Meet NY’s Tax-Funded Ex-Terrorist
Meet NY’s Tax-Funded Ex-Terrorist Who Co-Wrote The Stimulus Bill
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.
Guess who wrote the stimulus bill?? Van Jones and Jeff Jones.
You remember Jeff from his days with Ayer’s Weather Underground, right?
In 1966 he traveled to Cambodia to meet with high-level leaders of the NLF. In 1967 and 1968 he served as SDS Regional Organizer for New York City. In 1969, he was elected, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. 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.
Jeff Jones went to his first rally against the Vietnam War in 1965. Within a year, he had quit Antioch College to become a fulltime organizer for Students for a Democratic Society.
What does that tell you.
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.
Here Jeff Jones responds:
Since mid-summer, Glenn Beck, a commentator for Fox News, and others have waged a smear campaign against the Apollo Alliance, and Van Jones, who resigned his White House post as a special advisor to the President on green jobs and clean energy. Because of my work with the New York State Apollo Alliance and my history of political activism, starting with the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, and my opposition to segregation and racism, I have also been attacked. It is now clear that those leading this campaign include people supported by big oil interests who deny the dangers of climate change and are opposed to the clean energy movement that is growing in the country. Because of the attacks on me, I am posting the following statement on my website.
Losing Van Jones from the White House was a loss for the country. He is a tested and admired leader of constituencies that have been locked out of both the economy and the democratic process. His inclusion gave hope to millions of people – people of color, young people, the disenfranchised, environmentalists and working people. His appointment by President Obama was significant. His voice was powerful and distinct. We are diminished as a nation because he is no longer part of the Administration.
Van Jones is working to create new jobs, forging pathways out of poverty through the emerging clean energy economy. Like so many others, he sees this as a critical part of a just and shared economic revitalization. It is no surprise that he became such a target.
Glenn Beck and others charge that environmentalists and the labor movement – and especially the two in alliance – are responsible for the loss of American jobs. This ranks high in the annals of delusion. We are at a moment of tremendous opportunity and at a crossroads: the Bush Cheney administration pursued a single-minded strategy of support for the oil industry, and war for oil. They prevaricated, delayed, and misrepresented the urgency of both global and U.S. action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now vital coalitions for a new strategy are forming, but the defenders of the petroleum-based status quo are rallying to discredit and smear those laboring to save the planet and create new, productive forms of work. Van Jones was their target; apparently so am I. Make no mistake, leading this smear campaign are climate-change deniers and oil-company shills.
The problems that we face require a real and vibrant national debate about the causes of economic decline and the best solutions for an equitable recovery. Smear campaigns are no substitute for dialogue. Open-minded conversation is at the heart of truly participatory democracy; it generates our best ideas.
One of those ideas motivates the Apollo Alliance, which believes we can fight climate change and create good, green jobs that put people back to work. As someone who has spent most of the past two decades working in the environmental movement, but whose family is rooted in labor, I am committed to the idea of building a partnership of workers, environmentalists, business, government, social and environmental justice advocates.
I grew up in a Quaker, pacifist family. I was opposed to war, and registered with my draft board as a conscientious objector. But the promise of America for me was marred by segregation, and by a criminal war waged by my government against the people of Vietnam. So, as a teenager and young adult, I dedicated myself to supporting civil rights and opposing racism, and to ending the illegal and genocidal Vietnam War. I was personally enriched by participating in those movements and by the people I met, worked with, and loved in those years. This is what I mean when I say that I do not regret my militant opposition to racism and the Vietnam War. That said, like most people my age, I made my share of mistakes.
Today, I am using the organizing skills and insights I learned from those movements in my work as a consultant for environmental and labor groups. One is the New York State Apollo Alliance, an affiliate of National Apollo. Apollo is working toward a goal that is simple and straight-forward: create good jobs for working people in the new clean-energy economy. That is a goal I support, and work I continue to do.
Read the article attacking Jeff Jones
Who is Phil Kerpen?
Read the East Bay Express article, “Did Big Oil Swiftboat Van Jones?”
See also:
September 18th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Is Obama Following the Leninist Line?
Top Comment From Soda Head Blog
By: Nicole~M♥
Is former Weather Underground terrorist Jeff Jones claiming that Barack Obama’s “centrist” appointments are a “smokescreen” and that he is pursuing a strategy of governing that would “make Lenin proud?” That shocking information is being reported by many different conservative blogs and Internet sites as proof that the President-elect is pursuing a political strategy designed to confuse people about his revolutionary agenda.
Obama may be a Marxist attempting to fool people, but the “Jeff Jones” post on the Rag Blog website doesn’t necessarily prove it. It turns out that the “Jeff Jones” claiming Obama to be a disciple of Lenin is NOT the Jeff Jones from the communist Weather Underground. However, to further complicate matters, the Mark Rudd who is defending Obama on the same blog IS the former Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd.
On the Rag Blog website, Mark Rudd makes some revealing remarks of his own, defending the “conservative appointments” of the President-elect and saying that they are part of a deliberate strategy to “feint to the right” and “move left.” He explains, “Any other strategy invites sure defeat.” Rather than immediately propose cutting the military budget, for example, Rudd suggests that Obama will pursue security “through diplomacy and application of nascent international law” and lay the groundwork for eventual defense cuts.
Rudd also declares that left-wingers questioning Obama’s cabinet picks should “Look to the second level appointments. There’s a whole govt. in waiting that Podesta has at the Center for American Progress. They’re mostly progressives, I’m told (except in military and foreign policy). Cheney was extremely effective at controlling policy by putting his people in at second-level positions.” Podesta is John Podesta, a co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Team, who runs the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.
Rudd’s comments are themselves revealing and newsworthy. But the remarks of “Jeff Jones” about Lenin really provoked interest and controversy. Obama’s “centrist appointments are a smokescreen; they co-opt the moderate center, but he’s still the commander in chief,” wrote Jeff Jones. “Even Lenin would be impressed!”
However, the Jeff Jones of the Weather Underground told me that he was not the Jeff Jones on the Rag Blog praising Obama for following the Leninist line. He thought that individual was a “Jeff Jones” from Austin, Texas. Weather Underground member Jeff Jones, by contrast, now works in New York as a political consultant and environmentalist. Among other things, he promotes windmills as a solution to America’s energy crisis. Still, he is an Obama supporter, like Rudd and other members of the Weather Underground.
Richard Jehn of The Rag Blog in Bellingham, Washington, confirmed this account, saying that “The article posted on the Rag Blog on 28 November 2008 is not by Jeff Jones, the former Weather Underground member, but rather was written by another Jeff Jones who was an activist in Austin, Texas in the late 1960s. The article by Mark Rudd posted on 27 November 2008 on the Rag Blog is indeed by Mark Rudd the former Weatherman.”
Mark Rudd confirmed that he was this Mark Rudd. “Yes, I wrote that,” he said. But the reply comment was not by the Jeff Jones, formerly of the Weather Underground. Rudd added, “The right wing is freaking out because he made a little joke ‘Lenin Would be Proud.’”
A little joke?
The controversy has erupted because of interest in what former terrorists are saying about the new U.S. President, and whether they know something about him or his political strategy that the public doesn’t. Some conservatives in the media, including Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol and Mona Charen, have stated that they are impressed by some of Obama’s high-level appointments and that he is coming across as mainstream and moderate.
But what are the former terrorists who are backing Obama saying?
This interest has been growing because of the continuing controversy over Obama’s relationship with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and other controversial far-left figures, including his childhood mentor, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Many people suspect that the full truth has not been told and, needless to say, the major media show no interest in continuing to pursue the question of Obama’s past associates and influences.
Blogger Trevor Loudon, a respected anti-communist researcher and analyst in New Zealand, discovered the “Jeff Jones” and Mark Rudd articles on the Rag Blog website and his article about their comments was picked up far and wide as evidence that Obama was adopting a sophisticated Leninist strategy of making moderate appointments to his cabinet while seeking to implement revolutionary “change.”
Loudon was the first writer to note that the mysterious “Frank” in Barack Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father, was the communist Frank Marshall Davis. AIM confirmed the identification with another source and did a series of articles about Davis’s involvement in communist and subversive activities. AIM eventually wrote about the 600-page file that the FBI had maintained on Davis, covering 19 years of his life.
Loudon acknowledges the error about “Jeff Jones” but says that the Mark Rudd article may be even more important to the point that he was making. He says that Rudd is “at most one degree separate from Obama and as such may well know more of Obama’s true agenda than do most voters.”
Beyond this controversy, he also points out that former Weather Underground members Rudd, Jones, Ayers and Dohrn are all now working through an organization called Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), which is operating as “a parent body for Progressives for Obama.”
The Jeff Jones of the Weather Underground, who says he voted for Obama, openly advertises his past on his own website, as well as his current activities in the firm “Jeff Jones Strategies.” Under the “Protest” section he even includes an FBI mug shot and his fingerprints. It declares, “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 told me that he was arrested in October of 1981 but was only in jail for a couple of weeks. He said he was “not really guilty of all that much” and got community service and probation after pleading guilty to an explosives possession charge.
Larry Grathwohl, the former FBI informant in the Weather Underground, recalls that Jones was a member of the Central Committee of the Weather Underground and that other members were Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd. He thinks Jones got off easy because the FBI had used extra-legal tactics to track him down and that most of the case against him was thrown out.
However, Grathwohl says that Jones’ fingerprints were found in a San Francisco apartment around the time of the Park Police station bombing in 1970 that killed police officer Brian V. McDonnell. “It was never clearly stated that Jeff was an active participant in the Park Police station bombing, but he was in the area at the time it took place,” Grathwohl says. The bomb included industrial metal staples that ripped through McDonnell and other injured officers.
He also notes that Jones was one of four authors of the Weather Underground statement, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which was dedicated to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan and others. The other authors were listed as Billy Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Celia Sojourn.
“I knew Larry,” Jones acknowledged. “I knew him before we went underground.”
Jones, who says that he has since “rebuilt my life,” includes a photo on his website of him and New York First Lady Michelle Paterson at the Healthy Schools Gala in the New York Times building in New York City on May 12, 2008. In addition to the Healthy Schools Network, his clients include the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Despite the confusion over the “Jeff Jones” on the Rag Blog, and the fact that he also supports Obama, Jeff Jones of the Weather Underground said that he didn’t want to comment on the article about Obama’s moderate appointments being a smokescreen.
He did offer the opinion, when asked, that Obama is “not a Marxist.”
For his part, during the campaign, Obama said that he shared toys in Kindergarten and jokingly wondered if that made him a communist.