[Bret L]

The Van Jones Fiasco—How Low Can Lefty Greens Go?

By Brenda Walker

"It was a very bad day for environmentalism in the mid-90s when the Sierra Club secretly took a $100 million donation from Wall Street investor David Gelbaum on the condition that its historic caution about immigration not be renewed.

It signaled the end of true bipartisan defense of the earth and the
beginning of environmentalism's enthusiastic plunge into extreme
multicultural ideology and nutty One-Worldism—with a deep-sixing of
the overpopulation issue both domestically and worldwide.

The greens' recent elevation of radical Van Jones, Obama’s just-
derailed green jobs czar, is another marker of the decay.

In 2000, conservationist icon David Brower resigned from the Sierra
Club board, complaining that there was "no real sense of urgency"
about saving the earth. "Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem
facing us, and immigration is part of that problem'', Brower said.”It
has to be addressed''.

The immigration issue is a great integrity detector—the position of an
individual or group on immigration reveals basic integrity…or the lack
of it.

The Sierra Club once had integrity—back in 1989 when the official
position was "Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that
which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S".

Then the Club got that big pile of cash (with which it purchased some
very nice land to preserve), for which donor Gelbaum required
censorship on the issue. He confirmed to a reporter:

“‘I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-
immigration, they would never get a dollar from me…’

“Gelbaum, who reads the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion and is
married to a Mexican American, said his views on immigration were
shaped long ago by his grandfather, Abraham, a watchmaker who had come
to America to escape persecution of Jews in Ukraine before World War
I..

“‘I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would
dishonor the memory of my grandparents.’"

[The Man Behind the Land, By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times,
October 27, 2004. Links added].

That would be Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, who as a young
man spent two earnest years in India as a Peace Corps volunteer,
promoting overpopulation awareness and educating about birth control.
But now he hangs out with leftist billionaire George Soros and self-
identified truther and communist organizer Van Jones, who until
recently was White House green jobs advisor.

After Jones resigned following revelations of his own extremist
statements, Pope penned a strange apology titled We All Blew It—
meaning "we, the far left" didn't support Jones enough. That blog item
appeared on the Sierra Club site as well as the Huffington Post.

Pope blamed racism, Fox News, the "reactionary right"—everything but
Jones' own history of radical associations and remarks. Pope wrote:

“..I assumed it would blow over.

“Well, that was a mistake. So was the decision by the White House to
treat the initial attacks not as part of an assault on the president
but, instead, to allow them to be viewed as being about Van Jones.
What we underestimated was the power of the fact that both Jones and
the Barack Obama are black. Yes, the hysteria was about politics—I
don't think Fox News really cares about Jones's ethnicity—but it was
enabled by race. Calling Bush a ‘crack-head’ is seen by a large part
of America as worse than calling him ‘addict-in-chief’ because crack
is not just a drug -- it is a drug used largely by black people. It
reminds those Americans who are still uncomfortable with Barack Obama
that we have a black president.” (Links added).

Is it not odd for the leader of an environmentalist organization to be
(wrongly) beating the racism drum? Whatever happened to concern about
preserving endangered species and wild places?

The Sierra Club's new pursuit of diversity as the highest good has led
to curious obsessions—such as a recent self-criticism on its website
by Sierra Club President Allison Chin (who is Asian), responding to
complaints by Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (who is black),
which was cringingly headlined "Yep, We're Too White".

Multicultural values dictate that a movement doesn't matter unless it
includes lots of colorful people, so environmentalism had to shape up.
As a result, the leftist concept of "social justice" morphed into
"environmental justice". The Sierra Club now devotes a special webpage
to celebrating diversity, which has greenified the familiar bromide
that "diversity is our strength" into the “Sierra Club Diversity
Statement”:

“Like a healthy ecosystem, our differences strengthen us in our
efforts to preserve and protect the natural and human environment.”

But efforts at outreach have proved to be more difficult than
anticipated in the liberal playbook. The New York Times recently
quoted Carl Pope complaining about the "cultural barriers" created by
the Club's existing membership: “If you go to a Sierra Club meeting,
the people are mostly white, largely over 40, almost all college-
educated, whose style is to argue with each other", he remarked. [In
Environmental Push, Looking to Add Diversity, By Mireya Navarro, March
3, 2009]

Certainly that difficulty meant it was easier for Pope to happily
welcome an edgy black man like Vann Jones into the green fold. There
was expediency on both sides. Pope got more of the diversity he
desired. Jones got a whole new sphere where he could strut his stuff,
as well as connect to a lot of foundation money.

What should set off alarm bells was how easily a radical organizer—
he's described himself as a former "rowdy black nationalist", said he
was a communist, was arrested while protesting the Rodney King
verdict, and supports cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal—could recast himself
as an important environmentalist without missing a beat.

Certainly the elite media were enthralled. The Washington Post called
him a "towering figure of the environmental movement". The New Yorker
produced an adoring puff piece for the January 12 issue: Greening the
Ghetto, by Elizabeth Kolbert.

“Jones, who is forty, is tall and imposing, with a shaved head and a
patchy goatee. He wears rimless glasses and favors dark clothing. On
this particular day, he was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans,
black boots, and a charcoal jacket. He was introduced by a community
organizer and aspiring rapper, who described him as ‘a leader with
answers,’ a ‘genius from the hood, similar to our own,’ and a youthful
version of Barack Obama. When it was his turn to speak, Jones rejected
the lectern that had been set up for him, saying that it reminded him
too much of college.”

A big part of Jones' appeal was his salesman pitch to solve poverty
and climate change with green jobs—a spiel no utopian leftist could
resist. His book The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix
Our Two Biggest Problems promised way more than it could realistically
deliver, but sounded terrific to those environmentalists friendly to
big-government approaches.

The idea was that Washington should create a green New Deal, based on
spending $350 billion to rebuild the country with energy-saving
technology. Instead of a chicken in every pot, Jones promised a solar
panel on every roof. As for the cost, a few hundred billion sounds low
to remodel the country.

It's obvious how Carl Pope could have starry-eyed plans for the guy,
even though Jones had no experience in business, or green technology
either for that matter. The message was the important thing. And
having it delivered by a shaved-headed black guy who exuded street
cred was too juicy to resist.

VDARE.COM readers who are strong of stomach may want to watch a
documentary titled "The Brave Nation", in which leftists like Pope,
Jones, Delores Huerta, Pete Seeger and Anthony Romero chat about their
big plans for America, framed with historical background footage.
Watch the trailer here. The Pope-Jones section is here, and shows
Jones in his upbeat friendly mode, with none of the hostile commie-
speak that has showed up on YouTube.

What is disturbing about this dismal episode is what it reveals about
the environmental movement.

The earth needs friends right now, and the organizations that are
supposed to be doing that job aren't. America is a conservative
country, and far-left environmentalists are very off-putting.
Watermelon greens—"Green on the outside, red on the inside"—are wrong
for Americans on too many issues.

There are plenty of environmental problems about which we can all
agree, e.g. the destruction of fisheries and a Texas-sized patch of
floating plastic garbage in the North Pacific. But Carl Pope would
rather trash-talk about conservatives than engage in bi-partisan
environmental protection.

Furthermore, the Sierra Club has taken positions that are either
purely political (i.e. friendly to the Hispanic lobby, often to the
detriment of Americans) or are actually harmful to the environment.
For example, in California's 2003 gubernatorial recall election, it
endorsed candidate Cruz Bustmante, despite his refusal to condemn the
race-baiting Brown Power organization MEChA, which he joined as a
college student. In 2001 Bustamante had to apologize for using a
racial slur when speaking to an audience of black trade unionists. All
too blatantly, the Club has lower standards for its political allies
than for its critics.

Mexican cartels have turned parts of our most treasured national parks
(including Yosemite and Sequoia) into toxic marijuana plantations. But
the Sierra Club has "acknowledges other priorities then drug bandits".

In California, the Club has supported drivers licenses/identification
cards for illegal aliens, despite the increased threats of terrorism
and worsened public safety.

The Sierra Club has opposed a fence on the Mexican border. Despite the
terrible destruction to habitat and mountains of trash left by illegal
alien crossers (1.18 million pounds in Arizona during 2006 alone),
Carl Pope had the effrontery to complain last year that the project
might cause "the destruction of the borderlands region" [Parry and
Thrust | Green groups challenge a bid to speed the border fence, By
Andrew Murr, Newsweek, April 4, 2008].

The Sierra Club Stalinists have personally attacked genuine
environmentalists (like your humble correspondent, among others) for
merely pointing out their misdeeds and for working within the
organization's dwindling democratic structure for reform.

It's a tragedy. Both the earth and America need extra care and
attention. But instead both are being shafted by watermelon
environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club, which now appeal to only
a small, very liberal segment of the population.

There is something terribly wrong if greens cannot convince the
country with logical arguments, but prefer extremists like Van Jones
to be their messenger."

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes
two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. She
actually agrees that the country needs to rejigger its energy use to
more sustainable sources, but not in the top-down government-spending
approach of the Van Jones ilk. Rather than shoveling taxpayer money
out the door to political cronies, why doesn’t the Congress create
business incentives for the greener future?

http://www.vdare.com/walker/090916_van_jones.htm