Democrats and Republicans Unite !!!

You continue to spin while ignoring evidence from Jones' own statements detailed by a credible source. Politifact succinctly debunked your Glenn Beck-inspired argument but you continue to plod along making the same inane statements without addressing the points Politifact made. One can only conclude that you are unable "refudiate" them so you ignore and spin, ignore and spin instead. If you can't present a rational counter argument, get off of the merry-go-round because all that spinning has made you extremely dizzy.

Jones did say he was a Communist in the 90's but he also said that he now believed that working through capitalist means was a better solution. In his book he wrote:

"There will surely be an important role for nonprofit voluntary, cooperative, and community-based solutions," Jones writes on page 86. "But the reality is that we are entering an era during which our very survival will demand invention and innovation on a scale never before seen in the history of human civilization. Only the business community has the requisite skills, experience, and capital to meet that need. On that score, neither the government nor the nonprofit and voluntary sectors can compete, not even remotely.

Did you even bother to read the Politifact article? You certainly are pretending that you haven't. Why selectively choose some of his words while ignoring the more recent, more accurate portrayal of his political beliefs just to maintain a false view of the man? Cherry picking your way through life can reinforce your long-held beliefs but it contributes heavily to your ignorance at the same time.

 

No explanation is what I expected. You said what I thought you said, but you claim otherwise. Youre a real stand up guy.

 

Once again, you've proven nothing. Jones said he was a communist, but has not retracted that... ever. Even a communist can recognize that the "business community has the requisite skills..., etc." But, a leopard like Van Jones is not going to change his spots:

(April, 2009):



Anthony (Van) Jones was a San Francisco Bay Area radical agitator–a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, waging war on the police and capitalist system. Today Van Jones holds a key position in the US government and has the ear of President Barack Obama. The White House Blog for March 10, 2009, states:

• The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Nancy Sutley announced yesterday that Van Jones – an early green jobs visionary — will start Monday as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at CEQ:
  Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the President’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources. Jones will also help to shape and advance the Administration’s energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities
  Jones is the founder of Green For All, an organization focused on creating green jobs in impoverished areas. He is also the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change, and was the author of the 2008 New York Times best-seller, The Green Collar Economy.
  
  
  
  Today Van Jones mixes not with street level militants, but with the cream of the left “establishment”. But who is Van Jones? Has he really abandoned his communist beliefs? Van Jones first moved to San Francisco in the spring of 1992, while studying law at Yale, when the leftist Lawyers Committee for Human Rights hired several law students to act as legal observers during the trial of policemen charged with assaulting Rodney King. Not guilty verdicts in the King case led to mass rioting–which Jones joined in. Arrested and jailed, Van Jones met a whole new circle of friends. The East Bay Express for November 2, 2005, reported:
  • “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…I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th..By August, I was a communist.
  • The communist organisation Van jones went on to lead was called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM).
  • The leftist blog Machete 48 wrote March 3, 2009:
    • Returning to Van Jones, with all the shimmer associated with a rising star, many forget that a man now advising the president was a member of a revolutionary organization in the SF Bay Area called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement). Throughout the group’s history, Van Jones was seen as a public figure within the Bay Area left and a leading member of STORM.
      STORM had its roots in a grouping of people of color organizing against the Gulf War in the early 1990’s and was formally founded in 1994. The group’s politics had a number of influences, but evolved towards what could be best characterized as third worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism). The group grew in influence until its disbanding in 2002 amid problems of internal dynamics and especially controversy around the leadership roles that members played in the youth movement (such as the fight against Proposition 21). Nearly the entire membership of the organization was staff members for various social movement non-profits in the Bay Area, many linked to the Ella Baker Center, which Van Jones steered. While never large, STORM was one of the most influential and active radical groups in the Bay Area, controlling numerous front organisations including Bay Area Police Watch, one of several anti police activities in which Jones was involved.
      
      Other STORM fronts included a Marxist training organisation-School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) and an unemployed rights group-People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER).
      Jones and STORM were also very active in the anti Iraq War demonstrations of the early 2000s. W hile way out on the left STORM also worked with “mainstream” communists.
      Bay Area left identity Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez was close to Jones and helped “mentor” his Ella Baker Human Rights Center.
      
      Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organisation Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) in the early 1990s.
      Martinez still serves on the CCDS advisory board alongside radicals such as Angela Davis, Timuel Black (a personal friend of Barack Obama who served on his 2004 Senate campaign committee) and musician Pete Seeger (who performed at Obama’s Washington Inauguration Concert).
      Martinez is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, the radical parent body of Progressives for Obama.
      

 

Martinez and Jones worked together on several projects including attending a Challenging White Supremacy workshop which much impressed Jones:

• “To solve the new century’s mounting social and environmental problems, people of color activist and white activists need to be able to join forces. But all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration. The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop is the most powerful tool that I have seen for removing the barriers to true partnerships between people of color and white folks. If the CWS trainings were mandatory for all white activists, the progressive movement in the United States would be unstoppable.”

They also both worked together with another STORM member Adam Gold on the organizing committee for anti Iraq War newspaper War Times.


STORM also had ties to the South African Communist Party, with three “core” comrades attending the SACP Congress in 1998.
STORM also very much admired Amilcar Cabral the late revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.
STORM may have learned about Amilcar Cabral from the SACP, which also revered him.


A tribute to Cabral from the SACP’s African Communist, No. 53, second quarter 1973, states:

• “How is it that we, a people deprived of everything, living in dire straits, manage to wage our struggle and win successes? Our answer is: this is because Lenin existed, because he fulfilled his duty as a man, a revolutionary and a patriot. Lenin was and continues to be, the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.”

• These were the words addressed to the delegates attending the seminar on “Lenin and National Liberation” held at Alma Ata, capital of Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, in 1970 by Amilcar Cabral, Secretary-General of the PAIGC, who met his death on 20th January 1973 at Conakry, Guinea, at the hands of a traitor, Innocenta Canida, an agent of the Portuguese colonialists who had infiltrated into the ranks of the movement three years ago. These words reflect the revolutionary thinking and life-work of this utterly dedicated patriot, outstanding African revolutionary of our time and the father of the new independent sovereign State of Guinea in the process of birth. It was the cognition of the scientific theory of revolution, of Marxism-Leninism, to which he was introduced by his contacts with the Portuguese Communist Party during his student days in Lisbon which was to combine within him, in the words of the statement of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, “a deep understanding of the processes of the African revolution with an untiring devotion to practical struggle.” Van Jones has named his three-year-old son Cabral–in honor of his hero.

 

OK McCarthy, whatever you say! Practice this Joe..."Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of ...

 

Tsk..tsk.., Moen. It's people such as yourself who see the truth staring them in the face, yet refuse to see it or, worse, fail to realize the danger. Our fellow forum members can judge for themselves whether or not Van Jones is/was/could be/might be a communist. I'll let his own words and actions speak for themselves.

 

Horse Feathers
~ Bert Kalmar

 

Face it. His opinions have been so slanted for so long that he cannot even see straight any more. He can only understand BS so slanted that the rest of us find to be complete lies.

 

You don't seem to be letting his own words speak for themselves. He has said plenty since the 90's that you are completely ignoring. I look at the man and judge him for the sum of his words not the cherry picked single statement you are laser focussed on.

 

And we have another McCarthy wannabe.

 

Unlike the socialists/communists, us normal people do not feel that because we disagree with a (your) stance, it is therefore illegal or unconstitutional.

 

The first thing you learn in Abnormal Psychology is that they all think that they are "normal".

 

Exactly! Just like liberals think they're normal. It's amazing, isn't it?

 

Wow. You should write for The New Yorker. Such sophisticated quips.

 

Wow. You should write for Fisher Price. Such callow drivel.

 

There is a desperate plea for help. Everyone that believes like I believe is "normal". If you have a different point of view, or look different, or act different, then you are not "normal".

In psychology, egocentrism is:

• the incomplete differentiation of the self and the world, including other people and
• the tendency to perceive, understand and interpret the world in terms of the self.

Sounds like a person that would define themselves as "normal".

 

It is much more likely that he was calling you a nutcase.

 

How about everyone who thinks like you do.