The mainstream media has conspicuously omitted Obama's former green jobs czar Van Jones from their news reports on the Solyndra scandal but that doesn't mean he shouldn't be "under suspicion." When Jones was appointed back in 2009 as special adviser to the President, Phil Angelides, chairman of the Apollo Alliance praised his fellow non-profiteer.
He will help shape the administration's clean energy and climate policy by producing high-quality, career track jobs that give all Americans an opportunity to share in new prosperity. The appointment of Van Jones as special advisor on green-collar jobs is evidence of President Obama's determination to pursue a new economic development strategy, founded on the principles of clean energy and good jobs.
Jones, who helped get the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007 along with then Representative Hilda Solis (now Secretary of Labor), was a former board member of the National Apollo Alliance. Apollo helped write and pass the initiative creating a new sector in the economy to the tune of $125 million a year. Warning signs of Jones' avarice were apparent when he noted the paltry sum in his 2008 best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.
Those relatively modest funds constitute a small down payment on the massive investments that the Green Growth Alliance must someday soon require of the government. (p 150)
Indeed the $125 million was a drop in the bucket. The "massive investment" materialized when the 2009 Stimulus bill shelled out tens of billions more to fund the administration's green projects.
Around the same time the taxpayers were being milked in 2007, Anthony "Van" Jones was caught up in his personal conversion story from radical communist to a more benevolent career of organizing in the name of greenery. In this video from 2008, Jones contritely admits that eating green veggies at his meditation groups got him thinking about other things in life. He must have had a eureka moment: his former activist endeavors like PoliceWatch and INSwatchcould never bring in the kind of green connected with the newest scam perpetrated on taxpayers--green jobs. Jones switched his focus from police brutality, prison reform, civil rights and immigration issues to "tofu."
I went to meditation centers, and they were doing some strange things...salad, tofu, solar panels, hybrid cars..."why don't we have this in the hood?"
Solar panels "in the hood" might be funny if taxpayers weren't on the hook for this nonsense. Jones' environmental justice shtick grew out of the ubiquitous leftist playbook--we can "move the needle on poverty and create more economic opportunity in the country." Jones, who has never held a real job in the business world, combined the left's environmental movement with job creation.
Trouble is the government-sponsored green-tech industry only produced a few thousand jobs out of a projected 65,000. Last week Ed Morrissey from Hotair reported out of $40 billion in government subsidies "the cost per actual job created comes to $4.853 million."
Solyndra stands as proof that Jones and all the other thieves in our present government are looters of the people's money. This is not crony capitalism, this is crony radicalism. When you cross professional revolutionary hucksters like Jones and the Obamas with taxpayer dollars you get a progressive windfall. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
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