Obama plans to discuss jobs at company shifting focus to China

[Geee]

Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama will visit the North Carolina-based Cree LED Light Company Monday to tour the plant and meet with his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness to discuss job creation and policies to spur economic growth.

But Cree, a major recipient of Recovery Act funds, may be sending that money straight to China. At the very least, its CEO, Chuck Swoboda, has a very China-centered strategy that involves building a new plant overseas, two facts that the Republican National Committee plans to highlight Monday morning prior to the president’s visit.

Cree received a $39 million as an Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit from the Recovery Act.

The company began developing clean energy technology, hired a few more hundred workers, and the administration touted it as a “true American success story” on the White House Web site.


Then in late 2010, the company opened its first plant in Huizhou City,China. That made Cree the first global LED company to locate a manufacturing plant in China.

[Geee]

Obama rubs elbows with regulatory robber barons

 

 

President Obama on Monday was scheduled to give a pep talk for American manufacturing at a factory in Durham, N.C., where Cree Inc. makes LED light bulbs. Cree embodies Obama-era capitalism: profiting from government grants, political connections, revolving-door lobbyists and regulations that force people to buy your product.

Cree deals mostly in light-emitting diode technology. The company makes LED light bulbs and sells LED components to other manufacturers to put in their own bulbs, automobiles or electronics. This is by far the fastest-growing part of Cree's business.

 

Company Vice President Greg Merritt spoke about the LED boom in April 2009 at a green-tech conference. "We are in a perfect storm in some respects," he said. After talking about new manufacturing efficiencies, Merritt added, "The political environment for sustainable technologies and energy efficiency is perhaps more favorable today than it's been for quite a while."

 

Merritt should know -- he and his colleagues helped shape that "political environment." Merritt lobbied Congress on the 2007 energy bill, "Specifically, provisions related to energy-efficient lighting." That is, Merritt and Cree's other lobbyists supported the law that will effectively outlaw the incandescent bulb, thus creating unwilling demand for their more expensive LED bulbs.

 

Energy-efficient lighting has value even without regulations, but Cree conceded that government is driving demand for its product. The company's latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists, among the risks the company faces, the risk that consumer choice might be restored.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/06/obama-rubs-elbows-regulatory-robber-barons

[NCTexan]

The prosperity from the GREEN JOB BONANZA that Obama promises with companies like Cree is a joke.

 

The only "green jobs growth" that I see from the Obama plans are in jobs that most Americans don't want to do.