Getting Rich Off Green Jobs

"Green jobs" are being touted as the wave of the future and are an integral part of the stimulus plan rammed through by Obama and the Democrats. But don't be fooled into thinking the average American is going to get rich off the green jobs push. The money is going to be collected by the unholy trinity on the left: environmental whackos, big labor and community organizers like ACORN.

The first group to get rich off the money is the Apollo Alliance. In late 2008 the Apollo Alliance -- with Obama's 'Green Jobs' Czar Van Jones then serving on its board of directors -- seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity to repackage the ideas it had long been promoting as a stimulus bill. Many of those ideas would be incorporated into the enacted legislation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), in February of 2009. The PDF of the legislation can be found here.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them." (1)

Although this legislation is supposed to generate a lot of "high tech" jobs, it just takes away white collar jobs and replaces some of them with blue collar jobs. Spain tried a green jobs program that President Obama and his allies have held up as a model for cap-and-trade. According to researchers at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the results have been disastrous -- every "green job" created by government intervention destroys 2.2 real jobs in the private economy. Since 2000, Spain has spent $753,778 on each "green job," while their greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 50 percent (2).

This brings us to the second group -- the unions. All of the jobs created here are union jobs. And who do the unions support? Democrats. It's not just payback. It is now the law (3).

And probably the most hideous of the three is ACORN and groups like it. It is now eligible to apply for as much as $4.19 billion of stimulus funding under the so-called "Neighborhood Stabilization Program" and are likely eligible for other stimulus programs as well. A vote was taken to try to prohibit this from happening but it was defeated. (As a side note, I am happy to see that the senators for Nebraska, one Republican and one Democrat, both voted to keep the money out of the groups' grubby little hands.)

But this doesn't end the money hunt for these groups. They are now looking to get more money from the cap and trade bill. Blue-Green's executive director, David Foster, said, "It is an economic restructuring bill for the global economy. We should not pretend that it isn't. Instead, we should do it right." (4)

The original article from Phil Kerpen can be found here.
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1. Schneider, Keith (2009, February 17). "Recovery Bill is Breakthrough on Clean Energy, Good Jobs". The Apollo News Service.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from Apollo News Service

2. Kerpen, Phil (2009, September 2). "Obama's 'Green' Groups Eye Lots of Greenbacks". Fox News.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from Fox News

3. "DOL Issues Guidance on Davis-Bacon Requirements for Stimulus-Funded Projects". (2009, June 12). AGC of America.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from AGC of America

4. Geman, Ben (2009, August 28). "Can Push for Climate Bill Forge a Lasting Labor-Enviro Alliance?". The New York Times.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from The New York Times