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.”
With Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers, Jones in 1969 co-founded the radical Weatherman, which orchestrated the violent “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, and later undertook an anti-government bombing campaign. Three of its 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.
Phil Kerpen is director of policy for Ameri cans for Prosperity. philkerpen.com