Is Van Jones a communist?

PolitiFact | Glenn Beck says Van Jones is an avowed communist

Here's what Politifact, a fact-check site that takes on both the left and the right, has to say. Click the link above to read the whole article, which also quotes Jones about his disillusionment with the revolutionary approach.

...This, from [Jones's] book, The Green Collar Economy, released in October 2008:

"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.

"So in the end, our success and survival as a species are largely and directly tied to the new eco-entrepreneurs — and the success and survival of their enterprises. Since almost all of the needed eco-technologies are likely to come from the private sector, civic leaders and voters should do all that can be done to help green business leaders succeed. That means, in large part, electing leaders who will pass bills to aid them. We cannot realistically proceed without a strong alliance between the best of the business world — and everyone else."

Or how about this, from an address before the Center for American Progress on Nov. 19, 2008 (well before Jones was brought into the Obama administration):

"Everything that is good for the environment, everything that's needed to beat global warming, is a job," Jones said. "Solar panels don't manufacture themselves. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Homes don't weatherize themselves. Every single thing that we need to beat global warming will also beat the recession. And the challenge is, how do we get the government to be a smart, and limited, catalyst in getting the private sector to take on this challenge?"

Beck would have been on solid ground if he said Jones used to be a communist. Jones has been up front about that.

Healthcare Town Hall

Our Congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey, held a town hall meeting last week in Petaluma, within walking distance of our house. Knowing the tea-baggers would be out in force, even in our liberal town, I had to attend. It was astonishing. My daughter, a born writer, describes it so much better than I could:

It was everything I expected - and more! People would come up to the mike and ask Lynn Woolsey whether she had read the Constitution (a devastating rhetorical blow that was repeated multiple times!) Then there would be a bunch of whooping and hollering. Then Lynn Woolsey would say "yes!" Then there would be a rousing chorus of "Liar! Liar!" Then the guy at the microphone would ask Lynn Woolsey why she was trying to ram a government takeover of health care down the throats of honest Americans. Lynn Woolsey would explain that there is in fact no government health care takeover being proposed - merely the *option* of a government-run insurance policy. Then there would be another rousing chorus of "Liar! Liar!" Then someone else would come up to the microphone and ask Lynn Woolsey why she hated AMERICA!!! (Seriously. They did.) And Lynn Woolsey would give some sort of non-answer to this non-question. (Her best response all night, in my opinion? "I assume that's a rhetorical question.")

Sometimes this varied, in two major ways. Sometimes someone would come up to the microphone and explain how they'd had cancer and now couldn't afford health care anymore, which had them a little troubled given that cancer can be a recurrent disease, and they really hoped the public option would provide an option for them. Then there would be a bunch of booing and calls of "Communist!" Abusing cancer survivors and people in wheelchairs: classy. [ETA for scrupulous accuracy - I don't want to imply that there was as much abuse of sick people as there was of Lynn Woolsey and the public option. This was definitely a smaller subset of the group.]

Alternately, several times during the evening, people came up and told this story:
1) They had been trying to contact Lynn Woolsey for weeks! months! and her office had refused to tell them anything about her position on [issue x].
2) Finally, they had gotten through to someone who answered them.
3) That someone told them Lynn Woolsey didn't care about their opinions and that she would vote how she wanted to because she knew what was best for them.

So apparently, there's someone in Lynn Woolsey's phone-answering staff who is not only stupid enough to make that last statement, but is making it to every single conservative who calls! Amazing! Or perhaps, by the rules of civil debate favored by these groups, that would have been my cue to shout "Liar! Liar!"

I really wish I were exaggerating this for liberal humor effect. Sometimes it was actually pretty funny. But I'm not. I'm relaying stuff as near to verbatim as I can remember it, though there were interludes of saner questioning (from both sides, though honestly, more from the pro-reform side than from the anti-) that I haven't relayed.

Lynn Woolsey looked pretty uncomfortable up there, and frankly I would have too. Aside from the fact that having a room peppering you with vaguely insane questions and then screaming abuse at you while you try to talk isn't fun, I have to assume the congresspeople doing these meetings are wondering who's going to be the first to have a shot taken at them by the people who have been making such a show of bringing their guns to meetings (I'm actually pretty gun-friendly for a liberal, but I think all sane people can agree that guns have no place at crowded events with public figures and tempers running high).

I would say coverage of these meetings has in no way oversold the hysteria and craziness at these things. And this was in one of the most liberal areas of the country! Interestingly, the pro-reform people didn't jump up and yell all that often (though they clapped and sometimes cheered for stuff that excited them), but the few times they really did respond all-out, they were louder. Based on noise volume and how many people jumped up and cheered around me for the anti-reform rabble-rousing stuff, I would guess the audience was actually split roughly 70-30 or 60-40 pro-reform vs. anti-. But most of the time you wouldn't have known it from the volume.

Good times, good times.

Obama: Read this!

Roosevelt: The Great Divider

By JEAN EDWARD SMITH

Published: September 2, 2009
New York Times

When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

***

Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him — and he profited from their hatred. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Read the whole thing and weep for our lost Democratic spine.

Harvest

Tomatoes (Dante's saucers, Principe borghese, pear), green beans, tomatillos, Sungold cherry tomatos, Macintosh apples. Not shown: potatoes onions.








Tomatillos and roasted peppers for salsa verde.

What is a sense of community?

Okay, this is totally based on my own conjecture.

My conservative relative once complained about the inefficient low-flow toilet in her new home, built after the government began mandating low-flow toilets in all new construction. It was one of the first such homes, and perhaps the low-flow technology wasn't as good as it is now. She wished she could rip it out and put in an old-fashioned toilet. What she should have done is rip it out and put in a newer low-flow toilet, since the newer ones work just fine, but she objected to having to make such a choice.

My impression is that conservatives have a pretty good sense of community. Many are active in their schools, churches, business and fraternal organizations and neighborhoods. They are generous in helping friends who are undergoing difficulties.

But the sense of community doesn't extend beyond sharing with these groups. For instance, it doesn't extend to strangers who depend on shared resources such as water and energy. Conservatives seem less likely to be concerned about whether people beyond their immediate community have enough water, for instance.

It seems like the difference between the conservative sense of community and the liberal one is that a conservative community is heavily weighted toward people conservatives know personally. When it comes to community, liberals are more abstract thinkers.

The conservative view is probably the more natural one. Think back to our primitive origins, when people lived in small groups, and most people personally knew everyone they saw in their daily life, and probably were somewhat familiar with the people the nearest outside community that they might meet with during gatherings to trade resources or find marriage partners. Anyone else was a stranger, the "other."

Unfortunately, we no longer live in such groups. We know nothing about the people two blocks away from us, or many of the people who work in the same building as we do. We're surrounded by strangers. There are two ways to respond to this: the primitive, natural way, which is to exclude strangers from our sense of community; or the adaptive way, which is to extend our sense of community to include people nearby, even though we don't personally know them. (Note: humans are highly adaptable creatures.) Once we've made that adaptation, it's relatively easy to extend the community outwards, to the region, the nation, the world.

Just my thought. Probably horribly over-generalized, but I think there's a grain of truth to it.