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I have to admit, I spend far too much time watching Glenn Beck on Fox News. Some of my friends believe my consumption of Fox News can be directly linked to my slightly elevated blood pressure rates. It is true that I spend more time yelling at the T.V. during Beck's show than any other program. The fact is, I listen to, watch, and read an inordinate amount of media on any given day. Believe it or not, I frequently consume somewhere between 12 and 14 hours of news and other related media in a day. Sometimes I hear or read the same story told with three different spins within one hour.
So, of course Fox News gets a share of my attention. I like to watch or listen to parts of O'Reilly, Hannity, and/or Beck before flipping over to Olbermann, Maddow and then finally the Daily Show and Colbert Report. Mostly these programs run in the backdrop while I'm reading the papers, a book, writing, preparing for dinner, whatever.
Over the last couple of weeks, I watched Beck do one of his conspiracy trees in which he attempts to link all things Obama to an evil communist plot to create a New World Order. He likes to illustrate his conspiracies with big beautiful images of what looks like a child's rendition of a tree or some octopus shaped thingy. Most of this months crazy conspiracy trees and monsters went into trying to "prove" Obama's health care plan- or Obamacare- is an essential element to the communist takeover of America and thus the whole wide world. (I kid you not.) However, on a few occasions, Beck has made Van Jones the center piece of his conspiracy theories.
Van Jones is the Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council of Environment Quality (CEQ.) The CEQ was created by congress in 1969 and, to date, I can not think of a single Special Advisor that became a household name in its 40 year history? However, some, especially Beck, see Jones as an important piece in the building of a New World Order.
Beck, calling Jones the "Green Jobs Czar," suggests that he is a key to unraveling the whole leftwing communist takeover. At first, Beck correctly points out that Jones has been working to join the forces of labor, environmental movement, and social justice activists together in order to form the backbone of the new "green collar economy." That is absolutely correct. Beck goes on to say that Jones is a "former black nationalist and a self confessed communist." That is also correct. In fact, I have read several rightwing articles which have focused on the fact that at one time Jones considered himself a black nationalist and communist.
Not only that, Beck, and every article I have read from the rightwing, have also repeatedly brought up the other fact that Jones claims he became a black nationalist and communist while he was in jail. Beck then draws the connections between the unions, environmental movements, grassroots social justice groups, black nationalists, and the communists plan to takeover of world and wraps it all up into one big tree or octopus like thingy. Here is a youtube links in which Beck talks about the conspiracy and draws on his board.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdCdCXNhwh4
However, let's take a closer look at Van Jones. I'll begin with his "so called" time in the joint, when he converted to a black nationalist and communist, and what he did during those early years of his life. To begin with, it is not like he went to jail because he was driving drunk with a bag of cocaine and risking peoples lives or anything like that. If he had done that, he just might be considered a good candidate for President of the United States
Jones became a radical activist by way of Yale Law School and rural Tennessee. In the spring of 1992, the San Francisco based Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) hired a group of law students as legal observers during the protests of the Rodney King beatings. After the verdicts came down, not guilty, the city exploded into riots. Jones was swept up in a mass arrest during a legal rally he was hired to monitor as a legal observer. He spent all of 4 hours in jail and the charge against him was dropped. However, it was long enough for him to sit down and listen to the activists he shared a jail cell with. Van Jones has spent no other time in jail.
In 2005, an East Bay Express writer Eleza Strickland sat down with Jones and here is how they tell his transitioned from Yale Law to social activist, "... Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "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.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "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 that he might fit in with the status quo. "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."
In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, 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. They protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades. In 1996, Jones decided to launch his own operation, which he named the Ella Baker Center after an unsung hero of the civil-rights movement. Jones wedged a desk and a chair inside a large closet in the back of Paterson's office (at the LCHR.) He brought in his home computer and ran cables through the rafters to get the operation humming."
So, fresh out of law school, Jones decided to forgo a job with a Washington D.C. law firm and opted to work with a radical group of black communists, anarchists, nationalists, and socialists in the Bay Area on issues of police brutality, prison reform, and urban poverty. He began his work out of a tiny backroom office in a San Francisco non-profit human rights organization.
After a couple of years, he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He launched the Books Not Bars campaign to help steer young people away from a life in prison. The center created the CD and magazine project Silence the Violence which attempts to reach out to youth with messages of non-violence.
Over the years, Jones began to realize that his utopian black nationalism and communist dreams were not having the desired effect. He began to look at other liberal groups to see what they were doing. Again, here is the East Bay Express article as Jones explains his transition from single focused social justice activism to a wide sweeping ideology which wholeheartedly embraces both social programs and capitalism.
... Jones' fixation on solidarity dates from this experience. He took an objective look at the movement's effectiveness and decided that the changes he was seeking were actually getting farther away. Not only did the left need to be more unified, he decided, it might also benefit from a fundamental shift in tactics. "I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs," he said. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/PrintFriendly?oid=290098
What Jones began to see was that their where a large group of liberals having a powerful impact on the country and achieving many of their goals. He also noted that they were the mostly white environmentalist that had embraced eco-capitalism. For example, he saw the organic food industry explode and help transform American agriculture. He realized that these rich white liberal, "eco-elite," Wholefoods shopping, Prius drivers were the ones actually financing a revolution all on their own. And many of them were the investors, entrepreneurs and consumers of the change they envision. In other words, they were personally investing in and developing the foundation for the green economy.
In late 2008, Jones published his first book, The Green-Collar Economy. In his book he explains how he saw the two vital factions of the leftwing operating in completely different mindsets.
"... What I have found is that leaders from impoverished areas like Oakland, California, tended to focus on three areas: social justice, political solutions, and social change. They care primarily about "the people." They focused their efforts on fixing schools, improving health care, defending civil rights, and reducing the prison population. Their studies center on "social change" work like lobbying, campaigning, and protesting. They were wary of businesses; instead, they turned to the political system and government to help solve the problems of the community.
The leaders I met from affluent places like Marin County (just north of San Francisco), San Francisco, and Silicon Valley had what seemed to be the opposite approach. Their three focus areas were ecology, business solutions, and inner change. They were champions of the environment who cared primarily about "the planet." They worked to save the rain forests and important species like whales and polar bears. Also, they were usually dedicated to "inner change" work, including meditation and yoga. And they put a great deal of stress on making wise, Earth-honoring consumer choices. In fact, many were either green entrepreneurs or investors in eco-friendly business in the first place."
Which brings me to the main point in part one of this article. While it is true to say Van Jones is "a former black nationalist and self confessed communist," it is misleading to suggest he currently holds those views. In fact, anyone who takes an honest look at the political trajectory of Van Jones can see a man that was youthfully swept up in a radical utopian ideological but slowly advanced his thinking into a deep and complex understanding of inclusion. And, ironically, one of the nations leading advocates of capitalism as a vital part of the solution to our biggest problems.
And so, after a little scrutiny of Beck and the rightwing's conspiracy theory about Obama and Jones being involved in a plot to orchestrate a communist takeover of the world, we see once again their theory falls flat. And anyone that spends a little time reading Van Jones' biography on line, watches a few youtube videos of some of his lectures, or even goes as far as to read his book will find that he is now a devout convert to free market enterprise solutions.
In part two, I will review his book, The Green Collar Economy, How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.
Dean Walker
Photo of Van Jones from Ella Baker Center website
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hey dean, great article. I've respected Van Jones for quite some time now -- there was a great article on him in YES! magazine a while back. http://yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/3368 (and an amazing mag altogether really, for the straight story's sake). It seems like an absolutely essential act of citizen journalism to play a bit of a watchdog role of the non-citizen, controlled, agenda-spun news sources that are so central to our nation's vast confusion. keep em coming! thanks for this.