The truth about Van Jones: Communist? Nope. Revolutionary? Hope so.
September 7, 2009 at 10:22 am by sharonjoykleitsch
blogs.creativeloafing.com
In April, Van Jones was recognized by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet for the work he did with Green for All and the U.S. government.
Sunday, in the midst of a quiet Labor Day weekend, Van Jones resigned as special advisor on green jobs for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Glenn Beck, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly all promoted the idea that Jones was a threat to our national security. Once the now-infamous video surfaced showing what he said about Republicans last year during the campaign and long before he went to DC, Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks gave him two weeks, max. Turns out that prediction was optimistic.
So the Jones controversy became just another firestorm to stir up, something to discredit the president with and distract from the most important conversation today – health care. But in case you’d never heard of Jones before all this brouhaha, here’s more:
Friday morning, I received an email from Ocean Robbins, last year’s recipient of the Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service by an Individual 35 or younger, coming to his friend’s defense by circulating the news widely with informational links, such as Jones’ talk on the Colbert Report and Tom Friedman’s New York Times article about Van’s good works. He and his father, John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and founder of EarthSave International, urged others to post blogs, send emails, contact or submit stories to media outlets, to comment on internet news articles, and to use any other media available to tell the truth about Van Jones from their own dealings with him.
From what I’ve known about Jones as a person and his work the past four years, I would say it’s pushing it to call him a communist. As for being a revolutionary, he is indeed a leader in the Green Revolution, a timely relief to the Industrial Revolution. While Beck believes revolution is bad for capitalism and the economy, MIT Sloan School of Management professor and international organizational consultant Peter Senge titles his latest book The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Tony Lamport reviews it as “…an invitation to a capitalist uprising for those who see as possible a new kind of natural or regenerative capitalism that can achieve environmental well-being, equity and abundance for all.” Leaders described are Nike, Coca-Cola, Alcoa, BMW and Xerox. Marxists? Business Week agrees our economy needs some new thinking and actions.
Beck urged his listeners to speak out against the fear being promoted, while the background clip of Jones talks about changing the system, implying the plan is to bring down the U.S. government. The last time I noticed, business, education and healthcare are also examples of systems in flux. Recent films such as Food Matters, Food Inc., and Fresh show an agriculture system that’s not working.
Without learning something about the science of systems, we will likely continue doing the same things we’ve done before, even when they don’t work. An earlier radical, Albert Einstein, advised, “One cannot alter a condition with the same mind set that created it in the first place.”
In case you missed what the conservative pundits said about Jones, here are three clips from Glenn Beck:
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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It does make you wonder to see police leading a black man away, as the voiceover talks about Jones being arrested during the Rodney King riot in LA. Jones was in San Francisco at the time. Former employer Eva Paterson, president and founder of Equal Justice Society, writes another version of Jones’ hours-long jail visit and that he was paid for wrongful arrest.
In an earlier day, David Roberts even calls Jones the green Jack Kemp:
“Indeed, when Jones talks about targeting jobs and economic development at struggling urban areas, he sounds like nobody so much as the late Jack Kemp. I once saw him deliver a short talk to a crowd of largely white, middle-aged, besuited businessmen at a Wall Street Journal business conference; he was sandwiched in the middle of a long line of droning talks. Within 10 minutes, he had the executives on their feet in a standing ovation. They don’t do that for communism.”
Van Jones a communist? No. Revolutionary? Hope so.
Read CL Tampa Editor David Warner’s recent Van Jones post, The Van Jones resignation: “Coarse rhetoric” only OK if you’re a Republican. |
