Senior executives at Solyndra collected hefty bonuses -- ranging from $37,000 to $60,000 apiece -- as the Fremont company bled cash and careened toward bankruptcy this summer.
Bankruptcy documents filed in Delaware earlier this week reveal that more than a dozen senior executives at the defunct solar manufacturing company were awarded sizable quarterly bonuses April 15 and again July 8. Solyndra ceased operations in late August and filed for bankruptcy Sept. 6. About 1,100 employees were laid off without severance pay.
The bonuses, awarded to more than a dozen executives, came on top of what were already highly competitive salaries. Karen Alter, Solyndra's vice president of marketing, had an annual base salary of $275,000; she was awarded a $55,000 bonus in April and again in July. Ben Bierman, Solyndra's executive vice president of operations and engineering, had an annual base salary of $300,000; he was awarded $60,000 in April and again in July. Will Stover, the company's chief financial officer, was also awarded a $60,000 bonus in April and again in July.
The bonuses were paid despite the fact that "everyone knew that our solar panels were uncompetitive... including President Obama."
Townhall commenter "turfmann" had a rather strong reaction to this news:
Ladies and gentlemen, what you have just read is a textbook example, a dictionary definition of a conspiracy to defraud the government.Solyndra was not by any stretch of the imagination a viable enterprise. From what I understand, no reputable funding organization that performed a proper due diligence upon this company would give them the spare change in their pockets, never mind billions of dollars.
Not the Obama administration, though. Having no one in their ranks that has run so much as a lemonade stand, they determined that Solyndra was deserving of an exponentially larger sum of money than would ever be sought or approved of in the private sector - our friggin' money - that will never be paid back by the company, but will certainly be exacted like a pound of flesh upon my grandchildren.
As far as the concept of "retention bonuses" is concerned - I say hogwash. The company is dying and if it cannot successfully keep the rats from jumping off the ship without government-supplied ransom then the proper course of action is to let the company go bankrupt.
Bankruptcy is a necessary and proper instrument of capitalism - creative destruction clears the way for competitors to successfully garner market share.
Solyrdra was a failure on each and every level and should have been bankrupted long, long before the government started picking it as a winner when by every objective measure it was a loser.
What occurred here is a criminal conspiracy. What occurred here was criminal fraud.
Bernie Friggin' Madoff went to prison for the rest of his life for defrauding investors of an exponentially smaller sum than Barack Obama and his ilk have stolen from the American people.
Some brain-dead Obama sycophant responded to a post I made yesterday on these pages that (this will come as a shock, I know) that Chicago Jesus was pure and that the evil Darth Cheney should be brought up on war crimes - never mind the fact that for the final two years of the Bush administration Pelosi & Reid had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and could have trumped up specious articles of impeachment, could have seen to the indictment of any number of Bush administration personnel on any number of charges, but aside from one notable and trumped up example of Scotter Libby, there was nothing. No charges. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. And nearly three years on into the Obama administration there is no attempt to charge Bush or anyone else with any crime committed while in office - because there were none.
Now we have a criminal organization occupying the White House. There are actual crimes that are being committed, from the murder of a U.S. Border Agent with smuggled firearms to the looting of the U. S. Treasury.
I demand justice for my nation!
I demand that these people be indicted for their crimes, tried, and if guilty sent to prison for a very long time! That goes for the nameless bureaucrat in his cubicle in a windowless office right up to the man in the Oval Office. In this nation, no one is above the law - most certainly the ones most responsible for upholding it.
With weak-kneed RINOs like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell leading the respective Republican delegations in Congress, it will be impossible to effect change.
There's only one thing we can do, you and I. Vote for the... most... conservative Republicans you can... at every level of government. Men and women like Allen West, Michelle Bachmann, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and many others I'm forgetting. Constitutional conservatives. Citizen activists in the mold of Sam Adams, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other patriots who risked everything to establish this society.
It's time for the Tea Party to roll over the establishment Republicans -- the "neo-Statists" -- and begin to reestablish a Constitutional Republic. We have no choice if we are to save this country.
Related: Your Handy Dandy EnergyGate/Solyndra Cheat Sheet. Hat tips: John Hayward and Mark Levin.
Yeah, and take a look at my blog or at Powerline, where we both have gone through opensecrets.org and noted that all the executives who took big bonus' just before the company went bankrupt donated quite a bit of money exclusively to the Democratic Party.
ReplyDeleteDemocrats give company bailout, company pays top executives big money, top executives donate to Democrats, company goes under and workers loose jobs, and top executives lobby for Democrats to give new company big money. Repeat.