Cross-posted from the New Zeal blog

Obama File 110 here

Stanley Kurtz’s new book “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism”, finally proves that Barack Obama attended the Democratic Socialists of America - run Socialist Scholars Conferences in 1983 and 1984.

He also reveals how some of the marxists participating in those conferences would influence Obama’s career in later years.

In this post I look at the 10th annual Socialist Scholars Conference held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in April 1992.

One panel in particular was important: “Towards a New Party”, with Elaine Bernard, Arthur Lipow, Kurt Stand and Judy Page.

The panel was openly sponsored by D.S.A., and Elaine Bernard and Kurt Stand were both leading D.S.A. comrades. Lipow is at the very least a supporter.

At this time, the New Party was in its infancy. The first strategic meetings to plan the New Party were held in the Madison Wisconsin home of radical academic Joel Rogers in the very early 1990s.

Present at the meeting were Rogers’ wife Sarah Siskind, (a lawyer who worked for the same firm as Barack Obama), Dan Cantor (now a leader of the D.S.A. infiltrated New York Working Families Party), ACORN leaders Wade Rathke, Zach Polett, Steve Kest and Jon Kest, Steve Cobble (from the far left Institute for Policy Studies, (there in an advisory role), Sandy Morales Pope (for the first 18 months), and at least at the first meeting Gerry Hudson from D.S.A. and SEIU.

Of the conference panelists Judy Page was obviously a New Party activist, while Elaine Bernard went on to become a key builder of the New Party.

The most interesting of the panelists however, was Kurt Stand.

At the time Stand was member of the D.S.A. Racial Diversity Task Force – charged with finding ways of recruiting (and retaining) more “people of color” into the organization. He would also soon become a member of the D.S.A.’s “steering committee” and later, its “national political committee”. In other words he was a key leader of the organization.

Kurt Stand was the son of Mille Stand, a long time Communist Party USA member.

Inspired by his family’s beliefs, Kurt Stand was politically active from his teens – defending Angela Davis and Philip Berrigan and Daniel Berrigan and joining the Young Workers Liberation League; youth-wing of the Communist Party.

Kurt Stand was also a long standing spy for East Germany and possibly the Soviet Union.

The young Kurt Stand began his spying activities in 1972 after being recruited by East Germany to cultivate other spies in the Washington, DC, area. He was introduced to East German intelligence officers (the Stasi) through his father Mille Stand, a chemical engineer who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

An FBI affidavit said East Germany’s relationship with the Stand family goes back to Stand’s father (Mille Stand), who recruited his son as a communist agent.

Stand and his wife, co-conspirator Theresa Squillacote frequently traveled to Mexico, Germany, and Canada during which time Stand would meet with their East German handlers.

When the two Germanys united in 1990, Stand’s controllers attempted to recruit him to spy for the Soviet Union and then for the Russian Federation. Although he never gained access to classified material, his role in the operation was to recruit agents and to provide information about the non-governmental groups with which he worked. Stand allegedly received $24,650 for his recruiting and coordinating efforts.

On 23 Oct 1998, he and wife Squillacote were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, attempted espionage, and illegally obtaining national defense documents. On 22 Jan 1999, a US District Judge sentenced Squillacote to 21 years and 10 months in prison and Stand to a sentence of 17 years and six months.

What role if any Kurt Stand played in the New Party is unknown, but the role of its most famous recruit, Barack Obama is becoming increasingly clear.

In 1993, the Chicago New Party founded an equally radical “sister organization”, Progressive Chicago. New Party members, ACORN activist Madeline Talbott and labor unionist Dan Swinney played a key role in this new organization’s formation.

Barack Obama was a member of both organizations.

In an April 27, 1993 letter to prospective Progressive Chicago members, Swinney wrote;

I recently have become interested in the New Party as well as committed myself to see if we can build a Progressive Chicago network, working with Madeline Talbott of ACORN – the local New Party convener.

I wanted to introduce you to the NP and Progressive Chicago and would like to talk to you about it to see if there is a role you want to play.

Barack Obama was probably approached to join Progressive Chicago as early July 7, 1993 and was among key members invited to a January 1994 meeting in this December 31 1993 letter.

Numerous documentary sources have confirmed that Obama went on to also join the New Party including this clipping from New Party News Spring 1996, page 1.

Barack Obama went on to win an Illinois State Senate seat, then a US Senate seat, followed by the Presidency of the United States of America.

Kurt Stand languishes in prison, a convicted traitor to his country. However he still remains committed to “changing America”.

In June 2008 Kurt Stand wrote an essay in prison entitled “Supporting Barack Obama: A Prison-Eye View of the Presidential Campaign“:

As to Obama, I vacillated, knowing of his past activism, but not seeing enough in his Senate record or campaign approach to sufficiently differentiate himself from Edwards or Clinton…

To go back to Obama, nobody knows what he will do, but if he is able to overcome our country’s racism and actually win election we can expect some initial efforts to rein in the excesses of the Bush Administration, some measures to ameliorate the worst conditions which people are experiencing in terms of rights, in terms of insecurity…

It will be up to those who want genuine social justice to build movements that give him the possibility of pushing further; finding out then whether he will or won’t remembering that the key will not be him but us (us defined as those who worked for his election, for social justice activists, the left) and what we do, how we organize. How we use the social solidarity the campaign is developing as the basis of a renewed social solidarity. Will that be enough—no, the structural roots of the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, of neo-liberal economics, of the authoritarian aspects of our political culture won’t go gently in the night. Only, however, by working in good faith with attempts to improve what is, is it even possible to imagine the building of the necessary, broad-based, independent, radical formations able to press for deeper changes.

In sum, radicals and progressives ought to join those—including those in prison—who have already decided to back Obama, see where the campaign can take us, see what can then be accomplished.

Interesting indeed that that Kurt Stand should claim know of Obama’s “past activism.”

Kurt Stand was a Washington DC based labor activist. Barack Obama was an obscure Chicago “community organizer” and local politician. How did he know of Obama’s past? What was the connection?

Two men once moved in the same circles. One is an now incarcerated traitor, the other is President of the United States of America.

Do they still share the same goals?

Obama file 112 here

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Cross-posting from the New Zeal blog

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

He is also the author of “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism”.

In his new book, (which references the New Zeal blog) Mr Kurtz confirms President Barack Obama’s long time links to the US’s largest marxist organization, Democratic Socialists of America.

In a new article in National Review Online , Mr Kurtz confirms something I first speculated on here, that Barack Obama had attended D.S.A.’s annual Socialist Scholar’s Conferences in New York, in the early 1980s.

On the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a “Socialist Scholars Conference.” There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life.

The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency — and its own spotty reputation. In the early 1980s, America’s socialists discovered what Saul Alinsky had always known: “Community organizing” is a euphemism behind which advocates of a radical vision of America could advance their cause without the bothersome label “socialist” drawing adverse attention to their efforts.

A loose accusation of his being a socialist has trailed Obama for years, but without real evidence that he saw himself as part of this radical tradition. But the evidence exists, if not in plain sight then in the archives — for example, the archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which include Obama’s name on a conference registration list. That, along with some misleading admissions in the president’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, makes it clear that Obama attended the 1983 and 1984 Socialist Scholars conferences, and quite possibly the 1985 conclave as well. A detailed account of these conferences (along with many other events from Obama’s radical past) and the evidence for Obama’s attendance at them can be found in my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

The 1983 Cooper Union Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing. Obama’s account of his turn to community organizing doesn’t add up. He portrays it as a mere impulse based on little actual knowledge. But that impulse saw Obama through two years of failed job searches. Clearly he had a deeper motivation. The evidence suggests he found it at the Socialist Scholars conferences, where he encountered the entrancing double idea that America could be transformed by a kind of undercover socialism, and that African Americans would be the key figures in advancing community organizing.

Kurtz also confirms another New Zeal thesis, that the cross class, multi-racial movement that put Obama in the White house, was modeled on the the communist/socialist backed alliance that made far-left Harold Washington mayor of Chicago in 1983.

The 1983 conference took place in the shadow of Harold Washington’s first race for mayor of Chicago. Washington was not only Obama’s political idol, he was the darling of America’s socialists in the mid-1980s. Washington assembled a “rainbow” coalition of blacks, Hispanics, and left-leaning whites to overturn the power of Chicago’s centrist Democratic machine. Washington worked eagerly and openly with Chicago’s small but influential contingent of socialists, many of whom brought the community organizations and labor unions they led onto the Washington bandwagon.

America’s socialists saw the Harold Washington campaign as a model for their ultimate goal of pushing the Democrats to the left by polarizing the country along class lines. This socialist “realignment” strategy envisioned driving business interests out of a newly radicalized Democratic party. The loss was to be more than made up for through a newly energized coalition of poor and minority voters, led by minority politicians on the model of Harold Washington. The new coalitions would draw on the open or quiet direction of socialist community organizers, from whose ranks new Harold Washingtons would emerge. Groups like ACORN and Project Vote would swell the Democrats with poor and minority voters and, with the country divided by class, socialism would emerge as the natural ideology of the have-nots.

Mr Kurtz also specifically names two leading D.S.A. members Frances Fox Piven and Peter Dreier as driving the strategy that eventually brought Obama to power.

Interestingly Frances Fox Piven was also a leader of the radical New Party, which Obama joined in Chicago in the mid 1990s and was later an endorser of Progressives for Obama in 2008.

Figures pushing this broader strategy at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference included ACORN adviser Frances Fox Piven and organizing theorist Peter Dreier, now a professor at Occidental College and an adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. That is to say, Obama’s connection to socialist ideologues didn’t end with his recruitment into the ranks of community organizers. It began there and blossomed into a quarter century of intricate relationships with both on-the-record and in-all-but-name socialists.

Kurtz also brings in Obama’s former pastor, the marxist and D.S.A. connected Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the father of Black liberation theology, the also D.S.A. allied James “white man is the Devil” Cone.

I’ve spent the last two years in the archives unraveling the connections. Here are a few. By the mid-1980s, James Cone, Jeremiah Wright’s theological mentor, had struck up a close cooperative relationship with the DSA. Cone and a prominent follower spoke at the conferences Obama attended. Shortly after the 1984 conference, Cone joined Reverend Wright in Cuba, where they expressed support for the Cuban social system as a model for the United States. Wright touted his Cuba trips to his congregation for years. Obama would have quickly discovered Wright’s ties to the liberation theologians he’d first learned of at the Socialist Scholars conferences. The connection helps explain Obama’s choice of Wright as his pastor.

Mr Kurtz also devotes a lot of space to Obama and the D.S.A. controlled Midwest Academy, D.S.A. “friend” Heather Booth and Obama’s pro-Soviet political patron, Alice Palmer.

A little-known Chicago training institute for community organizers, the Midwest Academy, is in many ways the key to Barack Obama’s political rise. The Midwest Academy was closely allied to the DSA, which sponsored the Socialist Scholars conferences in New York. Most Midwest Academy leaders remained quiet about their socialism. Inspired by the success of the American Communist “Popular Front,” and by 19th-century American reformers who used populist and communitarian language to achieve socialist ends through incremental legislative means, the Midwest Academy’s leaders advocated a strategy of stealth.

Officials from the Midwest Academy network trained Obama, supplied him with funds, and got him appointed head of Illinois Project Vote. Years later, Obama sent foundation money to the Midwest Academy. Barack and Michelle Obama ran a project called “Public Allies” that was effectively an extension of the Midwest Academy. Alice Palmer, the Illinois state senator who chose Obama as her successor, was once a high official in the Midwest Academy network. Several Midwest Academy leaders advised Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Academy founder Heather Booth is now a key figure in coordinating grassroots support for the president’s budget, health-care, and financial-reform plans.

Stanley Kurtz sums up the article with an explanation of why Obama’s hidden socialist ties are so important.

As I detail at length in Radical-in-Chief, deceptions and glaring omissions about his radical past reach far beyond Obama’s involvement with the Socialist Scholars conferences and the Midwest Academy. Archival documents reveal that Obama lied during the 2008 campaign about his ties to ACORN. New evidence confirms that Obama has hidden the truth about his relationships to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. The unknown story of Obama’s deep involvement with a radical group called UNO of Chicago is revealed. The claims of candidate Obama and his mentors that he shunned Saul Alinsky’s confrontational tactics turn out to be a sugary fairy tale. The obfuscating techniques of Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, are exposed.

The pattern of misdirection upon which President Obama’s political career has been built has its roots in the socialist background of community organizing. ACORN, Reverend Wright, and Bill Ayers were all routes into that hidden socialist world, and that is why Obama has had to obscure the truth about these and other elements of his past. More important, the president’s socialist past is still very much alive in the governing philosophy and long-term political strategy of the Obama administration.

As we move into the first national election of the Obama presidency, Americans are confronted with a fateful choice. Either we will continue to be subject to President Obama’s radical and only very partially revealed plans for our future, or we will place a strong check on the president’s ambitions. Knowing the truth about Obama’s past is the best way to safeguard our future.

Stanley Kurtz’s book will be a must read for every serious student of the Obama phenomenon. Buy your copy today.

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Cross-posted from the New Zeal blog

The Communist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America have realized their mistake.

After working hard to elect their long time friend and ally, Barack Obama in 2008, the marxists relaxed a little and waited for “change” to come. They didn’t figure on the level of resistance their programs would generate via Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement and patriotic elements in the Republican Party.

Realizing that their socialist agenda hangs in the balance, the Communists and D.S.A. are working overtime to re-invigorate the Obama coalition – both to counter the Tea Party and to keep the Democrats in power after the looming mid term elections.

Discounting the obvious lies and propaganda, there is a serious message in this article on D.S.A. official, Eliseo Medina from the from the Communist Party USA’s latest Peoples World.

The 567 organizations and groups that turned out several hundred thousand people for the “One Nation” march in Washington on Oct. 2 will try to stay together to work on each other’s causes after the Nov. 2 election, a top union participant says.

In an interview with Press Associates during the march, new Service Employees International Union secretary-treasurer Eliseo Medina added that for many of the groups involved, it would mean “getting out of the silos” of their own causes.

The coalition, including SEIU, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the teachers, the National Nurses Union, the Communications Workers, the Transport Workers Union and many other national and local unions, got behind the march for two reasons.

One was to show that progressives can muster more numbers than the radical right tea party zealots of radio talker Glenn Beck and GOP politician Sarah Palin. They led a similar march at the Lincoln Memorial – site of the Oct. 2 rally – several weeks before.

The other was to energize the progressive forces for the final days of the 2010 election campaign.

Medina made it clear the coalition will extend beyond the election. “This is an exercise in power,” he explained…

Medina admitted that energy and enthusiasm among progressives had slacked off in the last two years, after the 2008 election brought Democratic President Barack Obama into office, accompanied by Democratic majorities in Congress – all elected with heavy labor support.

“There was such a sense of excitement in 2008. We forgot and left everything to Obama,” he said.

“But then we saw issue after issue – health care, tax cuts for the middle class, immigration reform – go down” to Senate GOP filibusters and obstructionism. The groups then “realized we had to do something, but organizing takes time,” veteran organizer Medina admitted.

The left knows exactly what is at stake here.

The Tea Party and its allies also understands that this election could decide the future of America for ever.

The big question is – which way will the center vote in November?

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Cross-posted from the New Zeal blog

Tony Pecinovsky is a prominent member of the Communist Party USA. He is currently district “staffperson” for the Missouri/Kansas Communist Party.

Pecinovsky is the Bureau Chief of the Missouri / Kansas Friends of the People’s World. He serves as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater St. Louis Communication Workers of America Council and Secretary of St. Louis Jobs with Justice. He is also a Newspaper Guild delegate to the St. Louis Central Labor Council, a St. Louis Progressive Vote Coalition board member and is a big Barack Obama supporter.

Tony Pecinovsky is a propagandist and a student of power politics. He understands the balance of forces now in play in American politics and the high stakes being played for.

In today’s Peoples World, Pecinovsky lays it on the line for his Party comrades.

The looming mid terms will either lead to: a resurgent extreme right-wing Republican Party (which will) use every trick in the book to curtail democratic rights, workers’ rights and continue the failed policies of the Bush Administration, but worse.

Or an advance in the; struggle for immediate reforms and long-term systemic change.

In Tea Party terms , the elections will lead to either a last chance to restore a free American republic, or a major, possibly irreversible, advance towards socialism.

Writes Tony Pecinovsky;

Ultimately, whether we are aware of it or not, our country is in the midst of a power struggle. And any honest analysis of the direction of our country has to take into account the balance of political power.

Power is the ability to control, create or prevent change. As such, any talk of change has to also deal with questions of political power. Without an understanding of this power, we are ill equipped to engage fully in the process of change.

In other words, if we don’t objectively understand our – and our enemies’ – strengths and weaknesses, how can we understand which terrain of struggle is most conducive to victory or defeat? Simply put, if we fail to conduct a proper power analysis, how do we know if we should be on the offensive or the defensive; how do we know if we are ready as a movement for more substantive change, or if we are facing a period of prolonged retrenchment?

At this moment, tens of thousands of union members, activists and community leaders are engaged in what could be a decisive moment in our nation’s history – the mid-term elections. Make no mistake about it: this is a question of power, of people and money mobilized.

At the same time, Wall Street CEOs, big banks and the health care industry are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the outcome of the November elections, while activating fringe elements in their right-wing base. No question, this is a fight for political power – from the other side.

So let’s be clear about one thing: The mid-term elections are about power – the power to move our country forward or to take us backwards. Anyone who doesn’t see that is missing the forest for the trees.

Furthermore, if we aren’t united, energized, enthusiastic and mobilized, if we lack the power to win the most immediate of struggles that we are confronted with – most importantly the mid-term elections – then all other possibility of more far-reaching reforms are jeopardized, as we will likely see a resurgent extreme right-wing Republican Party use every trick in the book to curtail democratic rights, workers’ rights and continue the failed policies of the Bush Administration, but worse.

So the only question for us (left, progressive and working-class folks) should be: What am I going to do between now and November 2? How many doors am I going to knock? How many people am I going to call? Who am I going to mobilize, energize and activate between now and November? What am I going to do to make sure that we can continue to move forward as a nation?

Any other question at this moment ignores the real, objective balance of political power and does a disservice to the struggle for immediate reforms and long-term systemic change.

The communists understand what they and Party “friend” Barack Obama are fighting for.

Do you? What about your family, friends, neighbors and colleagues?

Better tell them fast.

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Cross-posted from the New Zeal blog

Why is it important that a former Maoist militant, Roz Pelles, was a leading organizer of last Saturday’s communist infiltrated anti Tea Party One Nation Rally in Washington DC?

In late 1979, hard core Maoists from the Communist Workers Party in North Carolina physically attacked local members of the Ku Klux Klan at a Klan film showing. I wrote about this in detail in my last post on this subject, but below is a summary.

The communists followed up by organizing a November 3 “Death to the Klan” rally, and publicly challenged the Klansmen to show up.

When a convoy of cars full of Klansmen and American Nazis did turn up, the Communists attacked their cars and according to the testimony of one witness, shot at the Klansmen.

The Communists unfortunately didn’t realize just how crazy the Klansmen could be. The resulting gun battle left 5 dead and 10 wounded C.W.P. supporters.

Incredibly, despite the whole battle being filmed by local news media, not one assailant on either side was ever convicted.

Roz Pelles and her husband Don Pelles, both C.W.P. members, were actively involved in the Death to the Klan rally that led to what became known as the “Greeensboro Massacre”.

It is no secret that elements of the US left would love to provoke violence by the “Tea Party” in order to discredit the movement.

Leftist publications regularly compare the Tea Party movement to the Klan and continually accuse the movement of racism.

Tim Wheeler writing in the Communist Party USA‘s newspaper, People’s Weekly World quotes Roz Pelles’ AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka speaking at the One Nation Rally, “debunking the image of a ‘nation full of hate’ projected by Fox News, the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck” – who, asserts Wheeler, “staged a virtually all-white hate rally here August 28.”

Why was a woman, once part of a violent communist group that deliberately provoked violence on the streets of Greensboro, appointed to organize a major anti-Tea Party rally?

The Tea Party is a patriotic, non-racist movement which supports the U.S. Constitution, small government and the free enterprise system.

The Klan and the Nazis were and are racist, socialists thugs, with nothing to offer American society.

If any of them have succeeded in infiltrating the Tea Party movement they should be expelled immediately.

If the US “progressive” movement thinks its acceptable to let Roz Pelles assume a leading role in the anti-Tea Party movement, what else do they think is OK?

The Tea Party movement needs to exercise the utmost restraint and be vigilant against possible infiltration by extremists or provocateurs.

The Tea Party must do everything possible to deny extremist elements of the U.S. left their dearest wish – violence on the streets of America.

No more Greensboros.

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Cross-posting from the New Zeal blog

Like her boss Barack Obama, Ohio Democratic Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy has been accused of hiding a radical past.

Further evidence has emerged confirming that Congresswoman Kilroy was once a member of America’s largest marxist organization Democratic Socialists of America.

In this post New Zeal provided documentary evidence that Kilroy was a member of D.S.A. in the early 1990s and was supported by that organization in both her 2006 and 2008 Congressional races.

Now comes more confirmation of kilroy’s socialist ties from an article in Oakland California based marxist journal CrossRoads, October 1992. The author Bob Fitrakis, is also a long time D.S.A. member and was himself a Democratic Congressional candidate in 1992 in the same district.

Note that Fitrakis mentions the 1990 candidacy of, Tom Erney, also a D.S.A. member.

D.S.A. member Tom Erney stood unsuccessfully for the seat in 1990. DSAer Bob Fitrakis also stood in 1992. Former(?) D.S.A. member Kilroy stood unsuccessfully for the seat in 2006 and successfully in 2008 – both times with D.S.A. support.

This is strong evidence that a marxist organization infiltrated a Democratic Party local over more than a decade until they succeeded in putting one of their own into Congress on the Democrat ticket.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the three comrades ever declared their marxist loyalties to the voters of Ohio.

Writing for a marxist audience, note that Fitrakis emphases Kilroy’s membership of the National Lawyers Guild.

Founded by the Communist Party USA in the late 1930s, the N.L.G. is still today a radical organization, infiltrated by marxists from several radical organizations.

To this day, the N.L.G. is the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a well documented front of the former Soviet Union. Today, the I.A.D.L. is dominated not by Moscow but by Cuba and other third world communists and radicals.

It is not known if Kilroy is still involved with N.LG., but her husband, labor lawyer Robert Handelman is still a member.

Kilroy likes to pose as a moderate Democrat. She even serves on the House Homeland Security Committee.

Yet she is tied to two radical organizations, one of which (D.S.A.) has a former leader, Kurt Stand, still in jail for spying for the former East Germany and Soviet Union.

Mary Jo Kilroy has not been open about her past and possibly current allegiances.

The media needs to be asking this woman some serious questions.

There are security implications here.

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