The Great Left-Wing Conspiracy

Glenn Beck accused President Barack Obama of being a Marxist as well as a racist (against White people and White culture). Beck also accuses the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress of allowing the Apollo Alliance to write the federal Recovery Act.

In a series of his programs, Beck and Phil Kerpen (Program Director, Americans for Prosperity) go about dissecting the Great Left-Wing Conspiracy for us dupes.

Barack Obama a Marxist? Many bloggers on the far right claim this to be. One even included a quote from Pravda On-line to support the accusation. It seems that, if you lose an election, all you need to do is throw smears, hoping something sticks. Mr. Beck said:

All right. You know, what we're uncovering here on this program is complex, and it is—it takes a lot of our day just to figure out how to explain it to you. And it's complex by design—you know, it's the vast left-wing conspiracy.

Glenn Beck, in the program linked above, quoted a joke made by Venezuela President, or dictator, Hugo Chavez, noting Obama for “nationalizing” General Motors.

I supposed that anyone who followed the stories about GM and its collapse would know that the federal government never set out to nationalize that beleaguered auto company. I also would have thought that any rational observer would note that GM remains in private hands, although the federal government and US taxpayers are now the majority shareholders. But, what do I know?

“Should we be asking more questions?” Beck asked.

Yes! I’d like to know—silly me—why Beck doesn’t debate issues or elements of the bills he doesn’t like instead of trying to tar people with names.

Further, Beck also linked the “head of the Federal Reserve in New York” to corruption because he was a former head of the AFL/CIO.

Those who are appointed to Chair the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Banks are investigated by the FBI. Denis M. Hughes, who was appointed by the New York Fed board of directors to lead them this August, is president of the New York AFL/CIO. Does that latter position mean that Mr. Hughes is corrupt?

Neither Beck nor Kerpen can explain the fact that many mainstream non-profit, corporate, and labor leaders are those who lead the Apollo Alliance.

Let’s Look at what has been said of Some of the Accused…

Van Jones

The Apollo Alliance combines environmental policy—the green movement—with labor and social justice. Why is that troubling? Maybe it's the guy behind the curtain making it all happen. He's a former black nationalist and self-professed communist…[a] guy who went to jail—this is during the Rodney King thing—he went to jail and he was just a black nationalist. He came out a communist and he also then started looking into the green movement and he is the guy who said, hey, if we tie labor and ACORN and Greenpeace together, we've got a super-powerful group: Apollo.

Glenn Beck

There are a few things Mr. Beck left out in his description of Van Jones. These include:

• In 1992, Jones was, as the local court determined, illegally arrested along with others in a peaceful demonstration protesting the police treatment of Rodney King
  • The District Attorney dismissed the charges
  • The City of San Fransisco paid a small amount in restitution to those who were illegally arrested
• Jones did describe himself as a communist, although he was not a member of any Communist party organization
• Jones is, today, an avowed capitalist whose goal is to foster an environmental capitalism

Since the late 1990s, Jones has promoted “environmentally-friendly” capitalism. President Obama appointed him to serve as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. His mission is to help ensure that funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are spent as marked up in the bill.

John Podesta

John Podesta is also on the Apollo board. He, of course, is also the president of the Center for American Progress, which sends out the daily marching orders, the talking points for the left side of the blogs and the online activists and those organizers out on the street, the ACORN and SEIU folks, they get their daily talking points from that Center for American Progress e-mail.

Phil Kerpen, Americans for Prosperity

So, should we not see with what radical activities this Mystery Man, John Podesta, has been involved?

• Graduated Georgetown University Law Center
• Trial attorney, US Department of Justice Honors Program, Land and Natural Resources Division
• Counselor to Sen. Thomas Dashle
• Chief Counsel, Senate Agriculture Committee
• Chief Minority Counsel, Senate Judiciary Subcommittees on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks
• Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Deputy Chief of Staff
• President, Center for American Progress
• Visiting Professor of Law, The Georgetown University Law Center

Certainly reads like the résumé of an environmental radical with communist leanings, doesn’t it?

Jeff Jones

Jones was a founder of the Weather Underground, a splinter from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He subsequently led a splinter group within the splinter group; these people decided to continue what they saw as the armed struggle against The Establishment, but they wouldn’t set bombs to kill others any more.

Wow; that was nice of them…

Jones was arrested with other Weathermen for their participation in the Days of Rage protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Following the explosion of the bomb other Weathermen members were preparing in a Greenwich Village town house in 1970, Jones and those arrested in Chicago failed to show for their scheduled trial for the Chicago riots. He went to the West Coast and at least contributed to communiques issued after a bomb was exploded at The Presidio by San Fransisco, California. His underground days ended in 1981 when he and his wife were arrested by the FBI; charges against his wife were dropped and Jones was sentenced to probation and community service. In 2004, Jones said this about that period of his life in an interview:

Well we went underground in 1970 at the height of the anti-war movement, at the height of trying to build support for the black liberation struggle, and we felt that there needed to be some level of resistance from the white movement in this country in support of people who were fighting back against the government policy in Vietnam, the racist policy of the government, and to this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do. We might have done it differently, and we certainly made some mistakes, but that’s what we were trying to do. Of course, I am sorry I put Thai [his son] in jeopardy as a result of that…

Almost no terrorist of that troubled time believes he or she was wrong in the Weather Underground’s approach to political and social change. In fact, few radicals or former radicals admit to error. People make excuses for the murder of doctors who perform legal abortions—Timothy McVeigh was apparently proud of the murders he committed.

After his release from probation, Jones served as communications director for Environmental Advocates of New York before launching his own firm, Jeff Jones Strategies. Jones also works with the Movement for a Democratic Society.

Apollo Alliance

“The Apollo Alliance is a project organized by the Institute for America's Future and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Its goals include establishing energy independence for the United States of America, as well as developing cleaner and more efficient energy alternatives. Its allies are drawn from businesses, environmental organizations, and over 30 labor unions.”

ACORN

“ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a community-based organization that advocates for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues. ACORN has over 400,000 members and more than 850 neighborhood chapters in over 100 cities across the United States, as well as in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. ACORN was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado. Maude Hurd has been National President of ACORN since 1990.”

SEIU

“Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a labor union representing about 1.8 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The main divisions are health care (around 50% of the union's membership), including hospital, home care and nursing home workers, public services (government employees), and property services (including janitors and security officers). SEIU has over 300 local branches. It is affiliated with the Change to Win Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. It is based in Washington, D.C., and has seven internal divisions: Communications, Education, Human Rights, International Affairs, Organization, Political, and Research.”

Greenpeace

“Greenpeace is a non-governmental organization for the protection and conservation of the environment. Greenpeace uses direct action, lobbying and research to achieve its goals and win the match. Greenpeace has a worldwide presence with national and regional offices in 46 countries, which are affiliated to the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International. The global organization receives its income through the individual contributions of an estimated 3 million financial supporters.

Americans for Prosperity

This conservative think tank was founded by David and Charles Koch in 2003 and is located on M Street in Washington, D.C. The stated missions of the AFP are:

…to educat[e] citizens about economic policy and mobilizing those citizens as advocates in the public policy process. AFP is an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels. The grassroots members of AFP advocate for public policies that champion the principles of entrepreneurship and fiscal and regulatory restraint.

AFP Foundation is committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its Constitutional limits. AFP Foundation's educational programs and analyses help policymakers, the media and individual citizens understand why policies that promote the American enterprise system are the best method to ensuring prosperity for all Americans.

Basically, if the Democrats and the Obama administration are for something, the AFP is against it.

AFP has established these programs:

• Freedom From Foreign Oil, which supports off-shore drilling & drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and opposes federal cap-and-trade legislation
• The “No Climate Tax Pledge”—opposition to legislation mitigating the effects of global climate change, or global warming
• Patients United Now—opposition to the America’s Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009