Jim Sheehan’s friend resigned as Obama’s Green Jobs Czar after he became the target of a Glenn Beck-fueled campaign of character assassination. That won’t be the end of the story.
Nine months into Barack Obama’s Presidency much is unclear about what the new President will be able to accomplish with a leadership style that he billed as being post-partisan. Still, what’s becoming increasingly obvious (as again demonstrated by South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s ugly outburst Wednesday night) is that the transfer of power to the nation’s first black President has resulted in breathtaking paroxysms of anger, incivility and dishonesty from his opponents on the right.
What’s also clear is that Van Jones is a casualty of the way this outrage has been fermented and amplified by Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets. Last week the prominent author and speaker resigned from the administration’s Council on Environmental Quality where he’d been working since March to try to inject more “green jobs” into the U.S. economy. He left because he’d suddenly gone from a young man celebrated as being among the nation’s brightest for his views on how to build green economies, to a mere caricature of a threatening “radical,” to be flattened and paved over by the right wing’s smoke-belching media machine.
Jones hadn’t come under fire for anything he’d done on CEQ. He’d not ordered the illegal
wiretapping of polluters. Nor had he ordered the illegal torturing of Hummer parts suppliers.
No. Jones sin was to have a past that, god forbid, included work and speech that reflected his bitter contempt for racism and other abuses of power in America. In one opening video collage from the Glenn Beck Show, Beck intones: “Lets start at Yale Law School. Van Jones showed up wearing combat books and holding a Black Panther book bag. A major turning point came in 1993 when he was arrested in the Rodney King riots. He spent the next ten years as a full-fledged radical, among other things, founding a group called STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement which held study groups in the Marxist and Leninist teachings. Then why is it that a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama Administration, as one of his chief advisers?”
As CNN and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz pointed out, Beck’s rendition of Van Jones’s resumé was somewhat incomplete in that Beck failed to note that Jones had helped to found an organization called Color of Change that, of late, has been advocating an advertiser boycott of Beck’s program on Fox News. The boycott campaign has prompted dozens of advertisers to remove their ads from Beck’s show because Beck, among other things, has said the President “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
More can be said about Beck who, wiping away tears and contorting his face in anguish, often appears to be having a televised nervous breakdown over the rather ludicrous prospect of Obama turning the country into a socialist or communist state. Beck routinely engages in blatant, manipulative fear-mongering and his show on Fox epitomizes how debased American media has become in some quarters.
But let’s stick with Van Jones. For the record, there were other grievances in addition to the Black Panther book bag. Jones is listed as signatory #46 to a petition framed by an organization seeking an investigation into whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
The list included Ralph Nader, actor Ed Asner, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and dozens of other prominent writers, academics and organizers. Some, including historian Howard Zinn, claim their names were used without permission.
When the issue of the petition came up, Jones quickly apologized for having his name on it, saying he didn’t agree with the statement “now or ever.” It did raise a question about just how familiar and committed to it he was when he (apparently) allowed his name to be used. (When the Washington Times sought comment from the petition’s organizers to confirm that Jones had been personally contacted about the petition, they wouldn’t confirm it. Instead, they sent the newspaper a statement that, without even mentioning Jones, defended the petition’s signers from media attacks.)
The other widely reported arrow in Jones’s back was his playful use of an obscenity during the question and answer period of a speech he gave before his appointment. A woman in the audience asked Jones why Republicans in the Senate were obstructing Obama’s legislative agenda, to which he replied, “they’re assholes.”
On the video of the speech, it’s funny because Jones seems as amused as everyone else that the word flew out of his mouth. He smiles and holds his palms to the sky, and then adds that Barack Obama “is not an asshole.”
The blunt and insightful comedian Bill Maher saw something in the video of Jones’s remarks that Beck and Co. may have missed.
“When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they’re in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats, who can’t seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen.”
One could further analyze and parse the indictment against Van Jones by his wide-eyed, right wing critics. But Maher, who is contemptuous of Obama for not standing up for Jones, aptly summarized it this way: “Van Jones got fired because he became the Scary Negro of the Week on Fox News, where, let’s be honest, they still feel threatened by Harry Belafonte.”
For the record, the White House and Jones says that his resignation was his decision.
The most important truth about this surreal carnival is that Van Jones had become an object rather than a person. It was in this meleé of dismemberment that most people (including Bill Maher) were first learning about him. This despite the fact that his 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy, was an instant New York Times bestseller and that TIME Magazine recently had named him one of the 100 most influential people on the planet for his ideas and his leadership.
The pace at which Van Jones was going from being a widely respected and creative thinker to a piece of political red meat was exemplified in the way former eBay CEO and aspiring Republican candidate Meg Whitman came under pressure from right-wingers to renounce her recent praise that Jones was doing “marvelous” work. She immediately disowned him, telling The Weekly Standard that “it’s clear that he [Jones] holds views that I entirely reject: any suggestion otherwise is ridiculous.”
“I think Van Jones is a big part of the future of environmentalism. He, more than anyone else, is bringing together a concern about the environment and a concern about social justice. And, if I had just one more thing to say, it is that we in the environmental movement cannot fail Van Jones.”–Gus Speth, co-founder, Natural Resources Defense Council.
Friends of the Center for Justice have known about Van Jones for years, most notably because Van agreed to come to Spokane and give the keynote speech at our 2006 Jazzed for Justice event.
The Center’s founder, Jim Sheehan, first sought Jones out years earlier after hearing him speak at a Bioneers conference in California. Sheehan engaged Jones there and then followed up with him at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. Jones founded the Ella Baker Center in 1996, originally with a civil rights focus growing out of his earlier work fighting police misconduct in the Bay Area.
Sheehan was immediately taken both by Jones’s engaging personality and dedication and, more importantly, his message.
“I liked his idea that you have to have a triple bottom line,” Jim says. “I don’t think it was necessarily an original idea with Van but he certainly put it out there in an understandable way. He likened it to a three-footed stool on which you have to have social justice, economic justice, and environmental justice. If you don’t have one of those, then you don’t have the other two. And those have to be reflected in our bottom line in any organization that you’re trying to run.”
Sheehan had no trouble getting Jones, who is an epic traveler and speaker, to come to Spokane three years ago. Jones gave a tour de force address, full of emotion and inspiration even though he’d become ill on the way town with a bad cold.
Sheehan said he’s sad but not surprised that Jones had suddenly become such a high-profile political target.
“It really demonstrates the racism that’s in our culture,” Sheehan said. “You look at the things that Republicans have said, or other Democrats and it (what Jones has said) is nothing compared to what they have said.”
By example, Sheehan pointed to former Vice-President Dick Cheney who, in July 2004 told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to “f*** yourself” after Leahy, on the Senate floor, brought up the subject of Cheney’s ties to the mega-defense contractor Halliburton.
Another irony in the Jones episode is that his excoriation by Beck and others at Fox News came just days after Chris Wallace of Fox News participated in a widely criticized softball interview with Cheney. During the interview Cheney gave his most explicit acknowledgment to date that he knew about the waterboarding and other torture practices being used by the CIA under the Bush/Cheney Administration. Cheney also told Wallace that if CIA interrogators went beyond the techniques the Bush Justice Department had authorized he was “okay” with that too.
Thus, the former vice president (who defiantly pushed the “dark side” abuses that even conservative legal experts consider to have violated U.S. and international law) is treated with royal deference by Fox News. But Van Jones is pilloried for, among other things, being radicalized by the beating of Rodney King and calling Republican obstructionists in Congress “assholes.”
“If Van were white,” Sheehan says, “I suspect that none of this would have happened. The fact that he is a dynamic, brilliant young black man means the right-wing sees the potential in him and they’ve got to do something.”
Sheehan doesn’t see it working though.
“If anything it will backfire,” he says. “Van was kind of insulated in the administration. He’ll be back on the road and he’ll address this and he will talk about racism because that’s who he is. He’s going to be fine.”
And as far as Van Jones’s work and influence on the world, well, Sheehan would be the first to tell you that you’re looking at it when you look at the Center for Justice. Why? Because Jim was so taken with Jones’s message that he brought it back to the then-new non-profit law office in Spokane and worked to revise the Center for Justice’s philosophy and scope of work to reflect Jones’s thinking about the dimensions of justice.
Real work results from that. And that really is a big difference between the world of Van Jones and the world of Fox News. Journalism takes work, but faux journalism really doesn’t. It’s one thing to go out and collect facts and profile a person, an issue, a controversy so that you can help viewers or readers understand what it’s really about and how it affects their lives. It’s another thing to collect and inflame only those facts that serve a premeditated point of view or favorite political cause, and that’s largely what Fox News does, especially through commentators like Beck. It’s not a surprise given Rupert Murdoch’s ownership and the guidance of Fox News President Roger Ailes, the former media advisor to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Among other things, Ailes is known for this pithy bit of wisdom about news coverage:
“If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
Only now, Fox News and its ilk actually take it a step further and shove people into the orchestra pit.
That’s what happened last week to Van Jones. At that point, his ideas didn’t matter and neither did his life’s work.
Well, it matters here. At the Center for Justice in Spokane, Washington, (among other places) Van Jones has inspired people to work for justice and change. And that work will go on with as much resolve as ever. We work for a lot of reasons but, henceforth, one of them will be the Un-Smearing of Van Jones.
To Van we can only offer this: our house will always be your house, and our work, your work.
–Tim Connor
UPDATE: On September 16, Huffington Post published a new email from Van regarding his resignation. You can link to it here.
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