Van Jones served on board of activist group where ex-Weatherman serves as top director
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.
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.
Aaron Klein, WorldNet Daily, 8/13/09
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