NY's Tax-Funded Ex-Terrorist
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.
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2. Mark Rudd
UNDERGROUND: MY LIFE WITH SDS AND THE WEATHERMEN
Older New Yorkers will remember Mark Rudd as the enfant terrible of the 1968 Columbia University strike, when radical members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupied administration buildings and President Grayson Kirk's office. Their stated rationale: To protest the university's plans to build a new gym in Harlem, thereby expropriating land and homes belonging to poor African-Americans and to end any research connected to the war effort. But their real goal, Rudd writes, was "not just ending the war [in Vietnam] but ending the capitalist system that had caused the war."
From the start, then, Rudd defined himself as a revolutionary, a leader of the SDS "Action/Faction," that was devoted to smashing the state, to overturning the government and even to defeating liberal enemies like "peace candidates" Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Columbia's then-Vice President David Truman called Rudd "a combination of a revolutionary and an adolescent having a temper tantrum." Reading Rudd's new book "Underground" it's hard to conclude otherwise.
After the Columbia strike, when seeking to up the ante, Rudd and his comrades transformed SDS into the group first known as The Weathermen, and later, as The Weather Underground. Unlike his comrade Bill Ayers, who is both unrepentant and who distorts and lies about the Weathermen's goals and activities, Rudd is reflective and truthful. He does not depict himself, as does Ayers, as someone who was part of the broad peace movement.
Back then, Rudd, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn favored "the necessity for violence in order to end the war and also to make revolution." They were fighting "a revolutionary war from within the United States," Rudd explains. When successful, the Weathermen would then build a new revolutionary army staffed by young defectors from the US armed forces.
To achieve these ends they adopted "armed struggle," as the only way to achieve their revolutionary goals. Instead of a loose organization of campus chapters, they now built a "highly centralized, clandestine revolutionary party," modeled, Rudd admits, on the strategy and organization of the Communists. A showdown came at the June 1969 SDS national convention in Chicago. Rudd left the convention as the elected leader of the SDS, with Ayers and Dohrn in subordinate positions.
Their goal was to build "the American arm of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam." Rudd led events like the Chicago "Days of Rage," in which hard-line Weather cadre fought the police. Rudd would recruit others saying, "The pigs have to be wiped out. We're going to fight violence with violence and wipe out Chicago." The guy had lofty ambitions. They injured 26 policemen and succeeded in paralyzing one Chicago official, which they then celebrated in song.
At some level, Rudd knew that all he was doing was a terrible mistake, but, he writes, "I felt like a member of the crew on a speeding train, dimly aware of disaster ahead but unable to put on the bakes." Rudd even acknowledges he was part of a "classic cult, true believers surrounded by a hostile world that we rejected .ñ.ñ. We had a holy faith, revolution, which could not be shaken."
Their attempts at guerrilla warfare ended with the 1970 New York City town house bombing, which Rudd and Ayers and Dohrn all approved. Rudd is honest about its intent, emphasizing how the bomb they built was meant to kill hundreds of GIs and their dates at a Fort Dix dance. It was, he now knows, a "fantasy of revolutionary urban-guerrilla warfare," done on their own, without police agents provoking them. He and his associates, he ruefully reflects, killed a broad and powerful movement opposed to the Vietnam War, all in the name of a fanciful goal.
Being truthful about his own madness and the crazy path he and his comrades took, Rudd does not go along with what he calls the convenient cleansing of their history carried out by Ayers, who after the town house bomb exploded, still favored "the overall strategy of clandestine armed struggle."
Rudd went into exile, slowly became disillusioned, turned himself in and surfaced publicly in 1977. He ends the book with the 2008 SDS reunion at Columbia University. Seeing his old comrades he finds himself still a man of the Left. Even while facing up to the delusions of his revolutionary youth, he still believes the United States is evil, and that he and his comrades spent years working "to continue the idealism inherent in our rebellion." The facts he presents speak otherwise. His "idealism" led to catastrophe. He and his "comrades" ruined much of their lives, including their marriages.
Despite Rudd's failure to re-evaluate his left-wing politics, he shatters the romantic myth of the Weather Underground, exposing them as a dangerous group committed to terrorism.
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