Van Jones Says We Should All Stand Up and be A**holes

Van Jones, Barack Obama’s czar of green jobs, handed in his resignation on a quiet Labor Day weekend, on the eve of two of President Obama’s speeches, after talk show host Glenn Beck targeted the civil rights activist for attention.

Jones, an eloquent and charismatic spokesperson who, last year alone, won high profile recognition as one of Times magazine 100 most influential people, considered himself “radical” as a young man. Since then, he adopted a pro-capitalist perspective focused on elevating the working-class poor through the employment in green jobs. Then, in 2004, Jones, along with many other Progressives, signed a petition calling for a public investigation of the events of 9/11. The controversy regarding the petition surrounds the 9/11 Truthers, considered broadly to be a conspiracy group who suspect a degree of federal administration culpability in the attacks of that fateful September.

Using these elements of Jone’s life, Beck, with McCarthian hysteria, decried Obama for having “invited” a “radical” “Communist” into the White House. To those of us leaning towards progressive values, terms like “radical,” “communist,” and “socialist” are not scary, but a part of the glossary of words, including “libertarianism” “patriotism” and “capitalism” with which we can evaluate a government’s responsiveness to its people.

In this report, The Young Turks, a progressive news/op ed channel, air a “controversial” piece of video which Fox News and Beck has used to hammer Jones’ reputation. While at a public forum, a progressive in the audience asked Jones why Republicans were able to see their policies enacted but Democrats were not able to assert their policies despite holding the majority power in the two houses as well as the executive. Jones’ asserted that the Republican party gets its policies through by sheer brute force that Progressives have to stand unyeildingly and that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could not do that for them. He called the Republicans a dirty word but also applied the same term to himself and suggested that we all toughen up.

Referring to the wailing Republicans, Young Turk host, Cenk Uygur said “They’re not interested in being polite.”

Brave New Nation presents this background interview of Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club and Van Jones at the Ella Baker Center. Jones describes the fight he pursues as “not left vs. right but right vs. wrong.”

references:
Huffington Post: “Thank you Glenn Beck”
Fox News: “Obama ‘Green Jobs’ Adviser Van Jones Resigns Amid Controversy”

Eco-Savvy Storytellers watching the greening of politics.

Trolling the White House Garden

This new video segment of Inside the White House features a follow-up story on the White House garden, the first garden of its kind on the grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt’s minimalistic yet symbolic “Victory Garden.”

The first Lady describes why this attention to food production is meaningful. “The garden is really an important introduction to what I hope will be a new way to how the country thinks about food…and I also want to encourage people to think about doing more family meals,” Mrs. Obama says. “We’ve found that we’ve been able to do that, and part of the message is that if the President of the United States can sit down with his family and have dinner, hopefully more families find the time to do the same thing.”

Back in April, when the First Lady announced that she was going to break ground on an organic garden, big-Ag shovelled considerable criticism her way for highlighting the local and pesticide-free choice rather than celebrating “conventional” farming practices which utilizes crop protection technologies, allowing us to prosper.

In a letter sent by Mid-America CropLife Association (MACA), an organization that represents producers of crop protection technologies, to Mrs. Obama and, by extension, to us, we are asked to consider, amongst other things, the great value modern agriculatural practices like the March delivery of California strawberries to the mid-West. While it is wonderful that we have plentiful crops in America and still have a capacity to ship around the nation (unlike Kenya and Afghanistan this year for example), all is not well with our conventional use of chemicals nor our dependence on their transport for sustainable living, particularly during a regional, state or national catastrophe.

With her first White House summer literally under her belt, Michelle Obama still takes heat for her organic choice from trolls in the comment sections of articles such as this Huffington Post one. One commenter even takes a crack at Van Jones, who appears nowhere in the article but has been recently called out as a “Communist” by right-wing drummer Glenn Beck. I’m sure that we will see something coming from Big-Ag soon in response to this latest episode of “Life at the Whitehouse.”

references:
Times Online: Big Agriculture takes umbrage at Mrs Obama’s organic garden, April 22, 2009
Solve Climate: Solving Kenya’s Food Crisis One Indigenous Crop at a Time, Sept. 2, 2009
World Focus: One third of Afghans at Risk of Hunger, Malnutrition
Organic Consumers: USDA says Biotech Compatible with Organic

Eco-Savvy Storytellers watching the greening of politics.