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Van Jones received raves from Chicago lawyer Valerie Jerrett where she spoke at an August 16th Netroots meeting stating:

“Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.”

Jerrett is a long time advisor to the President and Michelle Obama and now has the titles of Senior Advisor to the President and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison. She is extremely influential in Chicago politics where in 1991, as Deputy Chief of Staff to Mayor Richard Daley, she hired the young lawyer Michelle Johnson who was engaged to Barak Obama who had returned to Chicago after law school.

These are all people who have long term political associations with an extremely progressive agenda. That Obama or Jarrett would be surprised by past statements and affiliations of Jones is as believable as Obama saying William Ayers was just “some I knew from the neighborhood.” Obama claimed ignorance of Ayers past stating he was only 8 years old when Ayers, a co-founder of the radical Weather Underground group, was involved in a 1969 bombing in Chicago. In fact he worked along side Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund in Chicago and Ayers held an early fund raiser at which Obama appeared in a bid for a state legislature seat. As Jerrett said about Jones, we’ve been watching him since his days in Oakland.

Van Jones’ book, “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems,” was published October of last year receiving great reviews from the likes of Hollywood notable Mario Van Peebles, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope among others with progressive credentials. They speak in glowing terms such as

“It’s rare that someone with such a gift for speaking is able to convey the energy and excitement of his message equally well in writing”

and

“The Green Collar Economy is both a rallying call and a road map for how we can save the planet, reduce our dependency on budget-busting fossil fuels, and bring millions of new jobs to America.”

But none of these benefactors include any details of how we could accomplish this and neither does the book.

Other reviewers who had hoped to find answers to environmental and energy challenges viewed the book differently. One that echos a common critique state

“My largest complaint is that so much of this book - the first 65 pages - covers nothing but Hurricane Katrina and race relations. You would never tell from the cover descriptions or introduction that this really is a book about race and class. Van Jones comes across as obsessed with this issue, yet fails to convince me of a real connection between race and the environment.”

Without bothering to read the book, one can learn what Van Jones stands for from a lengthly public record of events and memberships in organizaions. After graduating Yale law Jones immediately engaged in community activism jailed twice for public demonstrations including protests during the Rodney King trials. Not surprisingly, not only were charges dropped but Jones actually won a legal settlement from his arrest. The year was 1992, the year Jones declared “I was a communitst.” He would then move to San Francisco where he got involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement [STORM], a group committed to revolutionary Marxist politics promoting revolutionary democracy, revolutionary feminism, revolutionary internationalism, the central role of the working class, urban Marxism, and Third World Communism.

The mainstream media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times as well as ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN have largely ignored the growing public outrage over Jones until Glen Beck on the Fox Network and Michelle Malkin stayed on the story and the White House could no longer ignore it. They will still have to explain how he got there in the first place. The more radical progressives have fained disgust at the resignation attributing it to hate by the extreme right as reported by David Sirota at Salon who writes

“Jones being forced out will not mollify the racists, crazies, tea baggers, Republican congresspeople and other assorted conservative freakshows - it will only embolden them. When lynch mobs in the Old South lynched someone, when a witchhunting band caught a target in Salem, when HUAC “proved” the supposed communism of its victims, that didn’t calm them down - it only intensified their bloodlust because it made them believe they could be even more successful in the future.”

The progressives would like to break it down to right wing racism but one has to ask if there is anything in Jones education or history to qualify him as “Green Jobs Czar” charged with crating green jobs? No technical background, no business background. Like the President, his experience is primarily related to community organizing and protest. No solutions, just symptoms of a progressive regime promising “Hope and Change” with no practical experience, direction or budget.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.