In the latest development of the events leading to Van Jones’ resignation as Special Adviser to the President on Green Jobs, it has emerged that the effort was spearheaded by Americans For Prosperity (AFP). Adele Stan of AlterNet writes:
If you thought the targeting of Van Jones for vilification by the right was about his race, his youthful flirtation with socialism, or a petition he signed about the 9/11 attacks, you’d only be a little bit right.
And if you think it was about the Color of Change campaign against Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News Channel, you’d really miss the mark.
The racism and red-baiting suffered by Jones at the hands of Beck and his admirers are simply key elements in a marketing strategy designed to serve Very Big Business — the oil and other business interests that support the astroturfing group Americans for Prosperity.
The strategy is simple: Prey upon the worst fears of the right-wing folks who live next door in order to get them to organize against their own interests.
Naming defeat of clean-energy legislation his “No. 1 legislative priority,” Kerpen, in his Fox column, details his role in demonizing Jones in the right-wing echo chamber from which Jones, as an Obama aide, could not escape.
According to The Reid Report,
Americans for Prosperity is also the group that sent buses around the country to town hall dust-ups, where its speakers compared healthcare reform to the Holocaust, and its proponents hung members of Congress in effigy (they’re also connected to the Jack Abramoff web of intrigue and tangentially, to the birthers) but their main issue is climate change — or rather climate change denial, for the purposes of stopping any reform that would cost its financial benefactors money.
AFP’s effort to bring down Van Jones, green jobs and stop climate legislation kicked off earlier this summer. Enviroknow obtained two documents from AFP outlining the “Green Jobs Radical Network,” one from July and a more recent one from late August.
Both documents place Van Jones near the center of this so-called radical network. Other prominent individuals in the environmental and progressive movements mentioned in the documents include Stephen Chu, John Podesta, John Holdren, Jason Grumet, Bracken Hendricks, Robert Borosage, Carl Pope and Andy Stern, among others.
So what does this all mean? The effort to oust Van Jones was led by an organization dedicated to painting Obama as a white-people-hating socialist and preventing any progress on clean energy, healthcare and Obama’s entire agenda. AFP promotes McCarthy-esque scare tactics, AFP does the muck-raking, AFP feeds the material to Glenn Beck who proceeds to add his own racist spin on the issue. Beck is serving as the mouthpiece for fringe conservative organizations and calling it reporting.
It is not reporting. It is promoting corporate PR and lobbying efforts.
I can’t help but be reminded of the famous quote from Ghandi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” It won’t be easy, but we need to keep fighting.
Call it how it is. It’s one thing to dig up information to act as a watchdog on the government. It’s an entirely different thing to fabricate lies about government officials (Van Jones is not a convict), encourage intimidation of Congressmen (burning effigies outside of healthcare town halls) and act on behalf of corporate funders (AFP) as Glenn Beck has done. And of course, the mainstream media is almost silent over this outrageous breach in journalistic integrity.
So speak up. Don’t let this story fade – it is part of a pattern that needs to be stopped.
AFP is seriously troubling, and this is not the first time they have been behind a public mis-information campaign, repeating un-truths until doubt exists in even the minds of mainstream news=watchers.
I have to wonder what are the next steps to discredit such an organization and its tactics in a way that will convince most Americans that AFP’s behavior is reprehensible, or even simply that this is not the “other side” of the argument.
I think that the youth of this movement possess the organizing and political skills and connections to make a real impact – standing behind Van Jones is a good first step.
What should our next steps be?