The one name I have not yet seen mentioned in any of this, and who has got to be in this up to his eyeballs is Van Jones. Green Jobs was his baby for the short time he was there, but there is no way Solyndra or any other one of these $35 Billion worth of “Green” loans got approved without Van Jones’ fingerprints all over it.
This is the first real proof of just how out of control this crew has been from the very beginning, and just the tip of the first iceberg to show. Word on the street is that there are at least four or five more Solyndras out there on the verge of declaring Chapter 11 as well.
We are just gettin’ started here folks....
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_ktSaBCwrr6MDK2gMz7xqhN
NY’s Tax-Funded Ex-Terrorist
By PHIL KERPEN
Last Updated: 5:09 AM, September 9, 2009
Posted: 2:55 AM, September 9, 2009
VAN Jones resigned as White House green-jobs czar after the public got a look at his history of radical activism, including his time building the so-called Apollo Alliance — a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around the green-jobs concept. But another, even more radical Jones (not related) is leading Apollo’s New York state activities.
Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late ‘60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the ‘70s — yet now he’s a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded group.
Jones was a fugitive from justice for 11 years. His own account at his Web site says: “As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son.”
With Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers, Jones in 1969 co-founded the radical Weatherman, which orchestrated the violent “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, and later undertook an anti-government bombing campaign. Three of its members died when a bomb they were constructing to attack Fort Dix accidentally detonated in Greenwich Village.
And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities — saying as recently as 2004: “To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do.”
Now, Jones is back to revolutionary organizing — but with taxpayers footing the bill. He’s the director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group.
Apollo unifies the three most powerful elements of the political left — environmental groups, labor unions and street organizers like ACORN — and points them toward a common goal that enriches all of them under the banner of “green jobs.” (Van Jones was an Apollo board member until he joined the White House staff.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently credited Apollo with helping write the stimulus bill and getting it passed. Yet the stimulus’ “green jobs” provisions funnel federal tax dollars to unions, green groups and community organizers — that is, the organizations that make up Apollo.
(snip)
Though it wasn’t money from the just-passed stimulus bill, the Obama administration this week made its first big investment in renewable energy and good green-collar jobs. The Department of Energy, under a $40 billion clean energy loan guarantee program that the prior administration never used, awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., Solyndra is a four-year-old California-based maker of cylindrical solar photovoltaic generating systems that has a state of the art manufacturing plant in Fremont, California.
This is why federal support is so crucial to the clean energy sector and green-collar job generation, particularly now. The guaranteed loan, the company said in a statement, will help finance a $725 million plant, capable of manufacturing 500 megawatts of photovoltaic generating equipment per year, that Solyndra is building in California. Solyndra executives said that constructing the plant will employ approximately 3,000 people, and operating it will generate 1,000 green-collar production jobs. Moreover, the 500 megawatts of photovoltaic energy it is capable of manufacturing each year is equivalent to the power generated by a mid-sized coal-fired electrical plant.
Scaling Up The Clean Energy Sector
Loan guarantees of this magnitude are just what the Apollo Alliance called for in The New Apollo Program, our national clean energy economic development strategy. It’s useful to remember that before the banking industry collapse last summer, and the severe downturn that began in September, clean energy was the fastest growing industrial sector in the United States. A big focused federal investment, Apollo asserted, would generate millions of new jobs in industries that are good for the environment.
In an article this week in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Apollo Board Members Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers of America, and Michael Peck, founder of MAPA Group and Gamesa’s director of media, institutional and labor relations in North America, make the same point. They report that 750,000 Americans already are employed in green-collar jobs. “They make energy-efficient products, produce renewable power and invent cleaner technologies, among other things,” Gerard and Peck wrote.
Much more, they said, is possible. “President Barack Obama and Congress can and should create millions more green jobs by passing and signing climate-change legislation that includes a cap-and-invest system to regulate carbon emissions and investments to grow clean energy technologies that will repower, refuel and rebuild our economy.”
Sound Policy and Investment Matters
Pennsylvania is an excellent case in point for how good clean energy policy and sound public investment can really work. Governor Ed Rendell and his aides have focused on building a new foundation for the state’s economy. Gamesa, the Spanish wind manufacturer, now employs 1,000 well-paid industrial workers in its Pennsylvania plants. On Tuesday evening, during his nationally televised news conference, President Obama commended another clean energy company, Serious Materials, which just reopened a plant in Vandergrift, outside Pittsburgh, that makes energy efficient windows. (see pix below)
Serious Materials, which we profiled this week in our Signature Stories feature, was the company that also reopened the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago after it abruptly closed in December.
The point is that producing energy from sources other than coal and oil represents an enormous industrial, technological, and jobs opportunity. Americans understand its dimensions and are genuinely enthusiastic. This week in Chicago, for instance, tickets to the second annual Chicagoland Green Collar Jobs Summit, a convening of the city’s important clean energy policy makers and practitioners, sold out. Producers of other green-collar job and clean energy industry gatherings around the country report similar excitement.
One of the people who is really helping to make the clean energy future happen is our own Jerome Ringo, (see pix above) the president of the Apollo Alliance, who is on the road 300 days a year to deliver our clean energy, good jobs message. We feature Jerome this week on our home page. Keep pace with events on our Apollo Blog and Digest. And there are new links to information about how the stimulus dollars are being spent and how you can get involved on our Recovery Act Information Center. This week we posted guidance documents from the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency for governments and companies seeking clean energy, good jobs grants and loans. Look for them under “Implementation Resources.”
//
The New Apollo Program (Apollo Alliance)
(More coming ...)