In 2009, newly-installed President Barack Obama warned Congress that passage of his nearly one trillion dollar stimulus bill was urgent, so much so that the normal procedures for prudent review and examination would simply have to be bypassed.
As reported at the reference in part, in February of 2009:
‘President Barack Obama warned today that failure to act on an economic recovery package could plunge the nation into a long-lasting recession that might prove irreversible, a fresh call to a recalcitrant Congress to move quickly.
‘In an op-ed in The Washington Post, the president argued that each day without his stimulus package, now exceeding $900 billion in the Senate, Americans lose more jobs, savings and homes. He painted a bleak picture if lawmakers do nothing.
"This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse," Obama wrote.”
As a result of Obama’s lack of business acumen in stimulus 1, more than $500 million was loaned to Solyndra, a solar company that is out of business and bankrupt after dumping 1,100 employees on the street.
Obama’s simple-minded bungling will be the subject of a congressional investigation as reported in reference 2:
White House budget officials raised questions about whether they had "sufficient time" to evaluate a 2009 federal loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., a solar panel maker that recently filed for bankruptcy protection, congressional investigators said Wednesday in a report.
The report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Republican staff quotes excerpts of emails in which officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which does due diligence on loan guarantees, appear to be under pressure to approve the guarantee as White House media staff planned an event at the company's headquarters attended by Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
"We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week)," one OMB staffer wrote to Vice President Joe Biden's domestic policy advisor on August 31, 2009, according to the report. "We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around."
Why the delay? Its called due diligence and protecting American taxpayers from undue financial risk!
No doubt that concept is foreign to Obama, but one suspects that he is about to experience a ‘learning moment,’ courtesy of Republicans in the U.S House!
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/02/obama_stresses_urgency_of_now.html
http://news.yahoo.com/house-probing-528m-loan-failed-solar-company-125931197.html
