Democratic Socialists of America member Dr. Michael Eric Dyson gives an impassioned speech on his “brother” Barack Obama to last weekend’s “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda” Conference in Chicago, while comrade Cornel West nearly wets himself with excitement.

Dyson is a former co-parishioner with Obama of Marxist Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, in South Chicago. He claims to have known Barack Obama since 1991.

This makes Dyson , along with Dr. Quentin Young, Timuel Black, Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, Congressman Danny K. Davis, Cornel West , Lou Pardo and possibly Rev. Jim Wallis , yet another of Obama’s long term DSA Marxist associates.

To give the man credit, if U.S. conservatives and libertarians could muster the passion for liberty that comrade Dyson has for socialism, they’d be winning hands down right now.

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Several key figures on the black left and Louis Farrakan of the Nation of Islam, gathered Saturday, March 20, 2010 for the “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda” Conference in Chicago.

The conversation was moderated by Tavis Smiley. Invited panelists included former Obama adviser Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson , both of Democratic Socialists of America, current senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, leftist Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, far left California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Tom Burrell, Marc Morial, Ben Jealous of the NAACP and the ever controversial Al Sharpton.

Louis Farrakan asserts very forcefully, that president Obama does not run America but was selected for the role. To Farrakan, Black America will only get any crumbs from the table through the power of organization.

In this tape Farrakan questions who selected Obama and expounds on the future of a declining America.

Cornel West mixes paranoia with a valid analysis of the degradation of American youth. He warns against “right wing” attacks on Obama and asserts that the President needs to be “co-rrected” to move him in a more socialist direction.

Some genuine concerns, obscured by paranoia, socialist ideology and perhaps a little racism.

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Chris Maisano

Purposefully create economic chaos and de-stabilize millions of lives to pursue an ideological ideal?

Who would would propose such madness?

Chris Maisano would.

Chris Maisano is a leading member of the Young Democratic Socialists (youth wing of Democratic Socialists of America) .  He is a member of  the  NYC DSA Economic Crisis Group, with socialist heavyweights such as Rob Saute,  Karie Gubbins and Michael Hirsch.

Writing on the YDS website on March 22, Maisano explicitly called for a new application of the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy.  Maisano  wants to overload Medicaid until it crashes, forcing the Federal government to assume full responsibility for all health care – in other words,  socialized medicine. Maisano writes,

“With yesterday’s passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed…

However, there are many serious flaws in the bill that will put single payer back on the political agenda sooner than we may think. The indispensable and indefatigable folks at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) cataloged many of them in a press release earlier today, but they only briefly touch on an issue that I think could potentially be a central aspect of single-payer strategy in the coming years: Medicaid and the fiscal crisis of the states…”

Quentin Young and friend

Physicians for a National Health Program, is incidentally led by the father of the “single payer’ movement, retired Chicago physician Quentin Young,  personal friend and former doctor of Barack Obama and a leading member of Democratic Socialists of America.

“Under the plan that Congress will pass, about half of the roughly 30 million people that would gain access to health insurance coverage would be placed in Medicaid. Medicaid is funded jointly by the federal government and the states, but the combination of dwindling tax receipts and surging enrollment – an estimated 3.3 million people joined the program in the last year alone – has severely impaired the states’ ability to meet their Medicaid obligations. This has forced many states to cut Medicaid reimbursements to doctors, resulting in drastic hardships for many Medicaid recipients. .. Since state budgets are not expected to return to health any time in the foreseeable future, Medicaid expansion could potentially break the budgets of many states around the country…”

Maisano then goes on to invoke a revival of the  Cloward-Piven Strategy, which was credited with almost bankrupting his hometown New York in the late 1970s.

“So what does this all have to do with formulating a winning strategy for the single-payer health care movement? To begin to answer this question, we need to look back at an old strategic proposal that I think has acquired a new relevance in the political terrain created by the passage of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill…”

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward

“In 1966, scholar-activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (a long-standing DSA member) wrote an article for The Nation called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty.” In the mid-sixties, Cloward and Piven found that only about half of the families eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (what welfare used to be called), were actually enrolled in the program. Recognizing the political opportunities this gap between welfare law and practice presented, they formulated an analysis that became known as the “Cloward-Piven strategy.” As they explained in their book Poor People’s Movements, the strategy had two main components…

Here Maisano directly quotes The Nation article;

“If hundreds of thousands of families could be induced to demand relief, we thought that two gains might result. First, if large numbers of people succeeded in getting on the rolls, much of the worst of America’s poverty would be eliminated. Second…we thought it likely that a huge increase in the relief rolls would set off fiscal and political crises in the cities, the reverberations of which might lead national political leaders to federalize the relief system and establish a national minimum income standard. It was a strategy designed to obtain immediate economic aid for the poor, coupled with the possibility of obtaining a longer-term national income standard” – excerpt from “Poor People’s Movements”, 1977 by Piven and Cloward

Maisano then goes on to say;

“As efforts to win single payer through traditional organizing techniques and engagement with the established political system fail to bear much fruit, the crisis provoking strategy proposed by Cloward and Piven may be our best way forward…”

Maisano’s strategy?

“So here’s what I would propose as the next step in single payer strategy: explode the Medicaid rolls. Single payer activists should organize in their communities to sign up as many eligible people as possible for Medicaid – if the administration wants to expand Medicaid coverage, then let’s give it to them. Many people would get the health coverage they need in the short term. In the longer term, the system would probably not be able to support all of them when the financial burden shifts back to the states. Popular pressure could then be mobilized to force drastic federal intervention to deal with the ensuing crisis, possibly including the implementation of single payer…”

Maisano accepts that what he is proposing carries some risk – not for the US taxpayer, or those Medicaid recipients who might be left stranded, but that the strategy might play into the hands of the dreaded ‘right’

“Of course, there are some serious potential disadvantages to this strategy. For it to be successful, the balance of political forces at play when the crisis is provoked would have to be favorable to the left and to poor and working people so that it is not settled on right-wing terms…. In any case, if meaningful progress toward the establishment of a national single payer health care system is to be made, it’s clear that we need a new strategy. Challenging the administration’s health care reform on its own terms could be a very good place to start.”

Maisano’s article clearly illustrates two things.

Firstly that Obamacare is seen by the left as a stepping stone for a “single payer” health system.

Secondly, that the deliberate destruction of  a major Federal program,  with its attendant increase in popular misery and possibly death,  is seen as a legitimate way to promote socialist ideology.

What screwed-up political ideology would promote measures  to  destroy the Nation’s existing health care system, potentially putting at risk the well-being of millions? Socialism.

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The ever-controversial Reverend Al. Sharpton states that the American people voted for socialism when they voted in President Barack Obama.

“I think the President and Nancy Pelosi get the credit. I think that this is, he began the transforming of the country, the way the President had promised. This is what he ran [on]… First of all we’d have to say that the American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama… The President promised the American people health reform when he ran, he was overwhelmingly elected running on that, and he has delivered what he promised. I don’t understand Republicans saying “this is against the will of the American people”. They voted for President Obama, who said this was going to be one of the first things he would do, and he has done the first hurdle of that tonight, So I think the American people were heard loud and clear; this was not some concept the President introduced after he won. He ran on this, and the American people won tonight because they got finally, something from a president that they voted for”

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At its national congress in February, the Workers’ Party of Brazil acclaimed Marxist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s endorsement of  as the Party’s presidential candidate for elections in October.

Dilma Roussef

In his remarks, “Lula” emphasized Dilma Rousseff’s history of militancy and  highlighted her persistence in policy implementation and in “resolving problems of the population.”

Rousseff herself promised to continue the social, economic, environmental, energy, and foreign policies of the “Lula” government. Promising once more to form a coalition government, she called for “appropriate public policies” over total reliance on market forces.

The daughter of an exiled Bulgarian Communist Party activist and a wealthy Brazillian ranching family,  Rousseff  joined Marxist anti-government guerillas in the 1960s in armed struggle against the then military government.

Taught Marxism in high school, Rousseff joined several revolutionary groups as a young woman, including Command of National Liberation (COLINA).

In early 1969,  the police invaded the group’s house and the militants responded by using a machine gun, which killed two policemen and wounded another.

Dilma went underground, later participating in the formation of the Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares. After that group split ,  Dilma was sent to Sao Paolo , where she was  charged with guarding the groups weapons-which she hid under bed.

In 1970, Rousseff, was arrested, jailed and allegedly tortured by police.

Released in 1972, Rousseff  moved into mainstream politics, serving as municipal treasury secretary in Porto Alegre in 1985. Later, she twice headed the Ministry of Energy for the Rio Grande do Sul state government. In 2000, she left the Democratic Labor Party, which she had co-founded, for the Workers Party,  serving as Minister of Mines and Energy in Lula’s first term. Rousseff became Lula’s Chief of Staff two year’s later in a government reshuffle triggered by a corruption scandal.

In March, the Communist Party of Brazil endorsed Dilma Rousseff’s candidacy.

Allied to the Workers’ Party since 1989, the Party has held government posts since 2003. Its statement affirmed, “There is no middle ground in this political clash. The result will either guarantee the continuity of the political cycle that president Lula started or backpedal with those who ruined Brazil.” At issue, according to the Party document, is national development, increased production, adequate pay for labor, and improved living standards. The Communist Party reiterated its commitment to “unity in the democratic, patriotic and popular fields.” The Party looks forward to Brazil “becoming one of the most progressive, strong and influential nations of the world.”

Lula and Rousseff meet President Obama, September 2009

Brazil is somehow regarded by many US policy makers as a moderating force in the region. This despite President Lula’s Marxist background and long term ties to Cuba and the radical Sao Paolo Forum, the Latin America wide grouping of socialist, communist and revolutionary parties, that has done much to promote the near total conquest of Latin America by the left.

Visiting Brazil recently, Secretary of State Clinton got the smile and three negatives. No, Brazil would not discourage Iran from developing nuclear power, would not help return Honduras to the Organization of the American States, and would not take on supervision over Venezuela.

Chavez and Castro aren’t the only problems America has south of the border.

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