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,â€