White Polluters and White Environmentalists: The Van Jones Saga

Hello everybody I'm back already, it is after all, the next day. I hope I'm not too fatigued to the point that I screw this up. I said in my previous post that I would be talking about Obama's advisers, cabinet members, and court jesters. Well, here I am and ready to start with part adviser and part court jester Van Jones. First a little background. Van Jones was born in Jackson, Tennessee on September 20, 1968. He attended and graduated from Jackson Central-Merry High School in 1986. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Tennessee-Martin. He then attended Yale Law School and received a Juris Doctor degree in 1993 after which he moved to San Francisco. During the 1992 trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King, Jones was a volunteer "legal monitor" at a protest of the not guilty verdict. Jones and several other protesters were arrested presumably for disorderly conduct. The San Francisco District Attorney later dropped the charges. He stated that the verdict outraged and radicalized him and by August of the same year said, "I am a Communist." He was heavily involved with the group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement aka STORM. This is group is steadfastly committed to Marxist revolutionary politics their platform promoting revolutionary democracy, revolutionary feminism, urban Marxism and Third World Communism. Jones, while with STORM, was committed to protesting alleged police brutality. Now we jump ahead to the year 2004 and the 911 "Truth" movement. Van Jones was one of one hundred prominent Americans who signed the "911 Truth Statement" from 911Tuth.org, an organization dedicated to "proving" the Bush Administration was involved in the 9/11 attacks. On October 7, 2008 Jones' book The Green Collar Economy was published by HarperOne. On February 11, 2009, Van Jones delivered the Second Annual Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative lecture, where he was questioned on why Democrats are having trouble moving their initiatives through Congress when Republicans had little trouble doing the same when they were in charge. Jones' response was, "The answer to that is: They're assholes. That's a technical political science term. And Barack Obama's not an asshole. I will say this, I can be an asshole and some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are gonna have to start getting a little bit uppity." In January of 2008, Jones made the following statement, "The environmental justice community has said, 'Hey wait a minute, you're regulating but you're not regulating equally.' And the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities, because they don't have a racial justice frame.' " White Polluters? Racial justice? May I ask what the hell is the difference between a white-owned factory and a black-owned factory that supposedly "pollutes"? I didn't know that pollution was something that discriminated against anyone on the basis of color. (Or anything else for that matter.) And "racial justice" I'm not sure what the hell that means. I always thought justice was blind to race and color. Hmmmm, maybe I should've paid more attention in history class. My question is, if Obama's such a moderate trying to reach across the aisle, why is he appointing a self-admitted Communist as one of his advisers? I wonder if there are any more court jesters such as this for me to write about? Next post: Mark Lloyd.