Video Replay: House Solyndra Hearing

I guess with employees no longer on the premises, no one is available to update this company timeline from the Solyndra web site, which includes entries like:

2008 – Commenced commercial solar panel shipments. Opened office in Germany
2009 – Reached $100 million in annual revenues

with something like…

2011 – Went belly-up, thus creating an opening for Republicans to attack, in ascending order, the company, the Dept of Energy program from which said company received a loan guarantee, the stimulus bill that spawned said program, and the President of the United States that pushed said stimulus bill.

Not to mention the entire concept of government trying to create jobs by any means other than tax cuts, and the hope that a green economy might one day be our ticket to clean energy with good-paying manufacturing jobs.

Well, congressboys and girls will be congressboys and girls. From a San Jose Mercury News report on yesterday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the Fremont-based solar-panel manufacturing firm’s collapse:

The bitter bipartisan divide on Capitol Hill was clear in the four-hour hearing. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee hammered the administration’s support of Solyndra as “crony capitalism run amok,” while Democrats argued that the United States is losing the cleantech race to China and that Republicans were trying to discredit clean energy just as they have dismissed the scientific evidence of climate change.

If you want to watch the fun and games, here’s the CSPAN video archive:

Video: Solyndra hearing Part 1

Video: Solyndra hearing Part 2

More coverage of note here:

• Solyndra as lousy political theater (CNN Money)
• Solyndra “Scandal” Is Washington Business as Usual (Ecocentric, Time magazine)
• Who’s to Blame for Solyndra Crisis? (Fox News)
• ‘Green jobs’ story has Department of Energy seeing red (Politico)