Various communist and socialist groups were photographed and filmed during the October 2 “One Nation Working Together” rally in Washington, D.C. But the real controversy could be found in the fact that the Communist Party USA, a group that served as a subversive pawn of Moscow for decades, was officially invited to be part of it.

The CPUSA was an official “endorsing organization” and was given space to set up a literature table by the rally organizers. Indeed, a two-page official list of “One Nation March” organizations shows that it was given a highly coveted “reserved space.”

Paul Kengor, author of the new blockbuster book, Dupes, called this fact remarkable. He commented, “It’s remarkable because historically, communist involvement at these rallies has been meticulously concealed, hidden from progressives, with the communists using the progressives as props — as dupes. That the two sides…happily accepted one another, proudly uniting, shows how far to the left progressives have moved, not to mention their unflagging confidence under the ascendancy of Obama-Pelosi-Reid.”

The officially-sanctioned groups also included the AFL-CIO and several left-wing labor unions; United for Peace and Justice, founded by veteran Marxist activist Leslie Cagan; Code Pink; the ANSWER Coalition, a front of the Party for Socialism and Liberation; the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism; Green for All, the group once associated with former White House official Van Jones; Democratic Socialists of America, which helped give Barack Obama his start in Illinois state politics; and the NAACP.

The progressives in the AFL-CIO and other unions which sponsored the October 2 rally in the nation’s capital were excused by the major media for giving special status to a political party that has always elevated the interests of world revolution ahead of the United States. The CPUSA, when it was directly funded by Moscow, was viewed by the FBI and the CIA as a subversive force representing a foreign ideology and America’s destruction. The CPUSA announced objective was a “Soviet America.” That is why the CPUSA and its agents, many of them secret members such as “historian” Howard Zinn, Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, singer Paul Robeson and labor leader Harry Bridges, were under FBI surveillance and the subject of extensive files about their activities and associates.

Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who picked Davis as his grandson’s mentor, also had an FBI file. But that has turned up missing.

The CPUSA was so extreme during its heyday that it not only defended the mass murderer Stalin but the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The group also supplied Soviet espionage agents in the U.S. Government. Nobody can claim ignorance about the CPUSA at this late date in its history. But top CPUSA officials Jarvis Tyner and Sam Webb were there at the “One Nation Working Together” rally.

Interestingly, an on-line publication that noted the involvement of Tyner and his colleagues was The Root, which is published by The Washington Post. Cord Jefferson, a staff writer for The Root, quoted Tyner as saying, “This is the real deal here. We don’t agree with Obama on everything, but the future of our country is associated with moving the country away from the last 30 years, and he’s part of that. He said the people ought to get involved and make the change that they want, and I think that’s a good thing for the country.”

In terms of the size of the rally, Jefferson acknowledged, “Composed of labor union members, teachers, gay activists and others, the excited crowd was noticeably smaller than the one that overtook the National Mall during Restoring Honor.”

Debating Obama’s Marxism

The CPUSA spin-off, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), took a different tack on Obama. Former Obama associate Carl Davidson, once a top official in the SDS, was helping run the CCDS literature table, explaining why he thinks Obama is not a socialist. “Obama is a Keynesian liberal,” he told me, “and not a very good one.” By that he meant that Obama prefers to use federal government monetary resources to influence but not control outright the economy. He refused to be interviewed on camera, saying conservatives misquote him.

When I commented to Davidson that there must have been a dozen different socialist groups at the event, he laughed and said I had underestimated the number.

Some of these are clearly more important than others. Two of the most important these days are the Workers World Party (WWP) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Some members of the former left to form the latter. They operate front organizations such as ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and the International Action Center.

These groups supplied some of their representatives to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on September 21, while he was in town speaking to the United Nations.

Left-wing press reports say that among the individuals and organizations in attendance at this event were Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic member of Congress from Georgia and the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2008; poet and activist Amiri Baraka; Brian Becker of ANSWER; MOVE Minister of Information Ramona Africa; International Action Center co-director Sara Flounders; Ardeshir and Eleanor Ommani, co-founders of the American-Iranian Friendship Committee; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; Million Worker March Movement organizer Brenda Stokely; Shafeah M’balia of Black Workers for Justice; Phil Wilayto of Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality; Larry Holmes of Bail Out the People Movement; Don DeBar of WBAIx.org; Ryme Katkhouda of the People’s Media Center; Michael McPhearson of United for Peace and Justice; and Reverend Graylan Hagler.

Michael McPhearson was the “peace organizer” of the “One Nation Working Together” October 2 march and his “peace contingent” assembled near 14^th Street and Constitution Ave., where Larry Holmes riled up the crowd at a mini-rally by denouncing recent FBI raids on so-called “peace” and “anti-war” groups.

While Holmes remains with the WWP, Brian Becker left to join the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a favorite of the Kremlin’s propaganda arm, Russia Today television.

The Workers World Party had been investigated by the House Internal Security Committee for its support of the North Korean regime and Arab terrorist groups. But the House Committee was disbanded by liberals in Congress.

In total, there were reportedly “100 leaders and representatives of anti-war, labor, alternative media and Iranian and Palestinian solidarity organizations” at the event with Ahmadinejad. Anti-Israel activists were clearly visible at the October 2 rally, with McPhearson expressing the predominant view that U.S. military aid to Israel should be immediately ended.

Editor’s Message

Glenn Beck has embraced the new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which contends that the president is driven by anti-colonialism. That is, Obama is determined to reduce the influence of the United States and the West in such places as Africa and the Third World.  The book says Obama adopted this approach because of the influence of his father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.

The book, published by Regnery and written by Dinesh D’Souza, is provocative, but I think D’Souza largely misses the main influence on Obama –communist Frank Marshall Davis.  Obama didn’t know his father, who abandoned the family. It was for that reason that Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, had asked Davis to serve as a young Obama’s role model in Hawaii. D’Souza devotes only three pages of his book to Davis and says, “During the presidential campaign some conservatives highlighted Davis’s Communist ties.” He is apparently referring to people like me and New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon, who broke the story of Davis being Obama’s mentor. Davis was just “Frank” in Obama’s book.

Communist Party official Jarvis Tyner told me in a brief recorded interview at the October 2 “One Nation” rally in D.C. that progressives had better “stick” with Obama and his “dream” for America. The CPUSA literature table featured a poster-size capitulation of everything that has supposedly been accomplished for the progressives and why they should “defend our victories” and vote against the Republicans.

It is Marxism, not anti-colonialism, which motivates Obama. The Marxists know it.

NBC Favors Rich Over Poor

By Roger Aronoff

While NBC has once again put itself in the service of the Obama administration, this time on education, they are both unwittingly making the case for more choices for parents desperate to get their children out of dead-end public schools. But is there a reason other than liberal bias that explains NBC’s willingness to serve as an outlet for Obama Administration propaganda?

Could it have something to do with NBC parent company GE having been the beneficiary of federal largesse?

Obama took some time out from traveling around the country, bashing the Republicans for supposedly favoring the rich, so that he could sit down with NBC’s Matt Lauer and act concerned about poor students being stuck in failing public schools. He talked about his own “reform” initiatives, which consist of more federal money and control. Then, he accused Republicans of wanting to rein in federal spending by cutting funds to education. It was a political performance that did nothing to solve the problem about which he claims to be concerned.

NBC played along with the facade, calling its coverage “Education Nation,” while ignoring the fact that the Republicans are the ones who actually favor educational policies that benefit the poor by giving them a way out of the public schools through choice. On this issue, Obama is definitely not “pro-choice.”

An excellent commentary by Lindsey Burke in National Review Online pointed out that when Obama sat down with Matt Lauer on Monday’s “Today Show,” the one tough question came from the audience, when a woman asked the President whether his daughters could receive as good an education at a D.C. public school as they were currently getting at their elite private school.

“I’ll be blunt with you,” said Obama. “The answer’s ‘No’ right now.” He continued, “I’ll be very honest with you. Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for Malia and Sasha to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. But the broader problem is: For a mom or a dad who are working hard but don’t have a bunch of connections, don’t have a choice in terms of where they live, they should be getting the same quality education as anybody else, and they don’t have that yet.”

As Burke pointed out, “no doubt unintentionally” the President had just delivered “a beautiful thesis on the necessity of school choice.”

She noted, however, that this was just rhetoric, and that the President has stood by “as Congress phases out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program…which provides vouchers of up to $7,500 to low-income children to attend a private school of their choice,” and which “has been a lifeline out of the unsafe and underperforming D.C. public-school system.”

This is how Obama demonstrated that his priorities are with the union, rather than the children and their parents.

And while he “may invoke the language of school choice,” Burke said, the reality is that “last spring, 216 children in the nation’s capital had scholarships wrenched from their hands by the Department of Education, in some cases just days after receiving what was likely a life-changing letter of acceptance into the D.C. voucher program. The families of those children will certainly not be fooled by Obama’s newfound affinity for school choice.”

GE on the Federal Dole

So why did NBC decided to put itself at the service of the President and his phony educational “reform” policies at this time? Was it purely political and designed to give Obama a boost before critical mid-term elections? That seems to make sense. Or was there another reason?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that GE had federal credit amounting to $126 billion from the government, and that it just negotiated some new terms from the federal government on issuing bonds and debt. When a company is dependent on the government, it makes sense for a company subsidiary to serve as a propaganda platform for the administration dispensing the money.

But there is another factor. According to Burke, “Perhaps the president is feeling pressure to adopt reform language because of the attention being paid to the new documentary Waiting for Superman, which charges education unions with the poor state of American education.” The film draws on the expertise of those with intimate knowledge of how teacher unions have prevented educational progress.

Burke points out that “These unions are, by a long shot, the largest contributors to members of Congress. The two major education unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), make 95 percent of their political contributions to Democrats. And with a budget of more than $355 million, the NEA spends more on campaign contributions than ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Walmart, and the AFL-CIO combined.”

She concludes by arguing that “As long as the Obama administration continues to let unions set the high mark for reform, as was the case with the Race to the Top program, it will be difficult for families nationwide to gain access to a quality school. If the president wants to legitimize his school-choice rhetoric, he’ll need to start by standing up to education unions and standing for school choice in D.C.”

The left is clearly anti-choice when it comes to schools, and they defend that position by arguing that state or local funds given to families in the form of vouchers, which could then be redeemed at private schools, further weakens an already failing public school system. The question is, will the realization that the status quo is failing result in fundamental change, or just lead to throwing more money at the same failed system. In other words, is Obama’s “reform” agenda a fraud?

On Morning Joe on MSNBC, as part of the “education nation” propaganda offensive, a statistic was cited from the National Center for Education Statistics showing that 68% of 8th graders cannot read at grade level. What Joe Scarborough and his liberal colleagues failed to emphasize was that Obama’s “plan” to solve the problem is more of the same—more money for the public schools that created the problem in the first place.

It is time for GE’s talking heads in the media to look beyond the “solution” of more federal money and the interests of teachers unions and take into account the fate of parents and their children. It is time, in short, for NBC’s news personalities to truly take the side of the poor. That means not leaving it to the audience to grill Obama about why he has made sure that his own children don’t attend the D.C. public schools.

Spotlight on the Media

Phony “Watchdog” Group Tied to Partisan Agenda

The influential National Journal recently ran a story about Media Matters, the progressive “media watchdog” organization, and included a few critical comments from AIM editor Cliff Kincaid. Media Matters is a favorite source of research for the little-watched left-wing network MSNBC. For the record, Kincaid made the following points:

• “Media Matters is an arm of the Democratic Party masquerading as a media watchdog organization. It has become part of the “noise machine” that its founder David Brock once decried. Brock is a former conservative who appears to hold a grudge over the fact that conservatives rejected his gay lifestyle.”
• “When he was a ‘conservative,’ Brock used AIM’s research. He came to my office at AIM and I provided my research on the Christic Institute for a story about the left-wing group that he did for the Washington Times. In return, he promised to give me credit when his article appeared. He did not.  I knew at that time that he could not be trusted.”

Kincaid also went into detail about the significant number of Media Matters’ staffers who have come from the ranks of the Democratic Party and Democratic politicians. He cited Ari Rabin-Havt, Managing Director of the Media Matters Action Network, who used to work for Sen. Harry Reid, Al Gore and the Democratic National Committee.

Rabin-Havt surfaced on a purported list of controversial “JournoList”  journalists, along with Eric Alterman, who has also been affiliated with Media Matters. Since the “JournoList” group’s members and messages were technically “private” and we have had to rely on leaks about it, we do not know for sure who was on the list. However, “JournoList” came to light when David Weigel, a writer masquerading as a conservative who was supposed to be covering the conservative movement, quit his job under fire at the Washington Post. Weigel was an admitted member of “JournoList” and had made private critical comments about conservatives to that list.

Media Matters was originally established with money from supporters of Hillary Clinton but turned into a defender of Barack Obama once he won the nomination and Clinton became his secretary of state. The group was originally run out of the offices of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

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