Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | September 30, 2019,Updated: October 1, 2019
Commentary
Controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is about to associate herself with one of the most subversive organizations in this country.
On Oct. 3, Omar will present the annual Letelier-Moffitt Awards at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The IPS is a center of both far-left policy formation and support for the Palestinian socialist cause. The Letelier-Moffitt Award is named after the late Orlando Letelier, a paid Cuban intelligence agent.
With Omar’s strong ties to radical groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Palestinian socialist cause, she is a perfect fit for the IPS—whose columnists have been defending her regular outrageous statements since her election to Congress.
An IPS press release states:
“We’re excited to announce that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th District will present this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Awards!
“Rep. Omar has made herself a key figure in the progressive movement by working with a diverse group of legislators on the best ideas in politics today; bold, transformative policies like student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal.
“We’re thrilled to work with her and delighted to welcome her into our community.”
Omar’s IPS connection should raise all sorts of alarm bells.
For many years, the IPS was the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. From its founding in 1963, it steadily pushed a pro-Soviet line on foreign policy, defense, and the economy.
In a 1978 article in National Review, Brian Crozier, then director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described the IPS as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”
The Letelier-Moffitt Award has its roots in Chile’s bloody anti-communist counter-revolution of the early 1970s.
Assassination
In 1973, at the request of the Chilean parliament, Chile’s generals stepped in to remove pro-Castro socialist President Salvador Allende from office for alleged gross breaches of the country’s constitution. Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace rather than surrender to the military. For several years afterward, the military brutally cracked down on Chilean socialists, communists, and terrorists. Thousands were imprisoned, many were executed, and some simply “disappeared.”
One of the victims of the anti-communist purge was Allende’s former ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier. After a period of imprisonment, Letelier was allowed to leave Chile, settling first in Venezuela, then in Washington at the suggestion of IPS staffer Saul Landau, a personal friend of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
In 1975, Letelier became a senior fellow of the IPS, where he soon became a leader of the leftist resistance to anti-communist Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. On Sept. 10, 1976, Pinochet officially deprived Letelier of his Chilean citizenship.
Undeterred, Letelier carried on his efforts to bring down the Pinochet government. He was reportedly responsible for the cancellation of several major European loans to Chile, which made him a major enemy of the government. He was described by one of his colleagues as being “the most respected and effective spokesman in the international campaign to condemn and isolate” Chile’s anti-communist government.
On Sept. 21, 1976, Letelier was traveling to work with an IPS colleague Ronni Moffitt and her husband. As they were driving down Washington’s Embassy Row at 9.35 a.m. a bomb exploded in their car. Within an hour, Moffitt and Letelier were pronounced dead. Moffitt’s husband survived.
It was later revealed that the bomb had been planted in the direction of Chile’s intelligence service, the DINA.
During the investigation into the assassination, the FBI leaked documents to The Washington Times columnist Jack Anderson, and others, which indicated that Letelier had been an Eastern Bloc intelligence operative. Letelier had also apparently been coordinating his activities with the Chilean government-in-exile, then based in communist East Berlin.
Letelier was reportedly working closely with Allende’s daughter, Beatriz Allende, who was married to a senior Cuban intelligence officer. While working for the IPS, Letelier was being paid $1,000 a month (no small sum in 1976) from Cuba’s communist regime.
So in giving out the Letelier-Moffitt Award, Omar is, in effect, honoring the memory of a paid Cuban agent-of-influence.
Marxist Ties
Today’s IPS maintains strong ties to the DSA and other domestic Marxist groups. The IPS has several DSA comrades on staff, including Ashik Siddique, a research analyst with IPS’s National Priorities Project, and John Feffer, co-director of IPS webzine Foreign Policy in Focus. The Metro DC DSA steering committee even holds its meetings in an IPS office.
Like Omar, the IPS is uncompromisingly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.
Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the IPS. He researches “U.S. empire, borders, and migration.”
Until earlier this year, Petersen-Smith was a leading member of the now-disbanded International Socialist Organization. According to the Socialism 2016 conference website: “He has written about Black and Palestinian liberation and US empire for Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. He co-authored the ‘Black Statement of Solidarity with Palestine’ in 2015, which was signed by over 1,100 mainly communist Black activists, artists, and scholars.”
In April, Petersen-Smith, with his IPS colleague Noura Erakat. held an event with the Tufts University chapter of the far-left Students for Justice in Palestine, titled “Black Solidarity With Palestine.”
Veteran IPS staffer Phyllis Bennis runs the IPS’s New Internationalism Project. In 2001, she helped found the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She advises several leading U.N. officials on Palestine and was twice in contention to be appointed the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.
Bennis was also a leading member of Line of March, a Marxist-Leninist group that supported first communist China and then the Soviet Union.
The IPS still maintains strong ties to Cuba and played a role in President Barack Obama’s disastrous directive to ease sanctions on Havana, which probably saved the communist dictatorship from imminent collapse.
In July 2015, as the communist flag was raised over the newly reestablished Cuban Embassy on 16th Street NW in Washington, Bennis and her IPS and ex-Line of March comrade James Early “joined in the delirious shouts of ‘Viva Cuba!’,” according to The Washington Post.
“It’s an amazing moment,” Bennis told The Washington Post. “In the decades-long effort to normalize relations with Cuba, to stop the US attacks and hostility toward Cuba, we have not had so many victories. Suddenly we have a victory. The flag going up—that’s huge.”
“For those of us who were committed to the values and the aspirations of the Cuban revolution,” said Early, raising that flag again “is a recognition of Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.”
Right from the start, the IPS built networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staff, academics, government officials, and the national media. The IPS’s main aim has always been to influence U.S. government policy in favor of the world socialist movement.
It’s no surprise to see the IPS welcome Omar into its radical bosom.
Feature Photo: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks at a press conference on the Capitol on July 15, 2019. (Holly Kellum/NTD)
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 Loudon | TheEpochTimes* | September 16, 2019, Updated: September 16, 2019
Commentary
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is working closely with Brazilian Trotskyists from the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) to coordinate attacks against U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
The U.S.–Brazil revolutionary alliance is conducted through revolutionaries in both countries aligned to an international Trotskyist revolutionary coordinating body—the Brussels-based United Secretariat for the Fourth International.
One of the key point men in the alliance is Pedro Fuentes, an Argentine-born revolutionary now living in the United States. Fuentes, along with São Paulo-based “militant and leader of the Socialist Left Movement” Bruno Magalhães (also known as Bruno Silviano), represented PSOL at the August DSA convention in Atlanta. During his speech, Magalhães declared, “We in Brazil are really, really excited with the Democratic Socialist movement here in the U.S.”
Also associated with PSOL are journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, who is a federal congressman for Rio de Janeiro, and former PSOL member Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, who stabbed Bolsonaro in the stomach during a 2018 rally, almost killing him.
Pedro Fuentes
Pedro Fuentes is the “nom de guerre” of Argentine Trotskyist revolutionary Alberto Pujals. Born circa 1943, Fuentes “began his activism [in Argentina] as a teenager, when he and his brother joined a high-school student movement to reform the schools called Movimiento de Acción Reformista. In the 1960s, he joined Palabro Obrera, led by the Argentine Trotskyist revolutionary Nahuel Moreno,” according to a DSA Facebook event post. In 1971, Pedro’s older brother, Luis Pujals, a leader of the Proletarian Revolutionary Army, died in the “dirty war” against Argentina’s anti-communist government.
Fuentes was forced to flee Argentina, traveling across Latin America and Europe, where he continued working with Trotskyist groups in several countries.
Fuentes eventually settled in Brazil and, in 2000, began organizing with Movimento Esquerda Socialista (MES), a Trotskyist tendency inside the ruling leftist Workers’ Party. In 2003, the Workers’ Party split over pension reform issues, and several Trotskyist factions, including MES, subsequently founded PSOL—now Brazil’s fifth-largest political party.
Fuentes served for many years as PSOL’s secretary of international relations and still works to build ties between PSOL and other leftist parties. Though living in the United States, Fuentes still serves as a leader of the PSOL’s MES faction.
Fourth International and Mass Party of the Left
In the early 1990s, the Fourth International used its national affiliates in an attempt to rebuild the world revolutionary movement after the so-called “collapse of communism.” These efforts were modeled on the very successful Brazilian Workers’ Party—an amalgamation of leftist Christians, Greens, black radicals, ex pro-Soviet communists, former Maoists, and Fourth International Trotskyists.
In my home country of New Zealand, this concept materialized in the New Labour Party/Alliance Party, which ruled for a time in coalition with the “old” Labour Party. The Australian counterpart, Socialist Alliance, achieved little success, but in Germany, the former East German communists joined up with several Trotskyist factions to form the Party of Democratic Socialism (now Die Linke), Germany’s third-largest party on the left. Similar coalitions were formed with varying degrees of success in El Salvador, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and some Scandinavian countries.
Many of these groups also maintained close ties to old-line communists, including the Maoist-leaning Belgian Workers’ Party, the pro-Soviet South African Communist Party, and of course everyone’s friend on the left, the Cuban Communist Party.
In the United States, Trotskyists from a small “socialist feminist” group called “Solidarity” joined with former pro-Soviet communists, DSA activists, Maoists from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and ex-Maoists from the Frontline Political Organization, to form the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) in Chicago in July 1994.
According to the September/October 1994 issue of Chicago DSA’s New Ground publication, “Over 500 delegates and observers … attended the founding convention of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) held here in Chicago in July.”
New Ground reported that the speakers included Charles Nqukula, general secretary of the South African Communist Party; Dulce Maria Pereira, a senatorial candidate of the Workers’ Party of Brazil; Angela Davis of CoC; Andre Brie of the Party of Democratic Socialism of Germany; and a representative of the Cuban government.
CoC was supposed to lay the foundation for a new mass party of socialism—one that could eventually replace the Democratic Party. However, rampant sectarianism and lack of visionary leadership eventually turned the project to dust. Today, the organization still exists as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, but it’s down to fewer than 200 mainly elderly members nationwide—many of whom hold dual membership in the DSA or the Communist Party USA.
While the Fourth International’s dream of an international alliance of new mass parties of the left lived on in Brazil and Europe, it was dead in the United States—until Bernie Sanders came along.
Rebirth of the DSA
From the start, PSOL and the broader Trotskyist movement welcomed the Sanders socialist movement that took the U.S. left by storm in 2015 and 2016. The DSA went to nearly 30,000 members from 6,500 in two years, and is now approaching 60,000. This was very inspiring to many Trotskyist revolutionaries, including Pedro Fuentes.
Writing on the Spanish language website Aporrea in August 2015, Fuentes and his PSOL comrade Tiago Madeira urged Trotskyists to get behind the Sanders movement:
“In our opinion, we must support Sanders. For us, the debate in the US, with its specific characteristics, is similar to what we face in the rest of the world. Will Trotskyists, without losing sight of our strategy, intervene in events and real political movements—however contradictory they are—to contend for influence. … We are talking about building new organizations, new parties—and respecting their leaders, even if we disagree with them.”
And support Sanders they did. Solidarity, the U.S. affiliate of the Fourth International, joined the DSA en masse to help lead the Sanders movement.
Fuentes has worked closely with DSA members in the United States and attended several DSA events. As mentioned, he was a PSOL delegate to both the 2017 and 2019 DSA national conventions.
Fuentes and PSOL comrade Mariana Riscali wrote of their experience attending DSA’s breakout 2017 national convention in Chicago on the socialist website Left on the Move. The PSOL delegates were very welcome and were given equal standing to large Marxist parties from Europe.
“PSOL was known by a large share of delegates. … We are proud to say it was MES, a slate from PSOL, that has made the greatest effort to establish this contact so that we are proud of our country being recognized by the DSA at the same level as the Momentum from England, Mélenchon’s Party [France], Podemos [Spain] and Bloco de Esquerda [Portugal],” Fuentes and Riscali wrote.
The PSOL delegates look to the DSA as a breakthrough in world socialism—the start of a new international hybrid left that might build a mass revolutionary movement where older formations such as the CoC and the Brazilian Workers’ Party have failed.
“Surely, this privileged relationship with DSA will allow PSOL to look from a more internationalist point of view [at] the international situation and the emergence of new political processes independent from the old social democracy or false Latin American progressivism as PT [Workers’ Party]. DSA is the best expression of the ‘new cycle.’”
In November 2018, Fuentes attended a DSA meeting in New York, where he was photographed with two admiring members of the DSA International Committee, Carrington Morris and Ella Mahony.
In June 2017, Mahony represented the DSA at the PSOL organized “International Encampment of Youth in Struggle” in Rio de Janeiro. The event was both a congress for PSOL’s youth wing and “a convocation of international solidarity.”
Solidarity and the DSA International Commission
In 2018, the DSA revived its decades-old International Committee. After splitting with the “moderate” Socialist International in 2017, the DSA began looking for revolutionary friends overseas. The International Committee became the DSA’s diplomatic wing, charged with cementing ties to foreign socialist and communist movements.
At least two Solidarity members made it onto the newly formed committee: Boston-based David Grosser and New Yorker Dan La Botz.
Grosser is a longtime supporter of El Salvadorean revolutionary movements, whose personal goal is to “build the internationalism necessary to bring down the US Empire.”
La Botz is a seasoned revolutionary with direct ties to the Fourth International and to several Latin American revolutionary movements, including PSOL.
La Botz was meeting with PSOL activists in Brazil as far back as 2014, and also met with PSOL activists in New York in November 2016.
In April and May 2016, La Botz toured several countries in Europe and Brazil speaking about Bernie Sanders and the U.S. elections. All of his talks in Brazil were sponsored by either PSOL, or by Insurgencia, another Fourth International affiliated group also active in PSOL.
In a May 2016 article on the DSA website, La Botz explained how Fourth International Trotskyists were working with mainstream communists and other Marxists to create broad-based political parties that could compete electorally in Europe, Brazil, the UK, and the United States:
“In France, Spain, and Brazil, there have been and continue to be attempts to found new broad left, radical socialist parties as an alternative to the Social Democrats. In France we have seen both the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and the Front de Gauche, in Spain Podemos, and in Brazil, PSOL. These efforts can be compared to those in the English-speaking nations where Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labor Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party clearly represent a similar popular reaction among youth and sections of the labor movement to the conservative policies of Labor and the Democrats.”
La Botz emphasized that the Fourth International had moved on from its notoriously violent and sectarian past to a strategy of bringing about socialist revolution through the electoral process. Forming broad-based electoral alliances with communists and socialists was to be the new path to the revolution:
“The New Anti-Capitalist Party came out of a merger of former members of the French Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) with environmentalists and other social activists. Anticapitalistas was formed by people out of the Spanish Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), also Trotskyist. Ensemble in France, which participates in the Front de Gauche, has members who come from the Socialist and Communist Party, as well as from NPA and the Trotskyist left. Similarly, solidaritéS Suisse [Switzerland], though it has Trotskyist roots, has also incorporated those from other traditions.
“These groups, if they were Trotskyist in origin, have by and large turned away from many of the characteristics once associated with Trotskyist organizations. At one time many of these groups held a dogmatic view of socialist ideology based almost exclusively on a very particular and narrow reading of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. …
“They worked to organize ‘vanguard parties’ based on a supposedly ‘democratic centralist’ model and often attempted to take control of and to dictate to labor unions and popular movements. … The Fourth International … has developed a more broad-minded view of revolutionary socialism, and so have most (but not all) of its affiliated organizations.”
Hating on Trump and Bolsonaro
According to an article by DSA comrade Ben Dalton:
“The official topic at the first Brooklyn Jacobin [DSA-aligned magazine] reading group held after the [2016] election was socialist politics in Brazil, but the conversation kept returning to Trump.
“’I think you should be in the first line against Trump,’ said Pedro Fuentes, a visiting speaker and official in Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Around the room heads nodded. ‘Anti-Trump. This is the first task you have.’”
If PSOL and the DSA are united in their goal of building mass revolutionary parties in their home countries, they’re even more unified in the hatred of their respective presidents, Trump and his friend Bolsonaro.
In the United States, the DSA’s approximately 60,000 members are active in the anti-Trump movement in all 50 states. DSA comrades and their captive unions, non-profits, student unions, and even churches have organized thousands of anti-Trump rallies and meetings across the country. DSA comrades played a major role in taking back the House of Representatives for the Democrats in 2018.
Currently, the DSA is working with two pro-China organizations—Communist Party USA and Liberation Road (formerly Freedom Road Socialist Organization)—in the Left Inside/Outside Project to flip North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and even Texas to the Democratic column in 2020. If they succeed, Trump will be a one-term president, and the United States will almost certainly be lost. All the remaining free countries will then fall like dominoes.
PSOL has played a major role in almost every anti-Bolsonaro rally held before or since Brazil’s 2018 election. Their American DSA allies have tried to poison the waters for Bolsonaro in the United States as well.
At a meeting on May 26, the Collin County DSA (North Texas) Skyped in “three comrades from Brazil who are members of the PSOL … to talk with us about their organizing efforts against the current proto-fascist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Thanks to Mr. Pedro Fuentes of the PSOL, Ms. Alice Domingues, a student organizer, and Mr. Bruno Silviano, an organizer with the teacher’s union.”
“One of the most important things we learned from our comrades in Brazil was that opposition to Bolsonaro is huge in Brazil right now. At the most recent demonstrations against Bolsonaro before our conversation (which happened around the same time as DSA NTX and other area socialists, communists, anarchists, LGBTQ people, labor, and antifascists were protesting against Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to Dallas …)
“We asked our comrades in Brazil what we in the U.S. can do to help — the big ask right now was to boost awareness in the U.S. of the huge protests against Bolsonaro and show our solidarity. …
“Solidarity with the working class and oppressed of Brazil against fascism!”
The Trump–Bolsonaro Alliance Must Continue
Brazil was specifically mentioned in DSA’s Resolution #4, titled “Building the DSA International Committee,” passed during the convention, where the comrades resolved in part to “prioritize establishing relations with socialist and working-class organizations in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Latin America broadly.” The resolution claimed that “an effective and orderly International Committee is necessary for DSA to transition into an internationalist organization.”
The DSA and their PSOL comrades are fully committed to destroying the Trump–Bolsonaro alliance. From the revolutionary’s point of view, presidents Trump and Bolsonaro are huge impediments to world socialism.
They understand that this auspicious pairing could do more to counter world communism than anything we have seen since the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher–Pope John Paul partnership of the 1980s.
If Trump can turn around the United States and Bolsonaro can save Brazil, the positive consequences will be felt across the entire Western Hemisphere. And it will not end there.
If Trump and Bolsonaro destroy the Marxist movements in their respective countries, the world communist movement could be set back decades. This would be a fantastic boon for world freedom.
Trump and Bolsonaro should immediately direct their intelligence services to investigate the DSA and PSOL’s transnational interactions and their network of international allies. The DSA–PSOL–Fourth International alliance needs to be countered and dismantled. It poses a more urgent threat to our freedoms than does ISIS or al-Qaeda.
This alliance is nothing short of transnational treason. We need widespread media exposure, international governmental cooperation, and firm legal action to put an end to this threat.
Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump (R) and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (L) walk down the Colonnade before a press conference at the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on March 19, 2019.
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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | September 5, 2019, Updated: September 5, 2019
Commentary
For the fourth time since April, U.S. Maoists from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) have sent a delegation to Venezuela.
These delegations are clearly in support of Venezuela’s Marxist regime. They organize support and solidarity for the regime and clearly propagandize in its favor. They also clearly side with the Maduro regime against President Donald Trump.
Is this legal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)? Are any of these delegates registered with the U.S. government as agents of Venezuela? If not, why not? Are there grounds for prosecution under FARA?
The latest FRSO trade union delegation traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, for the “1st International Meeting of Workers in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, its Government and Its People,” which started on Aug. 29.
Delegates included labor delegations and trade union leaders from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina, Nigeria, Portugal, France, the UK, and Spain.
“On opening day, the international delegates joined their Venezuelan trade union comrades and traveled to the Plaza Bolivar in the center of Caracas. Delegates, special guests and workers from across Venezuela joined in a ‘No mas Trump!’ rally. Francisco Torrealba, the president of the Venezuelan Workers Confederation, kicked off the rally with a rousing speech.
“Attendees signed a declaration against U.S. imperialism and Trump’s blockade, demanding respect for international law and the sovereignty of Venezuela. Delegates and people from the street joined in chanting, ‘No more Trump!’ and ‘Que viva Venezuela! Que Viva Maduro! Respeto por Venezuela!’”
On Aug. 31, labor union activists from 25 countries gathered again “for the ultimate goal of building solidarity with the working class, the people and the government of Venezuela” and to coordinate opposition to “the criminal economic sanctions put in place by U.S. President Donald Trump.”
Both FRSO delegates Jared Hamil from Los Angeles and Gabriela Killpack from Salt Lake City, Utah, are active in Teamsters United, an alliance working to build Maoist power in the Teamsters Union. Both have histories in organized labor and the U.S. Maoist movement.
The latest FRSO delegation comes hard on the heels of another FRSO delegation to Venezuela that attended a major international communist gathering, Foro de São Paulo (São Paolo Forum), in Caracas in late July.
“Delegations to the Foro de Sao Paulo committed in the final declaration to act together in solidarity with Venezuela, Latin America and other countries of the world against U.S. aggression,” according to FightBack! News.
Among the 1,200 delegates were leaders of socialist and communist parties “from every Latin American country, most of Central America and the Caribbean, as well as Mexico.”
They were joined by leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines-aligned National Democratic Front, the North Korean ambassador to Venezuela, several far-left Palestinian groups, European communists including Basque and Irish militant, and the FRSO delegation led by Grand Rapids, Michigan-based comrade Tom Burke.
Among other socialist dignitaries, Burke, as FRSO organizational secretary, had a photo-op with Alfredo Valdivieso of the Communist Party of Colombia Central Committee.
In late April, Burke also led a four-member FRSO delegation to Venezuela to celebrate May Day. On their first day, the comrades held a two-hour meeting with “members of Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) Central Committee and leaders of the Communist Youth of Venezuela,” according to FightBack! News.
The comrades also met Venezuelan Minister of Communes Blanca Eckhout, who had just made a “triumphant speech about building 2.6 million new homes.” Eckhout quoted Hugo Chavez, saying, “Our new society cannot be capitalist because capitalism is designed to destroy our homeland, our society, and our people.”
Between the two events, long-time FRSO supporter and Chicago Teachers Union activist Richard Berg led an unofficial teachers union delegation to Caracas in mid-July.
According to FightBack! News, “Their goals were to learn what they could from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, exchange views on effective education and to show solidarity with the students, teachers and social movements of Venezuela.”
The Trump administration has clearly signaled that it wants to oust the Maduro regime in favor of the legitimate interim President Juan Guaidó.
The citizens of Venezuela have suffered for too long at the hands of the illegitimate Maduro regime. Today, I have officially recognized the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela. https://t.co/WItWPiG9jK
Since then, the U.S. government has instated ever-stronger sanctions on Venezuela to drive the Russian-, Chinese-, and Cuban-backed Maduro regime from power.
Yet all through this, U.S. communists have been regularly traveling to Caracas to meet with government officials and Communist Party leaders. They’re organizing with other communist entities, including North Korean diplomats, to counter U.S. sanctions. Then they hold meetings on U.S. soil to propagandize for the Maduro regime all over the country.
If these FRSO Maoists are all registered under FARA as Venezuelan agents, they’re only morally guilty for supporting a tyrannous regime. If they’re not registered as Venezuelan agents, are they acting illegally?
Perhaps if the Justice Department isn’t too busy investigating the president, they might look into this matter.
Photo credit: Freedom Road Socialist Organization supporters during an anti-Trump march in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017. (slowking4/GFDL 1.2)
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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | August 1, 2019,Updated: August 8, 2019
Commentary
When the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, endorse “critical race theory” (CRT), you know American Christianity has a Marxism problem.
At the Southern Baptist national convention in Birmingham, Alabama, in June, a resolution on CRT and “intersectionality” gained passage with a strong majority.
The resolution affirmed the Bible as “the first, last, and sufficient authority” in guiding the church on dealing with social evils and said that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be used in submission to Scripture,” according to a news article from the Baptist Press. The resolution described critical race theory as a “set of tools to explain how race functions in society and intersectionality as the study of how various characteristics overlap.”
Traditional Baptists who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and contains the answers to all problems within its pages must have wondered why their church would need Marxism for any reason at all.
One brave Christian, Tom Ascol, a senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, unsuccessfully challenged the CRT resolution, correctly explaining that “critical race theory and intersectionality” are “rooted in ideologies that are incompatible with Christianity.”
What Is Critical Race Theory?
So what actually is CRT? What does intersectionality mean?
“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”
In other words, racism is about power, it’s exclusively a white problem, and it’s intrinsic in the current social system. Therefore, to end racism, we must change the existing power structures—a polite way of saying revolution. Affirmative action, reparations, and hate speech legislation are all justified by CRT. All are revolutionary tools derived from Marxism.
Intersectionality is the concept that all oppressions are linked. Racial oppression is linked to gay oppression, which, in turn, is linked to the oppression of women and workers. This is a modern expansion of the Marxist idea that “capitalism” oppresses not only workers but racial and gender groups as well. All “oppressions” intersect. We can’t treat them as separate problems. The main problem is not just capitalism, but white racist sexist capitalism.
Two black scholars are most closely identified with modern CRT—the late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the recently deceased James Cone, a professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary.
It’s worth noting that a member of the Southern Baptist convention resolutions committee, Walter Strickland, avidly teaches Cone’s theories from his post at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, according to a graduate of the seminary. Strickland seems to have no conflict teaching Cone’s version of race-based Marxism to the future Baptist pastors who stream through his classroom.
James Cone: Religious Revolutionary
There is zero doubt that James Cone was a Marxist.
In 1980, the Democratic Socialists of America published an essay by Cone titled “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?”
In June 1984, a delegation of Black American Church leaders visited Havana.
Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, reported that the organizers included the communist-controlled Ecumenical Council of Cuba, the Baptist Worker-Student Coordination of Cuba, and the Caribbean Council of Churches. The Black Theology Project was listed as a U.S. sponsor, and the Soviet-controlled Christian Peace Conference was also represented.
Delegates included Rev. Jeremiah Wright of UCC Trinity Church in Chicago, the future pastor to Barack Obama; William Babley, director of the Racial Union Program of the Methodist Church; Howard Dodson, chairman of the Black Theology Project; Dwight Hopkins, vice chairman of the Black Theology Project and a future founder of the communist-led Black Radical Congress; and James Cone of Union Theological Seminary.
Cone was also a little un-Christian in his racial views.
In his 1969 book, “Black Theology and Black Power,” Cone wrote: “The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. … All white men are responsible for white oppression. … Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”
In a 2004 essay, Cone opined: “Black suffering is getting worse, not better. … White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison.”
Derrick Bell: Legal Revolutionary
Derrick Bell, who a young Barack Obama once praised at a Harvard protest rally as comparable to Rosa Parks, was also a man of considerable influence.
According to his 2011 New York Times obituary, Bell’s “1973 book, ‘Race, Racism and American Law,’ became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.”
Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” Lani Guinier, told The New York Times. Guinier was the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty and is the daughter of the late leading Communist Party USA member Ewart Guinier.
Bell was a contributor to the journal Freedomways, which has been described as “one of the most influential African-American literary and political journals of the 1960s and 1970s.” Freedomways was established and run by well-documented members and sympathizers of the Communist Party USA.
According to Accuracy in Media, documents declassified in 2011/2012 from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party, revealed that Freedomways, which closed in 1986, was subsidized by both the Soviet and Chinese communist parties.
Bell was also a founding member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the self-proclaimed “legal arm of the Black Liberation Movement.”
According to an archived page of the organization’s website:
“In 1968, young people of African descent in America were growing impatient with the slow pace of social change. Despite modest advances brought on by two decades of non-violent resistance, from one end of the country to the other, the cry for Black Power was raised in the midst of a sea of clinched fists. At the same time, this new militant spirit had moved many to don black berets and carry rifles. On street corners in practically every Black community, passers-by heard demands for Nation Time and Power to the People!
“Inevitably, the powers-that-be responded to this activist renaissance with police brutality, frame-ups and a vicious counter-intelligence program that targeted scores of militants for harassment, prosecution or assassination. A small group of Black lawyers refused to sit idly by while the iron fist of government came down hard on the bravest and most intelligent of the Black community’s younger generation. This period forced the birth of the National Conference of Black Lawyers which, as an organization, began to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with rifle-toting revolutionaries.”
The National Conference of Black Lawyers was a U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a still-existing international communist front originally founded by the Soviet Union.
Is CRT Compatible With Christianity?
Is CRT compatible with Christianity, or indeed any God-centered faith?
Christianity is based entirely around the individual and his or her relationship with God. It is the individual who may be saved through faith in Jesus Christ, not the collective.
How can a collectivist philosophy that emphasizes racial division above all else and despises all manifestations of individual liberty have anything to offer Christianity? The answer is simple: It doesn’t. CRT is a Marxist technique used to divide society into antagonistic racial groups that can be manipulated to create chaos and revolution.
Are those who bring CRT into the church Christian? Or are they Marxists posing as Christians? Is their true purpose salvation or revolution?
I was told recently of an episode that occurred in a church in North Carolina. The young pastor, all fired up with CRT, noticed that a black family and a white family in his congregation shared the same surname. He falsely concluded that the ancestors of the white family must have once owned the ancestors of the black family. From the pulpit, the pastor demanded that the white family apologize to the black family for the slave-owning sins of their forefathers. The white family bravely refused to apologize for the nonexistent transgression, which created a major split in the church. That church no longer exists.
CRT is not just a Southern Baptist problem. This false Marxist doctrine is taught in churches, seminaries, and universities all across the United States.
Some brave souls are standing against this corrupt doctrine, but hundreds of thousands of seminarians and churchgoers are going along with revolution posing as religion.
The late great Andrew Breitbart used to say that “politics is downstream from culture.” He could have added that “culture is downstream from religion.”
The Southern Baptists, the most conservative major Protestant denomination in the United States, have started down the Marxist road. Several other denominations are well ahead of them. If this isn’t reversed, how will this shift affect our culture and politics in years to come?
Photo: Parishioners sit inside the renovated Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 19, 2002. (Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)
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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | January 22, 2019,Updated: February 17, 2019
Commentary
The United States is a deeply religious country. Very early on, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) realized that if the United States was ever to be brought to socialism, religion would have to be harnessed to the task.
Enter the CPUSA’s Religion Commission, where socialist pastors, religious academics, and laypeople network to spread Marxist ideas through their churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.
As the United States is primarily a Christian country, the communists began to infiltrate churches, seminaries, and theological colleges even before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In congressional testimony in July 1953, former CPUSA Chairman Ben Gitlow described how the first communist front was established in the United States, by minister and later Party member Harry Ward:>
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action … was first organized by a group of Socialist, Marxist clergymen of the Methodist church headed by Dr. Harry F. Ward. … Its objective was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of socialism. It was established in 1907, 12 years before the organization of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919.”
In testimony a few days later, another high-ranking communist defector exposed Ward as a card-carrying communist and a powerful “agent of influence” for the communist cause:
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by the Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a Party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations campaign. It was invaluable because, through it, the Party was able to get contacts with thousands of ministers all over the country.”
That defector, Manning Johnson, also went on to reveal how the CPUSA’s Soviet masters had shifted emphasis to co-opting religion from destroying it:
“Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the ‘new line’ was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia, where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself.
“The Communist leadership in the United States realized that the infiltration tactic in this country would have to adapt itself to American conditions and the religious make-up peculiar to this country. In the earliest stages, it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools. The practical conclusion drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”
According to Johnson, the CPUSA set about infiltrating American Christianity at every level:
“In the early 1930s, the Communists instructed thousands of their members to rejoin their ancestral religious groups and to operate in cells designed to take control of churches for Communist purposes. This method was not only propounded but was executed with great success among large elements of American church life. Communists operating a double-pronged infiltration, both through elements of Communist-controlled clergy and Communist-controlled laymen, managed to pervert and weaken entire strata of religious life in the United States.”
All over the United States, CPUSA members went back to their childhood churches. Over time, many gained positions of influence. This activity ramped up during the Vietnam era.
Some examples follow:
In Utah, Wayne Holley was a proud member of the Mormon Church and founder of the Joe Hill Club of the CPUSA. Holley worked for “all economic and social issues including universal health care, fair housing, jobs with justice, women’s issues, and all ‘movements for peace.’ He fought against nuclear testing at the Nevada test site, the Vietnam War, and the MX Missile Program,” according to CPUSA publication People’s World.
In Chicago, Bill Hogan, a CPUSA member and Catholic priest, joined in the national campaigns to end the U.S. war in Vietnam, was a leader in Chicago Clergy and Laity Concerned (an anti-war group), and “was one of the plaintiffs in a pair of federal lawsuits in 1974 and 1975 that sought to stop alleged Chicago Police Department harassment of political activists,” according to his obituary.
In New York, CPUSA member the Rev. Richard Morford was executive director of the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship and a leader of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
During the Vietnam war era, the American Communist movement split into Maoist, Trotskyist, and “democratic socialist” factions. The traditional CPUSA was dramatically reduced in numbers. However, far-left infiltration of seminaries and theological schools increased as thousands of young draft-dodgers opted to promote socialism in divinity school rather than fight communists in Vietnam.
Today, most of the leftist divinity professors and religious leaders come out of the 1960s Maoist and “democratic socialist” movements rather than the CPUSA.
However, the CPUSA did continue to make considerable progress in black-majority churches. Since the 1960s, when the CPUSA began to more deeply infiltrate the Democratic Party, a larger emphasis was put on recruiting black pastors. These pastors could be used to promote socialist policies within the Democratic Party, and to keep their congregations loyally voting for the left.
In April 2005, the CPUSA re-organized its Religious Commission with a conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The CPUSA’s People’s World newspaper quoted several participants to give a flavor of the event:
“‘The word of God and communism are hand in hand,’ said Diana Sowry, a school bus driver from Ashtabula County, Ohio. … Sowry is a union activist and also active in her church, where she sings in the choir. She feels communists and others who are working to defeat the ultra-right and advance peace, social and economic justice, and socialism are ‘doing the work of the Word.’
“The Rev. Scott Marks, from New Haven, Conn., said ‘people in the pews’ cannot simply stick to ‘feel-good issues,’ but must ‘be willing to go to the wall on the real issues.’ … [Marks] is a Pentecostal minister who leads the Connecticut Center for a New Economy. For him, this is doing ‘the real work’ of Jesus. ‘It’s not pie in the sky when we die,’ Marks told the World. ‘It’s how are we going to change things in the here and now.’ …
“In the session on work in local churches, the Rev. Gil Dawes, a retired volunteer pastor at Trinity Methodist Church here, emphasized that grassroots progressive religious activism has deep historical roots, and has to be re-energized today. ‘That’s where the right is way ahead of us,’ he said. …
“’People suffering will become leaders if they have a chance to put it together with other people,’ Dawes said. This kind of Bible study helped turn one congregation from fundamentalist to one of the most progressive, he said.
“In the session on Marx and religion, Paul Nelson, a Lutheran minister who teaches at a community college in Iowa, disputed the idea that Marx opposed all religion. What Marx denounced was an ‘illusory’ form of religion that served as ‘ideological cover for the exercise of aristocratic economic and political power.’”
Today’s Influence
Today’s CPUSA is still very active in the church. Here are some examples:
Edward Carson, chairman of the Boston Communist Party, was an editor for The Christian Century “Then and Now” blog.
Michael Adam Reale served on the CPUSA Religious Commission in 2004 and 2005. Reale told the CPUSA newspaper People’s Weekly World (later changed to People’s World) in 2004:
“I personally felt led to bring into the Communist Party three friends who are active in their faiths, one a Quaker, another who is the pastor of the United Church of Christ, and the third a Jehovah’s Witness—all three had expressed an interest in the party. We all need to confront the myth that communism is anti-religion. Communism is not anti-religion—it is anti-opulence. …
“I came to the Communist Party because of my deep Quaker faith. I have become convinced (a Quaker expression) of the ‘rightness’ of Marxism.”
In 2010, Pierre Williams was secretary of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He received his master’s in divinity from Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. He also completed pastoral residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and served as staff chaplain at Harbor Hospital in Baltimore. He is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and has been a member of the Florida Interfaith Commission on Children and Youth.
Henry Millstein, a practicing Roman Catholic, is an activist in several faith-based social justice organizations. He serves on the National Committee and the Religion Commission of the CPUSA.
Millstein holds a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of California–Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, with a focus on Jewish–Christian relations, and has taught humanities and history of religion at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Graduate Theological Union.
Millstein is currently programs manager at Islamic Networks Group in San Jose. His LinkedIn profile states:
“His background includes both academic and experiential acquaintance with a variety of cultures and religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Native American traditions. In his current position at ING-Islamic Networks Group, he brings together his experience in moving across boundaries of faith and culture with his passion for peace, nonviolence, and social justice.”
The Rev. James Caldwell is one of two black pastors in the Houston Communist Party branch. He is a graduate of Phyllis Wheatley High School and Texas Southern University’s School of Public Affairs. He also attended Dallas Theological Seminary and has been an ordained minister for over 30 years.
The Rev. Tim Yeager was, in 2010, chairperson of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He has served on the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns and the Advocacy Center of The Episcopal Church.
After a Christian upbringing in Iowa, Yeager went on to study Russian and History at the University of Iowa. The Vietnam War was raging then, and he became involved in the anti-war movement.
“That opened my eyes to a whole host of issues. I moved away from Christianity and became a Unitarian. As time went on, I became a leader in left-wing student activities … I had read Karl Marx on Ludwig Feuerbach [a German philosopher and anthropologist] and decided that I had to move away from religion altogether and became a Marxist,” Yeager said in a 2015 interview in British local magazine Westcombe News.
Yeager also became chief organizer of the Communist Party in Iowa but was drawn back to the church by communist pastor Gil Dawes.
“I never really lost my connection to my home church in Iowa. It was part of my family. And then, I met a wonderful man named Gil Dawes. He was a Methodist minister and liberation theologian who showed me what I had not really taken on board, that Christianity and socialism had much in common and so I joined his church … but I have to admit that I had not yet become a Christian again in my heart,” Yeager said in the same interview.
In 2011, Yeager was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, and, in 2012, he took on responsibility for serving a small inner-city church on the West Side of Chicago.
He currently serves at a church in London and is a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
Communists want to be gods on Earth. Their main competition for the minds of men is revealed religion. Attempts to brutally suppress Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the early days of the Soviet Union proved counter-productive; infiltrating and twisting religion is far more effective. This tactic has been applied all over the world and has made huge inroads in the United States.
Much of what is preached today in U.S. churches have been influenced, if not dominated, by communist ideology posing as religion.
Feature photo: A priest walks to the sanctuary following a mass Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
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 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.
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.
