Van Jones: Revolutionary Communist in the Obama White House

Matthew Vadum has a new piece up at the American Spectator, "Van Jones and His STORMtroopers Denounced America the Night After 9/11":

Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), the revolutionary group formed by self-described "communist" and "rowdy black nationalist" Van Jones, held a vigil in Oakland, California, "mourning the victims of U.S. imperialism around the world" on the night after Sept. 11, 2001.

The reason this is important is because Van Jones is now President Obama's green jobs czar. He does not appear to have distanced himself from his past communist activities and is now part of the Obama administration's push to turn Sept. 11 into a National Day of Service focused on the promotion of the radical environmentalist agenda.

Vadum cites passages from Jones' revolutionary pamphlet, Reclaiming Revolution. For example, Jones' group "blamed the U.S. for 9/11":

That night, STORM and the other movement leaders expressed sadness and anger at the deaths of innocent working class people. We were angry, first and foremost, with the U.S. government, whose worldwide aggression had engendered such hate across the globe that working class people were not safe at home. We honored those who had lost their lives in the attack -- and those who would surely lose their lives in subsequent U.S. attacks overseas.

Check out the Glenn Beck video above. Michelle Malkin indicates the significance of Van Jones' background as a Leninist revolutionary, and Beck reads key passages from the pamphlet.

But to be clear: Van Jones is President Barack Obama's "Green Jobs Czar." Kathy Shaidle wrote about him earlier, "Van Jones, 'Green Jobs Czar', a Self-Described 'Communist' Arrested During Rodney King Riots."

Note as well that Jones is the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Here's this from Cliff Kincaid's investigation on Jones' organization:

I visited one of his organizations in Oakland, California, the Ella Baker Center, and discovered a photograph of Communist Angela Davis on the first floor. Ella Baker worked with Communists such as Anne Braden. This fact is noted on the official Baker bio distributed by the organization named in her honor. They are proud of this fact, although they claim that "she had mixed feelings about communism" and only embraced socialism "as a more humane alternative to capitalism."

Jones shows up on a list of "veteran activists" attending a conference in the summer of 1998 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the same place where Bill Ayers is now a professor. The purpose was to plot the "Black Liberation Agenda for the 21st Century" under the auspices of the Black Radical Congress. Angela Davis participated and the Communist Party USA helped organize the event.

One of Jones' sons is named Cabral, in honor of Amilcar Cabral, the African Marxist who spoke to Castro's Tricontinental Congress in 1966 and concluded with these words: "Our wish is that every national liberation movement represented here may be able to repeat in its own country, arms in hand, in unison with its people, the already legendary cry of Cuba: Patria O Muerte, Venceremos! Death to the Forces of Imperialism! Free, Prosperous and Happy Country for Each of our Peoples! Venceremos!"

Kincaid notes that Jones has undertaken "an extreme makeover" to mask his credentials as a hardline revolutionary agitator.

To that effect, check out this article from 2005, "The New Face of Environmentalism: Van Jones Renounced His Rowdy Black Nationalism On the Way Toward Becoming An Influential Leader of the New Progressive Politics":

He still considers himself a revolutionary, just a more effective one, who has realized that the progressive left's insistence on remaining a counterculture destroys its potential as a political movement ...

So, what to do? Join the far-left Obama administration as an environmental minister.

As Ron Radosh points out:

Barack Obama has seen fit to actually appoint a Communist to a position of importance in the White House ....

The man in question is named Van Jones, and President Obama appointed him as a czar in charge of developing “green energy policy.” His exact title is Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. His responsibility is to coordinate the stimulus spending to assure that a hefty portion of it goes to projects that promote green energy. What in Jones’ recent background should raise questions about his worthiness for the appointment? What was the expertise that made him qualified for the position? He was founder of in September 2007 of “Green For All,” a non-governmental organization “dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty … advocating for local, state and federal commitment to job creation, job training, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy – especially for people from disadvantaged communities.” He also attended Yale Law School, thus following a career path similar to that of President Obama. And like the President, he recently said he considers himself a “community organizer.”

As David Horowitz has pointed out, from 1992 until 2002, Jones was a member of a radical communist group that was dedicated to “organizing a revolutionary movement in America.” Arrested during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and briefly sent to jail, Jones met, he said “communists and anarchists,” and decided “ ‘This is what I need to be part of.’” He said that he spent “the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”

The group he joined was Storm, a Bay Area Marxist-Maoist collective staffed by members of radical nonprofit groups, who worked with another body Jones had founded, The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, that sought to provide alternative to prison for African-Americans convicted of crimes. Storm made its position clear in its published manifesto, Reclaiming Revolution:Standing Together to Form a Revolutionary Movement. The group defined itself as a “revolutionary cadre organization,” that understood that “revolutionary Marxist politics would be central to the development of a successful liberation movement in this country.” Its commitment was to “Marxist-Leninist politics,” which posed a problem- since its shrewd leaders knew that “most young activists…were hostile to revolutionary Marxism.”

That meant subterfuge: acknowledging that they could not appear as “an explicitly Marxist organization.” The answer was two tiers of members-a leadership of Marxists and a membership that had to support its unity program that was not “explicitly Marxist.” The group had ties to the South African Communist Party, the breakoff group from the American CP, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and it honored leaders like Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, who lauded Lenin “as the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.” In 2006, Van Jones named his newborn son “Cabral” in the Marxist leader’s honor.

This isn't surprising to conservatives who have long argued against Barack Obama's hardline radical background and associations.

See also, Astute Bloggers, "WHAT IF OBAMA HIRED A MAN LIKE BILL AYERS OR JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND BROUGHT HIM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE? HE HAS!"

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