Since misinformation about why Van Jones resigned is still floating around. I thought I'd do a bit of a resume, largely taken from Wikipedia.
1968 Born
1986 Graduated High School
c 1990 BA, University of Tennessee at Martin.
I don't know what his undergraduate degree was in, but he interned with about three companies involved in Journalism, and helped launch or spearhead three companies.
c. 1992 became a Communist.
1993 JD, Yale University Law School
1993 moved to San Francisco
1994 One of 8 founding members of
Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a group explicitly committed to revolutionary Marxist politics whose points of unity were revolutionary democracy, revolutionary feminism, revolutionary internationalism, the central role of the working class, urban Marxism, and Third World Communism.
1995 Started Bay Area Police Watch, to track and protest police brutality.
1996 Founded Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
1997-1999 Led a campaign to get Mark Andaya fired from San Francisco PD.
1999-2000 Unsuccessfully led campaign to defeat Proposition 21 (which proposed treating some juveniles accused of serious felonies as adults)
2001-2003 Launched "Books not Bars" campaign.
2002 Member of organizing committee leading a march to put "truther" questions to Sen. Diane Feinstein
2003 Grassroots director for Arriana Huffington's gubernatorial recall campaign
2005 Founded "Colors of Change", "to strengthen Black America's political voice."
2005 Began promoting eco-capitalism.
Produced "Social Equity Track" for the United Nations' World Environment Day celebration, held that year in San Francisco. Began promoting Oakland Green Jobs Corps
2007 Began creating "Green for All", a new NGO.
2008 published "The Green Collar Economy"
2009 Named Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.[7] Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality
The Communist history alone would be sufficient to disqualify him from a government position which would have required Senate confirmation, which his did not.
His experience seems to be principally that of an anti-establishment activist. Missing from his resume are some of the more radical causes he espoused during his activist career, and any expertise in business administration, economics, engineering, or biology.
The Green for All website is vague on exactly what green or green-collar jobs actually are. "We need [ to ] identify the specific skills the green economy demands." This implies that they have not already actually done so, and that their feel-good-about-the-environment talk is long on rhetoric and short on specifics.