December 22, 2024

Idavox Archives

Archived articles originally found on the One People's Project website.

VAN JONES RESIGNS AMID McCARTYIST PRESSURE

Van JonesFunny isn’t it? Van Jones calls Republicans assholes and they respond by proving him right. The White House environmental adviser was an excellent choice for the job, being the recipient of many awards in is work in human rights and the environment. He was also listed in Ebony Magazine’s “Power 150” list of most influential African Americans for 2009, Essence Magazine’s 25 most inspiring/influential African Americans in 2008, and TIME Magazine named him an environmental hero in 2008 and in 2009 one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The problems started right after a group he founded called Color of Change started giving Glenn Beck problems for calling Barack Obama a racist. When Beck started losing sponsors for his show, Fox News, where he broadcasts from went on a smear campaign against Van Jones. Everyone recognized their stunt for what it was, a retaliation against someone who had a hand in undercutting their conservative propaganda mill. Well, we would have liked Mr. Jones to stay on board as a White House adviser, but he recognized how much of a distraction this was becoming, so he resigned. The McCarthyites could not be happier, but they know what’s coming. Van Jones said people have asked his to stay and fight, but he was not serving for himself. He was serving the people – which is more than what we could say about those who were going after him in an effort to save Glenn Beck. Now he is free to really get down and dirty, and you can bet he will. And so will we. It might be time to start calling all of Fox News’ sponsors now, especially after what Newshounds.us dug up in their “victory” thread.

Washington Post

White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned Saturday after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: “I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.”

Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones’s “fitness” for the position, writing in an open letter, “Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?” On Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote on his Twitter account, “Van Jones has to go.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday that Jones “continues to work for the administration” — but he did not state that the adviser enjoys the full support of President Obama, instead referring questions to the environmental council where he worked.

Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality since March. He was a civil-rights activist in California before turning his focus to environmental and energy issues, and he won wide praise before joining the Obama administration for articulating a broad vision of a green economy Democrats could embrace.

Racist, Violent Comments On Fox Nation’s Van Jones “Victory” Thread

Newshounds.us

Fox Nation, the website that boasts about its commitment to “tolerance” and “civil discourse,” has a slew of disturbing comments, each of which must have been approved by a moderator, on its thread proclaiming “victory” over Van Jones’ resignation. The comments include an endorsement of armed resurrection and a desire to use Jones for target practice. Stay classy with your love for civil discourse, Fox! Or is your idea of tolerance? Screen grabs after the jump.

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Defending Van Jones from the McCarthyites

Nathan Newman, TPM

Glenn Beck and the rightwing is hunting scalps– and their prime target is Van Jones, the “green jobs” White House advisor who was formerly head of the organization Green for All. They are going after Van Jones, attacking him for professing himself in the past as a “radical”, “revolutionary” and studier of Karl Marx. (See this FoxNews “raw data” about Jones or this Glenn Beck rant).

All of which is true. Van has a long history of being a left advocate working in a variety of organizations. Which is why it’s even more important that liberals and moderates of good faith stand up to defend him. McCarthyism was not bad because it falsely accused moderates of being radicals. McCarthyism was bad because it made having any form of left views a bar to public service, from policy to being a teacher.

President Obama has explicitly filled his administration with a broad diversity of views, with many of the key positions held by establishment moderates from the corporate world. Van Jones is one viewpoint represented among many voices in the White House, yet the Becks of the world want to make anyone holding left views or having a history of sympathetically reading the “wrong” books forbidden from public service.

Disclosure– I knew Van pretty well back in the early 90s when we were both involved in community organizing efforts, including involvement in a variety of left-leaning groups. To quote Jerry Seinfeld- “Not that there was anything wrong with that.”

If people think Van Jones’s work against policy brutality was wrong, they could raise that concern for his qualifications. If they think his work to increase reading among prisoners to reduce recidivism was wrong, that’s a legitimate issue. If they think his wo
rk trying to get minority youth involved in training for green economy jobs was misguided, that might be a useful debate.

But the Beck’s of the world are involved in pure ideological smearing.

So far the worst of their real evidence against Van is he signed onto a petition calling for investigations of what led the Bush administration to ignore warnings about the 9-11 attacks– an association with the “9-11 truthers” that Jones has disavowed.

The other is a Van Jones comment that conservatives have been politically successful because they are assholes. This could be seen as intemperate, but Jones goes out of his way to say that he himself is an asshole often and that more Democrats need to be assholes– which means he is using the term for being politically aggressive.

We are seeing a full fledged movement to lie and smear anyone seeking change on the left side of the spectrum, with Obama being labelled a Fascist down to demands to fire folks like Van Jones. The best way to stop a slide towards McCarthyism is to stop it in its tracks and refuse to allow even one scalp for the rightwing, since history says that ideological blood just feeds bloodlust for more.

As German anti-Nazi activist, Pastor Martin Niemöller said:

In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

 

 Editor’s note: the fact that Pastor Niemöller was a right-winger who started off supporting Hitler believing it would bring about a national revival should be a lesson to all conservatives today. It’s either that or they can suffer Hitler’s fate.–OPP

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