VAN
Jones resigned as White House green-jobs
czar after the public got a look at his history of radical activism,
including his time building the so-called Apollo
Alliance -- a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around
the green-jobs concept.
But another, even more radical Jones (not
related) is leading Apollo's New York state activities.
Jeff
Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late '60s and a fugitive from justice
throughout the '70s -- yet now he's a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded
group.
Jones was a fugitive from justice for
11 years. His
own account at his Web site says: "As a leader of the Weather Underground,
Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they
finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx
apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."
Jones in 1969 - with Mark
Rudd and Bill Ayers - co-founded the radical Weatherman --- which orchestrated
the violent "Days
of Rage" riots in Chicago --- and later undertook an anti-government
bombing campaign.
Three Weatherman members died when a
bomb they were constructing to attack Fort Dix accidentally detonated in
Greenwich Village. And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities
-- saying as recently as 2004: "To this day, we still, lots of us, including
me, still think it was the right thing to try to do."
Now, Jones is back to revolutionary
organizing -- but with taxpayers footing the bill. He's the director of
the Apollo Alliance's New York affiliate and a consultant to the national
group.
Apollo unifies the three most powerful
elements of the political left --
environmental groups
labor unions
and street organizers like ACORN
-- and points them toward a common goal
that enriches all of them under the banner of "green jobs." (Van Jones
was an Apollo board member until he joined the White House staff.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently
credited Apollo with helping write the stimulus bill and getting it passed.
Yet the stimulus' "green jobs" provisions funnel federal tax dollars to
unions, green groups and community organizers -- that is, the organizations
that make up Apollo.
Green jobs serve a political purpose,
but not an economic one. The evidence from Spain and elsewhere is ample
-- each green job created destroys more than two other jobs elsewhere in
the economy.
Jeff Jones counts among his consulting
clients (along with Apollo) a half-dozen state and local environmental
groups and the Workforce
Development Institute (WDI), a union-controlled organization ("developed
in partnership with the NYS AFL-CIO," it says) that works with state and
local government and universities.
WDI's mission is to support union influence
on state and local governments. It gets state tax dollars to do it -- to
the tune of $4.8 million in this year's Education, Labor and Family Assistance
budget bill.
WDI is so tightly integrated with Apollo
that it features a full page of Apollo information on its Web site (wdiny.org),
which appears to be the primary Web presence of Apollo's New York branch.
WDI encourages its members and program participants to attend Apollo Alliance
events.
As a consultant to WDI, Jones is helping
write the grant proposals for federal stimulus funds -- funds authorized
in the bill Apollo helped write, presumably ensuring that taxpayer dollars
end up in the hands of groups that share Apollo's political agenda.
Anyone should be entitled to spend his
or her own money on political organizing, but Apollo and WDI are spending
taxpayer dollars to organize a coalition of extreme environmentalists,
labor unions and social-justice street organizers.
That's bad enough in itself, but to
have the effort spearheaded by an unrepentant domestic terrorist is a true
outrage. |
