September 9, 2009
Terrorist friend of Bill Ayers lands cushy taxpayer funded job
What will historians be saying 100 years from now about a society that feted and celebrated terrorists who were proud of their work? And who employed them at taxpayer's expense?
From a New York Post article by Phillip Kerpen, we learn that Jeff Jones, former Weather Underground fugitive, who along with Bill Ayers created the terrorist group, is being paid taxpayer dollars as Director of the New York affiliate of Van Jones's umbrella leftist group, the Apollo Alliance.
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.
What a racket. The "Axis of Evil" of left wing advocacy. Check that - not advocacy. What groups like Apollo, WDI, and ACORN are set up to do is enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers. It is political bribe money pure and simple.
It's vending machine politics; put some money in the ACORN-Apollo-WDI slot and out comes millions of votes. And heading up an important element in this gangster universe of left wing thuggery is a man perfectly suited by dint of his experience as a terrorist to hold up local, state, and federal authorities.
Jeff Jones is still proud of his terrorism, saying in 2004 "To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do."
That kind of attitude is perfect for his job as chief milker of the taxpayer teat.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky