More than 20,000 people were expelled from their homes.
By Josh Kron
According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner.People here remember it quite differently.
“I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.”
Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers.
“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”
According to a report released by the aid group Oxfam on Wednesday, more than 20,000 people say they were evicted from their homes here in recent years to make way for a tree plantation run by a British forestry company, emblematic of a global scramble for arable land.
“Too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights and destruction of livelihoods,” Oxfam said in the report. “This interest in land is not something that will pass.” As population and urbanization soar, it added, “whatever land there is will surely be prized.”
Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
At today’s House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing, “From DOE Loan Guarantee to FBI Raid: What Solyndra’s Executives Knew,” the witnesses, Solyndra President and CEO Brian Harrison and Solyndra VP and CFO W.G. Stover, invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to every question asked by Committee members. Harrison and Stover told the committee nothing about what Solyndra’s executives knew.
Nonetheless, the hearing spotlighted information that can only build public support for the Committee’s ongoing investigation.
President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state.
Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4.
His investment firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.
Republicans argue that it’s inappropriate for the Obama campaign to raise money from a donor who has benefited directly from the Recovery Act.
Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith compared the situation to the Solyndra affair, in which the Obama administration reportedly rushed federal support to a green-energy firm that subsequently collapsed.
Those of us from Chicago know exactly what the Solyndra scandal smells like. And It doesn’t smell fresh and green.
By John Kass
The Solyndra scandal cost at least a half-billion public dollars. It is plaguing President Barack Obama. And it’s being billed as a Washington story.
But back in Obama’s political hometown, those of us familiar with the Chicago Way can see something else in Solyndra - something that the Washington crowd calls “optics.” In fact, it’s not just a Washington saga - it has all the elements of a Chicago City Hall story, except with more zeros.
The FBI is investigating what happened with Solyndra, a solar panel company that got a $535 million government-backed loan with the help of the Obama White House over the objections of federal budget analysts.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden got a nice photo op. They got to make speeches about being “green.” But then Solyndra went bankrupt. Americans lost jobs. Taxpayers got stuck with the bill. And members of Congress are now in high dudgeon and making speeches.
Federal investigators want to know what role political fundraising played in the guarantee of the questionable loan. Washington bureaucrats warned the deal was lousy. And White House spokesmen flail desperately, like weakened victims in a cheesy vampire movie.
So forget optics. What about smell? It smells bad, and it’s going to smell worse.
Or, did you really believe it when the White House mouthpieces — who are also Chicago City Hall mouthpieces — promised they were bringing a new kind of politics to Washington?
This is not a new kind of politics. It’s the old kind. The Chicago kind.
The top two executives of a solar-energy company that filed for bankruptcy after getting $528 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration said Tuesday that they will invoke their constitutional rights against compelled self-incrimination when they appear at a Congressional hearing.
The chief executive of Solyndra, Brian Harrison, and Bill Stover, the chief financial officer, hired lawyers in preparation for the hearing this week before the House Energy and Commerce committee and got advice not to say anything, according to a representative of the lawyers.
The offices and the homes of some executives of Solyndra, a California solar-panel manufacturer, were recently raided by the F.B.I. as part of a criminal inquiry into the bankruptcy. The company said in a statement that it was “not aware of any wrongdoing by Solyndra officers, directors or employees in conjunction with the DOE loan guarantee or otherwise.â€
As if the Solyndra and LightSquared controversies were not enough, another one of President Obama’s favorite companies pushing the green agenda is being investigated, this time in China.
Johnson Controls Inc., which is headquartered in Wisconsin and operates a battery manufacturing facility in Shanghai, has recently come under scrutiny by locals for excessive cases of lead poisoning in children living in the area. According to China Daily, 25 children in Kangqiao town are being treated for lead poisoning. The Johnson Controls plant, along with others in the area, has been shut down.
Bill Clinton turned up the heat on the leading Republican presidential contenders Tuesday, saying their opposition to acknowledging climate change makes the country “look like a joke.â€
“If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial†about climate change, the former president said on the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative’s seventh annual meeting in New York City.
“I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right? That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there,†Clinton added.
Kicking off the three-day conference, Clinton called the lack of debate in America on climate change “really tragic.â€
“We need the debate in America and every country between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what is the best , most economical way to do it, what will get more done quicker,†he said.
GREENgate is the developing story that suggests that the Obama administration’s “green jobs” program is more about delivering the “green” to major donors than creating sustainable “new economy” jobs.
First a couple of clips from Fox News revealing some of the details coming to light in the Solyndra scandal. Next a clip from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show – you know things are bad when people from your own side of the political spectrum begin to poking fun at you.
President Obama on Green Jobs at 2011 State of the Union Address
Obama Regime Steals Billions from Taxpayers – Blows it on Failed Green Projects
By Jim Hoft
The Obama Administration spent nearly half of the $38.6 billion ($17.2 billion) set aside for his green energy programs and was only able to create 3,545 permanent green jobs. This comes out to a staggering $4,853,000 per job.
Obama continued to push green energy initiatives in his 2011 State of the Union Address.
The Obama Administration has blown billions of taxpayer dollars on green energy and has only succeeded in producing a few thousand jobs.
The global warming theory left him out in the cold.
Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that “global warming is occurring.”
Giaever does not agree — and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.
“I resign from APS,” Giaever wrote.
Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that “the evidence is incontrovertible.”
“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.
Dr. Michael Mann seeks the help of other Climategate players to prevent access to his University of Virginia emails.
By Paul Chesser
Dr. Michael Mann, who under a lesser title at University of Virginia created the famed “hockey stick” chart of 20th-century temperature escalations while leveling the Medieval Warm Period, has enlisted a Climategate Cavalcade of Stars to help him enter as an interested party in a lawsuit in which my organization, American Tradition Institute, seeks to get his old UVA emails and data.
Early this month Mann, who is now at Pennsylvania State University, had his lawyers ask for permission to intervene in ATI’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against UVA. Our request seeks correspondence between Mann and 30-plus other global warming activist scientists who form much of the cabal that created the various predictive reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The university, buttressed by the urgings of groups including ACLU, People for the American Way, Union of Concerned Scientists, and American Association of University Professors, is withholding the meaningful documents ATI seeks. Mann himself said the few thousand documents UVA turned over so far were, more or less, meaningless “boilerplate.” ATI lawyers David Schnare and Chris Horner (also an AmSpec contributor), under a court-order, will be allowed to identify some of the remaining emails the university believes should be kept from public view so as to reduce the number the judge will have to examine, and then ATI and UVA will argue which ones should be disclosed in a court hearing this fall. Dr. Schnare and Mr. Horner are under clear orders that whatever they see they must forever keep confidential unless the court later orders those emails released.
In his attempt to intervene, Mann has called upon friends in academe to bolster his claim that, despite using a taxpayer-funded email system at UVA, that he has the right to prevent the public from seeing what he says are “private” emails. The concept that government-owned, or “public,” does not mean “private” is inconceivable to him (see Exhibit 2, here).
CFACT’s new game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away, only to realize neither humans nor cows are threatening the planet and Al Gore is the one full of hot air!
From CFACT
“Put a cork in it, Al!”
That’s the message students are sending Al Gore, radical climate campaigners and assorted other bohemians, grant-seekers and profiteers cashing in on the global warming craze.
Al Gore is calling on folks to make September 14th a day of climate action through a series of propaganda videos he will be broadcasting worldwide. CFACT calls for a day of genuine “climate realism” instead. CFACT Collegians are spreading the word with a bit of online levity.
CFACT’s Methane Madness game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away. Methane is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but less than 1% of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from cattle. Even so, radical climate campaigners call for shutting down our cattle and dairy industries along with much of the rest our economy. They’d like us to go vegan.
Former Vice President Al Gore will renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multi-media event.
From Reuters
“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore’s message.
“There will be 200 new slides arguing the connection between more extreme weather and climate change,” Trewin Restorick, chief executive of the event’s UK partner Global Action Plan, told Reuters on Monday.
“There will be a full-on assault on climate skeptics, exploring where they get their funding from.”
The green-jobs revolution may be going up in smoke.Despite billions of dollars in federal investment and cheerleading from President Obama, even the most ardent supporters of a transformed, job-generating energy sector based largely on wind, solar and other renewable sources acknowledge that their dreams have not translated into reality. The records for other countries chasing green employment opportunities have been equally unimpressive.
Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, told MSNBC last month that, despite impassioned support from liberal Democrats and environmentalists, “green jobs” initiatives “have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that.”
The absence of a promised boom in environmental jobs has become a talking point among Republicans who are campaigning to unseat Mr. Obama in the 2012 election.
Mr. Obama “keeps talking about green jobs,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP candidates debate Wednesday night. “Where are they? Let’s have real jobs.”
Talk of green jobs was conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. He gave the address on the same day that the FBI raided California solar-energy company Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy and laid off at least 900 full-time employees.
[Carbon Credits Kill, Destroy]
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