While Glenn Beck was the most vocal and visible attack dog working to bring down Van Jones, this has been part of a right-wing effort to destroy the Obama Administration by painting them as communist radicals. From Kevin Gradia on the Huffington Post:
You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Glenn Beck wasn’t the mastermind behind the campaign to remove Van Jones from his position as the head of the White House Council on Envrionmental Quality… that would be giving Beck way too much credit.
Turns out that the attack was orchestrated by a fringe group of free-marketeers called the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) who describe themselves as “grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels.” You can read a complete backgrounder on AFP here. It suffices to say they get a lot of money from some of the biggest players in the right-wing attack machine…
We also know that their strategy moving forward will be to frame green jobs and the clean energy bill as a radical socialist plot.
From The Reid Report:
Jones, it seems, wasn’t pushed out by Glenn Beck. Beck was just the vehicle. The real pushers were anti-climate change advocates from, wait for it, the oil industry. From this DU post, which identified Phil Kerpen from “Americans for Prosperity” as the man “who started it all.” Apparently, he even bragged about his role on Fox News yesterday, and also issued the following boast on his website:
How Van Jones Happened and What We Need to Do Next
Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through with two critical policy victories. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions, and second repeal the unspent portion of the stimulus bill, which stands to give them billions.
The Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration if we use it as a window to understand the structure of the left and to stop the huge power-grab now taking place in the name of green jobs.
AFP, and its former incarnation the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, are the third largest recipient of funding from the Koch Family of Foundations, which is run by the ultra-conservative oil baron Charles G. Koch. The Koch Family of Foundations has been a major funding source for many of the think tanks that are in the business of delaying action on climate change issues.
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.
Even further, Enviroknow obtained two documents from AFP outlining the “Green Jobs Radical Network.”
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 funded and led by an organization dedicated to preventing any progress on clean energy and to discredit the environmental movement as a whole. AFP funds 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. Wonderful, Beck is serving as the mouthpiece for fringe conservative organizations and calling it reporting.
This is not reporting. It is spreading corporate PR.
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.
