RealClearPolitics has posted a video of Van Jones, President Obama’s “green jobs” adviser (his official title is Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality), appearing at an event in Berkeley, California on February 11, 2009. Jones was asked why Republicans, who when they were in the majority had fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, were able to pass significant legislation while Democrats have had trouble doing the same.
“The answer to that is, they’re a–holes,” answered Jones.
The crowd erupted in laughter. “That’s a technical, political science term,” Jones said.
“And Barack Obama is not an a–hole,” Jones continued. “Now, I will say this: I can be an a–hole, and some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to start getting a little bit uppity.”
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Jones has an extraordinary past for a White House adviser. For one thing, he’s a former communist, which was not unheard of in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but is a little unusual for someone who was born, as Jones was, in 1968. From a 2005 profile of Jones in the Oakland, California East Bay Express:
Jones came from rural Tennessee, by way of Yale Law School. The self-described former “rowdy black nationalist” is best known as founder of the Ella Baker Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit group with roots firmly grounded in criminal-justice issues that affect low-income people of color. In 1995, he started Bay Area PoliceWatch, a program that assists victims of alleged police brutality. He made his mark as an activist by brashly saying things no other civil-rights leaders would say, such as “Willie Brown’s Police Commission is killing black people.” The center’s second program, Books Not Bars, runs a campaign to radically transform California’s youth prisons into rehabilitation centers. As the group gained visibility and a reputation for in-your-face tactics, its annual budget snowballed to $1.4 million, and its staff increased to 22.
But Jones’ personal life has been punctuated with a series of epiphanies, each of which has expanded the focus of his work. In college, he embraced the fight for racial justice. Then he moved to the Bay Area and embraced the struggle for class justice. When he gained interest in environmentalism, he started searching for a way to pull together all three quests in the service of a better future. Now that he believes he has found that unified field theory — one suffused with his rediscovered spirituality — he’s out to sell it to the progressive world.
“There is a green wave coming, with renewable energy, organic agriculture, cleaner production,” he said in an interview. “Our question is, will the green wave lift all boats? That’s the moral challenge to the people who are the architects of this new, ecologically sound economy. Will we have eco-equity, or will we have eco-apartheid? Right now we have eco-apartheid.”
The East Bay Express describes Jones as arriving at Yale Law School “carrying a Black Panther bookbag, an angry black separatist among a sea of clean-cut students dreaming of Supreme Court clerkships…” After law school, in 1992, he moved to San Francisco to work for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights — Jones was an observer during the trial of the police officers who arrested and beat Rodney King. After three of the four officers were acquitted, Jones was arrested at a protest rally in San Francisco. “It was a turning point in his life,” the East Bay Express reported:
Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, “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.'” Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. “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.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”
In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia. They protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades. In 1996, Jones decided to launch his own operation, which he named the Ella Baker Center after an unsung hero of the civil-rights movement…
And so on, until Jones’ path led to the environment and the fight against eco-apartheid. And now to the White House.
