Van Jones Happy To Be In Seattle

[Chickadee]

SEATTLE POST INTELLIGENCER:

 

Make certain you read the COMMENTS at the end of this far-left article. We are not all bleeding hearts here in Seattle.

 

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By JOEL CONNELLY

SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

 

 

Van Jones is immaculately tailored and tailors his words with care, but controversial former White House "green jobs" adviser still bubbles up with anger at Big Oil.

 

"BP stations across America should be seen as places of mourning and grief," Jones said in an interview.

 

"Every person in America should make a pilgrimage to BP, hold pictures of the platform workers who died, the displaced seafood workers, the animals impacted -- until the Gulf is restored and those workers have new jobs.

 

"Never, never again must we let the lure of oil risk America and America's environment."

 

Van Jones was in town to headline a Climate Solutions breakfast sponsored by Boeing, Vulcan, Microsoft, Starbucks, K & L Gates and other luminaries of local business and corporate law.

 

The former presidential adviser is keeping his political bridges open -- he showered praise on President Obama -- while showering rage at the company formerly known as British Petroleum.

 

"I think it's a criminal act against the people of the United States, and perhaps Mexico as well," he said of the Gulf spill. "

 

"They are guilty of criminal negligence. This is an organization that came into our country, slagged up the coastline and lied about it."

 

Jones, 41, is a product of Yale Law and the streets of San Francisco, an activist who founded the Bay Area Police Watch, but later authored a bestseller The Green Collar Economy.

 

He was installed last year as Special Adviser for Green Jobs in the Obama administration.

 

In looking for Obama administration targets, however, the Fox News Channel put a bull's eye on Van Jones. He was ideal for a network that demonizes advocates for social change and defenders of the working poor.

 

Jones drew the rubbery faced wrath of Glenn Beck, scourge of "progressives" from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Michelle Obama. He focused in on Jones' onetime involvement with a group called STORM --Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.

 

Jones' name also turned up on a 911truth.org petition, circulated in 2004, which asked whether the Bush administration let the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings go ahead to get an excuse to invade Iraq.

 

Jones left the administration so as not to be a foil for right-wing attacks on health care reform and climate change legislation.

 

Color of Change, a group Jones founded, promptly launched a campaign that persuaded numerous sponsors to withdraw from Beck's program. (Beck is one Fox host whose audience is in sharp decline.)

 

Seattle is Jones' kind of town.

 

He basked in adulation at the Climate Solutions breakfast and a later appearance at City Hall. "You guys are a lot more fun and friendly than that other Washington," he told the breakfast.

 

Asked whether President Obama has treated the Gulf oil disaster as a "teaching moment" -- on the need for new energy sources -- Jones did a neat segue from teacher to classroom.

 

"I could better evaluate Americans as learners," he said. "It's a wakeup call for all of us . . . It's the biggest wakeup call the country could possibly get. We cannot dig, drill and burn our way out of the situation we are in."

 

At Climate Solutions' breakfast, Jones elaborated: "Nobody has told me a single thing that could have been done to stop this gusher that the president has not already ordered . . . The problem is not the last 30 days. The problem is the last 30 years."

 

He's right, of course.

 

The Reagan administration, in 1981, removed solar panels from the White House roof and eviscerated Department of Energy programs to develop new energy technologies.

 

In 2006, President Bush scheduled a visit to the federal government's renewable energy laboratory in Colorado. The White House discovered, to its horror, that a large number of scientists and technicians had been laid off at the facility. They were quickly brought back on.

 

The Northwest could boast about having America's biggest wind energy farm -- the Stateline Project on the Washington-Oregon border south of Pasco -- but its turbines were built in Europe.

 

"If we had a massive wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico, and it collapsed, we would not have a wind slick," Jones said at breakfast.

 

Fox News' audience is conditioned to salivate on command like dogs in a Russian scientist's behavior experiment: Phrases like "radical" and "community organizer" and "activist" get the reactionaries lathered up.

 

Introspection doesn't become such folk, but the Gulf disaster offers an opportunity to question such jingoism as "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

 

Isn't U.S. dependence on imported oil and risky deep-water offshore drilling a much greater threat to the nation's security than some guy who wore dreadlocks and mouthed off at cops when he was young?

 

Isn't the economic harm being inflicted on the Gulf's fishermen, shellfish growers and innkeepers a form of terror? Won't its impacts, like those of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, be felt for years to come?

 

Van Jones is doing right well for a guy demonized by Rupert Murdoch's minions.

 

He's teaching an environmental politics course at Princeton this fall, serves as a fellow at the Center for American Progress. He will soon be feted as a 20th Century Visionary by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

 

Oh yeah, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle, there's a connection that Glenn Beck should know about.

 

Jones is just back from Tanzania, where he attended the Young Leadership Council of the World Economic Forum: The company included Matthew Anderson, a top executive at News Corporation, Fox News' corporate parent.

[pollyannaish]

GRRRRRRRRR!

 

[righteousmomma]