Sunday, June 19, 2011

I’ve Had All I Can Stand! I Can't Stands No More!

In this video clip posted on the Netroots Nation YouTube channel, Netroots Nation 2011 keynote speaker Van Jones delivers the fiery last few minutes of his speech.

He humorously invokes “Popeye” cartoons, quoting, “I’ve had all I can stand! I can't stands no more!” and encourages attendees to stand up to the smears and hate-mongering spewed daily by Fox News.

Jones, who joined the White House Staff in March 2009 as Pres. Obama's environmental adviser on green jobs development, resigned in September 2009 after the rightwing media and blogosphere echo chamber ginned up calls for his ouster in over his past statements and activism.

Jones issued two public apologies in the days preceding his resignation, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said of Jone's resignation on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual." The president does not endorse Jones's past statements and actions, "but he thanks him for his service," Gibbs said.

The origin of Netroots Nation is traced to first years of the 21st century when a tremendous and growing number of citizens gathered every day in the virtual Internet forum to raise their collective voice and proactively influence their government. That group, broadly called the Netroots, has grown to include progressive organizations and politicians who use new media technologies to communicate with their constituents.

Netroots Nation formally formed in 2007 as progressive organizations and politicians gathered in the first annual Netroots Nation Convention. Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Through the annual convention, and a series of regional salons held throughout the year, Netroots Nation promotes programs that teach and empower the Netroots community of progressive activists and organizations to affect change in the public sphere.

Past Conventions have included a Presidential Leadership Forum that drew seven Democratic candidates, a surprise visit from Al Gore; an interactive Ask the Speaker session with Nancy Pelosi; and hundreds of panels, roundtables, training sessions, workshops and keynotes.

Netroots Nation Convention 2011 held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, MN during the weekend of June 16th included panels led by

  • national and international experts;
  • identity, issue and regional caucuses;
  • prominent political, issue and policy-oriented speakers;
  • a progressive film screening series; and
  • the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers to date.

Netroots Nation is a project of Bloggerpower.org, a 501(c)4 organization, with the generous support of the Netroots Arts and Education Initiative (NAEI).

JackAndJillPolitics: Elon James White of This Week in Blackness and Blacking It Up and Jill Tubman of Jack and Jill Politics infiltrated the Right Online conference masquerading as black conservatives.

Right Online was held at the same time and in the same place as Netroots Nation in Minneapolis this year. The right wing has struggled to mount a conference as popular, as successful and as important as Netroots Nation. BTW, this was the largest NN ever with over 2500+ people from all over the nation and the world, showing that despite a difficult economy — progressives online remain as committed as ever to coming together to design & promote creative solutions to turn this country around. Faced with the growing popularity of NN, a couple of years ago Right Online lit on the strategy of riding Netroots Nation’s coattails, hosting their conference in the same city around the same time as ours. While their conference remained small, it attracted media attention — which emboldened them further.

This year, not only was Right Online held at the same time in the same city as NN — it was in the same hotel! NN mostly took place in the convention center but the Hilton was the official conference hotel where many of the 2500+ attendees stayed. It was an aggressive move and beyond provocative. What did they want? What was their conference like? Why were they here and what did they hope to accomplish? And — what might we expect next year?

Go to JackAndJillPolitics to listen to a podcast and the article for the full story.

No comments:

Post a Comment