Last week, I attended a press conference in Washington held by longtime right-wingers Cliff Kincaid (www.usasurvival.org) and Herb Romerstein, an old cold warrior and former staff member on the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, that purported to link Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama to communists in Hawaii (where he lived as a child) and my hometown of Chicago (where he worked as a community organizer after his graduation from Harvard Law School.)
Although the voluminous information presented confirmed that Obama had indeed grown up in what researcher Max Friedman described as a “Marxist-rich environment,” that his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) – a fact Obama took pains to conceal in his
book, “Dreams From My Father,” by referring to Davis by just his first name, and that state Sen. Alice Palmer, who hand-picked Obama as her successor in the Illinois legislature, was a member of the U.S. Peace Council, a CPUSA front group.
But like the flap over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, this was still guilt by association. There was no evidence Obama himself had ever been a communist. Since my own grandfather was a socialist, and I am anything but, I am quite sensitive to the practice of tarring people with the views of others.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who was sitting right next to me at the press conference, dismissively likened the event to “a UFO convention” in a story he filed:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052203905.
html
Curiously, Milbank’s article said nothing about a copy of a 1996 newsletter he was handed right after the press conference ended (I got one, too) which identifies Obama as a member of the New Party, a front group of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as late as1996 – the year he was elected to the
Illinois legislature. On page 2, you can see a smiling Obama posing with his fellow New Party members.
This interesting bit of Obama history was not uncovered by major U.S. newspapers like the WaPo,but by New Zealand libertarian Trevor Loudon (newzeal.blogspot.com/), who told me he stumbled upon the Spring 1996 “New Party News” while researching far-left groups in the land down under.
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DSA, he says, was set up in Chicago by Trotskyites and former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) after a feud with the old-line CPUSA, which explains Obama’s close friendship with former SDS leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, in whose home he announced his Senate campaign.
Radical Harvard Professor Cornel West was an honorary chair of DSA, one of many black “Comrade Toms” – as they are called by author and ex-Philadelphia cop Michael Tremoglie. Former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney – who wrote a smarmy letter to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after then New York mayor Rudy Guiliani refused to accept his $10 million donation following the attacks on 9/11 – was honored on the group’s website. DSA stressed that its chief goal was to “work within the Democratic Party and remove the stigma attached to ‘socialism’ in the eyes of most Americans.”
There’s a stigma because socialism is incompatible with private property and free enterprise. Ask any of the millions of immigrants who fled to this country because they could no longer stand to live in a socialist “worker’s paradise”.
The socialist network in America is like an onion with many layers. DSA is, in turn, a U.S. front group for the Socialist International, according to a Nov. 2002 Washington Times article by Balint Vazsonyi. Jamie Glazov wrote in FrontPageMagazine (frontpagemag.com) that in 1999, three years after Obama was photographed as a member of its New Party off-shoot, DSA posted a song list on its website that included the communist anthem “The Internationale” and “Red Revolution” – to be sung to the tune of “Red Robin”:
“…When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along
There’ll be no more lootin’ when we start shootin’ that Wall Street throng…”
In 1999, WorldNetDaily exposed the fact that DSA was also hosting the website of the congressional Progressive Caucus, and it was quickly shut down – only to be set up again under the auspices of Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a former member of the caucus’ executive committee, and many of her fellow Democrats are members, including self-described socialist Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-VT.
Loudon, who has no horse in America’s presidential election race, told me that DSA – which
bills itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States” (discoverthenetworks.org) – and its New Party subsidiary contain some of “the most anti-American elements in the country.”
And he has hard evidence that Barack Obama, our would-be president, was once a card-carrying member.
