Skip to content
Grist home
All donations DOUBLED
  • Young, Green, and Out of Work

    by Rinku Sen & Billy Parish Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible […]

  • A message from Van Jones

    Van Jones sent this message out to friends and supporters on Tuesday, Sept. 15. Dear Friends: My family and I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support that we have received over the past week or so. I resigned from the White House on Sept. 6, and I have remained silent […]

  • A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

    Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the […]

  • Joe Klein compares Van Jones to ‘white supremacist,’ ‘Nazi’

    Cross-posted from Wonk Room. Joe Klein, the prominent Time Magazine liberal columnist, has embraced the right-wing assault on Van Jones, the White House green jobs advisor who resigned this weekend. Stung by a successful boycott for calling the president a “racist,” Glenn Beck led a campaign against Van Jones as a “self avowed communist” who […]

  • Big business’s hidden hand in the smear job on Van Jones

    If you thought the targeting of Van Jones for vilification by the right was about his race, his youthful flirtation with socialism, or a petition he signed about the 9/11 attacks, you’d only be a little bit right. And if you think it was about the Color of Change campaign against Glenn Beck’s show on […]

  • Fox News blurts out agenda: With Jones down, stop cap-and-trade

    Having taken Van Jones down, the job destroyers and climate destroyers of the right wing most certainly smell blood. Now Phil Kerpen, policy director for Americans for Prosperity, has laid out the right-wing strategy for how “the Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration,” in a piece on FOXNews.com. […]

  • After Van Jones resignation, Glenn Beck to go after ‘other radicals’

    Following Van Jones’ resignation Saturday night, Glenn Beck has released a statement vowing to go after “other radicals in the administration.” What could be scarier than the nation’s clean energy and climate policy being affected by uber-wingnut Glenn Beck. In a January attack on Obama’s energy and environment adviser, Carol Browner, Beck said on his […]

  • 5 reasons why Van Jones and progressives are better off with Jones out of the White House

    The end of Van Jones’ brief career as a White House insider, in the semi-obscure position of special adviser for green jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality, is likely good for Van Jones and very good for progressives. Yes, currently it seems as if Fox News’ Glenn Beck — who spent the past few […]

  • Labor Day of Infamy

    How easy to be cynical on this Labor Day, and declare it a day that will live in infamy for coal miners and coalfield residents and green job advocates across the nation. But thanks to United Mine workers like Terry Steele, and West Virginia military veterans like Chris Carey, and green job advocates like Van […]