Obama's communist friends and appointees
Sarah Austin
Obama's 'green jobs czar' worked with terror founder
Van Jones served on board of activist group where ex-Weatherman serves
as top director
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---- ---- Posted: August 13, 2009 12:20 am Eastern
By Aaron Klein
� 2009 WorldNetDaily
Van Jones
JERUSALEM � Van Jones, the man appointed as "green jobs czar" to the
White House, previously served on the board of an environmental
activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist
organization is a top director.
WND previously reported Jones was as an admitted radical communist and
black nationalist leader.
He was appointed 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 include
helping to craft job-generating climate policy and to ensure equal
opportunity in the administration's energy proposals.
Jones, formerly a self-described "rowdy black nationalist," boasted in
a 2005 interview with the left-leaning East Bay Express that his
environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class
"justice."
Jones was president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit
organization that advocates for building a so-called inclusive green
economy.
Until recently, Jones was a longtime member of the board of Apollo
Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environmental and community
leaders that claims on its website to be "working to catalyze a clean
energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new
generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs."
Although influential, Apollo has only 14 state affiliates nationwide.
Its New York office is directed by Jeff Jones, a top founding member of
the Weather Underground radical organization.
Jeff Jones' bio on the Apollo website boasts the activist campaigned to
remove PCBs from the Hudson River, clean up toxic pollution in
inner-city and rural neighborhoods, and reverse global warming.
Jeff Jones was wanted by the FBI after he failed to appear for a March
1970 court date to face charges of "crossing state lines to foment a
riot"
The bio states that from 1995-2005, Jeff Jones served as the
communications director of Environmental Advocates of New York.
Previously, he was a reporter covering state politics and policy for a
variety of news organizations.
Not mentioned is that Jeff Jones was a leading anti-war activist and
terrorist group founder who spent time on the run from law enforcement
agencies while his group carried out a series of bombings of U.S.
government buildings.
Jeff Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from
which the Weathermen splintered in the fall of 1965. Two years later,
he became the SDS's New York City regional director, a position in
which he participated in nearly all of the group's major protests until
1969, including the 1968 Columbia University protests and the violent
riots that same year at the Democratic National Convention.
In 1969, Jeff Jones founded the Weathermen with terrorists Bill Ayers
and Mark Rudd when the three signed an infamous statement calling for a
revolution against the American government inside and outside the
country to fight and defeat what the group called U.S. imperialism.
President Obama came under fire for his longtime, extensive association
with Ayers.
Jeff Jones was a main leader and orchestrator of what became known as
the Days of Rage, a series of violent riots in Chicago organized by the
Weathermen. The culmination of the riots came when he gave a signal for
rowdy protestors to target a hotel that was the home of a local judge
presiding over a trial of anti-war activists.
Jeff Jones went underground after he failed to appear for a March 1970
court date to face charges of "crossing state lines to foment a riot
and conspiring to do so." He moved to San Francisco with Ayers' wife,
Bernardine Dorhn. That year, at least one bombing claimed by the
Weathermen went off in Jones' locale at the Presidio Army base.
Jones' Weathermen would take credit for multiple bombings of U.S.
government buildings, including attacks against the U.S. Capitol March
1, 1971; the Pentagon May 19, 1972, and a 1975 bombing of the State
Department building.
Jeff Jones did not return WND phone and e-mail requests for comment.
White House adviser Van Jones, meanwhile, is not impartial to radical
activism.
He was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization
Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The
organization had its roots in a grouping of black people organizing to
protest the first Gulf War. STORM was formally founded in 1994,
becoming one of the most influential and active radical groups in the
San Francisco Bay area.
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)."
Speaking to the East Bay Express, Van 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."
"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 10 years of my life working with a lot of
those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary," he said.
Trevor Loudon, a communist researcher and administrator of the New Zeal
blog, identified several Bay Area communists who worked with STORM,
including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones' Ella Baker Human
Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and
Martinez also attended a "Challenging White Supremacy" workshop
together.
Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party
USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy
and Socialism, or CCDS, in the early 1990s, according to Loudon.
Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of
the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former
Weathermen radicals Ayers and Dorhn.
One of STORM's newsletters featured a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, the
late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde
Islands.
The tribute is noteworthy because Jones reportedly named his son after
Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the
communist leader.
STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering among its leaders.
Van 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, an activist organization which in 2008
held a national green conference in which 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 the list.
His appointment as a White House environmental adviser was announced
March 10.