Citizens United Amendment: Reason 1

I am seething right now.

After the subpoena of 30,000 pages of internal documents and interrogations of many Obama administration officials, the GOP found NOTHING corrupt, unfair, or even remotely below-board.  But the truth of their claims never mattered, anyway.  They have bought-in wholesale to the scorched-earth, nothing-is-sacred-not-even-policies-that-we-have-supported-or-even-been-huge-proponents-of-in-the-past, must-get-back-into-power-so-we-can-make-even-more-money-from-our-oil-and-defense-campaign-contributors-by-raping-the-earth-and-the-American-people-and-especially-those-terrorist-loving-Christian-hating-Muslim-Middle-Eastern-pits-of-scum-and-villainy tactics which have been remarkably effective, which is a sad statement on American education, ignorance, and psychology.

Solyndra had a ground-breaking approach to solar energy which attracted over a billion dollars in investments from people like the Walton family, Richard Branson, and George Kaiser.  They already had a large client-base and had other contracts lined up.  Unfortunately, they fell prey to a huge drop in traditional solar panel prices as China dumped $30 billion into solar panels.  The drop in price led Solyndra's product to be too expensive to be viable, leading it to bankruptcy.  I'm confident that their technology will find its way onto the market again within the next five years, and may even replace today's flat panels within the decade.  On top of that, the Bush administration queued up the loan to Solyndra and just never finished the paperwork and filing procedures before he left office.  If there was any "crony capitalism" involved, it would have stemmed from the Bush administration.

"Three failed companies is more than enough reason to declare DOE's loan guarantee program a failure and end it," said Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky).

This completely misses the point of the loan guarantee program.  If the DOE-chosen programs were safe, private investors would have already funded them without the need for guarantees.  The loan guarantee program has $10 billion set aside, specifically to account for companies that fail.  If all the loans were successful, then that $10 billion goes right back into the government to be used elsewhere (and most likely heralded as a spending cut...).  Secretary Chu has stated that even if only a few of these loans are successful, they could still result in more than a million new jobs.  Republicans want to "create wealth" and "create growth;" well, this loan guarantee program is exactly how that is done by the federal government.

The real reason for this bill: Fred Upton's main contributors are oil companies as are Ed Whitfield's.