PrintAugust 20, 2009
Backtracking on Obama's grandiose green jobs promise
Remember how Barack Obama claimed that he would create five million 'green-collar' jobs if elected? He was promoting the conceit as recently as a few days ago in Indiana.
You'd think that the good folks in the Hoosier state would recognize the odor of bull when they smelled it, although Indiana went for Obama last year anyway. The green jobs claim was peddled hook, line and eco-friendly sinker by the Big Media wing of the Democrat Party during the election, but now that it's time to put the pedal to the recyclable metal, the party line is changing.
Obama's porkulus bill included $60 billion -- not including interest on the debt incurred -- to create a green-topia, conveniently making billions of dollars available to his propaganda machine at GE in the process. (This is not hyperbole on the author's part. GE actually issued a news release officially urging passage of porkulus "to support record growth of the wind industry." GE is the nation's largest manufacturer of wind turbines.)
Without admitting it in so many words, the New York Times Thursday reported that skeptics of Obama's grandiose claims were right: Shockingly, it seems, those promised Now Hiring signs may not be appearing after all.
"Jenny Chase, a lead solar analyst for the London-based research firm New Energy Finance, says it's unrealistic for the United States to count on long-term manufacturing jobs in the solar industry, at least, where a global oversupply is pressing solar-panel prices through the floor.'Setting up a plant in an oversupplied market is just not a very sensible thing to do.' "
Leading even the Times to ask, "Does it make sense for the country to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars? Or will renewable-energy manufacturing -- mirroring the electronics, semiconductor and car industries -- only end up migrating to China and other countries?"
Newsweek is also helping their comrades-in-harm to backpedal on the issue, trying to redefine what could be considered a 'green' job. "Several environmental advocates polled by NEWSWEEK defined green jobs the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined obscenity: I'll know it when I see it."
And, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics is being tasked with tracking those supposed jobs, even Newsweek--whose editor infamously said Barack Obama is 'sort of God' -- admitted (albeit parenthetically) that "Critics, in response, quickly suspected that the BLS, an agency supposed to measure objective data, could soon help carry water for an administration eager to show the stimulus is working."
Even so, Obama's green jobs commissar, Van Jones, was forced to admit that any reports of green job creation so far is strictly hypothetical. "Yes, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence because the concrete numbers aren't ready... It's not a numbers problem, it's all angle."
"It's all angle"?
Thus, just about anything short of a position burying toxic waste in the backyard of Barack Obama's south Chicago mansion will soon be considered a 'green' job.
In other words, if you're waiting for one of those five million green-collar jobs Obama promised? Your check's in the mail.
Printed on recycled paper, of course.
William Tate is an award-winning journalist and author
