/2012 10:36:33 AM
From: joseffy2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1400
 
Obama bundler’s husband has received more than a billion in DOE solar loans

BY Patrick Howley - May 22, 2012
freebeacon.com

New disclosures show that one of President Obama’s bundlers is the wife of an executive at an energy company that received a more-than-$1.2 billion Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantee for a solar power plant.

Arvia Few is a bundler for the Obama re-election campaign who has promised to raise between $50,000 and $100,000. She began bundling for Obama in the first quarter of 2012. Her husband, Jason Few, is an executive at a company that has benefited handsomely from the Obama administration’s clean energy spending, records show.

The U.S. Department of Energy granted NRG Solar a $1.237-billion loan in September 2011 to help build NRG’s California Valley Solar Ranch, which is described as “a 250 MW alternating current PV solar generating facility” by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Few became senior vice president of Houston-based Reliant Energy in 2008. He was named President of Reliant in May 2009 when NRG Energy acquired Reliant for $287.5 million. He currently serves as executive vice president and chief customer officer of NRG Energy.

“This investment and its outcome represent a pattern in which the Obama Department of Energy took promises of technological development with an undue amount of credence,” says energy expert Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“On any given day, there are hucksters who say they can power the world. Unfortunately, there was also an administration that wanted to believe their claims,” Green said. “One has to assume that the administration was more likely to believe the people it knew.”

Other financial interests tied to the Obama administration have also invested in NRG Solar.

Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy holds a stake in another NRG project that received a $967 million Department of Energy loan guarantee.

DOE announced a $967 million loan guarantee to NRG in August 2011 for its $1.8 billion Agua Caliente Solar Project. Agua Caliente will be one of the largest photovoltaic plants in the world upon its completion in 2014.

NRG acquired the Agua Caliente Solar Project from First Solar on August 5, 2011, as DOE announced the loan.

Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy bought a 49 percent stake in NRG’s Agua Caliente project in December 2011.

The multiple DOE loans did not stop NRG Energy from reporting a first-quarter 2012 loss of $206 million.

Even so, NRG has recently expanded its operations.

Since acquiring Reliant in May 2009, NRG Energy has also acquired the offshore wind development company Bluewater Wind, thermal energy company Northwind Phoenix, Texas-based South Trent Wind Farm, Green Mountain Energy Company, Texas-based Cottonwood Generating Station, and Energy Plus Holdings.

In November 2011, NRG Solar further expanded by acquiring the San Francisco-based developer Solar Power Partners.

“When you talk to a lot of people on the environmental left, there’s a deep desire to believe that wind and solar power can help us replace fossil fuels,” Green said. “It’s a naiveté that permeated the administration.”

Jason Few was named to TheGrio’s 100 list honoring “history-makers in the making” in February 2011 despite NRG’s multi-million dollar losses. Few was “turning a profit by greening Texas,” theGrio wrote. The article did not mention the Department of Energy loan program and its relationship with NRG Energy.