Former green jobs czar Van Jones, during a roundtable discussion over the rollout of Obamacare on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” said President Barack Obama’s detractors have “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”
“It’s silly season. Literally, they have this sort of Obama Derangement Syndrome where Obama is this absent, weak, ineffectual dictator and tyrant who’s destroying America,” Jones said. …
www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org
11/4/2013
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
•Suspected that the Bush administration “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war”
•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.”
•Has been a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress
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 Bay-Area Marxist-Maoist collective that had ties to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
Jones helped organize an October 1999 rally in Oakland, California, calling for a retrial on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.
Jones’ new approach was modeled on the tactics outlined by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to present themselves as moderates until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. Jones still considered himself a revolutionary, but a more effective one thanks to his revised tactics.
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks made a deep impression on Jones. Just hours after the attacks, Jones and his fellow STORM members publicly denounced the United States for having brought the disaster on itself. The following day, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity not only with Arab and Muslim Americans, but also with those whom Jones described as victims of “U.S. imperialism” around the world. In a press release announcing this vigil, Jones stated: “Anti-Arab hostility is already reaching a fever pitch as pundits and common people alike rush to judgment that an Arab group is responsible for this tragedy. We fear that an atmosphere is being created that will result in official and street violence against Arab men, women and children.”
Around 2002, Jones, who had experience as a record producer, produced (for the Ella Baker Center) an album that starred cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. That album featured lyrics depicting America not only as a place where “terrorists are made,” but also as “a piece of stolen land led by right-wing, war-hungry, oil-thirsty ... mother f***ers” who “got people of color playing servant to do that sh** for them.” Jones himself performed on the album as well, reciting the following anti-Israel lyrics:
“The end of the occupation. The right of return of the Palestinian people. These are critical dividing lines in human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days let alone 54 years. U.S. tax dollars are funding violence against people of color inside the U.S. borders and outside the U.S. borders.”
Also in 2005, Jones co-founded Color of Change (COC), an organization that views the United States as a profoundly racist country, and whose mission is “to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.”
During the George W. Bush administration, Jones likened the president to “a crackhead” because of Bush’s supposedly insatiable desire to drill for oil.
In 2006, Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide “resistance” against police, whom he accused of having exploited the 9/11 attacks as a pretext upon which to carry out policies of torture. A notable fellow signer was the radical attorney Lynne Stewart.
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.” A major funder of Green for All was George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
According to Jones, America is plagued by “eco-apartheid,” where low-income people typically live in more polluted environments than wealthy people. In a January 2008 speech, Jones said: “The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don’t have a racial justice framework.”
After the Bush administration left office, Jones lamented that during Bush’s eight years in the White House “an authoritarian sentiment [had] seized control of the reins of power in our country, burned the Constitution, enshrined torture, launched an unjust war under false premises ... turned [the American flag] into a war flag, and used it to beat and whip and lynch anybody who didn’t agree that we should be bombing people and torturing people.”
At a February 11, 2009 speaking engagement, Jones asserted that congressional Republicans had been able to pass some of their legislative initiatives, even without majorities in the House and Senate, because they were relentlessly persistent, determined “assholes.”
Later that same month in Berkeley, California, Jones made clear his desire to incrementally socialize, by stealth, the U.S. economy:
“Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether ... until [the green economy] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”
On March 10, 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called “green jobs czar”; the formal title for the position was “Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation” for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. At the time, Jones was a senior fellow with John Podesta’s Washington, DC-based Center for American Progress. He described his new role with the Obama administration as that of “a community organizer inside the federal family.”
Amid mounting controversy over his radical past, Jones resigned his post as “green jobs czar” on Labor Day weekend 2009, claiming that he had been victimized by “a vicious smear campaign.” Jones was later asked whether President Obama had been aware of Jones’ controversial history before appointing him as green jobs czar. Jones replied: “I was fully candid, I mean, about my past, about the ideas that I explored....”
After stepping down from his Obama administration post, Jones was offered office work space in the DC offices of the Center for American Progress (CAP). In February 2010, he officially rejoined CAP. That same month, Jones received the NAACP’s President’s Award, for achievement in public service. He also announced that he had secured a one-year assignment to teach a seminar on environmental and economic policy at Princeton University, beginning in June 2010.
In April 2010, Jones said the following about the nature of the Obama administration: “You look at the New Party, which is now the Working Families Party, the idea of a new politics — that you could actually in this country bring together labor and civil rights and feminists, etc., and actually make a difference ... is the basic framework for what just took over the White House.”
Jones serves as one of 20 advisers to the Presidential Climate Action Project (based at the University of Colorado), which makes climate-policy recommendations for the Obama White House. He has been praised for his environmental work by such notable leftists as Thomas Friedman, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Arianna Huffington, Ben Jealous, Laurie David, Gavin Newsom, Carl Pope, Tavis Smiley, Fred Krupp, and John Podesta.
Speaking at a March 31, 2012 “All In For The 99%” rally in Los Angeles, Jones denounced libertarians and their principle of economic liberty, saying: “They’ve taken their despicable ideology and used it a wrecking ball, that they have painted red, white and blue, to smash down every good thing in America.” Portraying libertarians as racists, he continued:
“They say they’re Patriots but they hate everybody in America who looks like us. They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya’ll.... You can’t be an anti-immigrant bigot and a Patriot at the same time.”
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