Former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean said on December 8 that “cooperation” between European socialists and the Democratic Party has “intensified significantly” over the last several years and involves “regular contact” at “Congress, Senate, party and foundation levels.” He added that “efforts have been remarkable from both sides.”

But at a “Global Progress Conference” in October, President Barack Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, acknowledged that socialized medicine in the U.S. faces a serious obstacle. He said that while Europeans are receptive to the expansion of government in their lives, in America there is an anti-government culture which prevents people from “expecting the State to solve their problems.”

“This explains why Obama will find it difficult to implement the social coverage plans such as a broader health service,” Benenson reportedly said.

The conference was held in Madrid, Spain under the patronage of Spain’s socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose pro-homosexual and pro-abortion policies have led to street protests by thousands of supporters of traditional values. Zapatero is also under fire for a jobless rate of nearly 18 percent.

Dean’s comments came in a video address in which he joked that his failure to personally attend the Party of European Socialists (PES) convention, which was advertised as a “carbon neutral congress,” was actually a smart move because he avoided flying and contributing to global warming. “We’ve saved a lot of carbon,” Dean said.

In his comments, Dean called for a “long-term global vision” for the transformation of the global economy and mentioned that disgraced Democratic President Bill Clinton had previously spoken at a meeting of the PES-sponsored Global Progressive Forum. The April 2-3 Global Progressive Forum also featured Robert Borosage of the left-wing group that calls itself the Campaign for America’s Future.

The Global Progressive Forum is also sponsored by the Socialist International, whose U.S. affiliate, the Democratic Socialists of America, includes long-time backers of Barack Obama.

“Free-market globalization alone cannot achieve social justice,” Dean told the PES convention.  “What the world needs is a global New Deal.”

He defined this as a “transition to a low-carbon economy” involving “a major transformation in the patterns of production and consumption.” This will include “large-scale investments and mechanisms” to share the costs and the policies, he said. His remarks came on the eve of the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Dean never used the words “world government,” but did declare that “We need a new institutional framework to govern, manage and monitor implementation.”

In order to bring this about, the PES Congress issued a “Call to Action” urging the imposition of a “global financial transaction tax” that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars and “provide funding for long-term public investments, to finance global development and climate change.”

As AIM has disclosed, there is a secret plan by left-wing non-governmental organizations to bring about this global tax over the next several months.

In another PES document, “A New Direction for Progressive Societies,” the group urged a “progressive peace policy” that says “…we fully support the initiative of the US administration in favor of global disarmament” and urges the “deepening [of] transatlantic cooperation with the new US administration.”

“It is our profound conviction that we must secure a Global New Deal for a new global order of social justice, equality, sustainable development and democracy,” the document concludes.

Howard Dean’s involvement with the PES is actually an old story. In our February 14, 2008, column, “Obama’s International Socialist Connections,” we noted that:

“Another group associated with the SI [Socialist International] is the Party of European Socialists (PES), which heard from Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, back in 2006. Dean’s speech is posted on the official Democratic Party website, although the European socialist parties are referred to as ‘progressive.’ Democrats, Dean said, want to be ‘good citizens of the world community.’ He spoke at a session on ‘Global Challenges for Progressive Politics.’”  

Following up, in April 2007, PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen reported that European socialists held a meeting “in the Democrats HQ in Washington,” met with officials of the party and Democratic members of Congress, and agreed that “PES activist groups” in various U.S. cities would start working together.

Photos of the trip showed Rasmussen meeting with such figures as Senator Ben Cardin, Senator Bernie Sanders, officials of the Brookings Institution, Howard Dean, and AFL-CIO President John W. Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Brookings Institution is headed by former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott, a proponent of world government who was identified in the book Comrade J as having been a pawn of the Russian intelligence service.

The “Global New Deal” was also the theme of the October “Global Progress Conference” in Madrid, Spain, sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the IDEAS Foundation, and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, an affiliate of the German Green Party. A summary of remarks said that the conference was perceived to be the “starting point for a new global progressive alliance.”

The Center for American Progress is a George Soros-funded entity run by former Clinton official John Podesta, who co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project.

Obama pollster Benenson has a website which says that he “was the lead pollster and a senior strategist for President Barack Obama during the 2008 election, and he continues in that role today.”

In addition to Obama and various Democratic Party candidates, elected officials, and campaign organizations, his clients have included the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Brookings Institution, the Soros Foundation, and the Working Families Party, an ACORN front. 

The Benenson Strategy Group has represented several foreign governments and currently represents British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a prominent advocate of a global tax who is facing re-election in June 2010. Brown’s socialist Labor Party is a member of the PES.

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