More news on Van Jones’ sordid past comes to light, this time from VerumSerum,
At the risk of piling on, I made a discovery of my own related to Jones’ past. As has been detailed elsewhere, Jones was the founder and long-time executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. One of the Center’s projects that Jones was involved in has been little noted or discussed at this stage: a record label sponsored by the Center called Freedom Fighter Music. The label appears to have been created in the 2002-3 timeframe, and to have fizzled out by 2005-6. And apparently, Freedom Fighter only produced 2 or 3 albums.
However, one of these albums was an anti-Iraq-war compilation album that caught my attention because it was narrated by Mumia Abu Jamal, a Black Panther Party activist who is on death row for murdering a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. One of the controversies over Jones this week has been his prior statements and activity in support of Jamal.
I managed to track down an MP3 of the full album entitled WarTimes: Reports from the Opposition. And lo and behold, not only did Jones run the organization which sponsored the creation of this album, but he is also featured on the album itself. I created a highlight clip featuring Mumia Abu Jamal and some of the more outrageous song lyrics (NSFW WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE). The clip featuring the short interview with Jones begins at about 3:45…but the whole clip is worth a listen, IMO.
Click the link to find the YouTube portal and listen to the interview with Van Jones, that begins around 3:45. The money quote begins at around 4:40,
“We see violence against poor people and poor people of color within the U.S. border, at the U.S. border, and beyond the U.S. border and you see U.S. tax dollars funding all of it. And so we have this now global struggle against the U.S. led security apparatus and military agenda that impacts people here and impacts people around the world and I think that we need to see our problems as linked.”
So as to head off the inevitable argument from the Van Jones apologists that he doesn’t have anything to do with Freedom Fighter Music, please note that Jones claims it as his own in a 2003 interview he gave to USA Weekend, an adjunct of USA Today,
Marable: That’s right. Every generation must find its own voice and use culture in creative ways to speak to the new realities. In the 1960s you had the Freedom Singers of SNCC. You had [anthemic] songs such as “We Shall Overcome”, and now the 21st-century hip-hop generation increasingly uses the most progressive currents as a way of interrogating and challenging the prison-industrial complex, and structural racism, discrimination based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation. [I understand you have] developed a record label, Freedom Fighter Music.
Jones: Yes, we’ve had one for a little more than a year. Our second CD is coming out this year.
So we now have a “Green Job Czar”, completely unaccountable to the normal, constitutional processes of the rule of law in this country, who actively seeks to undermine law and order in this country, and who sides with anybody who is “struggling” against the “U.S. led security apparatus and military agenda”? Wonderful. But not surprising. Van Jones also sided with al-Qaeda back in 1998 when Bill Clinton launched that attack on the Sudanese aspirin factory, speaking out against American militarism against People of ColourTM at one of several rallies that sprinkled the Bay Area after that cruise missile response,
“This is using dead Third World bodies to cover up his own unzipped pants,” declared Van Jones, director of Bay Area PoliceWatch, an organization that until now has focused on alleged misconduct by law enforcement officers. Jones spoke at a demonstration at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco that drew 400 people, according to police estimates.
The theme that Clinton took military action to distract public attention from the Monica Lewinsky affair was highlighted in a protester’s sign in Palo Alto that read, “Don’t let a wartime incursion be Clinton’s diversion.”’
[snip]
“There was scant mention in any of the demonstrations about the events that precipitated Clinton’s action: the terrorist bombs that exploded at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7 that killed 251 Africans and 12 Americans.”
Incidentally, isn’t it sad when the San Francisco Chronicle is more pro-American than you are?
