Van Jones: Follow The Money

Before Van Jones entered Obama's WH, he started several organizations, all geared to receive or help channel government cash into the inner cities. It appears as though some of those may have received stimulus funds Jones was expressly brought in to oversee. Also below in a recent interview, not one from the past, Jones cited profit making enterprises using prisoners - see note below with prisons*. Companies like Starbucks, apparently. The labor is marketed by ... who do you think? Government. My, what a red state Washington is, huh?

State Corrections agencies are even advertising their prisoners to corporations by asking these questions: "Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the cost of employee benefits? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your work force? Thinking about expansion space? Then the Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you."

What the several links below begin to reveal is a liberal infrastructure that manufactured an alleged best seller on green jobs by using their internal mailing lists. That was Jones' only so called best seller to date. Lastly, what this all amounted to was the same old politics of color, black, not green, that feeds existing corrupt, Democrat urban politcal structures.

When Van Jones came onto the scene he mentioned some specific organizations with which he had been deeply involved. In fact, he started many of them and also used them to sell his book. As for who else helped in that effort, among several other liberal groups, does the Tides Foundation ring a bell?.

Plus, the final version of the bill eliminates the loan guarantees the Senate had included for nuclear and so-called clean coal technology development -- false environmental 'solutions' that would have made matters worse, not better.

It's an especially exciting moment for me and my colleagues at Green For All, the Apollo Alliance, the Workforce Alliance and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The stimulus includes $500 million for green jobs training -- funding we've been trying to get for two years. That means that the recovery package won't just stimulate the green economy. It will also make sure that the green economy includes pathways out of poverty for low-income people and people of color.

So, what did Jone's Green For All do? Surprise, surprise ... they helped organizations get the very same stimulus monies Jones was involved with securing and dispersing at the WH.

Okay, so the stimulus bill was packed with a lot of funding for eco-initiatives and green job creation. Old news. But the question still lingers, with most of that money still yet to leak into the economy, how exactly do interested businesses secure funding and create those green jobs?

The nonprofit group Green for All answers that question (and more) with its Capital Access Program, an effort designed to help green-minded businesses secure stimulus funding and enter the clean energy economy. Here's how it'll work.

How convenient:

Van Jones, the head of Green for All, has been named special adviser to CEQ for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation. Jones, the author of The Green Collar Economy, has gotten considerable attention recently for his efforts to create "green" jobs to help low-income communities. CEQ also established an associate director position to address climate change.

A group of organizations, including the Tides Foundation, pimped Jones' book to thier own mailing lists and, lo and behold, an alleged green jobs demand was born based on a book sold to other liberal activists.

Their words were like music to our ears. It felt like a victory for all of our organizations, which have been making this argument for some time. So ... hats off to the Apollo Alliance, Ella Baker Center, Workforce Alliance, Center for American Progress, Sustainable South Bronx, Center on Wisconsin Strategy, 1Sky, Energy Action Coalition, Green For All, and many more. And then yesterday The Washington Post ran a major story on green jobs, Time magazine has taken up the issue, and CNN just featured it on their Situation Room. So it is now official: our demand for "green-collar jobs" has finally broken through!

Here's how they created a bestseller. It wasn't done on the open book market.

Using a Web-based, viral marketing strategy, Jones and Green For All, an environmental organization he recently founded, worked to get the word out about his book far and wide. The result was a place — number 12 to be exact — on the New York Times best sellers list in the book’s first week. “Everyone is stunned,” Jones told the Huffington Post. “Usually to get to number 12 the first week as a new author you’ve got to spend a million bucks or be on Oprah.” Through a combination of emails and phone calls to friends, bloggers, and a network of activists, Jones estimates that the viral campaign he and his co-workers launched resulted in emails being sent to millions of people, many of whom surely forwarded it along. The initial commercial success of “Green Collar Economy” proves that Internet buzz combined with online activism can push a book onto the best sellers list.

You see, capitalists actually create prisons in Jones' view - and these aren't old views, they're currently held. Update: Jones' view is actually that Republicans like prisons as a source of cheap labor. So, the suggestion that corporations create prisons is a correct interpretation of his views.

Often these are for-profit, privatized prisons; U.S. corporations use prisoners for labor and undermine union jobs. But when a prisoner is released, the same corporation that used his labor in prison won't even hire him—because now he is an “ex-felon.”

I did find an instance where a Workforce Alliance received ten million in stimulus funds. But these are complex organizations, so I'm not sure what is and isn't the same for now. I have other work to do, as well. Bloggers might want to start looking into what organizations linked to Jones received stimulus funds.

Green For All, the Apollo Alliance, the Workforce Alliance and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

And the final point one should understand is that this was never about the environment first, this is the same old failed urban entitlement myth we debunked in the Eighties dressed up in a different color to make it sell. It will ultimately funnel money into the same old failed and corrupt Democrat establishment of our urban centers and do little to help black youth achieve on their own in the end. They don't even embrace capitalism, for heaven's sake.

A growing cadre of young black activists is using the Internet in an attempt to eclipse traditional civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and hit the refresh button on the civil rights movement. Bloggers with names such as the Cruel Secretary, and blogs called What About Our Daughters? and the African American Political Pundit, have railed against groups in the "black-o-sphere," saying they do not understand young black Americans, are behind the times and react too slowly to incidents involving the younger generation.

The leaders of the fledgling movement -- Van Jones and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org -- may not be familiar to many, but their work is. They circulated a letter and a petition last week promising that the Democrats will pay a "political price" if they overturn the will of black and young voters and choose Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y) as the party's nominee over Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

* Jones is citing private corporations who use prisoners for labor here. How much would you like to bet as to which parties constituents mostly employ this practice?

Comments

[Able Stanton]

You're reaching here.

First, who cares how the word spread about his book? Why wouldn't he promote it to the membership rolls of the organizations he is involved with?

You also appear to have misunderstood him when he talks about prisons. He is talking about literal privately owned and operated prisons as opposed to public prisons. He is not making a facile analogy about factories or private companies behaving *like* prisons. He is talking about actual privately owned for-profit prisons.

[Dan Riehl]

U.S. corporations use prisoners

Id wager if you looked into this, you'd find more Democrat owned corporations using prisoners, than republicans.

[Dan Riehl]

see update.

[Beth Frederick]

Another good read on Van Jones:

http://crosssection.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/preaching-personal-responsibility-good-enough-for-the-school-childrens-message-but-not-good-enough-for-the-president-or-van-jones/

[xerocky]

"It will also make sure that the green economy includes pathways out of poverty for low-income people and people of color."

Have I ever told you how much I hate the term "people of color"? Everyone is "of color". Screw anyone who uses this phrase. If you want to talk about the poor, talk about the poor. Keep your racial problems to yourself and out of our government. The whole term is used to pit all races against white people, being that whites are the only ones who don’t qualify for that term. Are we colorless? Are we translucent? Are we incapable of being cheated, lied to? Screwed under the table? When it happens to us, they just say “white trash”. But everyone else is a “person of color”. Rubbish!

Van Jones said a mouthful about white polluters dumping pollution on people of color. What a crock. I grew up in Sayreville NJ. It’s not without its superfund sites and it’s a known cancer center. It also happens to have been mostly white for a long long time. Van Jones CHOSE to have this debate in terms of race, WHEN HE DIDN’T HAVE TO. He could have chosen to have it in terms of class and money, but he chose race. What does that say about Obama being “post racial”? HE’S NOT POST RACIAL. Period. He’s a race baiter who surrounds himself with race baiters, to his own detriment! He’s only in the process of being found out!

To anyone who paid attention, none of this should come as any sort of shock. Barry and Michelle jive with every word Van Jones ever uttered. Believe it because it’s a fact.

[JohnR]

This Jones fellow is an absolute monster. He is, in fact, a self described Marxist. There are numerous vids of him on Youtube using language which is racist (which the Left would agree with, if Jones was white...and the target of his remarks had been black), and making a host of comments which are at the least, embarassing for the Obama administration, and at worst intolerable in a powerful govt official.

And the larger issue is the one concerning these 35 so-called czars. These are powerful people sitting at Obama's knee...apparently with taxpayer funding at their beck and call. Who are they? What's their history? What are their powers, and where's the accountability? Congress vets cabinet appointees. IMO the "czars" are nothing but a sneaky method of shifting power from the cabinets to these shadowy people under Obama's direct control...and hidden from public scrutiny.

I call for a congress to conduct a transparent public investigation of these people.

[Dean]

For us simple-minded types this appears to be nothing more than a "buying votes" campaign.....

[FeFe]

Speaking of following the money and nonprofits, here is a primer that might be of interest to you interweb searchers (pdf-6 pgs):

http://www.givingusa.org/pdfs/SpecialBulletin2009FINAL.pdf
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:
Act Appropriations Beneficial to the Nonprofit Sector and Key Resources
for Organizations to Approach and Access Funding Sources
Researched and written at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University

[cc]

Dan, your column is a daily read, and usually enlightening. I really want to understand ALL of this post, but some of it is so convoluted and confusingly written, that I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say re: The organizations Jones has created. Maybe a little more editing is in order?