Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution. Globalrevolution. Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending. As the $344 million factory went up just down the road from the company’s leased plant in Fremont, Calif., workers watched as pallets of unsold solar panels stacked up in storage. Many wondered: Was the factory needed? “After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right,” said former Solyndra engineer Lindsey Eastburn.
“Because we were doing well, nobody cared. Because of that infusion of money, it made people sloppy.” Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. On Friday, company executives are scheduled to appear before a House committee investigating how Solyndra obtained its loan and whether the Obama White House rushed its approval for political reasons. A key question for lawmakers is whether Solyndra executives misled Congress about the financial state of the company as late as July, when questions about the loan surfaced on Capitol Hill. Read More on PostPolitics.com. U.S. Cities Criminalize Homelessness, Violate Human Rights Agreements. The challenges poor and homeless Americans often face accessing clean drinking water and restroom facilities violate international human rights standards, according to a report issued by a United Nations investigator this month.
Catarina de Albuquerque, a U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, visited the United States in late February at the invitation of the U.S. government. She found homeless individuals around the country not only struggle to access running water and restroom facilities but increasingly face criminal and civil sanctions when they improvise solutions. The right to safe drinking water and restroom facilities is a part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The most recent federal homeless count data available is from January 2010.
It shows there were 700,000 individuals in the U.S. who were homeless. Live Poor or Die: The New American Retirement. The very idea of retiring in America had become a mirage–tantalizing, but always sliding into the distance. Those visions of golden years spent playing golf in Tucson or bridge in Boca Raton, promoted by AARP magazine and purveyors of retirement investments, are now nothing more than a chimera for most Americans. The exception, of course, is a wealthy minority, who for the past decade has been squirreling away money they should have been paying in taxes. For everyone else, old age been reduced to three alternatives: Those of us lucky enough to have jobs can keep working indefinitely; the rest can live poor or die. Anyone who doubts this blunt truth should take a look at a few few recent trends. Start with something called the Retirement Income Deficit. Retirement USA, a consortium of non-profits and unions, which came up with the term, describes the deficit as follows: This gap is due, in large part, to the demise of the old-fashioned, fixed-income pension system.
This Manufacturer Can't Find 100 Unemployed Americans With Basic Math Skills To Hire.