This Is a Big Loss

Apparently, fringers on the right are celebrating the resignation of Van Jones as "czar" of green jobs. Now, I can't vouch for the article and refuse to cruise through conservative sites, so you'll either have to take my word for it or google yourself.

Here's where I first came across Van Jones. Van Jones is someone who combines economic justice, eco-activism, and racial equality; basically, he promotes green jobs for inner-city residents. The right based their attacks on him, cause basically they attack everything Pres. Obama does, on his early association with communism and his signing some 9/11 "truthers" petition. Now, when it comes to 9/11 . . . I don't want to believe that BushCo would have allowed thousands of Americans to die as a pretext for war. I don't put it past them; and it's certainly clear that if they didn't know, they should've; so, I don't think his signing the petition is something extraordinarily radical. But you know the right. These are people who block nominations because they have questions the agency the nominee will direct hasn't "adequately" answered. That's what David Vitter did to Craig Fugate. Vitter had questions FEMA hadn't adequately answered so he blocked the nomination. Yes, FEMA would be in a better position to answer Vitter's questions if there were a director; so you get my point.

But anyway, Jones' idea was to protect the environment by going green - windmills, solar panels, retro-fitting buildings to make them greener, etc. Doing that involves lots of stuff I'm not adequately informed about to explain to you. Suffice it to say that moving to a green economy would create a lot of jobs that would be difficult to out-source. So there's that.

What's really exciting to me about Jones' idea is that he wants to base the factories and plants in the inner-city!! Wow! Amazing! It's very rare that you find someone who has a vision for killing three birds with one stone. I gotta admit, even I'm not that bright, and we all know I'm incredibly bright!

The third bird? Well. Let's say racism was completely eradicated, but the basics of our social-economy remained the same: there would still be a drag on the black community. This is because of our disproportionate rate of concentrated poverty. Now, I should probably go through everything that's happened that's lead to the situation, but I don't feel up to it. Just . . . understand that the black unemployment rate was around 10% before the bottom fell out of the economy. Some of that is because there're no jobs in the inner-city. So you get concentrated poverty and from concentrated poverty you get high crime rates and high rates of high school drop-outs, etc and so on. Putting jobs in the inner-city would improve the economic outlook of the black community and diffuse a great deal of our social ills.

Don't misunderstand, he's anti-racist, too. But in the absence of more white people catching a clue, his idea would do just, :sigh:, do so much to improve the lives of soooo many people. And I hate that the right won on this. Glen Beck sucks even more than I originally thought, and what I originally thought, er, lets just say it involves a backhanded insult to teenage girls.

Holla dolla! Get at me!