The Apollo Alliance; It’s Beginning, It’s Coalition and It’s Ties to Legislation

 

This was written in October 2009.  It is an extensive investigative report on the Apollo Alliance that EVERY American should read (.pdf file).

Foundation Watch

The Apollo Alliance

Unifying Activists on the Left

By Phil Kerpen | Oct 2009

The radical environmentalists of the Apollo Alliance have tremendous clout with the Obama administration and Congress. The shadowy group is home to self-described communists and left-wing terrorists from the 1960s yet it somehow maintains a squeaky clean public image. In February lawmakers inserted into stimulus legislation its “green jobs” program, a government make-work project based on the fantasy that America could painlessly transition to an oil-free economy.

 View the full version in PDF Format

http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pubs.html?id=704

==================================

ADD THIS:

 APOLLO ALLIANCE:

• Project of the Tides Center
• Environmental organization that grew out of the Campaign for America’s Future
• Believes that expanded government intervention and control is the solution to all social and economic problems
• A notable Apollo Alliance board member is Van Jones.
• Has much influence on the Obama administration’s environmental policies

A project of the Tides Center, the Apollo Alliance (AA) claims to have been “launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America.” AA says that in late 2007 it “spun off from its founding organizations, Campaign for America’s Future and Center for Wisconsin Strategy, formed its own Board of Directors, and expanded its staff and program to better meet the critical challenge of promoting clean energy and good jobs.” AA’s name derives from the Apollo space program that set out in 1962 to put a man on the moon, and achieved its goal less than seven years later. Similarly, says AA, “an Apollo project for energy freedom must be big, bold and fast.”

The watchdog website UndueInfluence.com describes AA as a coalition composed of “[t]rue believers with an absolute belief that government is the solution to all social and economic problems, allied with labor unions, subsidy-seeking companies and global warming / weather control advocates.”

Van Jones, a self-procaimed “communist” and “revolutionary,” served on the AA board of directors for several years along with such luminaries as: Gerald Hudson, International Executive Vice President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); environmentalist Carl Pope; Joel Rogers, a founder of the Marxist political coalition known as the New Party; John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress; Robert Borosage, co-founder of both the Institute for America’s Future and Campaign for America’s Future; actor and environmentalist Robert Redford; former Bill Clinton administration officials Kathleen McGinty and Dan Reicher; and key figures from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the United Steelworkers Union, and the Laborers’ International Union of North America.

Van Jones describes Apollo Alliance’s mission as “sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes.”

A director of New York State’s chapter of Apollo Alliance is Jeff Jones (no relation to Van Jones). AA’s website describes Jeff Jones as someone devoted to “clean[ing] up toxic pollution in inner-city and rural neighborhoods and revers[ing] global warming.” The website does not mention that in the 1970s Jones was one of the four key leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist organization, along with Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn.

The Apollo Alliance has a long list of endorsers, among which are: ACORN; Change to Win (an ACORN entity); the SEIU; the Van Jones-founded Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which claims that the American criminal-justice system is infested with racism; Green For All (another organization founded by Van Jones); the Working Families Party; Greenpeace USA; the League of Conservation Voters; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Rainforest Action Network; the Sierra Club; the Union of Concerned Scientists; Working Assets; EarthJustice; the National Wildlife Federation; the Progressive States Network; and a host of big labor unions (including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Teamsters, Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Electrical Workers, SEIU, Sheet Metal Workers, Transportation Workers, United Auto Workers, Food and Commercial Workers, Mine Workers, and Steel Workers).

Apollo Alliance exerts a powerful influence on the views and policies of the Obama administration. AA helped craft portions of the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation (officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) that President Obama signed into law in early 2009. Specifically, AA had a hand in writing the “clean energy and green-collar jobs provisions” of the bill, for which $86 billion was earmarked. This included funds “to build new transit and high speed rail lines, weatherize homes, develop next generation batteries for clean vehicles, scale up wind and solar power, build a modern electric grid, and train a new generation of green-collar workers.” AA recommended that the stimulus bill allocate $11 billion for the development of a so-called “Smart Grid,” which would use digital technology to deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers; ultimately the bill allocated precisely that amount to Smart Grid-related projects, including a $100 million provision for job training related to Smart Grid technology.

Confirming the magnitude of AA’s role in shaping the stimulus bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in mid-2009: “The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us [the U.S. Senate] develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”

Read more HERE……

=====================================

A Muckety map of the Apollo Alliance connections.

***Note “Wizard” Joel Rogers is a Director at the Apollo Alliance***

http://www.muckety.com/E749F8F2A336079A6410A1895094ED99.map

=========================================

The Emerald Cities Collaborative:

***An Offshoot of the Apollo Alliance?**

What is ECC?

The Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC) is a start-up, national coalition of diverse groups that includes unions, labor groups, community organizations, social justice advocates, development intermediaries, research and technical assistance providers, socially responsible businesses, and elected officials.

 

 

Board of Directors Includes:

 

Chairman of the Board

Gerry Hudson

SEIU, Executive Vice President

 

Angela Blackwell

PolicyLink, Founder and CEO

Angela Glover Blackwell founded PolicyLink in 1999. A renowned community building activist and advocate, Blackwell served as senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation where she oversaw the Foundation’s Domestic and Cultural divisions. Blackwell also developed Rockefeller’s Building Democracy division, which focused on race and policy, and created the Next Generation Leadership program. A lawyer by training, she gained national recognition as founder of the Oakland (CA) Urban Strategies Council, where she pioneered new approaches to neighborhood revitalization. From 1977 to 1987, Blackwell was a partner at Public Advocates, a nationally known public interest law firm. She is the co-author of Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), and contributed to Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (The New Press, 2007), an anthology edited by John Edwards.

 

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Green For All, CEO

Since taking leadership of Green For All in March 2009, Phaedra has led the organization to a stirring string of victories. Chief among these was assembling a civil rights coalition that successfully lobbied for two significant improvements to the House version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act: securing funding for job training, and guaranteeing broad access to clean energy jobs. These are the Act’s only provisions creating opportunity for low-income people and people of color. Prior to joining Green For All, Phaedra was head of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council and Working Partnerships USA.

 

Jeff Grabelsky

Cornell University, Director of Union Building Strategies

Jeff Grabelsky develops and delivers education and training programs and provides research and technical assistance in all aspects of union affairs.

The programs he has worked on have reached over 300,000 unionists nationwide. Jeff began his career in the labor movement working and organizing in the steel industry in 1973, has been a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) for thirty years, and is the former national organizing director of the Building and Construction Trades Department (AFL-CIO).

Jack Hayn

IUPAT, Liaison to the AFL-CIO

Jack Hayn formerly served as the Government Affairs field representative for the IUPAT Central Region. His new position as IUPAT liaison to the AFL-CIO includes serving as the representative on the many AFL-CIO constituency groups as well as serving as support on IUPAT efforts on numerous federation committees to include the passage of Health Care Reform and the Employee Free Choice Act.

Joel Rogers

COWS, Director

Joel Rogers, a former labor organizer, is a professor of law, political science, public affairs, and sociology at the university. He is the director of COWS, MIP, and CSI, senior policy advisor to Green for All, and cofounder and first chair of the Apollo Alliance. Joel has written widely on democratic theory and contemporary politics and is a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 living Americans mostly likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century. John Sweeney and Andy Stern jointly said of Rogers: “nobody outside the American labor movement has shaped our present thinking as profoundly.”

 

More Directors HERE.

 

=================================

Members:

http://www.emeraldcities.org/?q=members

=============================

Donors

• Annie E. Casey Foundation
• Nathan Cummings Foundation
• The Joyce Foundation
• The Kendeda Fund
• The Kresge Foundation
• Living Cities
• The Rockefeller Foundation
• Surdna Foundation

ECN is a learning network to help organizations and individuals working to achieve the following goals:

• cost-effective energy savings and clean generation
• positive spillovers to other areas of environmental concern
• generation, local capture, and equitable distribution of resulting power, wealth, health, income, employment, and other opportunities
• attraction of private as well as public capital
• efficient and accountable government and democratic popular organization in achieving the above

The Efficiency Cities Network is hosted by ECC members COWS in collaboration with Green For All and their Retrofit America’s Cities Community of Practice.

 

http://www.emeraldcities.org

========================================

NOT RACIST.

NOT VIOLENT.

JUST NO LONGER SILENT.