Extreme (Right Wing) Weather Blows Van Jones Off The Deck

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Francesca Rheannon of Sea Change Media

Social entrepreneur Van Jones is the first White House casualty in the Right's gathering fight to derail climate change policy.

Green jobs champion Van Jones was dropped from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) last week after being targeted by a conservative smear campaign. Exceeded in its shamelessness only by its dementia, the right wing attack was spearheaded by Glenn Beck, a radical racist schlock jock host on Fox News.

Beck had a personal bone to pick with Van Jones, who was a senior advisor on the CEQ. After he called President Obama a "racist" who was "trying to enact a socialist agenda", Beck's show became the target of an effort to get advertisers to drop sponsorship. The campaign was mounted by Color of Change, an organization Jones co-founded but is no longer associated with. Fifty seven companies have already responded by pulling their ads. The roster includes some of Amerca's best known corporations, including AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's, Procter & Gamble, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Wal-Mart.

The White House didn't show the same courage against Beck's mendacious spew the companies did. It failed to back up Van Jones in the days leading up to his technical resignation, nor, tellingly, did the Administration urge him to stay on after he tendered it. Jones had been one of its most visionary appointments in the effort to promote green jobs and wrest the economy out of recession.

So Beck was feeling the heat from Color of Change's boycott and decided to take down a target that he associated with the group. But while personal vengeance played a role, it wasn't the main reason Van Jones was targeted. While most of the press has chosen to focus on Beck's spurious charges against Jones, they have failed to see the attack on him as what it really is, a salvo over the bow of the climate change deniers ship. The real target isn't Jones, but climate policy

When he was appointed to the CEQ, the far Right Web rag Worldnet Daily tarred Van Jones with the same McCarthyist brush that is being trotted out to derail health care reform: "White House appoints 'radical communist' who sees environment as racial issue". It's a neat triangulation of communism, environmentalism, and race that sets its sights squarely on the core philosophy of sustainability: that social justice is a key component of creating an environmentally sustainable economy. Jones personified this philosophy by making the connection between green jobs, racial equality, economic prosperity, and the environment.

Ironically, Van Jones has long been a promoter of capitalist entrepreneurship, most notably in his best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy. In a YouTube video, he can be heard saying, "We are not promoting welfare. We are promoting work. ... We are not expanding entitlements. We are expanding enterprise and investment. ... We are not trying to redistribute existing wealth. We are trying to reinvent an existing sector, so that we can create NEW wealth - by unleashing innovation and entrepreneurship. This should be common ground." Ronald Reagan couldn't have said it better.

The Right calls Jones a "watermelon environmentalist": green on the outside, red on the inside (never mind the racist connotations!). It claims that "environmentalism is nothing less than the global elitists replacement ideology for communism/socialism."

This nonsense would be laughable, were the stakes not so high. But they are. And there's method in this madness. One of its main spokespersons is Phil Kerpen, the director of policy for Americans for Prosperity. He's made no bones about the fact that Jones' fall is but the first victory in the Right's war on climate policy: "It's more important to follow through on the politics of 'green jobs' and use the Van Jones affair to fight that concept and cap-and-trade than to pursue other czars [sic]," said Kerpen. "The Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration if we use it as a window to ... stop the huge power-grab now taking place in the name of green jobs."

Follow the money. Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, Ralph Reed's former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. That group is funded by Koch family foundations - a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry, according to Think Progress: The connections go back to other lobbyists, as well.

One of the next targets is Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, along with regulatory advisor Cass Sunstein.

The tragedy is that Obama's "audacity" seems to have lost its strength. Without a forceful response to this political climate-changing agenda of the Right, we could be in for very rough weather.