Obama adviser victim of own past
SMH
September 14, 2009
A week ago, the Herald ran a story which, in its essence, was not true. The paper did not know this. It was the unwitting victim of a distortion created at The Washington Post, which produced the original story. The Herald's headline, which reflected the story, said: ''Right-wing 'lies' force Obama adviser out''.
The story began: ''The White House environmental adviser, Van Jones, a towering figure in the environment movement, has resigned after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism … In a statement announcing his resignation, Jones said, 'They [his critics] are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.'''
No. The distortions have come from Jones. Far from being ''a towering figure in the environmental movement'', Jones was appointed to the Obama Administration despite a past as a hate-mongering Marxist who reinvented himself as an environmentalist to further his political agenda.
As an environmentalist, Jones is a featherweight. As a moral blackmailer, he is a heavyweight. His career prior to his appointment by the White House was as corrosive and racist and driven by hot air as the career of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons Barack Obama listened to for many years.
Yet President Obama gave Jones, at the age of 39, with scant executive and financial experience, responsibility for helping to steer billions of dollars towards programs promoting green jobs. His formal title was Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
In examining Jones's fitness for elevation to a very high position in the Obama Administration, numerous glaring problems should have come to light.
From 1992 until 2002, Jones was a member of a Marxist fraternity dedicated to ''a revolutionary movement in America''. During the Rodney King race riots in Los Angeles in 1992, which spread to other cities, Jones was arrested in San Francisco during a demonstration by radical activists.
In 1996 he set up a community organisation, the Ella Baker Centre for Human Rights, named after an African-American communist.
On September 11, 2001, within hours of the mass murders in New York and Washington, the Ella Baker Centre issued this statement: ''Community-based organisations led by people of colour will hold a 'Solidarity Gathering' and candlelight vigil on Wednesday night to support the Arab-American community, which is suffering from a tidal wave of bigotry in the wake of Tuesday's bombings in New York City and Washington, DC.''
Two days later, on September 13, Jones said in an interview: ''The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.'' He later signed a petition calling for ''an immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur''.
He produced an album of racial provocations by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a member of the Black Panther Party convicted of murdering a police officer. He remains on death row, from where he contributes to a Marxist newspaper.
In 2005 Jones reinvented himself into an environmentalist, but merely shifted his racial baiting. Typical was this comment, available on YouTube: ''White environmental polluters are essentially steering pollution into minority communities.''
In another interview, he said: ''You've never seen Columbine [a high school massacre in 1999] done by a black child. Never! These suburban white kids, it's always them! Now, a black kid might shoot another black kid, but they'll never shoot up an entire school.''
As for his academic credentials, he was offered an affirmative action scholarship, available to African-Americans, to both Harvard and Yale universities. ''I decided to go to Yale,'' he said in an interview, ''because Yale didn't have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enrol I'm guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hell-raiser student, and they can't do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.''
When he later retooled his radical social agenda as environmentalism, he did so as journalist, polemicist and community activist. In 2007 he founded Green For All, an organisation dedicated to creating ''an inclusive green economy''. Last year his first book was published, The Green Collar Economy, which became a modest bestseller. The book earned him plaudits in the mainstream media.
But when Jones's past, his vicious rhetoric, his wild conspiracy theories, his Marxist economics and his paucity of managerial experience began to emerge, the same mainstream media, locked into its own political biases, did not want to know about this story, and did not want their audiences to know about the other side of this newly installed green hero.
Prior to Jones's resignation, despite revelation after revelation which made his position untenable, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, carried not a word. They preferred to be beaten on a big story than to even acknowledge it.
While the Fox News Channel, which drove the Van Jones story, has been one of the biggest media success stories of the past decade, becoming highly profitable and highly influential, during the same decade The New York Times Company has plunged in market value. It is one of numerous once-powerful media companies which would rather die than change an ideological agenda hidden under a false mask of objectivity.
Not just Van Jones has been exposed and damaged by this story. And President Obama's approval rating with white voters has dropped sharply in recent months.
