1:00 AM Eastern TimeShortly after midnight Eastern time, White House Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Van Jones submitted his resignation to Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. It was immediately accepted. Jones was appointed to the White House on March 10, 2008, but over the last ten days, as a GOP smear campaign against him has built, it's become clear to White House observers that tonight's resignation was likely. In his resignation letter, Jones wrote:
On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.
Connecting the dots: The green economy, the food economy, sustainability and social justice...
Jones is making the correct, noble choice in the interest of the attainment of President Obama's policy objectives, but Jones' exit from the White House is a huge loss for the ongoing, pathbreaking project of simultaneously greening the economy and achieving social justice. Jones was terrific at connecting the policy dots, and his work at the White House Council on Environmental Quality would have eventually had big implications for public housing and community projects--and their obvious side components, urban farming projects and edible landscaping, and farmers markets--in addition to providing a critical economic boost through job creation and helping break the cycle of poverty by training workers with 21st century skills. Jones also had (has) a vision for urban landscapes that's a critical component to changing our over-all understanding of what sustainable really means--and it's an important part of our ongoing conversation on the connections between food, the environment and health. Just one Jones project highlights this: Jones' advocacy for greenroof projects stood to be a huge transformation in American urban landscapes, and among these greenroof projects would have been food gardens. At a time when we're wondering how to rapidly get healthier foods into areas that are swamped with bad, processed foods, transforming urban environments with edible landscaping--and accessing the completely unused real estate of rooftops for food gardens--would've been a game changer that had all kinds of other policy effects--such as helping to reduce the prevalence of obesity, creating a dynamic local food economy in places that were far from farms, teaching children about where food comes from, creating food literacy in general....Jones' resignation is also a major win for hate, racism, fear mongering, and the further unraveling of civil discourse in the larger culture. Over the last week, it was disappointing to watch as Jones became a regular feature in the 15-minute TV news cycle. Worse, simultaneous with the Jones attacks have been the Republican protests over President Obama speaking on Tuesday to school children. We've entered a political era when all hope may well be demolished, if charges of "danger" and "socialist indoctrination" thrown at a sitting President who is simply addressing school children can be taken seriously; this issue has also entered the 15-minute TV rotation. And all of this comes hard on the heels of rise of the Birthers, the Death Panelers, and the Tea Baggers, who rely on literally screaming and spreading misinformation to rally support. Despite President Obama's exhaustive efforts to create a climate of bipartisanship, we've rapidly degraded from having a noble opposition that is worth listening to and compromising with to having an opposition that is immediately swayed by emotional appeals and lies, and whom the mainstream media courts, promotes, and incites, to the detriment of the larger interests of society as a whole. It's a sad day for the green, sustainable movement today, and it's a sad day for civil society and democracy, too.
*This year, Van Jones was on the Time 100 list, alongside President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, French president Nikolas Sarkozy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Edward M. Kennedy...among others. Photo, at top of post, is from the Time 100 gala. Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, and the founder of Green For All.
*Update: White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod discusses Van Jones' decision to resign, with David Gregory on Meet the Press:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
