Jay, your post reminded me of Van Jones and Katrina — addressed in a fabulous Frontpage article about Obama, Soros and the radical Left yesterday by David Horowitz (further developing the themes in David’s excellent but overlooked book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, which I noted in a post earlier this week):

According to his own account, Van Jones became a “communist” during a prison term he served after being arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. For the next ten years Jones was an activist in the Maoist organization STORM – “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” When STORM disintegrated Jones joined the Apollo Alliance and the Center for American Progress Democrats. As he explained to the East Bay Express in a 2005 article, he still considered himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward…. I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
Pursuing the deep satisfaction of radical ends is the clear sub-text of Jones’ 2007 book, The Green Collar Economy which comes with a Forward by Robert Kennedy Jr. and enthusiastic blurbs from Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore. According to Jones, the Katrina tragedies were caused by global warming, white supremacy, free market economics and the “war for oil” in Iraq. This “perfect storm” of social evils deprived poor blacks of the protection of adequate levees and private vehicles which would have allowed them to escape. The fact that a fleet of public buses was available but the black mayor and the black power structure in New Orleans failed to deploy them go unmentioned in Jones’ indictment of white racism. Instead, “The Katrina story illustrates clearly the two crises we face in the United States: radical socioeconomic inequality and rampant environmental destruction.” To deal with these crises “we will need both political and economic transformation – immediately.”