Getting to Know our Nation’s “Green Czar”

As our nations new 44^th president continues to name more and more czars to push his liberal initiatives he recently added one more to current list of 35 and counting. On March.10, 2009, President Obama named Van Jones as his new “Green Jobs” czar, working with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). This announcement came with little fanfare from the fawning Obama- mania main stream media. Had the liberal press actually done their jobs and vetted Mr. Jones there may have been more scrutiny for Obama’s newest czar. As the media continues to ignore Obama’s unprecedented use of these czars which have tremendous political power but hardly any oversight from the Federal Government, there may have been more outrage over the sketchy past of Mr. Jones. And I could only imagine the scrutiny that the MSM would give to such a shady character if he was appointed under a Republican Administration.

As of press time, only Fox News and specifically Fox News host Glenn Beck have been the only MSM source that has brought attention to this man’s checkered past and extreme left wing views. Yet, as the MSM continues to be firmly attached to the back pocket of our current President, no other news organizations have even addressed his past views and have even gone as far as to discredit Mr. Beck and Fox News by accusing them of fear-mongering and of course, spinning it into a racial issue. After researching Mr. Jones’s background and prior associations these half-hearted attempts to discredit Mr. Beck become laughable.

Anthony (Van) Jones was raised in rural Tennessee where he attended The University of Tennessee at Martin. After graduating college he attended Yale Law School.

In a November, 2005 article in the East Bay Express, Jones is quoted as saying “I arrived wearing black combat boots with a Black Panther backpack, I wasn’t ready for Yale and Yale wasn’t ready for me.”  At Yale Mr. Jones discovered the black liberation theology (Rev. Wright’s teachings) that reinterprets the Christ story as an anticolonial struggle. He also became heavily influenced by socialists, Marxists, and the communist movement (He has confessed to being a self-avowed communist). In 1992 he moved to San Francisco when the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights hired a batch of law students to act as legal observers during the trial of Rodney King's assailants.

When the three white officers were found not guilty during the trial, Van Jones participated in the racial riots and was arrested. During his time in jail Mr. Jones continued and expanded his radical racial and anti-authoritarian positions."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."  He reflected on his jail time by saying “"I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.” “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts of fitting in with the general status quo.

In 1994, the activist formed a socialist collective named “Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement”, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia. STORM protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades during supposedly peaceful protests. He then began his own operation fighting racism by creating the Ella Baker Center, “A non-profit agency for justice, opportunities, and peace” and named after Ella Baker, an unsung hero of the civil-rights movement. This group was heavily connected to STORM. This self-described “rowdy, black, nationalist” quickly figured out that a way to achieve a higher profile with-in his party and advance their agenda of re-distributing other’s wealth by catering to the left’s extreme environmental agenda.

So in 2007 Mr. Jones started “Green For All”, A Green-Collar Jobs Campaign that was Jones' first concerted effort to combine his lifelong commitment to racial and economic justice with his newfound commitment to solving the world’s environmental crisis. He launched the Green-Collar Cities Program to help build local urban green economies. As well as starting the “Green For All” Capital Access Program to assist green entrepreneurs. (Most of which almost strictly assist minority’s)

 To Mr. Jones’s credit he has always managed to stay ahead of the curve by constantly evolving and advancing his political views which have been instrumental in securing local, state, and federal funds for the non-profits that he creates. By presenting himself initially as a Black Panther sympathizer, then a communist, then as a racial and civil rights activist/lawyer protesting police brutality, he has once again reinvented himself as a “Green Jobs” guru of inner cities. This allows him to successfully mingle with the elite of the left while not losing his black activist credibility. But, most importantly as the “green czar” he is now able to secure and distribute much of the stimulus funding that has been earmarked for creating and producing green products. 

As President Obama crowns new czars continually with some having radical past associations and agendas that the MSM refuses to address and our nation struggling to escape a deep economic rut, we now have to worry about an “avowed communists” pulling the purse strings of the nation’s stimulus package. We can only imagine where and with whom the buck will finally stop.