Inside a Soros-funded “Progressive” Conference

by Cliff Kincaid on 6 Oct 2011

Progressive TV and radio star Thom Hartmann took time off from covering Van Jones and his “Rebuild the Dream” movement on Wednesday to briefly talk to this columnist about his relationship with the Vladimir Putin regime of Russia. The conversation quickly went sour when Hartmann objected to questions about how much he is being paid by Moscow. He grabbed my video camera, covering the lens briefly in the process, and stomped away, objecting to “gotcha” questions.

The entire spectacle was captured on camera and posted on the America’s Survival, Inc. YouTube channel.

Obama fundraiser Jodie Evans at Take Back the American Dream conference

During another embarrassing incident, Van Jones refused to sign a copy of his Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) manifesto when asked to autograph it. “No thank you,” he sternly said, before asking “Who are you,” looking at my name badge, and walking away to the next adoring crowd of Van Jones groupies. Jones, a “former” communist, is the new face of the progressive movement that is backing the “Occupation Wall Street” protests and is trying to guarantee President Obama a second term. He was fired as Obama’s “green jobs czar” when the truth about his extremist background and statements started to emerge in reports by blogger Trevor Loudon and then Glenn Beck on Fox News.

Joelle Fishman of the Communist Party at the Take Back the American Dream Conference. She says the CPUSA won’t run a presidential candidate to compete with Obama in 2012. Chair of the CPUSA Political Action Commission, her bio says “she has played an active role in the broad labor and people’s alliance that defeated the ultra-right in the 2008 elections and continues to mobilize for health care, worker rights and peace.”

The “Take Back the American Dream” conference was held in Washington, D.C. October 3-5. An affiliate of the Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for America’s Future, has itself received $1.3 million from Soros’s Open Society Institute over the last several years.

Two of the conference organizers, Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel, have written a call to arms in The Nation magazine saying that liberals must exert more pressure on the Obama Administration and they cite the work of the Communist Party USA and other groups in forcing Franklin Roosevelt to the left and expanding federal involvement in the economy in the 1930s.

“The Socialist and Communist parties and Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement grew threatening enough to goad Franklin Roosevelt into the second New Deal, including Social Security; the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of workers to organize; and much more,” they say. However, they complain that progressives have spent so much of their time over the last three years helping to pass “the Obama reform agenda” that their message has been “muted.” The conference was followed on October 5 by a rally on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

That the progressive movement has embraced Jones, despite his embarrassing exit from the administration, is evidence of how far to the left and how desperate modern “liberal” organizations are.

Jones today serves as the president of the Rebuild the Dream coalition of liberal organizations. His bio says that he is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, another Soros-funded entity, and holds a joint appointment at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

According to his website, he has also returned as a senior policy advisor at Green For All, the Soros-funded organization that helped make Jones into a national progressive star. Soros money also helped finance the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights when Jones was in charge of that group.

Blogger Trevor Loudon, who broke the story of Jones’s communist background, said he first came across his name in a socialist publication and discovered his affiliation with STORM. He then discovered that the far-left Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which Loudon considers the Obama administration’s “ideas bank,” had published a piece by IPS staffer Chuck Collins recommending Jones for a top government job. Collins offered “Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center, to direct the Commerce Department’s new ‘green jobs initiative.” Loudon added, “I researched Jones again at that point and found he was a fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP).” In the end, Jones left CAP and was appointed as a “special adviser” at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

“It didn’t take more than a few keystrokes to realize that STORM was very influential in the San Francisco Bay Area and had ties to both the Cuban and South African Communist Parties,” Loudon said. “Jones’ group and particularly Jones himself had ties to two former Weather Underground supporters — Jon and Nancy Frappier and the Bay Area branch of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Jones was the keynote speaker at a CCDS fundraiser in Berkeley as late as February 2006.”

Loudon’s reporting, picked up by Glenn Beck, then with Fox News, was followed by other embarrassing and damaging revelations from other conservative bloggers. It came out that Jones had called Republicans “assholes” and had signed a letter appearing on the website of 911Truth.org demanding an investigation into whether the Bush Administration “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” The implication was that the al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked the planes that struck New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon were part of a much-larger U.S. Government plot.

Van Jones

On June 20, 2011, attorneys acting on behalf of Jones sent a letter to Fox News demanding that the network immediately cease using six characterizations about Jones and demanding a retraction from Glenn Beck. The letter from Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb insisted that Jones had communist or Marxist notions “as a young man” but had backed away “from those views” and is now “pro-market.” The letter also claimed that Jones’s name had been placed on the 9/11 letter without his knowledge and had been removed.

But Jones had said in an “Uprising Radio” interview in 2008 that his goals were a “complete revolution” to “transform the whole society” away from capitalism.

None of this, however, seems to bother the modern-day progressive movement. In a “What people who know Van say” part of his website, John Podesta, President & CEO of the Center for American Progress, says, “Van Jones is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country…[At the White House,] Van was working to build a common-ground agenda for all Americans, and I am confident he will continue that work.”

Podesta, who rehired Jones after he lost his White House job, co-chaired the Obama presidential transition team that filled many administration jobs. The other co-chair was Valerie Jarrett, an Obama adviser who publicly talked about how “we” in the administration had followed Jones’s career and wanted him to serve in the administration.

The new “Contract for the American Dream” is a ten-point program to promote preserve federal programs and promote more federal spending and involvement in the economy:

Invest in America’s Infrastructure
Create 21st Century Energy Jobs
Invest in Public Education
Offer Medicare for All
Make Work Pay
Secure Social Security
Return to Fairer Tax Rates
End the Wars and Invest at Home
Tax Wall Street Speculation
Strengthen Democracy

In a YouTube video, Jones led a crowd in the chant “America is not broke” and urged higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

While Jones made remarks in his own conference speech about losing his White House job, he also mocked Beck, noting that he had lost his program on the Fox News Channel. Progressives demanded Beck’s ouster after he began exposing billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros, a major funder of the liberal-left.

Soros, who operates an off-shore hedge fund with mysterious sources of cash, has just failed in his effort to have the European Court of Human Rights lift his conviction in an insider trading case in France.

The STORM document is about the history of a communist group that Jones led and whose members traveled to Cuba. He has, however, tried to leave his communist past behind as he reinvents himself as an American patriot trying to “rebuild the American dream.”

During an extended interview, Joelle Fishman of the Communist Party USA talked about Jones’s leadership in this new phase of the progressive movement and how the conference welcomed socialists and communists. She said the Communist Party, which usually fields a presidential candidate, will not run anyone against Obama in 2012. Communist literature was openly displayed at the conference and the Democratic Socialists of America, a group which backed Obama’s political career from the start, had an information table.

Judith LeBlanc, who runs a group called Peace Action and is one of the vice-chairs of the Communist Party, was introduced on stage as one of Van Jones’s “partners” in the rebuild the American dream movement.

This slide from a Van Jones Power Point presentation links segments of the
progressive movement to Obama. Soros funds them all.

Hartmann, a leader of Progressive Democrats of America, has a show distributed nationwide by Russia Today (RT) television and Free Speech TV. He apparently didn’t grasp the irony of trying to silence a recording device while touting the virtues of the First Amendment.

Hartmann spoke to me after participating in a “Taking Back the Media” panel discussion during the Take Back the American Dream Conference. Hartmann was hailed in an official press release as a key part of Free Speech TV’s exclusive live coverage of the conference.

The head of Free Speech TV is Don Rojas, former press secretary to communist Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Caribbean island of Grenada before President Reagan ordered its liberation by American troops in 1983.

Rojas, in a taped interview, spoke fondly of the days when he worked for Grenada’s revolutionary government, even signing a copy of an address Bishop had made to the sixth summit of the non-aligned movement in Havana, Cuba, in 1979. Rojas said he helped to write the speech and was in Havana at the time. He signed it, “Forward Ever, Backward Never,” an inspirational quotation from Bishop which was supposed to capture the essence of the revolutionary process.

This is Thom Hartmann of Free Speech TV before grabbing the camera.
He said he wasn’t funded by Moscow before admitting he was.

Rojas was captured, arrested, and then deported from Grenada by U.S. forces. Today, however, his channel is called the “anti-Fox” network and claims carriage on 200 cable affiliates and Dish network and DirecTV, reaching 35 million homes. Free Speech TV has been promoting the “Occupation of Wall Street” protests and also distributes Al-Jazeera. Rojas says he has applied for cash from the Soros-funded Open Society Institute (OSI). “We are knocking on the OSI’s door as we speak,” he said.

In the speech, Bishop had talked about the “revolutionary process” which “has seen the emergence of successful and progressive revolutions in countries like Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Lao, and Kampuchea and, most recently Nicaragua and Iran, has had a vital impact on the balance of forces in today’s world.”

Kampuchea, the communist word for the country of Cambodia, saw a takeover by the communist Khmer Rouge after America’s defeat in Vietnam that took the lives of about 2 million people in a bloody genocide. Iran was taken over by radical Islamists, who remain in charge and are working to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the state of Israel and threaten the U.S.

“Long live the Cuban revolution!” was one of the concluding phrases in the Bishop speech.

Karen Nussbaum of the AFL-CIO won’t talk about her trip to Castro’s Cuba
as a member of the Venceremos Brigades. It’s “not relevant,” she says.

While Rojas talked openly about his service to Bishop and Castro, AFL-CIO official Karen Nussbaum was close-mouthed in regard to her trip to Cuba in 1970 as a member of the Venceremos Brigades to the communist-controlled island. “No,” she curtly replied, when asked to talk about a trip that reportedly included a meeting with Castro himself. Asked why she wouldn’t talk about it, she said it was “not relevant.” Nussbaum was on a panel discussing feminism that was organized by the Rockefeller Fund.

This was the second time I had tried to talk to Nussbaum. She appeared at a previous Campaign for America’s Future conference and turned and walked away when I raised similar questions. This time, she had a press representative intervene to say that he would try to get answers to my questions. I am not holding my breath.

A published report about Nussbaum’s trip to Cuba said she “was impressed with Castro and with Cuban socialism.” In an oral history of her days as a young radical, Nussbaum talked about the large number of Weathermen in the brigades to Cuba. The Weathermen became the terrorist Weather Underground after being brainwashed and trained in guerrilla warfare in Cuba by Castro’s intelligence operatives.

Nussbaum heads the AFL-CIO’s 3 million strong Working America affiliate. Her boss, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, was a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream Conference and referred to the protests on Wall Street, saying that “It’s our time” and calling Van Jones “my friend.”

DSA literature table at Take Back the American Dream Conference

How Soros Money Financed the Rise of Van Jones

When the list of donors to the Van Jones “Green for All” organization is examined, one name stands out-the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros. The Green for All 2008 annual report is also notable for the pictures of the powerful people who associated with Jones. They include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Al Gore.

While the Open Society Institute was supporting Green for All in 2008, when Jones was running it, the Soros-funded organization was financially underwriting the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights when Jones was in charge of that group. The Open Society Institute gave the Ella Baker Center $151,800 in 2006 and $140,000 in 2007. Jones ran this group during the years 1996-2007. He then emerged as a senior fellow at the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

Other funders of the Green for All group included Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, the Rockefeller family, Men’s Warehouse, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the New World Foundation, the Schwab Charitable Fund, the Streisand Foundation, the Service Employees International Union, and the Tides Center and Foundation.

The 990 IRS forms of the Open Society Institute also disclose $560,000 in 2007 and $455,000 in 2006 to the Equal Justice Society, whose president, Eva Paterson, emerged as the major apologist for Jones when he came under attack for his communist background and anti-American statements. Paterson, who said that she hired Jones at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, wrote a column for the Huffington Post about how Glenn Beck, one of Jones’ major critics, was allegedly “fabricating” his attacks on Jones.

“Beck has said repeatedly that Van is some kind of a mysterious ‘czar,’ accountable to no one but the President,” she said. “A simple Internet search shows that this claim is false. A March 10, 2009, press release announced that Van was hired by the Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality-to work on her staff as a ‘special advisor.’ In other words, Van is within the normal White House chain of command, reporting to an office confirmed by the United States Senate, just like most White House staffers. Media outlets sometimes use the ‘czar’ shorthand. But the facts show that Van has no mysterious role or extra-constitutional powers.”

In fact, that March10 release does not say that Jones was “hired” by the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. It says that, “White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Nancy Sutley announced today that Van Jones will serve as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at CEQ.”

Sutley had a role in announcing the appointment, but not in making the hiring decision. This was confirmed when my Freedom of Information Act requests to the CEQ failed to disclose any documents about his hiring. Instead, the CEQ told me to contact the White House, which did not respond. We have subsequently learned that White House official Valerie Jarrett said that “we” had recruited Jones for his job at the CEQ. The “we” has never been identified but Jarrett is close to Barack and Michelle Obama.

Paterson did report a piece of information that, if true, is startling. She said, “Beck has implied on two occasions that Van Jones and other Obama appointees were not vetted by the FBI. False. I was interviewed in my own office by an FBI agent, dutifully vetting Van. Yet another fabrication on the part of Mr. Beck.”

If the FBI did investigate Jones’ background, we don’t know what the bureau discovered, and whether that information was taken into consideration or disregarded before he was hired by the White House. Jarrett, however, had said that the White House had been following Jones’ career for years.

Josh Nelson, another advocate for Jones, wrote an ill-timed column for the Huffington Post entitled “I Stand With Van,” appearing on September 5, just hours before Jones submitted his resignation. He urged people to go to a standwithvan.com website to show their solidarity with Jones. One of the featured prominent endorsements of Jones came from Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP.

For those interested in finding out how a real communist got a White House job, the Van Jones scandal isn’t over. One of the most fascinating preliminary answers involves the George Soros connection. Why would an organization associated with someone who made billions of dollars by exploiting the global capitalist system want to underwrite the activities of a communist? We have previously noted that Soros has escaped press scrutiny because he has funded a variety of news media organizations, in addition to major elements of the Democratic Party. Soros was a major backer of Obama during the 2008 campaign.

Equally significant, Communist Party official Jarvis Tyner has written an article, “The persecution of Van Jones and the struggle for democracy,” defending Jones against the “racist and red baiting attack” that he blames on those to whom capitalism is a “cult-like religion.”

In a case of what seems like strange bedfellows, this communist official approvingly quoted George Soros, supposedly a capitalist himself, as calling such people capitalist “fundamentalists.” But the communist praise of Soros makes perfect sense, in view of the fact that, in the words of the Washington Post, Jones “rose from near obscurity in the Oakland, Calif., grassroots organizing scene to the leader of a national movement to spur the green economy.” The Post, of course, neglects to mention-but Tyner must fully understand-that Jones made his mark in part by using Soros money and Soros connections-before his past finally caught up with him.

Despite the forced resignation of Jones, Tyner is more determined than ever to support Obama. “It’s time for action,” Tyner went on to say. “Contact your representative and let them know what you think. Support the local demarcations candle light vigils, demonstrations and house gatherings being sponsored by Move on and Organizing for America.”

MoveOn.org is another Soros-funded organization, while Organizing for America is the official successor to the Obama for President campaign and continues to organize people to support the Obama agenda.

In an article in Political Affairs, the CPUSA publication, Tyner says that Obama is not a socialist but “is heading in a positive direction” and “the left and progressive forces are linked to Obama’s destiny.”

The interesting development is that today’s “progressive” forces don’t need funding from Moscow anymore. They have George Soros. The communists know this, even if most of the public does not.

Inside a Soros-funded “Progressive” Conference

How Soros Money Financed the Rise of Van Jones

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