Radicals Wrote Failed Stimulus

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 21, 2009 4:30 PM PT

Policymaking: If the stimulus isn't working, perhaps it's because it was
largely written by a collection of leftist interest groups called the
Apollo Alliance that counts among its directors a co-founder of the
Weather Underground.

The Labor Department reported Friday that 42 states lost more jobs than
they gained in August, and that 14 plus Washington, D.C., reported
unemployment rates of 10% or more.

Michigan's rate rose to 15.2%, highest in the nation. Nevada,
represented by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is second with 13.2%.
California, home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is tied for fourth with
Oregon at 12.2%.

Clearly, the stimulus bill that no congressman read is not working. As
it turns out, no congressman may have written it either. It's largely
the creation of a coalition of leftist organizations called the Apollo
Alliance, whose primary interests are saving the Earth, environmental
justice and redistributing wealth. They are not friends of job-creating
capitalism.

On Apollo's Web site, Sen. Reid, whose state also leads in foreclosures,
is quoted praising the group of which former green czar Van Jones was a
board member.

"We've talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades," Reid is
quoted as saying. "The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in
helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on
these goals and in motivating the public to support them."

Jones, the former Oakland, Calif., community organizer and self-avowed
communist, was on the board of the Apollo Alliance when he accepted the
position in the Obama administration as green jobs czar.

As Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity told Glenn Beck, Jones has
"described the Apollo Alliance mission as sort of a grand unified field
theory for progressive left causes" that would tie elements of organized
labor with community organizers and environmental groups into an outfit
that would restructure American society.

Wade Rathke, founder of Acorn, was also on the Apollo board, as is
Gerald Hudson, vice president of the Service Employees International
Union, which provides the shock troops in the movement to pass
government-run health care.

John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and now
president of the leftist Center for American Progress, also sits on the
Apollo board. Each day his group sends out talking points to the left
side of the blogosphere. Mark Lloyd, diversity czar at the Federal
Communications Commission, was a senior fellow at CAP.

According to Kerpen, the Apollo Alliance put together a draft stimulus
bill in 2008 that included almost everything in the final $787 billion
package. Little did the voters know that the congressmen and senators
they would elect would pass a bill written by activist outsiders.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of all this is that an even more radical
Jones (no relation) has a relationship with the Apollo Alliance. Jeff
Jones was a domestic terrorist in the '60s and a fugitive from justice
throughout the '70s who, with Bill Ayers, helped found the Weather
Underground in 1969.

Ayers, Jones and the Weathermen participated in the violent Days of Rage
riots in Chicago and a nationwide anti-government bombing campaign. Like
Ayers, Jeff Jones has no regrets, saying: "To this day, we still, lots
of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to do."

Today, Jones finds himself director of the Apollo Alliance's New York
affiliate and a consultant to the national group. One of his clients is
the Workforce Development Institute, a union-controlled organization.

As a consultant to WDI, Jones helps write the grant proposals for
federal stimulus dollars -- funds authorized in the bill that Apollo
helped write -- all to ensure that taxpayer dollars end up in the hands
of groups that share Apollo's political agenda.

Welcome to government of the activist, by the activist and for the activist.

http://tinyurl.com/l7xpoz

Ed

-- 
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools." --Herbert Spencer

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