by Trevor | Aug 31, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Barack Obama, Blog, Commentary, Enemies Within, Featured, Socialism/Communism
Commentary
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.
According to the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“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.
Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Aug 29, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Blog, China, Commentary, CPUSA, Enemies Within, Featured, Socialism/Communism
Commentary
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | August 27, 2019, Updated: August 28, 2019
A recent NBC report criticizing The Epoch Times repeatedly emphasized that the publication is anti-communism, with the clear implication that this stance is anachronistic, paranoid, or unwarranted. Unfortunately, such views are commonplace in today’s West, certainly on the left, but also on much of what is considered the “right.”
The NBC article included this amazing paragraph: “In 2005, The Epoch Times released its greatest salvo, publishing the ‘Nine Commentaries,’ a widely distributed book-length series of anonymous editorials that it claimed exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘massive crimes’ and ‘attempts to eradicate all traditional morality and religious belief.’”
Multiple reputable sources, including the famous “Black Book on Communism,” written mainly by academic ex-communists, assert that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been responsible for at least 65 million deaths during its 70 years of bloody reign. This adds to the full death toll of communism, which the authors show was at least 100 million.
In the first chapter, titled “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” academic Stéphane Courtois states that “communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” By comparison, Nazism, while its crimes were also reprehensible, was “distinctly less murderous than Communism,” with a death toll of 25 million innocents.
Currently, 100 million Chinese citizens identify as Christians, and there are many others who are Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, or Falun Gong practitioners. These groups are subjected to ongoing, intense persecution under the CCP.
To The Epoch Times’ credit, it is one of the very few publications in the United States that is not just “pro-freedom” but actively anti-communist, a very important distinction, which was brought home recently in a conversation I had with a senior Epoch Times staffer. He related to me how some Epoch Times journalists had attended a conservative gathering in Washington and were surprised to find they were not universally well-received.
There were some comments that the presence of the Epoch Times people, well-known for their opposition to the Communist Party of China, “might damage our trade relations with China.”
Bear in mind that many of these critics were veterans of the Reagan presidency. They had seen how Reagan’s tough anti-communist stance had forced the Soviet Union into a major retreat (not a “collapse,” but a strategic retreat)—something decades of appeasement and East-West trade under previous presidents had failed to achieve.
These “conservative” leaders were all about free trade between nations and liberty at home. However, the thought that they should be opposing “communism” in this day and age was completely foreign to many of them.
What Is Communism?
This view stems from a failure to understand that communism is not just another political system. Communism is a form of organized crime justified by the cult of Marxism–Leninism. It’s basically a combination of criminal inclination coupled with uncontrolled political power.
Like all crime, communism is parasitic. It produces nothing of value itself; it must rely on force, propaganda, torture, intimidation, threats, and espionage to survive. Like cancer, communism consumes its host. Except that in communism’s case, it will only die when the whole planet is consumed.
Must we let things get to that point?
It’s Not Enough to Advocate for Freedom
Most would agree that it’s not enough to merely advocate for a lawful society. A society must also actively work to suppress crime and punish criminals.
Most would agree that it’s not enough to advocate for a healthy population. When cancer appears, for example, it must be starved of nutrients and removed as quickly as possible from its host.
Similarly, it’s not enough to simply advocate for freedom. It is not enough to support free markets, the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, and private property. Liberty will not be assured unless men and women of goodwill fight against that which threatens it.
As long as we remain imperfect beings, some iteration of communism will always be with us. Communism is the politicized, malignant distillation of the evil that’s in all of us. Marx, Lenin, Mao, and other communist leaders saw this flaw in man and sought to organize and legitimize it, awarding their evil ideas with a scientific veneer.
Communism is the highest expression of organized evil this world has ever seen.
How is feeding this beast going to produce good results?
History
Before World War II, Nazi sympathizers in the United States and Britain worked to steer their governments away from confronting Hitler. Big business in many Western nations made fortunes feeding the Nazi war machine.
During the Cold War, leftists in the West were constantly pushing for accommodation of the Soviet Union, even as it swallowed up much of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some Western big businesses were more than happy to line their pockets with blood-stained rubles.
Nazism was ended with a huge loss of life, after years of appeasement had failed.
In the 1980s, Reagan avoided war by pushing the Soviet Union into full retreat through massive economic pressure. Had that pressure been maintained until the KGB was completely removed from power, we might now be friends with a free Russia instead of facing the nuclear weapons of a superior neo-Soviet regime now confronting us.
The United States has a similar choice with China. We can make billions trading with China (while gutting our own industrial base), then spend trillions defending ourselves from the monster we created when the inevitable war comes—not to mention the millions of casualties and the very real possibility of defeat and communist occupation of the lower 48 and Hawaii.
Or we can isolate China economically until the Communist Party is destroyed by internal pressures, and a new government, or governments, arise. That is our only hope for both a free China and a free United States.
Recently, President Donald Trump said in a tweet that U.S. companies “are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
There is no doubt that Trump has the authority to make such a call.
According to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), signed in 1977 by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the president has the power to restrict trade once a “national emergency” is declared.
According to the Washington Examiner:
“‘The president can impose a virtual embargo on a nation under IEEPA,’ said John Yoo, director of the public law and policy program at the University of California at Berkeley and a former official in George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“The law has been used in the past to enact sanctions on hostile regimes such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The Trump administration is now suggesting using it as a trade negotiation tool. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said China was an ‘enemy’ of the United States on trade.”
China is the United States’ enemy on every front, Secretary Mnuchin, not just in trade.
Let’s hope Trump is prepared to use IEEPA not just as a “bargaining chip,” but as the first step in doing to communist China what Reagan did to the Soviet Union.
The only peaceful way to achieve any real change in China, and to curb the regime’s criminal behavior and foreign and military policies of expansion, is to use U.S. economic leverage.
President Richard Nixon and communist China’s “best friend in America,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, opened up U.S.–China trade in the 1970s in a grossly misguided attempt to play communist-ruled Beijing against communist-ruled Moscow. That is the moral and practical equivalent of the FBI allying with the Italian Mafia to defeat the Russian mob.
Had the United States and the West economically blockaded Soviet Russia and communist China from the very beginning, both criminal regimes would have collapsed in a relatively short time. Millions of lives would have been saved, and the West could have spent trillions less on defending itself from the monsters they were economically supporting.
The Current State of Affairs
Today, the heavily nuclear-armed and FSB (KGB)-run Russia is in a formal military alliance (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) with communist-run China, which is now the world’s second-largest economy. Communism is closer to destroying this planet than it ever has been.
Communism is the plague of our times. After a setback in the Reagan era, communist and semi-communist parties now rule Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba, Nepal, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, the Congo, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and, only half in jest, California.
Communist ideology has deeply penetrated every Western nation, and in the United States, it dominates the universities, organized labor, Hollywood, and the new Democratic Party. And still, most Western conservatives and libertarians refuse to become active anti-communists.
Any force for freedom that doesn’t actively oppose communism is doomed to eventual failure. It is as impotent as a saint who won’t oppose sin, a pastor who won’t condemn the devil, a policeman who won’t arrest criminals, or a doctor who won’t fight disease.
The Epoch Times is one of a handful of pro-freedom publications in the West that actively works to expose and oppose communism. We will never fully defeat communism, but if we refuse to oppose it, it will inevitably defeat us. If you aren’t fighting communism, you are in effect enabling its eventual terrifying victory.
The Epoch Times is proudly and actively anti-communist. All of us who love liberty, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, should support The Epoch Times in this noble endeavor.
Feature Image: Cover of the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a collection of editorials that catalyzed the Tuidang movement and outlines its philosophy. (Benjamin Chasteen/Epoch Times)
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the year in which President Jimmy Carter signed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
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.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
by Trevor | Aug 29, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, Blog, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Europe, Featured, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
Commentary
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | August 26, 2019, Updated: August 26, 2019
The recent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) national convention in Atlanta proved two things:
A. The DSA is definitely a communist organization.
B. The DSA is rapidly becoming an integral part of the international communist movement.
Since cutting decades-old ties to the Socialist International in 2017 (SI is way too moderate for the new breed of DSA comrade!), the DSA has built extensive ties to radical socialist and communist groups in the Muslim world, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
The international guest list of the DSA national convention reflected both the organization’s far-left turn and its commitment to worldwide socialist revolution.
Muslim World
From the Muslim world, the DSA hosted two Americans supporting Middle Eastern revolutionary causes and one representative from the currently unfolding revolution in Sudan.
Speaker Rasha Mubarak represented the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an umbrella network of supporters of the Palestinian revolutionary movement. The campaign’s advisory board includes Cornel West of the DSA and Ahmad Abuznaid, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization-linked activist and the son of Palestinian civil servant Nabil Abuznaid. The senior Abuznaid was a “close friend” and adviser to Yasser Arafat, founder of the U.S. State Department-designated terror group Palestine Liberation Organization.
Mubarak is the regional director for Central Florida of the Florida Young Democrats, co-founder of Floridians Responding to Refugees, and former central Florida regional director at the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded by U.S.-based pro-Hamas activists. Mubarak is also close to DSA members and pro-Palestine Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
Hanan Yahya, a staffer with the office of Detroit City Council member Raquel Castaneda-Lopez, represented the Yemeni Alliance Committee, which is sympathetic to the Iranian-backed rebel faction in the still-raging Yemeni civil war.
From Sudan came Nuha Zein, a geophysics professor and activist in the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), which is a leading element in the current Sudanese revolution. According to a Liberation News interview with Fathi AlFadl, secretary for information and member of the Central Committee of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP):
“The SCP maintains very close cooperation with the Sudanese Professionals Association. In fact, a number of the SCP work within the SPA. Also, as a party active in the field of trade union movements, the SCP attaches considerable attention to the activities and work of the SPA.”
Latin America
Latin American guests included representatives from the pro-Cuba Workers Party of Brazil and the Peruvian far-left group Nuevo Peru.
Bruno Magalhaes, a Sao Paulo-based academic, represented the Brazilian Socialism and Liberty Party, a mainly Trotskyist grouping that broke away from the Workers Party some years ago, essentially because it was too moderate.
Asia
Asian guests included a representative of ZENKO (National Assembly for Peace and Democracy) from Japan, which is stridently anti-American and is known to have worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party in the past.
Lawyer Aaron Pedrosa also fired up the DSA crowd with tales from the Philippines revolutionary movement. Pedrosa is a leader of labor group Sanlakas and the Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Laboring Masses), both of which were founded by former leaders of the Maoist terror group Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army.
Europe
The first European delegate to address the DSA convention was Oliver Shroder, head of international politics and a member of the International Commission of Germany’s Die Linke (The Left). Directly descended from the Stalin-era East German Communist Party, Die Linke is now the major socialist party in the united Germany.
One of Schroder’s colleagues on the Die Linke International Commission is Gregor Gysi, the last leader of the East German Communist Party and a man repeatedly dogged by allegations that he was an informer for that country’s dreaded secret police, the Stasi.
Later on, the bill came Waltraud Fritz, representing the Party of the European Left, a more than 30-strong alliance of mainly communist parties currently serving in the European Parliament. Fritz has served on the executive committee of the Communist Party of Austria for the last 20 years. She became a member of the executive board of the Party of the European Left in 2004 and has also been a member of the Party of the European Left political secretariat since 2009.
Fritz passed on “heartfelt greetings of solidarity” from Party of the European Left Chairman Gysi.
She also heaped praise on the assembled DSA comrades, telling them:
“The Left forces of Europe are quite excited about what’s going on here in the USA. … The Democratic Socialists of America are at the forefront of the struggles of a different, of a new America in another radically changed world.”
She also emphasized the importance the European communists placed on the DSA’s work in the United States and vowed that:
“The European Left Party has realized the necessity to work together much closer with the DSA than in the past—much, much closer.”
‘By the Company You Keep’
The DSA portrays itself domestically as a noncommunist political organization that supports a “democratic” form of socialism.
The DSA claims it wants to make the United States more like Norway and Sweden, but on the foreign stage, it works almost exclusively with communist and Trotskyist political allies.
The DSA isn’t allied internationally with the moderate left-wing parties of Northern Europe, but with the openly communist parties of Western and Southern Europe and the “former” Stalinist communist parties of Eastern Europe.
That’s because the “democratic socialist” lie is only for naïve American voters. When the DSA welcomes its real friends into its bosom, they are almost invariably communists and terrorists.
Feature Photo: Democratic Socialists of America holds a rally in New York on Oct. 30, 2017. (Working Families Party/CC BY-NC 2.0)
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.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Jul 15, 2019 | Asia-Pacific, Blog, China, Commentary, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Liberty, North America, Socialism/Communism
Commentary
The Epoch Times | July 11, 2019, Updated: July 11, 2019
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party had better be ready for a tsunami of new Democratic voters coming their way in 2020.
Far from the easy victory many pundits are predicting, there’s a strong chance that the president and his party (strong economy notwithstanding) may be overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of new voters coming mainly from the South and Southwest.
The same pro-China, communist-led organizations that almost won gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia in 2018, and have almost turned once-reliably Republican Virginia blue, are aiming to mobilize a staggering 40 million new voters against President Trump.
If this network can mobilize just 20 percent of the new voters they are targeting, Trump will be a one-term president. Donald Trump Jr.’s recent prediction that the 2020 election will be a battle between “freedom and communism” will prove horribly accurate.
While most commentators are focusing on Midwestern “battleground” states, the American far-left is looking further South. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and its allies are looking to the millions of black, Latino, and low-income white potential voters in the South and Southwest who lean heavily Democrat but traditionally vote in low numbers.
If the FRSO can mobilize several million new Democratic voters in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona over the next 18 months, Trump will find victory extremely difficult—even if he makes some gains in Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.
Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona are all extremely vulnerable. Georgia isn’t far behind, and even Texas is in play. If the communists can flip Florida and Arizona for the Democrats, Trump almost certainly loses. If Georgia and North Carolina turn blue, Texas is not even needed. If Texas goes blue, the Democrat/communist alliance rules the United States forever.
Who Is Jon Liss?
Jon Liss is one of the most influential and little-known political operatives in the United States today. A longtime leader of the FRSO, Liss has been building political influence in Northern Virginia for over three decades. He has been active in Tenants and Workers United, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association, and the Left Strategies Collective.
Liss’s organization, FRSO, itself grew out of the Maoist “New Communist Movement” of the 1970s and has maintained ties to the People’s Republic of China. The FRSO is probably about 2,000 members strong, but it works in partnership with the 5,000 members of the equally pro-China Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the nearly 60,000-strong Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Working together in an alliance called the “Left Inside/Outside Project,” these three groups have infiltrated the Democratic Party in every state of the union.
Mass Voter Registration
In recent years, Liss has led New Virginia Majority (NVM), an Alexandria-based voter registration operation that has signed up several hundred thousand, mainly minority voters to turn Virginia to Democratic-leaning from a reliably Republican state. NVM is able to micro-target potential Democratic voters by using sophisticated demographic information and maps generated by an FRSO supporter based in the Geography Department of Wuhan University in China.
NVM’s Florida partner organization, New Florida Majority (NFM), almost elected far-leftist Andrew Gillum to the governorship of Florida in 2018, by helping raise the Democratic vote in the Sunshine State by more than 40 percent. Similar communist-directed mass engagement of minority voters almost elected Stacey Abrams to the governorship of Georgia and Beto O’Rourke to the U.S. Senate from Texas. They did succeed in electing Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate from Arizona and Alabama, respectively. In North Carolina, FRSO activists have used minority voters to elect several leftist Democrats to local government positions.
State Power Caucus
The lessons learned in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, and Texas are now being applied on a national scale to oust Trump.
One of the main coordinating bodies for this ambitious project is the State Power Caucus, headed by Liss and FRSO affiliate Andrea Mercado of NFM.
Liss writes about this new strategy on the FRSO-aligned website Organizing Upgrade:
“Inspired by the disaster of Trump and Trumpism two years out, most organizers are engaged in barroom or coffee shop speculation about the 2020 election.
“Among the two dozen announced Democratic candidates, many debate: will it be Sanders or Warren, with their attacks on corporate Democrats? Will it be one of Hillary’s heirs, with their cozy relationship with Wall Street? Will Harris be the first Black woman nominated by a major party? If it’s Biden, do we sit it out?
“All of it is idle speculation unless ‘we’ collectively organize tens of millions of the 108 million eligible voters who didn’t vote in 2016. That’s right, one hundred and eight million eligible voters chose not to register or to vote in 2016. The non-voting block is disproportionately young, poor, and people of color.”
So what’s the solution?
“Dozens of state-based power building organizations have banded together to lead efforts to build a bottom up long term front against Trump and Trumpism. Over the last twenty-five years, state power organizations have grown to fill the political space created by the decline of Democratic Party local organization, the breakup and collapse of ACORN, and low levels of voter turnout. This reflects a shift from narrow Alinskyism and its very limited political engagement.”
For years, communist-influenced groups such as ACORN and its spinoffs have chipped away at the Republican voting base in scattered efforts across multiple states. What Liss reveals here is an effort to consolidate these groups into one front to massively amplify their effects.
Building the Caucus
According to Liss:
“Starting in the summer of 2017, many leading state-power organizations have come together as a caucus to support peer-to-peer learning and incubate innovate organizing practices. Included among the organizations that have been leading the State Power Caucus are New Virginia Majority, New Florida Majority, California Calls, Washington Community Action Network, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
“All told, there are 22 organizations from 15 states involved in the Caucus. Importantly, these organizations recognized the need to develop a systematic and long-term alternative to Trumpism.”
These groups, all affiliated with the FRSO, can credibly claim to have had a significant effect on voting patterns since the 2016 election cycle. However, they acknowledge that a much greater effort will be required to defeat Trump.
“We’ve also begun to assess the collective impact of state-based organizations. Looking at 2016, our rough estimate is that at most 4 million people were contacted and encouraged to vote. This is our high-water estimate. The actual number who actually voted is probably much lower still.
“Now, recall the 108 million people who were eligible but not voting? They are largely our ‘core’ constituency, or in other terms, they are our unorganized social base. This 108 million, when compared to the voting electorate, is more Black, more immigrant, more working class and poor.
“If we initially target just half of the 108 million, and we acknowledge that some in that half are going to disagree with our values and politics, some aren’t going to vote no matter what, and some are in geographies that we just can’t reach, we believe our real voter mobilization target number is 40 million, and we’ve agreed as a caucus to that number as our target. That’s our natural constituency.”
Liss sees this goal as a means to elect more socialists and communists to public office, but also to decisively defeat Trump as a step toward moving the country much further down the socialist road.
“The long game to defeat white nationalism and move past neo-liberal corporatism is by building a bottom up movement of 40 million people.”
New Party, New Society
In a follow-up article on Organizing Upgrade, Liss makes it clear that the State Power Caucus aims to go way beyond defeating Trump. The real goal is to build a new mass socialist party that will eventually be able to challenge for state power.
Liss is happy that the communist left has finally acknowledged the necessity of electoral work on the road to a socialist America. The Bernie Sanders movement has been a big part of this tactical shift. Liss writes:
“I’m old, but a little too young to have lived through the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and its battles to form revolutionary parties and pre-parties, that is, to build a disciplined band of professional revolutionaries to carry out a political line. … On the other hand, there is a unique, maybe even historic opportunity to build a political-strategic space to carry out electoral organizing.
“Increasingly, there is a sector of radical organizations who believe that electoral work is a key area of struggle. That is a huge shift from the last few decades: credit Bernie and his campaign for revitalizing the notion of socialism and the importance of elections, credit many immigrant rights, Occupy and Movement for Black Lives leaders for recognizing the need for mass action AND an electoral strategy.”
But all this new energy will be wasted without centralized coordination:
“It’s time to create a ‘general command’ or a place where all organized groups of people who view elections as key area of struggle and who view growing a base of radical ‘new majority’ Democratic voters as a central task. To be explicit, new majority Democrats refers to women, especially women of color, Black and immigrant voters, and sectors of young and working-class voters.”
It’s also imperative to support whoever the Democrats choose to challenge Trump:
“Our task is to build an organizational vehicle, what I call a ‘party-like space’ … around the following points: a) build a stronger, larger base of voters of color, younger voters and women voters (in Virginia, for example, Black women voters have been the motor for all progressive change), b) support existing state power organizations that is ,some of the dozens of social movement organizations contending for state level governing power, or at least organizations that are outside of the Democratic Party structures c) agree to support the Democratic candidate who emerges to take on Trump in the general election.”
So what would this party-like structure do? According to Liss, it would be “a valuable step toward a coherent approach for building a socialist movement.”
“On a strategic level, this party-like space would exist in order to build the foundations for a mass left organization capable of challenging elites in the two dominant parties, leveraging the strengths and demands of multiple movements, and making possible a struggle for life beyond Trump and Trumpism. Practical next steps should include:
1. Agree to these or similar points of unity …
2. Coordinate electoral plans.
3. Do real world work both together and apart, regularly and collectively assess progress, learn lessons and adjust strategies.
4. Recruit other projects and organizations to join this political space.
5. Develop working relationships to funnel members and volunteers to state power organizations, DSA, or the Working Families Party who are building independently of the Democratic Party, while also expanding the electorate and building the broadest front against Trump and Trumpism.”
Communist Inspiration
In order to illustrate the past successes of this approach, Liss cites the example of El Salvador’s often ruling FMLN, an electoral alliance built around the Communist Party of El Salvador.
“In El Salvador, 5 organizations under life-threatening duress managed to unite to create the FMLN. They started with very different strategic positions but created a process for collaboration and coordination. Over time, many of the differences were not nearly as important as the need to work together. Again, while longer term strategic considerations may develop over time, getting this real work started for 2020 is the way to start.”
Credible Threat
The FRSO and its allies have enough people and resources to make possible their plan to mobilize 40 million new voters against Trump.
Their leadership of the State Power Caucus and their control of 22 voter registration organizations in 15 states is no small army. Add to that massive funding from the Democracy Alliance, labor unions, and leftist foundations, and possible ongoing informational support from China. It’s clear that Trump has some serious under-the-radar opposition coming from the FRSO and the State Power Caucus.
These groups will work in California, Ohio, and other states, but the real focus will be Southern and Southwestern Republican-held states with high minority populations. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona may well be the real battleground states this election cycle.
The outcome of the next election will either set the United States on a new upward spiral of freedom and prosperity, or it could send the United States and the West into a nearly unstoppable downward spiral into socialism and tyranny.
In World War II, the battle for civilization was decided in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway Island, Normandy, and “The Bulge.”
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.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Feb 12, 2019 | CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers, Welfare
By Trevor Loudon | via The Epoch Times | February 8, 2019 Updated: February 12, 2019
Commentary
Government welfare is communism. Free money from the state, whether in terms of benefits, hand-outs, or non-universal tax-beaks is a trap that will draw people into socialism and beyond.
It’s a lot like cancer.
Stage one of societal cancer is “welfarism.” Citizens get a few benefits for the elderly, the very young, those who can’t look after themselves, maybe some student loans. The economy remains pretty healthy. The symptoms are mild and noticed by very few.
As things get more “social democratic” (stage two), the benefits become more universal and more generous. The selective tax incentives become larger. At stage two, most people are getting something from the government. Some people are getting a lot. The government help is no longer seen as a gratefully received lifeline to get through tough times, but rather a “right.” People who are dependent on state funds grow increasingly envious of those who get more. People who work hard and get little grow increasingly resentful of those who work little and get a lot. Honest self-respecting businesses are at a competitive disadvantage against those less scrupulous enterprises willing to “milk the system.” The economy starts to show signs of distortions and inefficiencies. Economic growth slows while social tensions slowly rise. A small minority notice some worrying symptoms. Most remain oblivious.
In “socialism” (stage three), things begin to spiral out of control. Taxes are now way higher, and the economy is sluggish or negative. Benefits and handouts are near universal, and health care, education, and most social services are run by the state. Quality of service considerably declines as fewer and fewer private businesses can maintain a competitive service-oriented economy. Increasing private sector unemployment leads to growing unemployment rolls, and a corresponding growth in taxes, welfare expenditure, government-makes-work schemes, and a rapidly expanding public sector. Those few surviving businesses either live off government contracts or have a corrupt relationship with government bureaucrats, organized crime, or both. Symptoms are now very obvious. The economy is imploding, waiting lines are endemic, and service quality is abysmal in almost every sector. A few are fighting back, but most are desperately trying figuratively to cannibalize their fellow citizens to survive.
Stage four is “communism.” Society’s immune system—the virtues of honesty, responsibility, and compassion—are virtually wiped out. The economy is in free-fall and social decline is evident everywhere. Resentment and jealousy are endemic. Hatred is rife, only just contained by the increasingly powerful military and state security services. The state controls all and is busily sucking every last ounce of life out of the economy and the people. Everything is free, but most of it is worthless. Health care is available to all (unless you’re an enemy of the state) but quality is abysmal, and the queues are endless.
Unless you are politically connected, your elderly and chronically ill will die long before they get to share a hospital ward with 12 other people, an army of cockroaches, and a toxic soup of filth, bacteria, and viruses. By now the disease is obvious to all. But by that time everyone is trapped. The leaders must watch their backs every second lest their rivals stab them. They must repress the populace with terror, lest the people rise up and hang their leaders from lamp posts. The army and secret police must leech off the workers to get enough crumbs to feed their own families. The common people cannot organize a revolt because in every darkened basement of 10 or 12 conspirators, three or four will be government informants ready to sell out their fellow plotters for a bigger room or a few more ration coupons for their families. This is the terminal stage. Death can be staved off for a while with outside intervention, but the only possible cure at this stage is a desperate, bloody, and, almost certainly suicidal, revolt.
And it all started with just a little bit of harmless welfare.
Liberty for All
It constantly amazes me as I travel across this great land how many Americans and even anti-communists fail to see the connection between government welfare and socialism and communism.
I often hear people tell me how much they love the constitution, but can’t wait for their Medicare to kick in. They’re for freedom but, hey, just got an extra benefit because their college-aged daughter is living at home. They love America, but they just hired another worker because the state gave them a wage-subsidy to do so.
These people are all patriots, but they’re allowing stage one cancer to take hold in their own country. How can they complain when stages two, three, and four eventually destroy all they hold dear?
A friend of mine in New Zealand, I’ll call him Ian, is a committed libertarian. He has a favorite saying: “Being a libertarian costs.” He means that figuratively, as in the emotional pain and spiritual anguish he has often had to endure. But, he also means it literally.
As a libertarian, Ian will take nothing from the state. In New Zealand, both health and accident compensation are socialized, and there are numerous incentives for businesses covered by the taxpayer. Everywhere you turn from cradle to grave there are government benefits, hand-outs, and tax incentives available to rich and poor alike.
New Zealand is stage two, bordering on stage three.
Ian won’t take any of it. He’s paid massive amounts of tax to the state but refuses to take anything in return. He drives on the state-funded roads because there is no choice; he pays for state-provided utilities if there is no private competition. Beyond that, Ian refuses every free service, every subsidy, every hand-out, every “incentive.”
If he injures himself, he is “entitled” to state accident compensation. He pays the taxes, then he pays out of his own pocket for his own care.
Freedom is everything to Ian, and he would rather pay double for many things than give up an ounce of his liberty.
If all of us were like Ian, we would never have to worry about socialism or communism again.
Welfarism, social democracy, socialism, and communism are cancerous and parasitic. If we do not let these parasites attach themselves to us, they cannot drain the life from our bodies and souls.
Every American must understand that the first step in fighting creeping totalitarianism is get off every form of welfare and government largesse possible. This may be difficult at first, but becoming a free, fully self-responsible being is the only real way to effectively fight for liberty for all.
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.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW
by Trevor | Feb 11, 2019 | CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Environmentalism, Green New Deal, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) (R) announce the Green New Deal outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7, 2019. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
By Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | February 11, 2019 Updated: February 11, 2019
This article is Part 2 of a two-part series on the “Green New Deal.” Also see ‘Green New Deal’ Could Plunge the World Into War Part 1
Calls for a “Green New Deal” are rapidly building on the U.S. left. Promoted by openly socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the proposal calls for mass wealth redistribution, a federal jobs program, socialized health care, guaranteed minimum incomes, and the elimination of all fossil fuels from the U.S. economy by 2030, all in the name of fighting “climate change.”
n reality the Green New Deal is a deeply socialist plan formulated and promoted by bona fide communist groups.
The Green New Deal, which only a few years ago would have been labelled as crackpot utopianism, is heralded on the left as a serious program for addressing environmental issues and social inequalities.
So far, more than 45 leftist Democrats in Congress have endorsed the project, including likely 2020 presidential candidates Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and declared presidential candidates Sens. Kamala Harris (D.-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Former presidential candidate Al Gore has called the Green New Deal “part of the answer to global inequality.”
So far House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has balked at Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a Congressional Select Committee on the Green New Deal—but the idea still has momentum.
Christy Goldfuss, who was the managing director of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Barack Obama and now leads the energy and environmental team at the Democratic Party’s think tank the Center for American Progress, told the New Yorker that she had noticed the Green New Deal’s influence on senior Democrats.
“People are asking how are we going to address climate change at scale, not what’s our building-block approach,” Goldfuss said. “For me, that is a huge, huge shift, and it would not have happened if the Green New Deal had not come along.”
The Green New Deal, which “has come to define the progressive cause in Washington,” according to the New Yorker, has existed in several forms for years. The proposal echoes a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report from October 2008, when UNEP’s Executive Director Achim Steiner unveiled the Global Green New Deal initiative, which aimed at transforming the world’s economy and combating climate change through creating jobs in “green” industries. The Green Party USA has also promoted a Green New Deal, which includes massive defense cuts, for several years.
Significantly, the Manhattan-based Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) has discussed the concept since at least 2013.
“A Green New Deal is concerned with a just transition to a more sustainable economy, with improved provision of public services, and with strict regulation of polluters and financial speculators. While there is much promise in this approach, it contains unresolved contradictions and has been blocked by hostile forces. Moreover, it is unclear whether this agenda is adequate to the challenge posed by climate change,” stated the introduction to an RLS report.
“Building green socialism may be the only way to emerge from this time of crisis with a society that treads lightly on the earth while enabling a full range of human flourishing.”
descendant of the former Stalinist East German Communist Party. The RLS works closely with the United States’ largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the pro-China Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), as well as the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), all of which are fully behind the Green New Deal.
Who’s Behind the Green New Deal?
The current Green New Deal exists in its “most authoritative form” as an 11-page Google Doc, according to the New Yorker: “The document was written over a single December 2018 weekend by the staff of the freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three like-minded progressive groups: the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots climate organization; the Justice Democrats, which recruits and supports progressive candidates; and an upstart policy shop called the New Consensus.”
All three of these groups are spin-offs of a New York City-based revolutionary training organization called “Momentum.”
According to Momentum’s website: “>We see two dominant traditions of organizing in the United States: structure-based organizing and mass protest. In the structure-based tradition, developed by Saul Alinsky and others, organizers start with one-on-one relationships to develop leadership and build a base that can advocate for the needs of particular constituencies. Structure-based organizations, such as community organizations and labor unions, make instrumental demands, using the base’s leverage over policymakers to win concrete reforms for their members. By contrast, in the mass protest tradition, autonomous groups of individuals create polarizing moments that inspire thousands of unaffiliated people to take to the streets around symbolic, popular social issues.
“The Momentum model fuses the strengths of the structure-based organizing and mass protest to seed a new tradition of organizing in the United States. Momentum synthesizes the lessons of various 20th century movements, including the Color Revolutions of Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in North Africa.”
Momentum boasts of training activists from groups “doing some of the most important movement-building” in the United States, including “Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, BYP100, United We Dream, Showing Up For Racial Justice, 350.org, National People’s Action, PICO, and more.” All of these groups are front groups or close affiliates of the FRSO.
The Sunrise Movement, with established groups in several major cities, is the main cheerleader for the Green New Deal. Sunrise has heavily recruited activists from the DSA- and FRSO-affiliated groups, such as the Pennsylvania Student Power Network.
For instance, Stephen O’Hanlon is a former member of the Pennsylvania Student Power Network and founder and national field director of the Sunrise Movement.
The Sunrise Movement is openly endorsed by the DSA and several FRSO-affiliated groups, including Bay Area-based Green For All, which was founded by one-time Maoist and former Obama administration “green jobs czar” Van Jones.
The Justice Democrats, then co-run by Ocasio-Cortez (before she decided to run for Congress and join the DSA), backed dozens of far-left Democrats in the last election cycle, electing seven of them. Over 40 percent of their 78 endorsed candidates were either DSA members or endorsees. Several more were from the FRSO or CPUSA orbits.
The Justice Democrats also partnered closely with Brand New Congress, which is governed largely by DSA members.
New Consensus provides the theoretical backbone for the Green New Deal.
According to E&E News: “A policy group is being formed to support an energized progressive movement that’s taken Capitol Hill by storm under the leadership of Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“It’s called the New Consensus.
“The 501c(3) nonprofit is in the process of being formed to provide a policy platform that will underpin the ambitious—and increasingly politically popular—Green New Deal aimed at weaning the United States off fossil fuels, boosting renewables and clean energy jobs, and building a ‘smart’ grid.
“Front and center will be Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a 29-year-old Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar who will serve as the group’s policy director working to flesh out details of the plan.“
Gunn-Wright was a policy team intern for former first lady Michelle Obama. In 2018, she served as policy director for the far-left Abdul El-Sayed in his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in Michigan. Gunn-Wright put together a “uniquely comprehensive suite of policy proposals, including a commitment to establishing a $15 minimum wage; tuition-free college for Michiganders with family income under $150,000; aggressive criminal justice reform; and the most detailed state-level single-payer health care plan ever,” according to The Intercept.
El-Sayed’s Deputy Campaign Manager Claire Sandberg traveled to Germany in September 2018 with DSA member and RLS staffer Winnie Wong. The pair held a meeting in the German Bundestag with members of the crypto-communist organization Die Linke.
Sandberg was also a founder of another short-lived Momentum spinoff, “We Will Replace You,” which aimed to target “centrist” Democrats not on board with the far-left’s agenda. One of her fellow co-founders, Waleed Shahid, was a Momentum leader, spokesman for the Justice Democrats, and served as policy director on Cynthia Nixon’s DSA-endorsed campaign for governor of New York.
FRSO General Secretary Sendolo Diaminah served as an official “adviser” to We Will Replace You.
The Green New Deal is a thoroughly socialist program conceived of and promoted by communists.
The DSA, FRSO, and CPUSA are all behind the Green New Deal. Even the Stalinist League of Revolutionaries for a New America, which supports North Korea, Iran, and the Russian annexation of part of the Ukraine, has backed the plan
It’s not surprising that communists are behind the Green New Deal. What is shocking is how many Democrats are willing to run with it. Some are even saying it will feature heavily in their 2020 campaign.
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.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
