Discussion on:

DOE loan chief Jonathan Silver resigns

"It should be noted that the DOE awarded the program???s flagship $535 million loan guarantee to the now-defunct Solyndra prior to Silver???s arrival."

It should also be noted Solyndras loan application had been refused by the Bush administration because of concerns the company would fail by Sept. 2011.

Ignoring all the warnings from the people in charge of the program under Bush, the Solyndra application was fast tracked within days of Obama taking office.

Silver was put in charge to replace the 'Bush obstructionists' and enforce the new presidents plans to ignore facts and play crony capitalist with our tax dollars.

Hates Idiots,

A couple of points. The Bush Administration didn't outright reject Solyndra's loan guarantee. A DOE credit review committee remanded the loan back to the agency without prejudice because it wasn???t ready for conditional commitment (this according to the DOE). Two months later, the same committee approved the loan once Solyndra improved its application.

Of course, it's impossible to know whether the Bush administration would have ultimately awarded the loan guarantee. Maybe there would have been a last-minute decision to reject it. However, Walter Streight Howes, a director in the Department of Energy under President George W. Bush, told Platts in an interview last week that he would have approved the loan as well and that he saw Solyndra as "a good gamble."

Howe's stance today seems to indicate that Solyndra would've received the loan guarantee regardless of whether Bush or Obama had been in office.

To be clear, there were a number of Obama administration-specific failures with this loan guarantee, especially the management of it in the months after the original award was approved.

The bottom line is, DOE political leadership opinions aside, the recomendation from the actual DOE financial people doing the loan review under the Bush administration had given it a solid no which the Bush White House followed.

Offcially DOE remanded the loan back, but for all intents and purposes the loan app was dead until Obama got in office.

No matter how you try to spin this, the fact remains that the "government is a crappy venture capitalist". (Obama's top economic advisor Lawrence Summers words, not mine) The government isn't "well-equipped" to make such decisions, although I have to give at least some government bean counters some credit for picking to the month that Solyndra would fail nearly 3 years out. It was clear the politicians with alternate agendas and motives that signed off on this deal.

So your point is that this was such a marginal deal that even the Bush Administration was on the verge of signing off on it? Hardly makes for a convincing argument for the government being in the VC business. It really doesn't matter who is in the White House.

The U.S. government has no business acting as a venture capital operation using non-voluntary tax dollars. Promoting sector or industry development is one consideration but payoffs to fundraisers is simply illegal. What occurred with Solyndra was a crime on the magnitude of Bernie Madoff. This operation played out at the highest levels of the administration and as such Obama and his cronies should be spending some serious time in prison. Why Silvers is being taken to the task is beyond comprehension.

Obama's top economic advisor Lawrence Summers and our VC Energy Entrepreneur Jonathan Silver come from the left-wing of Harvard and both in their governement roles have contributed in their smal way to the wonderfully recovering economy...
At the end of the day, it is the American people who pay for the politics of cronyismand crappy government interventions. Both Lawrence and Jonathan are not impacted by their scandalous performances at the helm of Obama's economic ship. They will land at yet another port of economic call and enjoy their lifestyles as they await another day to serve the American public and squander the public treasury.

...these people are incredibly insulated from the reality of most of America. They are all "rent seekers" who's standard of living is in little way affected by their personal performance.