By the time you read this, if the Obama administration is smart, Van Jones and the guys who vetted him will be leaving government to spend more time with their families.
In another example of either poor administration vetting of appointees or atrocious judgment, the administration made Van Jones their “green czar” (special advisor for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality).
In the past few days he’s been revealed on tape calling the president’s opponents by a vulgar term for which he apologized on Wednesday to Politico. But that’s small potatoes.
In 2005 Jones told the East Bay Express that the acquittal of Rodney King’s assailants in 1992 in that infamous police brutality case changed him significantly. “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.” Jones and other young activists in 1994 formed a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, rooted in Marxism and Leninsm[sic].
In 2004, he signed a petition which demanded an investigation into what the Bush administration knew about 9/11 before it occurred, indicating that they allowed the attack to provide a pretext for war. Denying he was a “truther” and claiming he’d signed the petition without reading it or understanding its meaning (qualifying him, I suppose, for Congress), he has been caught acting as a truther long before his signature appears on the petition.
In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of “the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.” He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition. An administration source said Jones says he did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.
Whoever advanced that Jones defense did so without much investigation — or under the assumption that a supine press wouldn’t check it out either. Wrong again.
Yesterday, news broke out that Barack Obama’s communist Green Czar was a 9-11 Truther. The administration much later in the day released a statement saying Van Jones was “not now or ever” involved in the 9-11 Truther movement.
Jones said the petition he signed in 2004 did not reflect his views and that he did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.
Not true.
This article at Rense.com from 2002 links Van Jones to the 9-11 Truther movement at its infancy.
That petition states in relevant part:
The 9-11 disaster has been used to justify a “War on Terrorism” which endangers the lives and liberties of millions of people everywhere. The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan has killed thousands of civilians; millions of Afghans have been displaced and face starvation this winter. The administration has condoned massive Israeli assaults on Palestine, and threatens to attack Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, and other countries. Recent legislation is an attack on constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, especially those of immigrants and people of color. The laws are mirrored in other countries which are outlawing dissent and increasing political repression. The administration has institutionalized racial profiling and is secretly rounding up thousands of Arab Americans and other people of Middle Eastern background. At the same time, it is giving billions to the military, offering huge bailouts and tax incentives to corporations and the wealthy, while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of laid off workers, and cutting social services. This appears to be part of a long-range strategy to turn the clock back on the hard earned gains of the civil rights’, womens’, and environmental movements, to consolidate U.S. global domination, and to serve the interests of transnational corporations.
In fact, Van Jones, heading up the boycott drive against administration critic Glenn Beck from his perch in the White House, has seriously miscalculated the abilities of the largely alternative media in winkling out his views and background.
So now we know that Van Jones is a self-professed communist, a truther, an intemperate partisan, and a liar. What more does it take to persuade the White House that it’s time to depose the red “green czar”?
What about the fact that his notion that green jobs will provide any substantial meaningful long-term employment is pure hokum unsupported by fact? Just as the “shovel ready” jobs the president spoke about when he urged passage of the stimulus act referred quite obviously only to Pelosi and Reid being ready to shovel our money to their pals and not to major public works projects immediately ready to go but for the want of money, I believe Van Jones’ entire notion is a cover for payoffs to his radical buddies.
I agree with Elizabeth Kolbert:
[T]he basic premise of Jones’s appeal — that combating global warming is a good way to lift people out of poverty — is very much open to debate. … [I]t’s not at all clear that the number of jobs created by, say, an expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry.
Nor is it clear that a green economy would be any better at providing work for the chronically unemployed than our present, “gray” economy has been.
It is a leftist pattern to force government money into useless projects on the grounds that these expenditures will lift the poor from poverty. When they invariably do not — because they were based on ridiculous assumptions — the claim is that the establishment prevented the program from working. Sabotage show trials or less sinister demands for even greater sums to be thrown away follow, and everyone becomes ever more impoverished.
Van Jones needs to go — and fast. This “greening the ghetto” hoax should go out to pasture with the “red green czar.”
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