Van Jones’ Present Was Worse than His Past and Other White House Radicals Are Poised to Continue H

National Security Studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council ^ | September 8, 2009 | William R. Hawkins

[AIM Freeper]

Green Jobs Czar Van Jones' resignation over the Labor Day weekend occurred amidst controversy about his actions and statements prior to taking a post in President Barack Obama's White House. What has not been covered was his current role in the administration and the policy he was hired to implement. The goal of substituting "green jobs" for conventional work in American industry is as problematical as any of the Marxist delusions that Jones embraced as a radical activist in 1990s. There are reasons that Al Gore is a fan of Jones' work as an environmentalist.

Of all the allegations made against Jones in the weeks leading to his resignation, his signing of a petition circulated by 911Truth.org in 2004 was most damaging. The petition called "for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current [Bush] administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war." As a long time activist in the San Francisco area, Jones had to be familiar with this disinformation campaign as it was rampant within the antiwar movement. A look at the 911Truth.org website reveals that the group believes that concerns about terrorism or other threats to national security are "fake" and only used by "neoconservative warriors" to justify U.S. aggression. They take the argument back to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, claiming "President Roosevelt (FDR) provoked the attack, knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders." The only real threat to the world is the United States.

The antiwar and environmentalist movements share the same roots, coming out of the 1960s New Left. The first Earth Day was held in 1970 during the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests and featured the same activists. The shared objective has always been to bring down the United States as the world's leading power. To the Left, America's high standard of living is the result of imperialism overseas that has "raped the world" for the benefit of a wasteful, bloated, and racist American middle class. The U.S. must now step back so that the "oppressed" of the rest of the world can rise.

Jones was within this ideology when he dedicated the book which made him famous - and landed him the "Czar" appointment - The Green Collar Economy to solving what he saw as the two greatest problems, "massive socioeconomic inequality and imminent ecological catastrophe."

Another top Obama advisor built his early career espousing this same outlook. John P. Holdren is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He has argued in the past for the "de-development" of the United States, believing the country is "over developed." In the 1973 book Ecoscience co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, he wrote "The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one." The three environmentalists argued, "The most critical change of all must be a change in goals; all people, rich and poor alike, must come to recognize that being a citizen of a giant, smoggy, freeway-strangled industrial state is not necessary to being a happy, healthy, fulfilled human being." This is a concise statement of the core Green worldview.

I discussed in a January FSM column the career of "Climate Czar" Carol Browner and her affiliation with the Socialist International. That column included a history of Marxist thought regarding economic growth and redistribution within the context of an anti-Western "anti-imperialist" dogma.

As the 911Truth.org controversy swirled around him, Jones released a statement trying to change the subject from his radical past to his current duties, "As for the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement, and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever. My work at the Council on Environmental Quality is entirely focused on one goal: building clean-energy incentives which create 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and use renewable resources."

The legislative vehicle the Obama administration is backing to advance this Green agenda is the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act. The U.S. House passed this bill by the narrow margin of 219-212 on June 26, and the Senate is expected to take it up this fall. The legislation sets greenhouse gas emission reduction targets from 2005 levels of 20 percent by 2020; 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050. How such massive reductions in the by products of an advanced, industrial economy that requires increasing supplies of energy to maintain the living standards of a growing population is left unexplained and unaddressed by the bill. Instead, it is merely hoped that alternative "clean" energy sources, such as wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass, and solar, will be developed on a scale that can replace oil, natural gas and coal at comparable costs.

It was the task of Jones, and remains the task of Holdren, Browner and others, to convince the public that this program to downsize America can be implemented without adverse affects on household living standards. However, research at the Heritage Foundation finds, "Should it become law, Waxman-Markey will reverberate throughout the economy, costing the nation an average of $393 billion annually and over a million jobs from 2012 to 2035." The average household would see its energy bill go up by $829 per year beyond the normal market fluctuations. But that is only the surface effect, "Higher direct energy costs are only part of the total household burden: Since nearly all other goods, from food to furniture, require energy to produce and transport, their costs will rise along with the price of energy." writes Ben LiebermanThe Heritage Foundation calculates that, by 2035, America would be $9.4 trillion poorer with Waxman-Markey than without it," he concludes., a Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment at the conservative think tank. "

The targets of Waxman-Markey are not just large-scale enterprises and utilities. The bill states "Each increment of emission, when combined with other emissions, causes or contributes materially to the acceleration and extent of global warming and its adverse effects for the lifetime of such gas in the atmosphere. Accordingly, controlling emissions in small as well as large amounts is essential to prevent, slow the pace of, reduce the threats from, and mitigate global warming and its adverse effects." Thus small business firms, family farms, and even individual households will be subject to tight environmental monitoring and control.

Even if new "green technology" could replace current energy generation to provide for continued economic growth, there is reason to believe that the environmentalists would oppose its use. Joel Kotkin, a weekly columnist for Forbes, wrotein theAugust 4thissue about why "Green Jobs Can't Save the Economy." He reported, "Attempts to put windmills in Nantucket, Mass., the Catskills and Jones Beach in New York and other scenic areas have also been blocked by environmentalist groups. Transmission lines, necessary to take 'renewable' energy from distant locales to energy-hungry cities, often face similar hurdles. Solar farms in the Mojave desert might help meet renewable energy quotas but, as wildlife groups have noted, may not be so good for local fauna."

Waxman-Markey itself makes plans to connect remote wind and solar generators to urban areas subject to review based on "habitat protection, health and safety considerations, environmental considerations, or cultural site protection," the same set of obstacles that Greens have used for decades to block the expansion of convention energy development projects. The Green movement does not really want new "alternative" energy sources. It is entirely wedded to a "do without" ideology of lower living standards as the only way to save the world/environment from American abuse.

The public outcry that drove Van Jones from office was certainly a welcome sign that the American people have little tolerance for those who express radical, anti-American views. But it needs to be more sharply focused at the nuts and bolts of evolving policy in Congress as well as the White House, and not just at the rhetoric that shows up in the media. The Left is learning to spin its doctrines, as the use of the "green jobs" terminology shows, but it is harder to hide what it is actually doing.

[ansel12]

Romney’s handpicked choice for California Governor speaks on Van Jones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSn37TMXZO8&feature=player_embedded

[Sherman Logan]

These are the people who refer to themselves as “the reality-based community.”

[TBP]

As Morton Blackwell reminds us, personnel is policy.

Show me who your friends are and I’ll show you who you are. DumBO has a lot of friends like Jones, Cass Sundstein, and others. This is why Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc. were relevant.