Rainforest Network: A Socialist Network

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: VAN JONES

Became a Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 "Rodney King riots" in Los Angeles
Founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996
Was active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER
Served as a board member of the Rainforest Action Network and Free Press
In March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called "Green Jobs Czar."

Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones earned a B.A. degree from the University of Tennessee at Martin and then attended Yale Law School. During his years at Yale, Jones served as an intern with the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), which views the United States as an irredeemably racist nation and "champions the legal rights of people of color, poor people, immigrants and refugees, with a special commitment to African-Americans."

Jones says that he first became politically radicalized in the aftermath of the deadly April 1992 Los Angeles riots which erupted shortly after four L.A. police officers who had beaten the infamous Rodney King were exonerated in court. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th," says Jones, who is black, "and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist."

Jones was arrested during the L.A. riots and spent a short time in jail. "I met all these young radical people of color," he recalls, "I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary."

After earning his Juris Doctorate from Yale in 1993, Jones relocated to San Francisco, where he helped establish Bay Area PoliceWatch, a hotline and lawyer-referral service that began as a project of LCCR. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which, claiming that the American criminal-justice system is infested with racism, seeks to promote alternatives to incarceration. According to the Baker Center:

"Decades of disinvestment in our cities have led to despair and hopelessness. For poor communities and communities of color it's even worse, as excessive, racist policing and over-incarceration have left people even further behind."

By the late 1990s, Jones was a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who viewed police officers as the arch-enemies of black people, and who loathed capitalism for allegedly exploiting nonwhite minorities worldwide. He became a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a now-defunct Bay Area Marxist-Maoist collective that was staffed by members of various local nonprofits, a number of whom had ties to the Ella Baker Center.

In the early 2000s, Jones and STORM were active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER, a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. STORM also had ties to the South African Communist Party and it revered Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader (of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands) who lauded Lenin as "the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples." (In 2006 Van Jones would name his own newborn son "Cabral" -- in Amilcar Cabral's honor.)

During his tenure with STORM, Jones collaborated on numerous projects (including antiwar demonstrations) with local activist Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, who served as a "mentor" for members of the Ella Baker Center. Martinez was a longtime Maoist who went on to join the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), a Communist Party USA splinter group, in the early 1990s. To this day, Martinez continues to sit on the CCDS advisory board alongside such luminaries as Angela Davis, Timuel Black (who served on Barack Obama's 2004 Senate campaign committee), and musician Pete Seeger. Martinez is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, the parent organization of Progressives for Obama. Martinez and Van Jones together attended a "Challenging White Supremacy" workshop which advanced the theme that "all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration" with blacks.

In 2005 Jones and the Ella Baker Center produced the "Social Equity Track" for the United Nations' World Environment Day celebration, a project that eventually would evolve into the Baker Center's Green-Collar Jobs Campaign -- "a job-training and employment pipeline providing 'green pathways out of poverty' for low-income adults in Oakland."

Soon after attending the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2007, Jones launched "Green For All," a non-governmental organization "dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty … advocating for local, state and federal commitment to job creation, job training, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy - especially for people from disadvantaged communities."

In 2008 Jones published his first book, The Green Collar Economy, which focused on environmental and economic issues. The book received favorable reviews from such notables as Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Laurie David, Winona LaDuke, environmentalist Paul Hawken, and NAACP President/CEO Ben Jealous.

Jones has served as a board member of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including the Rainforest Action Network; Free Press; Bioneers (which accepts the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Report's warning that "[h]uman activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted"); the National Apollo Alliance (which seeks "to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs"); the Social Venture Network (which aims "to build a just economy and sustainable planet"); and Julia Butterfly Hill's "Circle of Life" environmental foundation.

Jones was also a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

In March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called "Green Jobs Czar." Jones' formal title is "Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation" for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

In a July 2009 interview with Newsweek magazine, Jones said he could not explain exactly what a "green job" is:

"Well, we still don't have a unified definition, and that's not unusual in a democracy. It takes a while for all the states and the federal government to come to some agreement. But the Department of Labor is working on it very diligently. Fundamentally, it's getting there, but we haven't crossed the finish line yet."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2406

"Kudos to Glenn Beck on investigating greenhouse gas Czar, Van Jones."

It's "Green Jobs Czar", not "greenhouse gas czar".

Yes that is known, but the real threat is the laws that deal with greenhouse gases.

Without the laws, his czarness would be useless.

Cap and Trade...

Related...

RE: Obama's "Climate Czar". She is on the same page with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro...

From The Washington Times, January 12, 2009

Obama climate czar has socialist ties
Group sees 'global governance' as solution

by Stephen Dinan

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.

lots more...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/12/obama-climate-czar-has-socialist-ties/
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From GreenLeft.org

VENEZUELA: Chavez calls for global offensive for socialism
August 31, 2005

excerpts...

"The environment is suffering damage that could be irreversible — global warming, the greenhouse effect, the melting of the polar ice caps, the rising sea level, hurricanes — with terrible social occurrences that will shake life on this planet."

"I believe this idea has a strong connection with reality. I don't think we have much time. Fidel Castro said in one of his speeches I read not so long ago, 'tomorrow could be too late, let's do now what we need to do'."

"I believe it is time that we take up with courage and clarity a political, social, collective and ideological offensive across the world — a real offensive that permits us to move progressively, over the next years, the next decades, leaving behind the perverse, destructive, destroyer, capitalist model and go forward in constructing the socialist model to avoid barbarism and beyond that the annihilation of life on this planet."

--Hugo Chavez, at the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Caracas on August 8-15, 2005

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/640/640p16.htm
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Here's a link to an image of a Google cache of the Socialist International's webpage that originally included Obama's "Climate Czar" Carol Browner. It was found by FReeper, Publius6961:
http://24ahead.com/images/si-csws-cache-as-of-011009.jpg
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She and Van Jones can send all of the environmentalist lawyers (Green Jobs) to litigate against the Orrinco field in Chavezland and “shut er down” like they are trying to do to the oil fields in the U.S. and Canada.

Watermelons.

Perhaps now is a good time to start a new thread exposing Browner’s socialist ties.

bttt

Perhaps now is a good time to start a new thread exposing Browner’s socialist ties.

Obama's "Climate Czar" (Carol M. Browner) is on the same page with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro...