The Return of Van Jones and Marxist Street Protests

[Jeanfromfillmore]

The Return of Van Jones and Marxist Street Protests
A “Take Back the American Dream” three-day conference in Washington begins on Monday that features Van Jones, the disgraced former Obama Administration “Green Jobs Czar,” a Russian TV star, and a veteran of the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba who works for the AFL-CIO. Such is the nature of the modern progressive movement.
“I think everybody should hold onto your seats,” said Jones on Thursday’s MSNBC program “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.”
“October is going to be the turning point when it comes to the progressive fight back,” he went on. “We are a part of something called the American Dream Movement. We`re having a huge summit on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Come—you can go to rebuildthedream.com and find out more about it. We are going to build a progressive counterbalance to the Tea Party.”
Once a top figure in a Marxist group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), Jones predicts “an American fall, an American autumn, just like we saw the Arab spring. You can see it right now with these young people on Wall Street. Hold onto your hats. We`re going to have an October offensive to take back the American Dream and to rescue America`s middle class.”
The Campaign for America’s Future, sponsor of the conference, depicts the conservative Tea Party as a puppet of corporate interests and protests Wall Street but remains silent about the millions of dollars that Van Jones and other progressive activists have received from hedge fund operator George Soros. Number seven on the Forbes list of the richest people in America, with $22 billion, Soros runs an “alternative investment vehicle” available only to the super-rich which is based off-shore and taps into mysterious sources of cash beyond the supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Indeed, a sister organization of the Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for America’s Future, has itself received $1.3 million from Soros’s Open Society Institute over the last several years.
Two of the conference organizers, Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel, have just written a call to arms in The Nation magazine saying that liberals must exert more pressure on the Obama Administration and they cite the work of the Communist Party USA and other groups in forcing Franklin Roosevelt to the left and expanding federal involvement in the economy in the 1930s.
“The Socialist and Communist parties and Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement grew threatening enough to goad Franklin Roosevelt into the second New Deal, including Social Security; the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of workers to organize; and much more,” they say. However, they complain that progressives have spent so much of their time over the last three years helping to pass “the Obama reform agenda” that their message has been “muted.” The conference will be followed on October 5 by a rally on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
That the progressive movement has embraced Jones, despite his embarrassing exit from the administration, is evidence of how far to the left and how desperate modern “liberal” organizations are.
Jones today serves as the president of the Rebuild the Dream coalition of liberal organizations. His bio says that he is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, another Soros-funded entity, and holds a joint appointment at Princeton University as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
According to his website, he has also returned as a senior policy advisor at Green For All, the George Soros-funded organization that helped make Jones into a national progressive star. Soros money also helped finance the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights when Jones was in charge of that group.
Blogger Trevor Loudon, who broke the story of Jones’s communist background, said he first came across his name in a socialist publication and discovered his affiliation with STORM. He then discovered that the far-left Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which Loudon considers the Obama administration’s “ideas bank,” had published a piece by IPS staffer Chuck Collins recommending Jones for a top government job. Collins offered “Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center, to direct the Commerce Department’s new ‘green jobs initiative.’” Loudon added, “I researched Jones again at that point and found he was a fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP).” In the end, Jones left CAP and was appointed as a “special adviser” at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
“It didn’t take more than a few keystrokes to realize that STORM was very influential in the San Francisco Bay Area and had ties to both the Cuban and South African Communist Parties,” Loudon said. “Jones’ group and particularly Jones himself had ties to two former Weather Underground supporters—Jon and Nancy Frappier and the Bay Area branch of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Jones was the keynote speaker at a CCDS fundraiser in Berkeley as late as February 2006.”
Loudon’s reporting, picked up by Glenn Beck, then with Fox News, was followed by other embarrassing and damaging revelations from other conservative bloggers. It came out that Jones had called Republicans “assholes” and had signed a letter appearing on the website of 911Truth.org demanding an investigation into whether the Bush Administration “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” The implication was that the al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked the planes that struck New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon were part of a much-larger U.S. Government plot.
On June 20, 2011, attorneys acting on behalf of Jones sent a letter to Fox News demanding that the network immediately cease using six characterizations about Jones and demanding a retraction from Glenn Beck. The letter from Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb insisted that Jones had communist or Marxist notions “as a young man” but had backed away “from those views” and is now “pro-market.” The letter also claimed that Jones’s name had been placed on the 9/11 letter without his knowledge and had been removed.
But Jones had said in an “Uprising Radio” interview in 2008 that his goals were a “complete revolution” to “transform the whole society” away from capitalism.
None of this, however, seems to bother the modern-day progressive movement. In a “What people who know Van say” part of his website, John Podesta, President & CEO of the Center for American Progress, says, “Van Jones is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country…[At the White House,] Van was working to build a common-ground agenda for all Americans, and I am confident he will continue that work.”
Podesta, who rehired Jones after he lost his White House job, co-chaired the Obama presidential transition team that filled many administration jobs. The other co-chair was Valerie Jarrett, an Obama adviser who publicly talked about how “we” in the administration had followed Jones’s career and wanted him to serve in the administration.
The new “Contract for the American Dream,” coming as the public is turning on Obama’s big government agenda, is a ten-point program to preserve federal programs and promote more federal spending and involvement in the economy:
• Invest in America’s Infrastructure
• Create 21st Century Energy Jobs
• Invest in Public Education
• Offer Medicare for All
• Make Work Pay
• Secure Social Security
• Return to Fairer Tax Rates
• End the Wars and Invest at Home
• Tax Wall Street Speculation
• Strengthen Democracy
In a YouTube video, Jones led a crowd in the chant “America is not broke” and urged higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Another prominent speaker at the “Take Back the American Dream” conference is Russian TV star Thom Hartmann, who calls himself “America’s #1 Progressive Host” and has a show, “The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann,” which is “produced in the studios of RT TV in Washington, D.C., and syndicated nationally by both RT and Free Speech TV.” RTTV is the American branch of the Russia Today foreign propaganda channel funded by Moscow. One of its correspondents, Katia Zatuliveter, is facing deportation from Britain for being a Russian spy.
Hartmann’s Friday show featured Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation Magazine and Maria LaHood of the Soros-funded Center for Constitutional Rights bemoaning the killing of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.
Hartmann, who has interviewed Take Back the American Dream conference co-director Robert Borosage on his RT show, will be broadcasting live from the conference.
Another speaker, Karen Nussbaum, is executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Working America organization. The group claims three million members. During a previous appearance at a Campaign for America’s Future conference, she refused to answer and walked away when questioned about a trip she made to Communist Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigades.
A featured speaker, Rep. Barbara Lee, was elected to the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence (the same group Jones spoke to) in 1992, while a member of the California State Assembly. Most, but not all, of the members of this group were active in the Communist Party USA.
Lee argues in her book, Renegade for Peace & Justice, that Fidel Castro’s Cuba has been subjected to “negative propaganda” from the United States.
Several members of STORM visited Communist Cuba, but it is not known if Jones was ever among them.
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[Jeanfromfillmore]

Van Jones Media Mouthpiece Gets Russian Cash
Progressive TV and radio star Thom Hartmann took time off from covering Van Jones and his “Rebuild the Dream” movement on Wednesday to briefly talk to this columnist about his relationship with the Vladimir Putin regime of Russia. The conversation quickly went sour when Hartmann objected to questions about how much he is being paid by Moscow. He grabbed my video camera, covering the lens briefly in the process, and stomped away, objecting to “gotcha” questions.
The entire spectacle was captured on camera and posted on YouTube.
During another embarrassing incident, Van Jones refused to sign a copy of his Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) manifesto when asked to autograph it. “No thank you,” he sternly said before asking, “Who are you?,” looking at my name badge, and walking away to the next adoring crowd of Van Jones groupies. Jones, a “former” communist, is the new face of the progressive movement that is backing the “Occupation Wall Street” protests and is trying to guarantee President Obama a second term. He was fired as Obama’s “green jobs czar” when the truth about his extremist background and statements started to emerge in reports originally by blogger Trevor Loudon and then Glenn Beck on Fox News.
While Jones made remarks in his own conference speech about losing his White House job, he also mocked Beck, noting that he had lost his program on the Fox News Channel. Progressives demanded Beck’s ouster after he began exposing billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros, a major funder of the liberal-left.
Soros, who operates an off-shore hedge fund with mysterious sources of cash, has just failed in his effort to have the European Court of Human Rights lift his conviction in an insider trading case in France.
The STORM document is about the history of a communist group that Jones led and whose members traveled to Cuba. He has, however, tried to leave his communist past behind as he reinvents himself as an American patriot trying to “rebuild the American dream.” At almost every stage of his career, he has been supported by money from Soros.
During an extended interview, Joelle Fishman of the Communist Party USA talked about Jones’s leadership in this new phase of the progressive movement and how the conference welcomed socialists and communists. She said the Communist Party, which usually fields a presidential candidate, will not run anyone against Obama in 2012. Communist literature was openly displayed at the conference and the Democratic Socialists of America, a group which backed Obama’s political career from the start, had an information table.
Judith LeBlanc, who runs a group called Peace Action and is one of the vice-chairs of the Communist Party, was introduced on stage as one of Van Jones’s “partners” in the “rebuild the American dream” movement.
Hartmann, a leader of Progressive Democrats of America, has a show distributed nationwide by Russia Today (RT) television and Free Speech TV. He apparently didn’t grasp the irony of trying to silence a recording device while touting the virtues of the First Amendment.
Hartmann spoke to me after participating in a “Taking Back the Media” panel discussion during the Take Back the American Dream Conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future. Hartmann was hailed in an official press release as a key part of Free Speech TV’s exclusive live coverage of the conference, which was held in Washington, D.C. October 3-5. An affiliate of the Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for America’s Future, is heavily subsidized by Soros.
The head of Free Speech TV is Don Rojas, former press secretary to communist Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Caribbean island of Grenada before President Reagan ordered its liberation by American troops in 1983.
Rojas, in a taped interview, spoke fondly of the days when he worked for Grenada’s revolutionary government, even signing a copy of an address Bishop had made to the sixth summit of the non-aligned movement in Havana, Cuba, in 1979. Rojas said he helped to write the speech and was in Havana at the time. He signed it, “Forward Ever, Backward Never,” an inspirational quotation from Bishop which was supposed to capture the essence of the revolutionary process.
Rojas was captured, arrested, and then deported from Grenada by U.S. forces. Today, however, his channel is called the “anti-Fox” network and claims carriage on 200 cable affiliates, Dish Network and DirecTV, reaching 35 million homes. Free Speech TV has been promoting the “Occupation of Wall Street” protests and also distributes Al-Jazeera. Rojas says he has applied for cash from the Soros-funded Open Society Institute (OSI). “We are knocking on the OSI’s door as we speak,” he said.
In the speech, Bishop had talked about the “revolutionary process” which “has seen the emergence of successful and progressive revolutions in countries like Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea and, most recently Nicaragua and Iran, has had a vital impact on the balance of forces in today’s world.”
Kampuchea, the communist word for the country of Cambodia, saw a takeover by the communist Khmer Rouge, after America’s defeat in Vietnam, that took the lives of about two million people in a bloody genocide. Iran was taken over by radical Islamists, who remain in charge and are working to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the state of Israel and threaten the U.S.
“Long live the Cuban revolution!” was one of the concluding phrases in the Bishop speech.
While Rojas talked openly about his service to Bishop and Castro, AFL-CIO official Karen Nussbaum was close-mouthed in regard to her trip to Cuba in 1970 as a member of the Venceremos Brigades to the communist-controlled island. “No,” she curtly replied, when asked to talk about a trip that reportedly included a meeting with Castro himself. Asked why she wouldn’t talk about it, she said it was “not relevant.” Nussbaum was on a panel discussing feminism that was organized by the Rockefeller Fund.
This was the second time I had tried to talk to Nussbaum. She appeared at a previous Campaign for America’s Future conference and turned and walked away when I raised similar questions. This time she had a press representative intervene to say that he would try to get answers to my questions. I am not holding my breath.
A published report about Nussbaum’s trip to Cuba said she “was impressed with Castro and with Cuban socialism.” In an oral history of her days as a young radical, Nussbaum talked about the large number of Weathermen in the brigades to Cuba. The Weathermen became a terrorist group, the Weather Underground, after being brainwashed and trained in guerrilla warfare in Cuba by Castro’s intelligence operatives.
Nussbaum heads the AFL-CIO’s three-million-strong Working America affiliate. Her boss, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, was a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream Conference and referred to the protests on Wall Street, saying that “It’s our time” and calling Van Jones “my friend.”
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