Even A Blind Squirrel Finds A Nut Once In A While: Why Can't The Obama Administration Find Any Success in Alternative Energy?

Just when you thought that we had covered all of the inane and wasteful spending the Obama administration has dumped on failed alternative energy companies, another company jumps up and bites the American taxpayer. Consider a company called LG Chem, located in Michigan, a company that produces high tech batteries, and what was uncovered by the local NBC television station in an investigative report:

• The company has received a Department of Energy grant worth $151 million as part of Obama’s economic stimulus program.
• The Korea-based company recently said it has 200 employees, and the company's most recent Federal financial filing shows 100 of them are funded through the Recovery Act grant. So, we have given American taxpayer money to a foreign company to operate a factory in this country. Unbelievable.
• Company financial records show that the company has spent $133 million so far, mostly for construction and equipment. But about 40% has gone to foreign companies, mostly to Korea, the NBC analysis shows.
• The company also spent more than $533,000 of that Federal grant for the groundbreaking and not for producing batteries.
• The analysis of Federal records show taxpayers spent $7 million to train workers and have paid more than $700,000 for workers' health and dental insurance.
• The production goals of the company was to be 300 employees pumping out 15 million battery cells a year. However, so far, virtually no batteries have been made.

But it gets worse, especially if you are an American taxpayer who put up that $150 million. Employees had so little work to do that they spend hours and days playing cards and board games, reading magazines and watching movies.

Consider quotes from actually employees at the LG Chem location:

• "There would be up to 40 of us that would just sit in there during the day," said former employee Nicole Merryman, who said she quit in May.
• "We were given assignments to go outside and clean; if we weren't cleaning outside, we were cleaning inside. If there was nothing for us to do, we would study in the cafeteria, or we would sit and play cards, sit and read magazines," said Merryman. "It's really sad that all these people are sitting there and doing nothing, and it's basically on taxpayer money."
• “There's a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch," filling their time with card games and board games," one of those current employees said.
• "There's no work, no work at all. Zero work," another current employee said. "It is what it is. What do you do when there's no work?"
• "I thought it might be a decent place to start a career, lots of places to move up," said one former employee, who left the job this summer.
• "You can only do nothing for so long. There were days, sitting around all day doing nothing. ... I didn't play a whole lot of cards," said the worker, who added, "I bailed out of a sinking ship."

You cannot make this stuff up. American taxpayers paying employees to do nothing. While workers at the Holland plant have quit or are looking for jobs, others continue to play games and watch movies and others have started helping local non-profits on company time. No telephone messages were returned to the NBC personnel putting the investigation together.

The only good news to come out of this report is that investigation has led the Washington, D.C.-based Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to investigate. The Board is supposed to be an oversight agency for the Federal economic stimulus program: "We are sending this to the Inspector General, Department of Energy, for his review," said Ed Pound, spokesman for the board. The Inspector General's Office would decide whether to open an investigation.

So now we can add LG Chem to the long list of Obama’s failed and wasteful alternative energy fiascoes: Solyndra, Spectra Power, Beacon, Abound, Solar City, Tesla, Fisker, ECOtality, A123, and others. Details about these other failures can be reviewed at:

 http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/obama-energy-disasters-still-abound.html

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-obama-solar-failures-and-some.html

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-corpse-of-solyndra-solarcity-and.html


So what is the total bill for all of this failure? How much American taxpayer wealth has been sacrificed for no societal benefit from Obama’s ill-fated alternative energy venture capital “Bets?” How much money has ended up enriching wealthy Obama election campaign fundraisers?

The obvious answer is too much has been spent, but an article in a recent October, 2012 issue of Business Week took a detailed look at how much wealth has been destroyed.

The article starts off with a review of the promises President Obama made back in 2008 when he was campaigning:

• At that time he promised to create 5 million “green jobs” (as if the government can “create” jobs) by spending $150 billion over ten years by investing in biofuels, hybrid cars, low emission coal plants, solar energy, and wind energy.
• It should come as no surprise, given the failed investments like Solyndra listed above, that this promise is seriously unfilled four years later.
• Business Week dove into detailed government records and found that the American taxpayer has paid out $21 billion to alternative energy companies via 19 Department of Energy programs so far, money that went towards 3,960 projects that resulted in the employment of 28,854 people.
• Thus, some simple math shows that it cost over $727,000 of taxpayer money to create each of those 28,854 jobs, hardly an efficient use of taxpayer wealth.
• Rather than creating 5 million jobs over ten years, this administration’s bad investments of taxpayer money has created less than .6% of that total over the first four years of trying, and failing.
• That means to meet his objective, Obama’s efforts would have to generate more than 99.4% of those promised jobs over the next six years.

As I have said before, you cannot make this stuff up. Results from this administration’s efforts in spending taxpayer dollars on alternative energy efforts is so bad that you actually start to wonder if they are trying to be unsuccessful.

You would think that the law of averages would come into play, that this administration would get lucky at some point in time, since “even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.” But tens of billions of dollars later, we have very few jobs created, no outstanding breakthroughs in the energy field, no significant alternative energy infrastructure put into play, nothing.

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