A $500 million Labor Department program designed to train workers for green jobs has come up far short of its goals, with only 10 percent of participants finding work so far, the agency’s assistant inspector general has found.
The report said the low rate makes it unlikely the program will meet the goal of placing nearly 80,000 workers in careers in energy efficiency or renewable energy by 2013.
“Grantees have expressed concerns that jobs have not materialized and that job placements have been fewer than expected for this point in the grant program,” said the report from Assistant Inspector General Elliott Lewis.
The report comes as the Obama administration has been on the defensive about making a $528 million loan to Solyndra LLC, a now-bankrupt solar panel maker that has become a target for critics of the administration’s green energy program.
The $500 million for green jobs training was part of the $787 billion stimulus act passed in 2009. Although the money was awarded in a series of grants in 2009 and 2010, only one-third has actually been spent by grantees. Lewis’ report said the rate of expenditures has been decreasing. He suggested the department should consider returning unused money that may not be needed.
“At this point, there is no evidence that grantees will effectively use the funds and deliver targeted employment outcomes by the end of the grant periods,” the report said.
[…]Another problem the report highlighted is that workers who completed training and were placed in green jobs have had trouble retaining their posts. Of the 8,035 workers placed, only 1,336 — or 2 percent of the overall target — have held those jobs for at least six months.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the audit, said the report “paints a pretty bleak picture of the program’s effectiveness in job creation.”
“It’s hard to see how leaving $300 million in unused funding for the program in the hands of the Labor Department benefits either the taxpayers or the unemployed,” Grassley said.
The news media loves the Democrats and they are constantly making fun of Republicans for doubting evolution and global warming. I submit to you that believe in green jobs programs is the scientific equivalent of flat-Earthism. And I have the numbers to prove it. They have the blind faith and the insults. We have the evidence.
President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state.
Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4.
His energy development firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.
Republicans argue that it’s inappropriate for the Obama campaign to raise money from a donor who has benefited directly from the Recovery Act.
Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith compared the situation to the Solyndra affair, in which the Obama administration reportedly rushed federal support to a green-energy firm that subsequently collapsed.
“At a time when Barack Obama is under fire for steering hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus funds to a failed company linked to a major campaign donor, it is stunning that he would come to Missouri and raise money with another recipient of stimulus cash,” Smith said in a statement to POLITICO. “Sadly, Missourians have come to expect this kind of pay-to-play from the Obama administration. November 2012 can’t come soon enough.”
The Obama campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Do you know how to stop this? I’ll tell you. Put money in the hands of individual workers and businessmen who have to work to earn their money and are more careful with how it gets spent. When you raise taxes on individuals and businesses, big-spending liberal politicians use that to get elected, and to get re-elected. Democrats are also the party of taxpayer-subsidized voter fraud.
FBI agents remove evidence from Solyndra Headquarters
Here’s the latest from the radically leftist New York Times.
Excerpt:
Republican lawmakers, escalating the political furor over the collapse of a solar equipment manufacturer that received a $528 million government loan, released excerpts from Obama administration e-mails on Wednesday suggesting that the White House pressed federal officials to wrap up their review of the loan quickly for political purposes.
In the e-mails, officials at the Office of Management and Budget expressed frustration that they were being put under time pressure to sign off on the loan to the company, Solyndra, two years ago so that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. could announce its approval at a groundbreaking for a factory. The White House wanted an announcement that would show progress on job creation.
The disclosure became a focus of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on Wednesday about the loan to Solyndra, which has developed into a political headache for the Obama administration. The administration used the company as a prime example of stimulus bill dollars creating “green jobs.” But Solyndra recently filed for bankruptcy protection and closed its factory, and its headquarters was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, apparently in connection with the loan.
The bankruptcy filing and the raid “clearly show that the committee was more than justified in its scrutiny of the deal,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan. “Why did the administration think Solyndra was such a good bet?”
[…]Suspicions that the administration might have pushed the loan for political reasons have centered on the fact that a major investor in the company is a charitable foundation associated with George B. Kaiser, a billionaire from Tulsa, Okla., who raised $50,000 to $100,000 as a “bundler” for President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Logs show that Mr. Kaiser visited the White House on several occasions during the spring and summer of 2009, while the loan to Solyndra was being considered. Among the officials he met with were the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Pete Rouse and Valerie Jarrett, both senior advisers to Mr. Obama.
[…]While Mr. Kaiser’s connection to the Obama campaign and to Solyndra, based in Fremont, Calif., have helped draw attention to the loan, he was not a major topic of discussion at the hearing on Wednesday. Republicans did, however, press those testifying on whether the Solyndra bankruptcy offered proof that the government should not be lending to companies that have trouble raising money from private investors.
“In this time of record debt, I question whether the government is qualified to act as a venture capitalist, picking winners and losers in speculative ventures and shelling out billions of taxpayer dollars to keep them afloat,” Mr. Upton said.
The company’s solar panel factory was heralded as a centerpiece of the president’s green energy plan — billed as a way to jump start a promising new industry. And internal emails uncovered by investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee that were shared exclusively with ABC News show the Obama administration was keenly monitoring the progress of the loan, even as analysts were voicing serious concerns about the risk involved. “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.
“If you guys think this is a bad idea, I need to unwind the W[est] W[ing] QUICKLY,” wrote Ronald A. Klain, who was chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, in another email sent March 7, 2009. The “West Wing” is the portion of the White House complex that holds the offices of the president and his top staffers. Klain declined comment to ABC News.
I think people need to get very clear on what “stimulus” spending is. Stimulus spending is nothing more and nothing less than taking money from the private sector job creators (“tax the wealthiest Americans”) and giving it to the people who got the socialists elected (“rebuilding our crumbling roads”).
In light of the Solyndra bankruptcy, terms like “economic stimulus package” and “green jobs” now appear to be Team Obama code words for “kickbacks to political supporters so huge they would make a third-world despot green with envy.”
Solyndra is (or, more accurately, was) a California solar energy company that was the crown jewel of Obama’s first economic stimulus package, which cost $787 billion. Solyndra’s chief investor, George Kaiser, was also a bundler for Obama’s 2008 campaign, gathering over $50,000 in campaign contributions. Kaiser, together with Solyndra executives and board members, donated $87,050 to Obama’s campaign.
As part of the economic stimulus, Obama’s Department of Energy (DOE) fast-tracked a loan of $535 million (at the lowest interest rate granted by the DOE program) to Solyndra in 2009 to create green jobs. All other energy companies that received loans are paying an interest rate three to four times higher, and Solyndra got this amazing deal despite a Dun & Bradstreet credit rating that was only “fair.”
About a year later, Solyndra wasn’t making the payments and needed refinancing. In 2011, Solyndra’s CEO communicated with members of Congress, claiming that the company was on sound financial footing and would be able to repay a refinanced loan. DOE had a man attending Solyndra’s meetings, so they should have known whether the CEO was telling the truth. DOE arranged for refinancing.
Just a few months later, Solyndra laid off nearly all of its 1,100 workers and declared bankruptcy. Just a few days after that, agents of the FBI and the inspector general were raiding Solyndra headquarters and the homes of the CEO and two other executives, with search warrants.
That means that criminal charges are possible. But in the bankruptcy, DOE allowed Kaiser and other investors to recover their investments first, before DOE attempted to recover the $535 million in taxpayers’ money. What a sweetheart deal. America’s taxpayers have been left holding the bag.
Mark Levin took a call from a Solyndra worker who says that “everyone already knew that China had developed a more inexpensive way to manufacture these solar panels. Everyone knew that the plant wouldn’t work. But they still did it. They still built it.”
WINTERY KNIGHT 