The Buzz on the Van Jones Resignation at Momentum

By Don Hazen
Posted on September 9, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//142516/

There was lots of buzz about the Van Jones resignation yesterday at the Tides Foundation Momentum Conference, but one speaker took the issue head on, and that was Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Jones' successor at Green for All, the organization he founded to promote quality training and green jobs at the grassroots level. Ellis-Lamkins had a lot to say, and she is not shy.

She joked about the fact that Jones calls her at 6AM, and she talks to him more than members of her family. She poked fun at the white guys -- Adam Werbach, now at Satchi and Satchi preceeded her at the podium -- who promote the notion of the environmental movement being dead as totally irrelevant to her and the work at the community and regional level.

She lambasted the DC- centered enviro movement as pathetic and embarrassing. She talked about the only criteria for her work is that it makes people's lives better, and made it clear that the green movement, as it exists, knows little about how to organize and contribute to the future of poor and working-class people and people of color, who have no role or use for the environmental movement as it presently exists. Surprisingly, she gave major props to the Congressional Black Caucus for helping Green for All fight for a couple of key provisions in the House-passed climate bill. And finally she gave a primer on power and how to exercise it at the regional level, which she did at the South Bay Labor Council in Silicon Valley.

Suffice it to say, Ellis-Lamkins is hardly blinking at the momentary setback with Jones stepping aside. In the end, she laughed at people who want to focus their attention on Glenn Beck and Fox, as a response to the attacks on Jones -- that's a distraction. The movement is not about Jones, or any one person. The job is to move the political base that Obama built to get him into office to an accountability base to keep him honest, and make sure those green jobs happen and go to the people who deserve them, in the communities that have been neglected for so long. " This is the moment," says Ellis-Lamkins, let's seize it. And ladies and gentleman, I would put my money on Ellis - Lamkins. With Van now a free agent again in his green jobs cause, this is one dynamic duo.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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