On November 22nd, in his weekly YouTube address to the nation, President-elect Obama detailed his plan to create 2.5 million new jobs. In the last few months, half a million Americans have lost their jobs to the finance crunch. Downtown suburbia is looking like a ghost town this holiday season, with retail stores closing left and right. Our new president has his job cut out for him.

I’ve been away from In The Loop for awhile. I was involved in my local elections, trying to establish a viable Green party alternative to the two party system. Although I share everyone’s enthusiasm at celebrating our country’s first black president, I’m doing so with a healthy dose of skepticism, because the systemic problems he’s inherited from previous administrations are so entrenched, it’s going to take a mighty wind to blow real change in our direction.

We lost our manufacturing base. We don’t know how to build things with our hands anymore, other than ReadyMade. The jobs Obama is promising are Green Collar Jobs. A big part of Obama’s strategy is Van Jones, author of the NY Times best-seller, The Green Collar Economy. It sounds a lot like Bill Clinton’s 1993 campaign promise of a 3 million strong Civil Conservation Corps revival open to all young people. Once elected, Clinton’s plan was gutted down by Congress and dwindled to just a few thousand college educated AmeriCorps volunteers.

The task of nationalizing the thousands of environmentally focused organizations where Americans give their time also didn’t sit well with the independent spirit of these groups, resisting Clinton’s vision which then died on the vine.

There are two major differences between 1993 and 2008. The first is the green consumer culture today is firmly established, whereby back in the early 90’s, there were just a handful of green companies. Green had not entered the vernacular as a lifestyle choice yet. The second is that environmentalism is no longer something you donate your time to anymore, it’s become a source of income for millions who have learned to blend their job with their sense of ethics. Those who want to change the world also want to get paid, testified by this new Harvard Press title Practical Idealists! Welcome to the ”grown-up 60’s.”

Van Jones and Obama’s green jobs initiative could succeed by forging deep connections with the online green community. Already, our own Jenny Hwa’s support of the Green Corps blends sustainable fashion with green job training. The growing eco-fashion industry provides great opportunity to bring back jobs to America. Made in the USA wasn’t enough to inspire our sense of purpose, but Made “green” in the USA suddenly has a real nice ring to it.

Recently, a young group of ecopreneurs in Colorado launched a green Craigslist at GenGreen, where environmentally-focused job seekers and employers can match up and find each other. Co-Op America has been doing that in print with their National Green Pages for many years. Both are now involved with the Van Jones organization, Green For All. My own environmental education and action center in Connecticut, The Aquarium (slang for think tank in the old Soviet Union), is working on green job creation and a green jobs directory for libraries and institutions.

Creating environmental jobs is what we’ve all been doing, because these jobs are anchored in the life cycle of the very products we design, make, sell, buy, and dispose of. Our green economy, compared to fly-by-night, short term gain operators out there, is a lasting one, bound by human as well as financial relationships carved worldwide. With green ethics should also come, sadly not always, a matching sense of business ethics. This institutionalized caring for one another, our products, our clientele, means that we will weather the storm.

In addition to green fashion and cosmetics, the new green job market in the sustainable fashion economy are green fashion blogs and magazines, which in turn fuel a growing need for green fashion photographers, models, graphic and make-up artists, and stylists, creating a brave new green fashion world feeding the emerging green collar job market with image branding & trend setting. Solar, wind, electric car companies, hemp products, etc… all need the services of the green fashion industry to promote their products and services. First the giant Gaiam umbrella, owners of Real Goods and Whole Foods, then professional associations like LOHAS and now B Corporation’s roles are to bring together all these factions into a multi-billion dollar strong economy, much like the Environmental Media Association, Earth Communications Office and Global Green USA brought Green Hollywood together.

This new Green Hollywood, expressed through TV channels like Planet Green and blogs like EcoRazzi, play a role in Obama’s presidency. Entertainment industry unions like the Screen Actors’s Guild have great influence on national politics. It’s hard to get hired in tinseltown these days if you’re not considered green. Green isn’t just the new black, it’s the new fanaticism, the new religion. It’s the logical outcome of the mid-70’s EST training seminars and First Earth Battalion. To quote the Gang Of Four, “love a man in a uniform.”

If President Obama can truly follow through on his green jobs promise and not buckle under Union leaders desperate to protect their antiquated Detroit and nuclear industry jobs, we might actually stand a chance turning the Titanic around. At the last G20 meeting in Washington DC, the world leaders refused to shake Bush’s hand, putting the blame for the global economic crisis squarely on his administration. The YouTube news clip is disturbing. By electing Obama, the people of this country have made a move towards restoring balance, but America still has to follow through on its promise.

(top image courtesy zootsuitstore.com)