Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | August 29, 2019,Updated: August 29, 2019
Former U.S. President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama have teamed up with a lifelong Marxist propagandist to distribute a major new documentary for Netflix.
“American Factory” tells the story of a “worker revolt” against Chinese company Fuyao Glass America’s factory in the Dayton, Ohio, suburb of Moraine.
The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and has earned very good reviews, with review website Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 96 percent “fresh” certification.
“The tale is rife with paradoxes: the communists are the capitalists; and the workers from the land of Reagan and Trump channel socialist solidarity as they move to form a union against the wishes of the folks from the People’s Republic.”
The first film distributed by the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground Productions, “American Factory” has already won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
All the rave reviews fail to mention that the Obamas’ partners, the duo who actually produced and directed the film—Ohioans Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert—are longtime leftist “propagandists.”
Reichert, in particular, is a lifelong Marxist who, according to the “Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film,” “focuses on various social issues, like gender and working-class issues, from a socialist perspective.”
The film itself is pro-union and anti-free market. The protagonist is a Chinese billionaire who allegedly treated his American and imported Chinese employees like serfs. He is portrayed as an example of rapacious and heartless “capitalism,” rather than a representative of Chinese communism, which is much closer to the truth.
The Dayton/Miami Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which claims Reichert as a member, warns its comrades on Facebook that the film contains “revelations of extreme alienation and is an indictment of neoliberalism and the late stage capitalism that defines the American Empire.”
Reichert served on the DSA’s Feminist Commission in 1985. Before that, she was a leader of a DSA predecessor group the New American Movement (NAM), an explicitly Marxist group formed out of Students for a Democratic Society and some dissident members of the Communist Party USA. NAM was a Maoist-leaning organization, with a strong emphasis on changing culture through propaganda.
NAM also advocated for the ideas of late Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci—a believer in revolution through cultural change. According to Gramsci, the people would only be ready for socialism when their consciousness had been sufficiently changed through socialist infiltration of religion, media, and culture.
Reichert and her partner and NAM comrade Jim Klein produced several documentaries in the 1970s and ’80s that would have made Mao and Gramsci proud.
In 1971, Reichert co-founded New Days Films, a film distribution company created to “help the women’s movement grow,” according to Reichert. New Day Films markets its members’ films directly to “educators, community groups, government agencies, public libraries, and businesses.”
Reichert received her first Academy Award nomination in 1978 with Klein and another NAM comrade Miles Mogulescu for “Union Maids,” a film about three far-left women union organizers in Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s.
A “lifelong progressive,” Mogulescu went on to become an entertainment attorney and a senior vice president at MGM. He continued to do his bit for the “culture wars” as a contributor to the Huffington Post.
Reichert also was nominated, again with Klein, in 1984 for the best documentary Oscar for “Seeing Red,” which profiled several former Communist Party members, including NAM comrade and onetime leader of the California Communist Party Dorothy Healey.
In 2010, Reichert and Bognar were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary for the film “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant.”
Obama Support
It’s no surprise that the Obamas would partner with a DSA comrade on such an obviously socialist propaganda project. Barack Obama, in particular, has worked closely with DSA-aligned socialists since his days at Occidental College in the late 1970s. In fact, it would be difficult to find a period in his adult life when he wasn’t tripping over DSA Marxists at every turn.
Writing in the radical Chicago magazine In These Times in March 2008, editor and DSA supporter Joel Bleifuss asserted: “In particular, Obama can be linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Democratic Party-oriented organization that is a member of the Socialist International.”
The young Obama attended DSA’s annual Socialist Scholars Conference while attending Columbia University in New York.
In Chicago, Obama mixed closely with well-known DSA comrades Timuel Black, Saul Mendelson, and Lou Pardo. His Hyde Park neighbor was DSA Religious Commission member Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf. His family physician, Quentin Young, who was first a communist, then a NAM comrade, then a DSAer, claimed credit for igniting Obama’s crusade for socialized health care.
In 1995, the Chicago DSA endorsed Obama in the Illinois state Senate primary. In January 1996, Obama addressed a DSA-organized forum at Chicago University alongside DSA members William Julius Wilson and Joseph Schwartz.
Most DSA members actively supported Obama in the November 2008 presidential election.
According to the summer 2008 issue of the DSA publication Democratic Left:
“DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda. …
“An Obama presidency will not on its own force legislation facilitating single-payer health care (at least at the federal level) or truly progressive taxation and major cuts in wasteful and unneeded defense spending. But if DSA and other democratic forces can work in the fall elections to increase the ranks of the Congressional Progressive and Black and Latino caucuses, progressive legislation (backed by strong social movement mobilization) might well pass the next Congress.”
DSA comrade Jose LaLuz served as president of Latinos for Obama. DSA and NAM leader Harry Boyte was co-chair of the Civic Engagement Group of Obama’s first presidential campaign. DSAer Cornel West Served on Obama’s National Black Advisory Council. Another comrade Eliseo Medina served on Obama’s Latino Advisory Council and went on to advise Obama informally on immigration issues through both terms of his presidency.
Obama went on to appoint one-time DSA comrade Ron Bloom as his “Car Czar.” Former congressman and DSAer David Bonior became a member of the Obama Economic Transition Team and was delegated by the president to negotiate the unification of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and Change to Win labor federations. Rosa Brooks, daughter of senior DSA comrade Barbara Ehrenreich, was appointed senior adviser to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy.
During his two terms of office, Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to at least three DSA comrades: Farmworkers Union leader Dolores Huerta, AFL-CIO boss John Sweeney, and feminist Gloria Steinem.
Given his clear affinity for the United States’ largest Marxist organization, it’s no surprise that Obama would now partner with another DSA comrade to churn out socialist propaganda for the apparently left-leaning Netflix.
As the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart used to say, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
No doubt “American Factory” will get lots of play and publicity between now and the 2020 election.
Photo credit: Directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert participate in the Q&A following Netflix’s “American Factory” Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival at SVA Theater on April 26,2019 in New York City. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Netflix
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.
Council News:
Debra Heine over at Nice Deb penned a superb article at PJ Media reporting on how the Obama Administration has sided with the Palestinians, working to try to stop US citizens from collecting judgments they won in court as victims of PLO terrorist attacks. It’s a must read.
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President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran paves the way for this totalitarian regime to attain nuclear weapons, ones which Iran’s dictators could then aim squarely at the United States, Israel, and our allies. But the complicit media repeatedly join the administration in championing the deal, which both falsely claim is the only viable alternative to war.
In order to stifle opposition to this narrative, the mainstream media have mostly offered the public misleading information and punditry. After an estimated 12,000 people gathered in New York City’s Times Square on July 22 to fight the Iran deal, the media did what they do best in the face of inconvenient truths—marginalize the opposition, or ignore the facts.
“Speakers, including Republican politicians, called on Congress to throw it out, whipping up the crowd that included supporters of right-wing Jewish and evangelical Christian groups,” reported AFP about the Times Square rally. Similarly, the widely distributed Associated Press article reported that “The event…consisted mainly of pro-Israel supporters, though organizers said it represents Americans of all faiths and political convictions.”
In other words, move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of right-wing crazies who want war with Iran. There’s no popular protest against the Iran deal, we are told, and opposition to the deal is not actually bipartisan. Yet notable Democrats who spoke at the rally included liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
David Brog, Executive Director, Christians United for Israel
Monica Crowley, Political Commentator
U.S. Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Steven Emerson, Founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Frank Gaffney, Founder of the Center for Security Policy
Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post
Kasim Hafeez, Christians United for Israel’s Outreach Coordinator
Pete Hoekstra, Former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee
Richard Kemp, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan
Tony LoBianco, Actor and Activist
Herbert I. London, President London Center for Policy Research
Clare M. Lopez, Center for Security Policy
U.S. Navy Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
Kevin McCullough, Radio Host from WMCA and 970 The Answer
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney from 1975 to 2009
George Pataki, former Governor of New York
General Paul Vallely, Chairman of Stand Up America
Col. USA (Ret.) Allen West, former Congressman
Genevieve Wood, The Heritage Foundation
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report
The New York Times’ decision to report on a minimum wage protest with far fewer attendees, and to splash that article onto the front page, reflects the cursory, feigned ignorance adopted by many in the media about this protest. The thousands of attendees apparently weren’t “enough people to catch the attention of The New York Times, who feature a $15 an hour minimum wage protest of a couple of dozen people on the front page, but not thousands rallying against the Iran deal,” notes Rick Moran for The American Thinker.
That pro-minimum wage hike article by the Times was titled, “Push to Lift Minimum Wage Is Now Serious Business,” and featured on page A1 of the July 24 issue. Instead of covering the Iran protest, and doing some genuine reporting on what was happening on their own doorstep, the Times instead featured the widely cited Associated Press article.
Clearly, the media aren’t going to tell the public the truth about the Iran deal—which is actually between the P5+1 nations and Iran—or why people oppose this debacle.
The many speakers at the rally provided compelling insights into why this is such a bad deal, and the video of this three-hour-plus rally can be viewed online. Speaker after speaker explained why this deal with Iran is inherently flawed and should be rejected.
One consistent theme throughout this powerful and emotional rally was urging people to contact their congressmen and women to try to get them to vote against the deal when it comes time for Congress to vote. Congress has 60 days to consider their vote, and that period began on July 20th.
The main focus of the event was on Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Schumer hasn’t committed either way, and is in a difficult position. He hopes and plans to succeed Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as the Senate Minority Leader (and eventually Majority Leader), and wants to be loyal to President Obama, and the party. But this conflicts with his longstanding support for Israel, which strongly opposes this deal.
The message from many of the speakers was that this is a moment of truth for Schumer. It won’t be good enough, they said, to wait until enough Democrats are lined up to assure that President Obama’s anticipated veto won’t be overridden, and then be able to make a safe vote against the deal. This crowd expects Schumer to lead the fight against the Iran nuclear agreement, which may be the only way for Congress to be able to defeat it. Even then, with the United Nations having already voted to lift its sanctions on Iran, based on certain conditions, it may not matter anyway. But it would definitely send a message.
There were too many great speeches to document here. I attended the event to be there in person, and to support my fellow members of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB). Below are the speeches of the six CCB members who spoke there, providing the story that the media refuse to tell.
“The reality is this arrangement, this deal with Iran is the worst negotiation the United States has conducted in history. … This agreement will actually free known terrorists who have killed Americans, Israelis, Europeans, Westerners and Muslims. An agreement that doesn’t give anything to the United States except the fact that it levels the playing field for Iran to dominate the Middle East, equate itself as a superpower, and ultimately become a power that has the ability to destroy all of its neighbors in the Middle East.”
“We stand united in believing that this is a bad agreement for America and the rest of the world, and we stand united knowing that America is strong. And in our history when we see evil we will confront it, contain it, and we will defeat it. … We have never, and we will never, accommodate it.”
“We know what’s in a good agreement, and people and this president say, ‘But it’s all we could get.’ It’s a sign of weakness.”
“This is the simple message that we should be sending to Iran. When Iran stands up and they chant, ‘Death to America!’ all we need to say is, ‘You first!’ … Well let me tell you something, the United States of America is about victors. The United States of America is about champions. The United States of America does not surrender to a bunch of black-robed crazed clerics that want to see us destroyed.”
“This traitorous group traded our national honor. … They humiliated this great nation before our friends, our allies, and most importantly our enemies. This surrender document must be thoroughly rejected by Congress, and then Congress must exercise its authority to start impeaching executive officials, starting with Secretary Kerry and following [with] President Obama for his illegal and unconstitutional acts.
“There’s only one sure way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon capability and that’s with a military strike—and you can take that to the bank.”
“And, oh by the way, we just learned there are two new side deals to this deal with Iran, and those deals have to do with a place called Parchin, where Iran was testing explosives for its nuclear warheads, says the IAEA. And the other one [is] about the ‘possible’ military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. These two side deals—not going to be made public, not going to be shared with Congress, not going to be shared with the American people or anybody else.”
“The last thing that Iran gets to keep, they’re keeping four American citizens hostages. … Until these hostages are set free we should not be having one word of negotiations with this Iranian regime.”
“I am tired of the deception, I am tired of the lies that come out of the White House and our government. …Let’s stick together, stand up, and kill this deal!”
* Satire, but you won’t believe what Hillary is doing on tax policy. It is virtually identical to Bill’s 1992 platform, when he made sweeping promises to enact a big middle class tax cut then denied it after being elected. This is surely Hillary’s plan too. After all it worked once, and those stupid Americans won’t remember…
Imagining a Clinton presidency in its earliest stages
What might the election of America’s first female president look like? But not just any first female president — the election of President Hillary Clinton?
Here, with a little imagination and a little kicking back, is the inside track on what Hillary Clinton’s highest policy priorities might be during her first 100 days in the Oval Office, should that come to pass.
Domestic Policy Make college affordable: In launching a new consumer-friendly college loan program, Hillary takes her inspiration from former Fannie Mae CEO Frank Raines, who promised the agency would underwrite $3 trillion in subprime mortgages to help the “little guy.” After all, homeownership is a civil right. The ensuing mortgage meltdown was just bad timing. But it was Bush’s fault anyway. Well, a college education is a civil right too!
In explaining her rationale for the program, Hillary describes her touching personal brush with poverty and her enduring identification with the lower classes. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy.”
Hillary’s new program guarantees that no American (including the Clintons) will ever have to suffer the deprivation she and her family were forced to endure in order to send Chelsea to Stanford University.
Tax Policy Wealthiest pay their fair share: Hillary’s tax policy is simple — the rich make too much money. It is not fair! As senator, she heroically opposed the Bush tax cuts, saying, “Many of you are well enough off that the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” She brings this refreshing attitude to her new job. Her new plan promises to “Reform our tax code so that the wealthiest pay their fair share.” After all, the top 20 percent of income earners pay a mere 84 percent of all income taxes. Clearly, not enough.
Middle class tax cut: Yes, you read that right. Hillary proposes a big middle-class tax cut just like hubby Bill did in his 1992 campaign. But don’t worry. Remember what Bill did after his election? Raised everyone’s taxes! Hillary plans to do the exact same thing. Bait and switch. Tee, hee, hee. Like our good friend Jonathan Gruber says, those stupid Americans will believe anything.
Economic Policy Raise middle-class incomes: Hillary says “it’s time to raise incomes for hard-working Americans.” She plans to do this by 1) increasing the minimum wage (because $15 an hour just isn’t enough); 2) expanding overtime (whether companies need it or not); 3) encouraging companies to profit share with employees — about time; 4) strengthening Obamacare; and 5) increasing workers’ pay and benefits, plus a lot more paid leave.
Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? While it may seem that all these things cost companies money, Hillary has an answer to that too: Expand employment opportunities.
Foreign Policy
As we all know, foreign policy is one of Hillary’s strong points given her time as President Obama’s secretary of state. Her tenure was marked by numerous foreign policy challenges, all of which she met with characteristic Clinton class and determination. Benghazi, as we all know, was Bush’s fault. And for those who question her handling of the affair, she asks in her characteristically presidential tone, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
When queried about her vast knowledge of Islam and Islamic terrorism, Hillary credits, surprisingly, her daughter, Chelsea. “I have to admit that a good deal of what my husband and I have learned [about Islam] has come from my daughter. [As] some of you who are our friends know, she took a course last year in Islamic history.” Think of it. A woman with such a breadth of foreign policy experience credits her daughter! She took a course. That makes Hillary a true expert.
Energy Policy Power the economy of tomorrow: This brilliant program expresses the aspirations of millions of Americans in reducing our carbon footprint. In announcing her plan she says, “You know, we can’t keep talking about our dependence on foreign oil and the need to deal with global warming and the challenge that it poses to our climate and to God’s creation and just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
Hillary’s plan is to put 500 million solar panels on roofs across America — for free — and increase green energy to 33 percent of the total by 2027. Of course, to see it through will require a third Hillary term, but who could oppose that?
While American energy producers will suffer after years of raping the planet, China and Taiwan, which produce 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaic cells, will prosper immeasurably, redistributing income to those parts of the world that really deserve it. So this environmentally friendly measure will be a boon for international trade.
But not all U.S. companies will suffer. Perish the thought. Hillary will made sure tax dollars flow in the right direction and boost the American economy at the same time. Companies to benefit include First Solar, whose investors include major Obama campaign bundlers, billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, green thumber Al Gore, Ted Turner, Goldman Sachs.
First Solar’s CEO is Michael Ahearn, a former fundraiser for both Obama and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. Another one, NRG Energy, got a $1.2 billion Department of Energy loan guarantee from the Obama administration, whose bundler, Arvia Few, was married to then NRG executive vice president Jason Few. What a coincidence, no? NRG will now be able to afford even more green energy jobs.
Finally, it looks like Elon Musk, president of SolarCity, Tesla Motors, and a major Clinton Library donor, will be able to snag even more tax money to fund his government-subsidized electric sports car.
In this scenario, we now have a president willing to tackle America’s greatest national security threat, global warming, while boosting the world economy at the same time. It is not for nothing that Hillary Clinton has been called “the smartest woman in the world.”
Hillary 2024! Because, after all, the first woman president deserves at least three terms.
James Simpson is an economist, former White House budget analyst, businessman and investigative journalist.
According to their tax returns, it turns out that essentially all of the Clinton family’s “charitable donations” were directed back to their own “charities”.
As TaxProf notes, the family’s charitable giving from 2007 onward has been a case study in moving money around. Since 2007, the Clintons “made $15 million (10.8 percent of their AGI) of charitable contributions, $14.9 million of which went to the Clinton Family Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.”
That leaves $100,000 for charitable uses that don’t directly involve the Clinton family and their globalist friends.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
