- Became a Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 "Rodney King riots" in Los Angeles
- Founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996
- Was active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER
- Served as a board member of the Rainforest Action Network and Free Press
- In March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called “Green Jobs Czar.”
- Resigned in early September 2009
Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones (whose birth name was Anthony Jones) attended the University of Tennessee at Martin. As an undergraduate aspiring to a career in journalism, he founded an underground campus newspaper as well as a statewide African American newspaper. After earning his BA degree, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist and instead enrolled at Yale Law School, where, as an angry black separatist, he first arrived wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag. "If I'd been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect," he reflects. "But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school.... I wasn't ready for Yale, and they weren't ready for me."
Though Jones contemplated dropping out of Yale, he realized that a law degree would furnish him with perceived credibility as a critic of the criminal-justice system -- which he believed was thoroughly infested with racism; thus he persevered and earned his Juris Doctorate.
During his years at Yale, Jones served as an intern with the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), which views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation and “ champions the legal rights of people of color, poor people, immigrants and refugees, with a special commitment to African-Americans.”
Jones says he became politically radicalized in the aftermath of the deadly April 1992 Los Angeles riots which erupted shortly after four L.A. police officers who had beaten the now-infamous Rodney King were exonerated in court. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th,” says Jones, “and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.”
In early May 1992, after the L.A. riots had ended, Jones was dispatched by LCCR executive director Eva Patterson to serve as a legal monitor at a nonviolent protest (against the Rodney King verdicts) in San Francisco. Local police, fearful that the event would devolve into violence, stopped the proceedings and arrested many of the participants, including all the legal monitors. Jones spent a short time in jail, and all charges against him were subsequently dropped.
Recalling his brief incarceration, Jones says: “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 ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”
After leaving Yale in 1993, Jones relocated to San Francisco, where he helped establish Bay Area Police Watch, a hotline and lawyer-referral service that began as a project of LCCR and specialized in demonizing local police. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which, claiming that the American criminal-justice system was infested with racism, sought to promote alternatives to incarceration. Jones headed the Baker Center from 1996 to 2007. Between 1999 and 2009, the Baker Center received more than $1 million from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
By the late 1990s, Jones was a committed Marxist-Leninist- Maoist who viewed police officers as the arch-enemies of black people, and who loathed capitalism for allegedly exploiting nonwhite minorities worldwide. He became a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a Bay-Area Marxist-Maoist collective that had ties to the Ella Baker Center.
Jones helped organize an October 1999 rally in Oakland, California, calling for a retrial on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Around 2002, Jones, who had experience as a record producer, produced (for the Ella Baker Center) an album that starred Abu Jamal. That album featured lyrics depicting America not only as a place where "terrorists are made," but also as "a piece of stolen land led by right-wing, war-hungry, oil-thirsty ... mother f***ers" who "got people of color playing servant to do that sh** for them."
In 2000 Jones campaigned aggressively against California Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that established harsher penalties for a variety of violent crimes and called for more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. Jones' efforts incorporated a hip-hop soundtrack that aimed to attract young black men clad in such gang-style garb as puffy jackets and baggy pants, who would call attention to the alleged injustices of the so-called "prison-industrial complex." But infighting and jealousies between various factions of Jones' movement caused it ultimately to fall apart. "I saw our little movement destroyed over a lot of sh**-talking and bullsh**," said Jones.
After the demise of his anti-Prop 21 movement, Jones decided to change his political tactics. Specifically, he toned down the overt hostility and defiant rage that previously had animated his activism. "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," he said in 2005. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."'
Added Jones: "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."
Jones' new approach was modeled on the tactics outlined by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to present themselves as moderates until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. In a 2005 interview, Jones stated that he still considered himself a revolutionary, but a more effective one thanks to his revised tactics.
Just hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jones stood in the streets of Oakland, California with his fellow STORM members to denounce the United States for having brought the disaster on itself. In October 2004 he joined a host of notable leftists in signing the 9/11 Truth Statement (signature #46), which called for a federal investigation into whether President Bush had been privy to advance knowledge of – or perhaps had colluded in – the destruction of the World Trade Center.
In the early 2000s, Jones and STORM were active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER, a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. STORM also had ties to the South African Communist Party and it reveredlauded Lenin as “the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.” (In 2006 Van Jones would name his own newborn son “Cabral” -- in Amilcar Cabral’s honor.)
Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader (of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands) who
During his tenure with STORM, Jones collaborated on numerous projects (including antiwar demonstrations) with local activist Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, who served as a “mentor” for members of the Ella Baker Center. Martinez was a longtime Maoist who went on to join the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and SocialismCommunist Party USA splinter group, in the early 1990s. To this day, Martinez continues to sit on the CCDS advisory board alongside such luminaries as Angela Davis, Timuel Black (who served on Barack Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign committee), and musician Pete Seeger. Martinez is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, the parent organization of Progressives for Obama. Martinez and Van Jones together attended a “Challenging White Supremacy” workshop which advanced the theme that “all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration” with blacks.
(CCDS), a
In 2005 Jones and the Ella Baker Center produced the “Social Equity Track” for the United Nations’ World Environment Day celebration, a project that eventually would evolve into the Baker Center’s Green-Collar Jobs Campaign -- “a job-training and employment pipeline providing ‘green pathways out of poverty’ for low-income adults in Oakland.”
During the George W. Bush administration, Jones likened the President to "a crackhead" because of Bush's commitment to oil drilling.
Soon after attending the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2007, Jones launched Green For All, a non-governmental organization "dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." A major funder of Green for All was George Soros's Open Society Institute.
According to Jones , America is plagued by "eco-apartheid," where low-income people typically live in more polluted environments than wealthy people. In a January 2008 speech, Jones said: "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 framework."
In 2008 Jones published his first book, The Green Collar Economy, which focused on environmental and economic issues. The book received favorable reviews from such notables as Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Laurie David, Winona LaDuke, environmentalist Paul Hawken, and NAACP President/CEO Ben Jealous.
After the Bush administration had drawn to a close, Jones lamented that "an authoritarian sentiment [had] seized control of the reins of power in our country, burned the Constitution, enshrined torture, launched an unjust war under false premises ... turned [the American flag] into a war flag, and used it to beat and whip and lynch anybody who didn’t agree that we should be bombing people and torturing people."
Jones has served as a board member of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including the Rainforest Action Network; Free Press; the Apollo Alliance; Bioneers (which accepts the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Report’s warning that “[h]uman activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted”); the Social Venture Network (which aims “to build a just economy and sustainable planet”); and Julia Butterfly Hill’s “Circle of Life” environmental foundation.
Jones also co-founded Color of Change (COC), an organization that views the United States as a profoundly racist country, and whose mission is "to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone."
At a February 11, 2009 speaking engagement, Jones asserted that congressional Republicans had been able to pass some of their legislative initiatives, even without majorities in the House and Senate, because "they’re assholes."
Later that same month in Berkeley, California, Jones made clear his desire to incrementally socialize, by stealth, the U.S. economy: "Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether ... until [the green economy] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society." In late February 2009, Jones spoke at a Washington, DC event called Power Shift ’09, which was billed as the largest-ever youth summit (attended by 12,000 young adults) on climate change. There, Jones advocated what WorldNetDaily reporter Aaron Klein saidFor example: “can easily be interpreted as a communist or socialist agenda.” - Jones said that the concept of "clean coal" was as "fictitious," "fantastical," and "ludicrous" as notions about the existence of "unicorns" and "a tooth fairy."
- He said that the "green economy" would emphasize "gender equity," in contrast to "the pollution-based economy" wherein women "are making 70 cents to the dollar" as compared to men.
- He said that the United States was built on land that had been "stolen" from "our Native American sisters and brothers," who had been "bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy." But under a "renewable energy" system ( i.e. the solar and wind power), he explained, Native Americans would "now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources." "Give them then wealth!" he shouted. "...We owe them a debt!"
- He said that the U.S. is "willing" to exploit immigrants who work "out in the fields with poison being sprayed on them ... because we have the wrong agricultural system," but "we don't want to give them rights, and we don't want to give them dignity, and we don't want to give them respect."
- He said that "our sisters and brothers that are in prison right now" or who were "formerly incarcerated" ought to be among the prime beneficiaries of a green economy "that doesn't have any throw-away species,... resources,... [or] any throw-away people either."
- He emphasized that "a clean energy revolution" would merely be the first step toward wholesale societal transformation: "[W]e gonna change the whole system! We gonna change the whole thing!"
During a February 26, 2009 lecture on energy issues in Berkeley, California, Jones, referring to the economic crisis in which the U.S. was mired at the time, sarcastically asked a questioner: "How's that capitalism working for ya this year?"
On March 10, 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called “green jobs czar”; the formal title for the position was “Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation” for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. At the time, Jones was a senior fellow with John Podesta's Washington, DC-based Center for American Progress. He described his new role with the Obama administration as that of "a community organizer inside the federal family."
In a July 2009 interview with Newsweek magazine, Jones was asked to explain exactly what a “green job” is. He replied: "Well, we still don’t have a unified definition, and that’s not unusual in a democracy. It takes a while for all the states and the federal government to come to some agreement."
Amid mounting controversy over his radical past, Jones resigned his post as "green jobs czar" on Labor Day weekend 2009, claiming that he had been victimized by "a vicious smear campaign."
Jones was later asked whether President Obama had been aware of Jones' controversial history before appointing him as green jobs czar. Jones replied: "I was fully candid, I mean, about my past, about the ideas that I explored...."
After stepping down from his administration post, Jones was offered office work space in the DC offices of the Center for American Progress (CAP). In February 2010, he officially rejoined CAP. That same month, he received the NAACP's President's Award, for achievement in public service. He also announced that he had secured a one-year assignment to teach a seminar on environmental and economic policy at Princeton University, beginning in June 2010.
In April 2010, Jones said the following about the nature of the Obama administration: "You look at the New Party, which is now the Working Families Party, the idea of a new politics -- that you could actually in this country bring together labor and civil rights and feminists, etc., and actually make a difference ... is the basic framework for what just took over the White House." Jones serves as one of 20 advisers to the Presidential Climate Action Project (based at the University of Colorado), which makes climate-policy recommendations for the Obama White House. He has been praised for his environmental work by such notable leftists as Thomas Friedman, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Arianna Huffington, Ben Jealous, Laurie David, Gavin Newsom, Carl Pope, Tavis Smiley, Fred Krupp, and John Podesta.
During a January 19, 2011 speaking engagement at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, Jones said that "in a society where there's social justice," any particular individual would be perfectly willing to trade his or her life with that of any other randomly selected person, knowing "with total confidence" that he or she would "have a roughly equal chance to have a good life." |