Posted on April 13, 2009

Will a ‘Red’ Help Blacks Go Green?

Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily, April 12, 2009

The man appointed as a special environmental adviser to the White House recently was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.

Van Jones, president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit organization that advocates for building a so-called inclusive green economy, has been tapped to serve as the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. According to the White House blog, Jones’ duties will include helping to craft job-generating climate policy and ensuring equal opportunity in the administration’s energy proposals.

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“I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward,” [Jones] told the left-leaning East Bay Express in a 2005 interview. “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”

“There is a green wave coming, with renewable energy, organic agriculture, cleaner production,” Jones said. “Our question is: Will the green wave lift all boats? That’s the moral challenge to the people who are the architects of this new, ecologically sound economy. Will we have eco-equity, or will we have eco-apartheid? Right now we have eco-apartheid.”

Jones was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM.

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).”

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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.”

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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.

At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007, Jones announced the establishment of Green For All, which in 2008 held a national green conference where most attendees were black. Jones also released a book, “The Green Collar Economy,” which debuted at No.12 on the New York Times’ bestseller list–the first environmental book written by an African American to make that list.

His appointment as a White House environmental adviser was announced on March 10.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley announced, “Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs, and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the President’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources. Jones will also help to shape and advance the administration’s energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities.”