Obama's great jobs plan

It was July 2009 when I wrote the following:

There is little play in the media about the huge story of the U.S. wind turbine manufacturers being forced to layoff thousands of newly hired mid-west workers just one week after the president's speech in Toledo, Ohio, touting that the U.S. wind generation industry would lead this nation back to prosperity. General Electric and others have announced their plans expand into China. With General Electric (GE ) on the president's business advisory council, we must ask how could there be such a disconnect.

The president's plan is based on retraining workers for new jobs in the newly created wind driven generation industry. These laid-off workers return to school with their living expenses underwritten by their unemployment compensation. They are to learn how to build and maintain the thousand of new wind turbines planned for installation in the U.S. Sounds good to me, but apparently no one told GE or the Chinese.

With billions of U.S. Dollars to spend and a huge internal demand for turbines, GE and China have hijacked the president's great plans. Good old General Electric was the first to ditch their US manufacturing plans in favor of a country that can pay its bills without printing money.

I did not submit this to the paper then, because I believed no one would believe it and it would bring my creditability into question. I am truly sorry and apologize to each of you. I let all of you down because as I believe to be a good America the truth must rule in favor of individual, corporate and governmental agendas. I did not have the courage to take on an American corporate icon and for that I apologize.

Recently, several U.S. senators including our own Senator Sherrod Brown had the courage to take on this issue.

According to Senator Charles Schumer's Web site on March 4: "We cannot sit idly by while China races to the forefront of clean energy production at the expense of U.S. manufacturing, U.S. jobs, and U.S. energy independence. And we certainly can't shoot ourselves in the foot by helping to finance Chinese clean energy production. Taxpayers expect the government to use their dollars to support American jobs. This legislation ensures that will happen," Senator Sherrod Brown said.

Please understand Sen. Sherrod Brown is not citing General Electric in this article.

I will write more on this subject in the future, but to better understand what has and will be said to you, log onto Google and search ge.china and wallmart.china. Please do it today as Internet censorship laws are already in place in China, and I see daily changes in what was available and the political slant on search results.

George Pappas Sr. is a former citizen member of the Times Recorder Editorial Board.