Despite boycott led by group founded by Obama environmental czar
Posted: August 25, 2009
12:51 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
 Van Jones |
Fox News host Glenn Beck last night continued reporting on the radical links of President Obama's "green jobs czar," Van Jones, despite a campaign led by a black activist organization founded by Jones demanding major advertisers withdraw from Beck's top-rated television program.
Beck's segments about Jones were based in part on WND's reporting that Jones was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.
Beck spent a large part of his program last night reporting Jones was a radical, quoting from Jones' own interviews in which he detailed his rise to radical politics. Jones in March was appointed as the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
"Why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?" Beck asked on his show last night.
Earlier this month, NewsBusters reported Jones, is co-founder of Color of Change, the activist organization that has been leading a furious campaign against Beck.
Jones' group says the controversy stems from Beck's recent comment while a guest on another Fox News show that Obama is a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people."
Bill Shine of Fox News' programming department clarified Beck was expressing "a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions."
Color of Change did not return a WND request for comment about whether its crusade is tied to Beck's recent reporting about Jones' radical connections.
Jones' group claims it has secured commitments from 36 companies who have pledged not to advertise on Beck's show, including Wal-Mart and Sprint.
But most of the companies did not advertise on Beck's program to begin with. They simply purchased general advertising time on Fox News. The cable network says the companies will continue their advertising on the network.
Representatives of Procter & Gamble and AT&T – listed by Color of Change as companies that had signed onto the boycott – told the Los Angeles Times last week their companies did not run spots on Beck's program to begin with.
"The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network so there has been no revenue lost," a Fox News spokeswoman said.
WND reported last week the Color of Change boycott has led to fan sites fighting back. For example, a husband and wife team of Beck fans has launched a website – DefendGlenn.com – that lists the contact information for advertisers for Beck's and other Fox News programs and provides users with information and suggestions to contact those companies to urge their continued sponsorship. The site also asks users to contact Beck's current patrons to thank them for their loyalty to the Fox News star's program.
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 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."
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 researcher and opponent of communism who runs 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 Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
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, 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.
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Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem bureau chief, is known for his regular interviews with Mideast terror leaders and his popular segments on America's top radio programs. His newly released book is "The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation's Survival."Follow Klein on Twitter.
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