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To: maggief

You have faster fingers :)


99 posted on 08/25/2009 2:51:34 PM PDT by fretzer
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To: fretzer

Jones was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. That organization had its roots in a grouping of black people organizing to protest the first Gulf War. STORM was formally founded in 1994, becoming one of the most influential and active radical groups in the San Francisco Bay area.

STORM worked with known communist leaders. It led the charge in black protests against various issues, including a local attempt to pass Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that sought to increase the penalties for violent crimes and require more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults.

The leftist blog Machete 48 identifies STORM’s influences as “third-worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism).”

Jones did not return WND requests for comment left at his Green for All organization.

Speaking to the East Bay Express, Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.

“I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

“I met all these young radical people of color – 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,” he said.

Trevor Loudon, a communist researcher and administrator of the New Zeal blog, identified several Bay area communists who worked with STORM, including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones’ Ella Baker Human Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and Martinez also attended a “Challenging White Supremacy” workshop together.

Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) in the early 1990’s, according to Loudon. Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former Weathermen radicals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn.

One of STORM’s newsletters featured a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.

The tribute is noteworthy because Jones reportedly named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every email with a quote from the communist leader.

STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering amongst its leaders.

Jones then moved on to environmentalism. He used his Ella Baker Center to advocate “inclusive” environmentalism and launch a Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, which led to the nation’s first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, Calif.

http://hd.highdesert.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17056&sid=333dc58d72a087ba57633247f8073264


113 posted on 08/25/2009 3:00:24 PM PDT by maggief
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