Good Intentions.

Collectivist theory explained

2008-07-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

Barack's failed policies of the past

2008-06-22T20:00:00.002-04:00

Change that means more of the same

The centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is “change.” The motto of his campaign is “Change You Can Believe In.” Does it really make sense, however, for a believer in more government spending and new government programs also to be a proponent for change?

Although Sen. Obama hasn’t described himself as a liberal, he has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate (according to the non-partisan National Journal). Perhaps the most basic philosophical difference between liberals and conservatives is in terms of the effectiveness of government in achieving our economic and societal objectives. There seems to be no clear, agreed-upon definition of liberalism, but confidence in government solutions would seem to be one of its primary tenets.

It’s unlikely, for example, that Obama would subscribe to President Reagan’s famous statement, “Government is not the solution, it is the problem.” In fact, he would probably not even agree with what Bill Clinton said in one of his State of the Union addresses, “The era of big government is over.”

Basically, we have two broad routes for achieving our economic and societal objectives — the private sector and the public sector. When the government sector grows, the private sector shrinks. Sen. Obama advocates several variations of higher taxes. Higher taxes leave fewer resources in private hands.

Which would you judge to be more conducive to change, the private sector or the public sector? There is a never-ending survival-of-the-fittest in a competitive environment, and no company is guaranteed survival or certain size. Two of today’s largest companies, Google and Yahoo!, for example, are in industries that didn’t even exist only 20 years ago. In the private sector, no company is guaranteed survival or a niche. Automobile companies and airlines that once had seemingly secure positions in the economy are now struggling to stay afloat. Private companies either adapt to changing conditions, or they perish. They must be responsive to evolving technology and consumer preferences or suffer the consequences.

Compare those realities to the typical course of events in the government sector. For example, Congress recently passed overwhelmingly an extension of a farm bill with massive price-support subsidies to grain, dairy products, sugar, and peanut farmers. The price tag for the new farm bill is $307 billion.

Federal agricultural policies were born in the midst of the Great Depression, an era profoundly different from today. The first farm bill in 1933 was meant to address a precipitous decline in commodity prices in the early years of the Depression. At that time, about 20 percent of the population lived on farms and most farms were family-owned. Now only two percent of our population lives on farms.

Although economists often disagree about many issues, you would be hard-pressed to find one who thinks our governmental agricultural policies make any economic sense, especially when commodity prices are at record levels. Market conditions today are almost exactly opposite to what motivated the first federal farm legislation.

Nevertheless, these policies have been in effect for over 75 years in basically their original form. They are a perfect case study of the virtual impossibility of governmental change once a policy is enacted and vested interests establish a beachhead. Once a government program is in place, it essentially has life everlasting.

If change is a good thing now, it should be a good thing in the future. For change to be a future possibility there needs to be flexibility. Flexibility, however, is not characteristic of government activity. Once a policy is passed into law it essentially gets set in concrete.

Government policies are implemented and enforced by bureaucracies. Most of us have experienced dealing with bureaucracies. Would you say that flexibility was an aspect of the experience you had?

If Sen. Obama becomes president he may well make changes in the form of new and additional government programs; however, once those new programs are in place, we can expect very little change after that.

We’re still having to cope with the innovations FDR blessed us with 75 years ago. Do we actually believe we know what policies our great-grandchildren will need and want?

- Ron Ross, Ph.D. is an investment advisor at Premier Financial Group in Eureka and former professor of economics at Humboldt State University. He lives in Arcata.

(eurekareporter.com)

Leninist named United Nations president

2008-06-07T20:00:00.004-04:00

Sandinista to lead world body

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D'Escoto (he's a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He's also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.

The U.N. also voted to name the government of Burma – which otherwise has been busy preventing humanitarian assistance from reaching hundreds of thousands of its own needy victims of last month's devastating cyclone – as one of the Assembly's vice presidents. Only at the U.N. is this not considered an embarrassment.

If that weren't enough, a U.S. official was present for the vote – which was by acclamation – when the U.S. could have at least protested the choice with an empty seat. Nor did the State Department make any effort to offer an alternative to Father d'Escoto, who ran unopposed. Somehow, we don't think this would have happened had John Bolton still been ambassador.

Speaking after his election, Father d'Escoto called for greater "democracy" at the U.N. – an odd remark coming from a former servant of a communist dictatorship. He also called for the U.N. to take a stand against "acts of aggression, such as those occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan." That would be American aggression, not the Taliban's, the Mahdi Army's or al Qaeda's.

A former Lenin Prize winner as General Assembly president and cruel Burma as vice president – another sick joke from the U.N.

(online.wsj.com)

Emulating Hugo Chávez

2008-06-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) calls for the U.S. government to socialize the oil industry.

Link: sevenload.com

Big George: Market-Theory fails

2008-05-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

Our Progressive Century (7)

2008-05-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

William James - Pragmatism

If you have been a good student of Progressivism, you will recall that the Fabian Society believed in the gradual progress of socialism ... thus the term "Progressive".

To insert collectivism into a U.S. culture and legal system defined by its opposite was no small task. Progressive icons like John Dewey and William James developed a new intellectual foundation, based upon new theories of human existence. This surge of social theory became the underpinning for socialism in academia - a bulwark of the Progressive movement and husband to another key constituency - the intelligentsia.

Pragmatism has ably served Progressives as justification for disregarding inconvenient legal limits on government intrusion into the non-government sphere. This is how Progressives get around the founding fathers' roadblocks to the undoing of liberty - without having to amend the Constitution. At the start of Our Progressive Century, pragmatism motivated intellectual leaders like Woodrow Wilson to inject the authority of the state into nearly every aspect of civic life. Thus, pragmatism helped undermine the bedrock constitutional doctrine of delegated, and thus limited, government powers.

[excerpted from wikipedia]

William James (1842-1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Carl Jung and Benito Mussolini.

Pragmatism is a philosophic school generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim. It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth. Other important aspects of pragmatism include anti-Cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.

Communist Party-USA backs Dem Progs

2008-05-03T07:00:00.001-04:00

The Communist Party USA views the 2008 elections as a tremendous opportunity to defeat the policies of the right-wing Republicans and to move our country in a new progressive direction.

The record turnout in the Democratic Presidential primary races shows that millions of voters, including millions of new voters, are using this election to bring about real change. We wholeheartedly agree with them.

While we do not endorse any particular candidates, we do endorse and join in the anti-Bush/anti-right wing sentiments that are driving so many people to activism.

The fact that the Democratic frontrunners are an African American and a woman speaks volumes on how far the country has come. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has attracted large numbers of supporters, especially women. Other Democratic contenders presented some excellent proposals to reverse the devastation caused by the Bush administration’s policies.

Barack Obama’s campaign has so far generated the most excitement, attracted the most votes, most volunteers and the most money. We think the basic reason for this is that his campaign has the clearest message of unity and progressive change, while having a real possibility for victory in November.

As we see it, however, this battle is bigger than the Democrats and Republicans, even though those parties are the main electoral vehicle for most voters today. Our approach is to focus on issues and movements that are influencing candidates and parties.

We will work with others to defeat the Republican nominee and to end right-wing control of the new Congress.

The activism growing out of this election will help guarantee a progressive mandate no matter who is elected. It is critical to our country’s renewal and future.

We think this election is a great opportunity to bring an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. It can mean job creation and relief for those who are losing their homes or unable to pay their bills.

This election can set the stage to advance the interests of working people; of those excluded because of race, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status.

This election can begin to turn the tide: it can help bring universal health care, save the environment and start the restoration of our democratic rights. This election can strengthen democracy for all.

In the long run, we see the need for an independent “people’s party” -- an electoral party that will unite labor and all democratic forces. We also are working for a political system and government whose priority is to watch the backs of working families, not fill the pockets of the corporate fat cats. Our slogan, “people before profits” and our goal of “Bill of Rights socialism” say it all.

(cpusa.org)

50 definitions of Progressive

2008-04-27T10:00:00.002-04:00

Chávez puts an old communist in charge

2008-04-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez named a veteran communist leader as labor minister on Wednesday, days after ordering the nationalization of a giant steelmaker whose workers are fighting for better pay.

The first task facing Roberto Hernandez, a long-term member of the Venezuelan Communist Party, will be to negotiate a new labor contract with the union at the Ternium Sidor steel works. The appointment was published in the government's official gazette.

Hernandez replaces former minister Jose Rivero, who was criticized for failing to resolve a fierce labor dispute that caused months of sporadic strikes and bloody clashes between workers and police. Chávez ordered the take-over of Ternium Sidor after the company refused to raise a pay offer to workers.

Chávez has spent billions of dollars reversing most of the privatization of Venezuelan industries that took place in the 1990s. The government now controls most of the energy, minerals and telecoms sectors.

Ternium Sidor is a giant steel plant on the banks of the Orinoco river in eastern Venezuela that was privatized in 1997. It employs as many as 14,000 workers, but only about 5,000 are unionized.

The union is divided between groups who support the government and others who oppose it and has blocked some steel exports since the nationalization announcement.

The plant's parent company Ternium is Argentine controlled. Investment bank UBS estimates that the Venezuelan operation is worth about $3 billion.

News of the nationalization has been welcomed by communist parties and left-wing union federations in Latin America.

Hernandez recently left the communist party to help found Chávez's United Socialist Party, or PSUV.

(reuters.com)

Our Progressive Century (6)

2008-04-16T17:00:00.003-04:00

John Dewey - Icon of Progressive Education

The state of today's public education system owes greatly to the progressive movement's most influential exponent for education reform, John Dewey.

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism. He is also known as the father of functional psychology; he was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.

[wikipedia entry]
[internet encyclopedia of philosophy entry]

Communists unify Dem coalition

2008-04-11T17:00:00.001-04:00

by Joelle Fishman, Chair, Political Action Committee, CPUSA

Video: Communist Party USA chief favors Dems

INTRODUCTION

Sam’s report lays out the extraordinary democratic struggle engulfing our country, and challenges us as Communists to make our contribution to the forward motion of our class and people.

The unprecedented voter turnout in the Democratic primaries reflects excitement at the possibility of the first African American or the first women President. Even more, participation in the primaries is being driven by the desire to pull the country out of Iraq, out of the economic crisis, out of the health care crisis, out of concern for immigrant rights, and out of the nightmare conditions in the country after three decades of ultra-right corporate power.

Millions of voters are making the connections between spending on the war and their own economic well-being. This election presents an historic opportunity to breakthrough and change the political landscape.

The grand coalition of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win along with National Council of La Raza, Women’s Vote, ACORN, MoveOn and Rock the Vote has launched the biggest ever independent voter mobilization, which is at the heart of winning a massive turnout on election day and after.

The purpose of this report is to discuss how we contribute to the remarkable movement growing in our country, how we can help build the unity needed to defeat the ultra-right with a landslide vote, and how we can build the movement and the Communist Party and YCL to achieve bold and sweeping gains in the post-election period.

LANDSLIDE

Mobilizing a landslide win against the ultra right, necessary to turn the country around, is at the center of our tactics.

The severe damage from three decades of policy rooted in super exploitation and world domination will not be easy to reverse. A token recovery package will not lift working people out of the economic crisis that is crashing down around us. A massive voter turnout in November is needed to provide a strong enough mandate for a completely new set of policies..

A landslide vote that changes control of the White House and improves the balance of forces in the House and Senate and in the states will create a new political dynamic in our country and the possibility to win gains far beyond the current platform of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

We do not yet know who will emerge, but with each new phase of the campaign Obama is proving to have the greatest potential to bring out a landslide vote to defeat John McCain, and the greater openness to working with mass movements. His recognition of the role of the people in moving history forward, and his message of “inclusion not division” inspires youth and all generations to get involved It reflects his own life experience.

In response to right-wing media attacks and the Clintons’ dangerous and opportunist negative campaigning, Obama’s profound speech tackling race and racism in America opens a new door to uproot the legacy of slavery and the devastation of the era of ultra-right domination. He makes a deep contribution to unity in the way he addresses white people and shows that racism holds everyone back and the progress made in overcoming racism benefits everyone. Bill Richardson’s response, embracing Obama’s vision and addressing racism against immigrants and Latinos further uplifts the level of unity.

But whether the nominee is Obama or Clinton the landslide vote must be fought for as a necessary first step to winning a different direction for our country. Neither candidate is of the left. But history teaches us that when mobilized, labor and people’s forces can push through and win progressive gains in a climate like today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not run on a New Deal program, but was propelled to create it by the unity in action of millions of unemployed and their allies. A landslide vote gives leverage to organize with the new President and Congress.

Peace and labor candidates for the House and Senate will benefit from a landslide vote. With enough progressives in Congress it will be possible to outweigh the Republican-Conservative Democratic alliance that has stalled progress. This alliance made it impossible to override presidential vetoes including a timetable to exit Iraq, expansion of SCHIP, and is now pushing the anti-immigrant, anti-labor SAVE Act HR 4088 which must be defeated.

It will take registering and mobilizing millions of new voters plus the votes of independents and some Republicans on top of a huge Democratic turnout to add up to the landslide that can break the chains of ultra-right corporate dominance.

MC CAIN

At the center of our election policy is keeping the fire on the ultra-right, John McCain and the Republicans in order to defeat them overwhelmingly.

The latest polls show that in a generic match-up, Democrats have a 13 point lead in the Presidential election. But in a specific McCain - Obama or McCain - Clinton match-up it is neck-in-neck, with a slight Democrat advantage. Once the Democratic nominee is known, and the campaign zeroes in on challenging McCain, these figures can be expected to improve.

John McCain is a representative of the military industrial complex and a favorite of Wall St. He intends to carry on the Bush agenda, and worse. His folksy image is a cover. The true John McCain must be made known. The stark contrast of McCain with either Obama or Clinton on a few top issues makes the case for an all-out campaign to defeat the ultra-right in this election.

McCain says he is for working people. But McCain, like Bush, opposes the Employee Free Choice Act which makes it easier to form a union.. At the AFL-CIO debate attended by 17,000 in Soldiers Field last year a commitment was secured from every Democratic candidate to sign the Employee Free Choice Act if elected President. Removing the barriers to join a union will vastly increase the size of the labor movement and its ability to mobilize for better conditions on the job and in the electoral arena. An enlarged labor movement is key to winning greater democratic victories post-election.

McCain supports Bush’s proposed permanent tax cuts for the super rich. The Democratic candidates oppose these obscene tax cuts, which is a good starting point We say that the taxes on the rich should be rolled back at least to 1970's levels to restore the ability of the government to meet social needs. This fight can be won with a new President, a stronger Congress and a new political climate..

McCain supports Bush’s pre-emptive war policy. He plans to stay in Iraq and expand the war to Iran and beyond.. Strong anti-war sentiment pushed the Democratic candidates to commit to end the war, although not as comprehensively or rapidly as can be. Obama has a stronger position, but both Clinton and Obama are for bringing the troops home. We disagree with their willingness to utilize troops in Afghanistan. But the first step to a new policy in the Middle East is to bring the troops home and provide for their needs when they return.. The biggest step to resolving the economic crisis is stop spending $500 million a day for the war and occupation. A landslide Democratic vote in November is the best way to begin troop withdrawal. In a new climate, a new foreign and military policy based on diplomacy and nuclear non-proliferation can be fought for more effectively.

McCain, like Bush has no solution to the health care crisis. His plan would not cover any additional people, would not cut costs and relies entirely on big insurance companies. The healthcare plans of both Clinton and Obama are limited, with a combination of public and private coverage. But both look to covering everyone. We support a universal not-for-profit single payer system. HR 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers. It is based on expanding and improving Medicare and has the endorsement of 389 labor organizations. Conyers, speaking at the Take Back America conference, stressed that number one to winning his bill is getting the presidency out of Republican control, which will give leverage to the growing movement for single-payer .

If John McCain is to be defeated overwhelmingly, his positions and voting records and his ties to the policies of George W. Bush and the ultra-right on these issues and others must be made widely known.

There are many creative materials. The AFL-CIO’s John McCain Revealed program is up and running for labor councils and union locals. Brave New Films’ The Real McCain videos are available on YouTube, the McBush Campaign of Americans United for Change, the Bush Legacy Project which will be touring the country, the Alliance of Retired Americans truth squad to expose McCain’s support for privatizing social security

The People’s Weekly World - Nuestro Mundo has been doing an excellent job exposing John McCain. There is a proposal for a pamphlet to be issued by the paper on McCain and the need for the landslide vote to defeat him.

HOUSE AND SENATE TARGETS

There must be both a change in control of the White House and a bigger shift in Congress to begin to chart a new policy course.

Many progressives and others are discouraged that despite the 2006 election in which voters changed congress to end the war, 4,000 US soldiers and many times more Iraqi soldiers and civilians have been killed and the war and occupation continue. Yes, the Democratic leadership could have returned the same bill the President vetoed again and again, and perhaps that should have been done.

But there is no escaping the reality that it would take a hundred percent of the Democratic caucus plus some Republican votes to override a presidential veto. But, a grouping of conservative Democrats has been voting with Republicans around the war and security issues

Of 232 Democrats in the House, 48 belong to the conservative Blue Dog Caucus and 60 are in the centrist New Democrat Coalition. In contrast, 73 are members of the Progressive Caucus, 43 are in the Black Caucus and 20 are in the Hispanic caucus. (Overlapping memberships have to be taken into account.)

In addition to increasing the number of Democrats in general there is a necessity to increase the number of pro-labor and peace Representatives in Congress.

The ultra-right is forging ahead with a $2 million “swift boat” style smear campaign funded by “Defense of Democracy.” Attack ads against 15 Democrats who won in traditionally Republican districts in 2006 claim they pose a security danger to the country for voting against domestic spying.

The “Defense of Democracy” Board includes neo-cons Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol and Richard Perle and also Senator Joe Lieberman, who is meeting stiff opposition in Connecticut.

The answer to this type of strong arm tactic is not to give in. The voice of peace and labor constituents must be heard in these districts both to re-elect, but also to establish a progressive mandate that reflects the shift in thinking taking place throughout the country.

Dennis Kucinich, won a vicious primary challenge with strong labor support. His main opponent spent $500,000 largely from AIPAC supporters. This victory shows challenges from the right wing can be overcome with a strong connection to the grass roots and a principled fight.

28 Republican incumbents in the House and 6 in the Senate are not running for re-election. The chance of these seats flipping to Democrat increases if the Presidential candidate wins with long coat tails..In the Senate, there is a chance to gain a 60-seat Democratic majority which could override filibusters

Democrat Bill Foster set off a political earthquake when he won the seat vacated by former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert showing that red districts can flip to blue. Foster was not the most progressive Democrat in the race, but the day he was sworn in his vote defeated a Republican procedural measure [207-206] and the independent ethics panel passed.

Donna Edwards stunned the political world with her 25 point primary victory over conservative Democratic incumbent Al Wynn in Prince Georges County, Maryland, which is encouraging to other pro-labor, peace and progressive candidates.. She is one of ten peace candidates for Congress running on “A Responsible Plan to Withdraw from Iraq.” which is a detailed, comprehensive plan to end the Iraq War and bring our troops home. Darcy Burner, candidate in Washington’s 8th CD initiated the report because voters kept asking how the war will end. All Congressional candidates are welcomed to sign on.

CORE FORCES AND BUILDING THE TURNOUT

The shifts we noted at our last National Committee meeting continue to materialize, with Latinos, youth and women increasing their Democratic vote, African American voters increasing their turnout in the South, and the religious right continuing to lose ground among rural voters.

We have a special responsibility to build the strength of labor, African American, Latino, women and youth voters – the core forces within the broad people’s alliance to defeat the right wing. Their leadership will be critical to win the election and then post-election to shape the demands for new policy and build the mass pressure to enact them.

Labor

The AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions are collaborating on the largest voter mobilization in history. “An army of shop stewards” is being trained for rapid response mobilization in the workplace and neighborhoods. Postcard campaigns with the goal of one million signers each have been launched in support of the Employee Free Choice Act and for universal healthcare. Everyone can be involved and reach out.

The community affiliate Working America is active in 14 states with 2 million members. Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the battlegrounds.

The primaries have been challenging because of the different union endorsements and the need to keep unity for November while at the same time building support for Obama. Change to Win has activated their member-to-member operation for Obama. Twelve AFL-CIO unions have endorsed Clinton with different amounts of activation, six have endorsed Obama and the rest are waiting until the nominee is decided.

A remarkable 30% to 40% of voters who turned out so far in the Democratic primaries are union members. The media plays a negative role in promoting the idea that wage workers are Clinton voters and professionals are Obama voters. A deeper look is required. For example, in Rhode Island Change to Win union members voted 56% for Obama, but the union vote reported was 59% Clinton and 40% Obama. Clearly wage workers were among those voting for Obama, as in other states.

Union leaders are concerned that some members are drifting to McCain. A special effort has been launched to show McCain is not on the side of workers. Our labor department’s electronic newsletter Labor Up Front discusses the tough questions and gives a lead for unity on NAFTA, health care, racism and the war.

Working in the elections through a union, whether or not you are a member, is the most meaningful participation. It builds up the labor component which is key to progress. Around the country community volunteers have been welcomed at phone banks and door knocks It is also a great way to meet other union members and build relations and possibly new readers of the paper or new club members.

African American

The Obama campaign has moved the African American community in a special way, expressed in the turnout and vote. The African American vote has been the most consistent progressive voting bloc over decades, 90% Democratic. We have noted if African Americans vote the proportion of their population in South Carolina, Mississippi and Georgia those states will flip from red to blue. That process is underway, starting with the large primary turnout. Massive voter registration drives are taking place . Participating in community mobilizations will deepen our ties and contribution on an ongoing basis.

The media and the right-wing have been working overtime to diminish the African American vote. Constant distortions by FOX News and others combined with the Clinton’s slash-and-burn negative campaign has been damaging for future unity and must be challenged.

However, the media’s attempt to split the African American and Latino people is backfiring. Hype that Latinos will not vote for an African American is clearly untrue. Special outreaches are taking place locally and nationally to further cement that unity. Our election work should be carried out in such a way that fosters this unity.

Attempts by anti-immigrant groups to split the African American and Latino people are being rejected in many instances at the local level. If such fissures are left untouched it will endanger the potential of a landslide vote and movement that can chart a new course. Obama’s speech on race made a great contribution in this regard and can be drawn upon..

Latino

There has been a big increase in Latino voters in the primaries, with the largest number of young voters. Latinos represented 10 percent of the voters (up from 6.7 percent in the 2004 general election). They voted 79% Democratic (up from 60-63 percent in the 2004 general election).. The vote was in majority for Clinton, but it is fluid as Obama becomes better known. Outreach to all Latinos on all of the issues is crucial for unity in November.

Coordinated by South West Voter Project 30,000 Latino voters are expected to register in schools and churches in 13 cities by July, with another 60,000 before November, involving hundreds of youth in 15 states coordinating with 800 local organizations. The goal is 12 million registered - up from 9.5 in 2006 – and 10 million turnout.

In South Florida three Republican Cuban American Congressmen face serious Democratic challenges in a volatile election. This could reconfigure the Latino vote and flip the whole state from red to blue. Democratic Congresspersons in the adjacent districts failed to endorse the challengers, but grass roots pressure brought national Democratic Party commitments to these races.

Cecilia Munoz, president of National Council of La Raza warned at the Take Back American Conference that there is a danger the Latino voter turnout will not reach its full potential, if Democrats do not differentiate themselves from the immigrant hate legislation associated with Republicans. The discharge petition to force the anti-immigrant Save Act HR 4088 to the floor is especially dangerous. The fight to get the 49 Democratic co-sponsors, who joined with almost all the Republicans, to withdraw their support is part of the fight for a landslide vote in November.

Women

Women voters have been turning out in large numbers for the Democratic primaries. Clinton has the overall advantage, reflecting the possibility of the first woman president, and the endorsement of NOW. But women are voting for both Clinton and Obama. African American women are voting overwhelmingly for Obama. Single women have voted overwhelmingly for Obama in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri and Utah, while Clinton carried single women in .the remaining ten super Tuesday states.

Women’s Voices Women’s Vote is concentrating on unmarried women because they vote more progressive but have not turned out. In 2006 twenty million single women did not vote. Unmarried women were 26% of all voters in the Tuesday super primaries.

Planned Parenthood has aimed its fire at John McCain, airing radio ads in February after he called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned – a good rallying cry for unity after the primaries.

Youth

When young people began flocking to vote in the Democratic primaries it galvanized the overall turnout. Young people want to impact these elections, and they want change. They want jobs, affordable education and an end to the war in Iraq. They are concerned about health care and the environment. (Rock The Vote 2/08) The number of under 30 voters in the democratic primaries tripled (3 million) from 4 years ago. My space and face book sign-ups on the internet show youth support for Obama who has 1 million “friends” compared to Clinton’s 330,000 and McCain’s 140,000. (NYT 3/27/08)

The YCL has an impressive program for the 2008 elections including a week long training in St. Louis, voter pledge cards to use with voter registration, and participation in youth vote coalitions. There is a big opportunity to connect with young people in this election. The YCL is mobilizing their clubs. Party clubs and districts can outreach to young people and work closely with the YCL to build existing clubs and new clubs.

A word about two other sectors - environmental voters and peace voters.

Environmental Voters

Environmental voters could have a big impact. The global climate change affecting our planet will not wait. Young voters, and voters in general want action. The Take Back America conference featured the Apollo Project and others including Van Jones who are organizing support for a massive infrastructure program to green the buildings in our country while creating good jobs with union rights and affirmative action in hiring as well as in selection of communities to be rebuilt. The Bush administration has taken an anti-science, arrogant and dangerous course. John McCain has a zero rating from the League of Conservation voters for missing every environmental vote of consequence in the Senate. Many environmental organizations will be involved in voter registration. We should participate.

Peace Voters

A number of initiatives are keeping the demand to end the war and occupation vocal and visible as part of bringing the peace majority to the polls.

There are many ways to participate.

United for Peace and Justice with others developed a special taskforce . They plan a Peace Voter Guide, city council resolutions to end the war, and work with members of Congress on tactics for the budget resolution.

Progressive Democrats of America launched a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign linking withdrawal from Iraq with support for HR 676 Medicare for All.

Progressives for Obama just formed. Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr.,Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover are calling on those in the peace movement who have been sitting out the election to join the grass roots upsurge around Obama and build the demand to end the war. This call to action should be useful locally.

The fifth year of war in Iraq and the economic crisis has given rise to a new national coalition of Peace and economic rights groups and unions. American United for Change along with MoveOn, SEIU, Vote Vets, USAction and others have initiated a major effort in swing districts on the “Iraq Recession”. Their poll shows that 69 percent of swing voters want to end the war and reinvest in health care and new clean energy jobs.

CLUB AND PARTY BUILDING

The reports from around the country on activities in the elections are exciting. We have to draw conclusions from our experiences so we can do our very best in the next seven months. There are many ways to participate – directly in the campaign movement; through the mobilizations of labor and people’s organizations; in our own concentration neighborhoods. These all overlap and are interrelated.

Like the slogan “building to win, building to last,” we should systematically work in a way that both strengthens Party clubs at the grassroots and simultaneously deepens our coalition relations with labor and allies.

This is a unique time when people are stepping forward, looking for answers and re-thinking old assumptions. This is a time to renew and refresh our concentration policy.

The upsurge of activism in this election, coming out of the conditions people face, presents new opportunities for building grass roots Communist Party clubs. The new stage of struggle demands a larger multi-racial working class base and constituency for our Party.

I can hardly think of a person or family we know who is not facing some crisis about their healthcare or their job closing or maybe losing their home. They all come to the Communist Party for advise, organizing tactics and skills and we must respond directly and also by mobilizing for the elections.

I would like to suggest that one component of our election work be choosing a multi-racial working class neighborhood or election district where we want to build the Party on an ongoing basis. A voter registration and education campaign with the goal of a landslide vote in that election district could be an excellent project, using the Peoples Weekly World and other literature.

Choosing one neighborhood and taking a collective mobilization approach could make it do-able where we are small. With a little follow-up a new voter or two may also become a new neighborhood activist and help organize the community to come out to vote. This could be the basis for a new or enlarged Party club.

In Missouri comrades took a goal for “decline to sign” pledges within the coalition working to defeat the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative. They plan to do the work in a way that builds a permanent base in one neighborhood.

There are other experiences of taking responsibility within a coalition for voter registration and turnout in a certain election district and then continuing to develop relations on a regular basis with the People’s Weekly World and activity.

There are experiences of making new friends at house parties or vigils and going together to community activities or traveling together to campaign mobilizations.

One workplace club with a good Peoples Weekly World readership found that people who had never come to meetings showed up for the elections powerpoint, got involved in the primary and then traveled to a nearby state to help out.

An education component to our work will help sustain and advance new activists. We will have materials to work with.

The People’s Weekly World is our number one. Goals for new readers should be part of our election plans. The internet department is providing YouTube presentations and other resources.
Work is beginning on a short pamphlet to be issued in large quantity by the Peoples Weekly World - Nuestro Mundo on McCain and the landslide. Fliers made from the “story of the week” will be available on the paper’s website.

Our 2008 Communist Party election program will be out in May in a short pamphlet format. It will talk about the landslide and expose McCain and the corporate ultra-right. It will present a bold emergency program to repair, restore and rebuild our country out of the devastation of the last 30 years including strong measures to relieve the victims of the crisis. It will introduce the Communist Party and our vision for socialism.

We are meeting numbers of people who are excited to come to work with us on the election. They want to know about the Communist Party. This program will be an important tool designed to have broad distribution among our coalition partners as well as at the grass roots.

A statement on the 2008 election policy of the Communist Party USA, drafted by Jarvis Tyner, appears on our website,

CALENDAR

Seven months to the November 4 general election is a short time. Three weeks to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary is even shorter. Pennsylvania has emerged as very important, perhaps the decisive primary battle. There are many opportunities to campaign in person and with phone calls.

Primaries to follow include Indiana on May 7 and Oregon on May 20.

During the months of June, July and August many states have their state and congressional primaries.

The Democratic National Convention is August 25-28 in Denver. The Republican Convention is September 1-4 in Minneapolis St. Paul.

At the next National Committee meeting we can better project outward to November.

CONCLUSION

We do not know all the twists and turns that the campaign will take. The great democratic spirit spreading through the country will hopefully prevail in a big way for a transformative election. If we stay on top of new developments we will be able to play our unity role. .

Just before he was assassinated, speaking from the depths of the civil rights movement, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave a sermon at the National Cathedral. He called for a radical revolution of values in our country from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society so that the triple evils of racism, militarism and exploitation could be toppled. Today, that revolution of values King dreamed of is unfolding.

The movement for a landslide victory is the beginning. The more decisive the victory, the greater the possibilities for that movement to keep going and growing to win big new gains in a new stage of struggle.

(cpusa.org)

Our Progressive Century (5)

2008-04-04T08:00:00.008-04:00

The Fabian Society - Creeping Socialist British Invasion

The United States was not always a Progressivist nation. The beginning of Our Progressive Century started in Europe with the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, where long-repressed German socialism began to blossom and give birth to organized labor and militant class warfare on the continent. The Russian Revolution was still on the horizon. And the sun never set on the British Empire.

Non-native Progressivism was imported to the U.S. at the same time as socialism began to infect the entire world. Perhaps the most instrumental purveyors of the new thinking were members of the socialist Fabian Society, founded in 1884 by Frank Podmore and Edward Pease. Fabians believe in the slow, incremental progress of socialism. Over time, Fabian Society members founded what are now considered main-stream institutions such as the London School of Economics and the British Labour Party. The society is very active to this day.

Its members have included George Bernard Shaw (before AlGore, the only winner of both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar), the author and friend-of-Teddy H.G. Wells, the short-term thinker and legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, the long-serving "Third Way" ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

History

In 1883 a group of British socialists had banded together to found a civic association called the Fellowship of the New Life (under the influence of Thomas Davidson). After a year, members wanted to pursue a political agenda, and two members - Podmore and Pease ( also a founder of London School of Economics) - founded the Fabian Society. The Fabians were opposed to the revolutionary theory of Marxism, holding that social reforms and socialistic “permeation” of existing political institutions would bring about the natural development of socialism. They eventually gave birth to the British Labour Party.

The society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded in 1883 called The Fellowship of the New Life. Fellowship members wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. But when some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society's transformation, it was decided that a separate society, The Fabian Society, also be set up.

Among Fabian Society members were H.G. Wells, who was entertained by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, and the labor economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories have been used to justify a massive expansion of government interventionism around the world ("In the long run, we are all dead.") and encroachment into the civic sphere ("The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.") for more than 70 years. Long-discredited schemes like "economic stimulus" are still observed in the United States, an homage to Keynesian socialism.

George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb joined soon after this and became its outstanding exponents. The group achieved recognition with the publication of Fabian Essays (1889), with contributions by Shaw, Webb, Annie Besant, and Graham Wallas. The Fabians were opposed to the revolutionary theory of Marxism, holding that social reforms and socialistic “permeation” of existing political institutions would bring about the natural development of socialism. Repudiating the necessity of violent class struggle, they took little notice of trade unionism and other labor movements until Beatrice Potter (who later married Sidney Webb) joined the group. They subsequently helped create (1900) the unified Labour Representation Committee, which evolved into the Labour party. The Labour party adopted their main tenets, and the Fabian Society remains as an affiliated research and publicity agency.

from wikipedia:

The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social democracy via gradualist, rather than revolutionary means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the Nineteenth century and continuing up to World War I.

The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the Decolonisation of the British Empire, especially India. The society is still in existence today and forms a vanguard "Think tank" of the centre-left New Labour movement. It is one of fifteen socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia (the Australian Fabian Society), Canada (the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and in past the League for Social Reconstruction) and New Zealand.

The Fellowship of the New Life was dissolved in 1898, but the Fabian Society grew to become the preeminent academic society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian era, typified by the members of its vanguard Coefficients club.

Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell later became a member. The two members John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were delegates at 1944's United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, commonly known as the Bretton Woods Conference.

The group, which favoured gradual incremental change rather than revolutionary change, was named — at the suggestion of Frank Podmore — in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning "the Delayer"). His Fabian strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal Barca.

The first Fabian Society pamphlets advocating tenets of Social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of Liberal reforms during the early 1900's. The Fabian proposals however were considerably more progressive than those that were enacted in the Liberal reform legislation. The Fabians lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a Socialised healthcare system in 1911, and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917.

Fabian socialists were in favour of an imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform and a welfare state modelled on the Bismarckian German model; they criticised Gladstonian liberalism both for its individualism at home and its internationalism abroad. They favoured a national minimum wage in order to stop British industries compensating for their inefficiency by lowering wages instead of investing in capital equipment; slum clearances and a health service in order for "the breeding of even a moderately Imperial race" which would be more productive and better militarily than the "stunted, anaemic, demoralised denizens...of our great cities"; and a national education system because "it is in the class-rooms that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost".

The Fabians also favoured the nationalization of land, believing that rents collected by landowners were unearned, an idea which drew heavily from the work of American economist Henry George.

Many Fabians participated in the formation of the Labour Party in 1900, and the group's constitution borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. At the Labour Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate.

In the period between the two World Wars, the "Second Generation" Fabians, including the writers R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, continued to be a major influence on social-democratic thought.

It was at this time that many of the future leaders of the Third World were exposed to Fabian thought, most notably India's Jawaharlal Nehru, who subsequently framed economic policy for one-fifth of humanity on Fabian social-democratic lines. It is a little-known fact that the founder of Pakistan, Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an avid member of the Fabian Society in the early 1930s. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, stated in his memoirs that his initial political philosophy was strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. However, he later altered his views, believing the Fabian ideal of socialism to be too impractical.

Through the course of the 20th century the group has always been influential in Labour Party circles, with members including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson, and more recently Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The society's 2004 annual report showed that there were 5,810 individual members (down 70 from the previous year), of whom 1,010 were Young Fabians, and 294 institutional subscribers, of which 31 were Constituency Labour Parties, co-operative societies, or trade unions, 190 were libraries, 58 corporate, and 15 other—making 6,104 members in total.

The latest edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (a reference work listing details of famous or significant Britons throughout history) includes 174 Fabians.

Four Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw founded the London School of Economics with the money left to the Fabian Society by Henry Hutchinson. Supposedly the decision was made at a breakfast party on 4 August 1894. The founders are depicted in the Fabian Window designed by George Bernard Shaw. The window was stolen in 1978 and reappeared at Sotheby's in 2005. It was restored to display in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics in 2006 at a ceremony over which Tony Blair presided.

Young Fabians

Members aged under 31 years of age are also members of the Young Fabians. This group has its own elected Chair and executive and organizes conferences and events. It also publishes the quarterly magazine Anticipations. The Scottish Young Fabians, a Scottish branch of the group, reformed in 2005.

Influence on Labour government

Since Labour came to office in 1997, the Fabian Society has been a forum for New Labour ideas and for critical approaches from across the party. The most significant Fabian contribution to Labour's policy agenda in government was Ed Balls' 1992 pamphlet, advocating Bank of England independence. Balls had been a Financial Times journalist when he wrote this Fabian pamphlet, before going to work for Gordon Brown. BBC Business Editor Robert Peston, in his book Brown's Britain, calls this an "essential tract" and concludes that Balls "deserves as much credit – probably more – than anyone else for the creation of the modern Bank of England"; William Keegan offers a similar analysis of Balls' Fabian pamphlet in his book on Labour's economic policy, which traces in detail the path leading up to this dramatic policy change after Labour's first week in office.

The Fabian Society Tax Commission of 2000 was widely credited with influencing the Labour government's policy and political strategy for its one significant public tax increase: the National Insurance rise to raise £8 billion for NHS spending. (The Fabian Commission had in fact called for a directly hypothecated "NHS tax" to cover the full cost of NHS spending, arguing that linking taxation more directly to spending was essential to make tax rise publicly acceptable. The 2001 National Insurance rise was not formally hypothecated, but the government committed itself to using the additional funds for health spending). Several other recommendations, including a new top rate of income tax, were to the left of government policy and not accepted, though this comprehensive review of UK taxation was influential in economic policy and political circles.

Hollywood's tilt toward collectivism

2008-03-29T08:20:00.006-04:00

Today it's Hugo Chávez and a fading Fidel Castro. In another time, it was Josef Stalin. Benito Mussolini even had his moment of admiration among America's entertainment elite. But 20 years ago, it was Mikhail Gorbachev.

There's nothing like a militaristic, totalitarian socialist brute to throw Hollywood into a swooning tizzy.

No lesson of history is clear enough, no gulag is big enough, no genocidal holocaust is complete to change the political culture of the entertainment industry.

Two decades ago this month, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship held star-studded fundraising dinners in both New York and Los Angeles ostensibly to pay tribute to its new chairman – one of Hollywood's own – the late Tony Award-winning actor and self-proclaimed Marxist John Randolph.

The National Council of American-Soviet Friendship was a well-known Communist front group, actually supported financially by Moscow. But that didn't dissuade the likes of Jane Alexander, Ed Asner, Tyne Daly, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Brown, John Houseman, Rita Moreno, James Whitmore, Paul Winfield, Dennis Weaver, Lee Grant, Linda Lavin, Ellen Burstyn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Patty Duke, Jack Lemmon, Howard Hesseman, Valerie Harper, Tony Randall, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Esai Morales and Sam Waterston from attending or sponsoring the affairs.

Senators, mayors and other elected officials wrote letters of encouragement, spoke at the dinners and lent their support. Both the New York and Los Angeles city councils declared March 13, 1988, "John Randolph Day" to honor this Soviet apparatchik. The glitzy, bicoastal shindigs raised more than $25,000 for the NCASF, which the State Department openly labeled, at that time, one of the most important Soviet active measures used in the U.S.

I'll never forget it. I witnessed this event. I reported it. I couldn't wait to bathe myself after breathing the air in that room full of caviar comrades.

I guess it was possible back then for useful idiots in Hollywood to be in denial about what it was they were supporting. Maybe they believed their own State Department was still caught up in "Cold War hysteria." Gorbachev, they might have thought, was really a different kind of Communist Party leader than his predecessors who killed tens of millions of their own people.

But a year later, that kind of wishful thinking was no longer possible.

On Feb. 8, 1989, still years before the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, the FBI arrested the Rev. Alan Craft Thomson, a Presbyterian minister and the executive director of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and charged him with trying to conceal the origin of $17,000 provided to the group directly from Moscow.

Not one of those Hollywood celebrities took a career hit as a result of playing footsie with a Soviet front group – not even Randolph, the chairman of the group.

In fact, Randolph's career was rehabilitated by the visibility the position afforded him. He told the Communist Party USA newspaper People's Daily World in 1988 that his phone wouldn't stop ringing with movie and TV offers after his coronation as chairman of the Communist front.

What's the lesson here?

Hollywood celebrities have learned they do not need to be discriminating in their political allegiances and social crusades. There is no cost to supporting even the most tyrannical, oppressive and murderous madmen on the planet. Of course, it's not entirely true that any political cause can be supported within the entertainment industry with impunity.

There is one cause that will bring harsh rebuke, censure, maybe even blacklisting even in the 21st century.

And that would be the cause of supporting freedom, self-government, decency and human rights. And, whatever you do, don't ever dare say a kind word about America.

(worldnetdaily.com)

Our Progressive Century (4)

2008-03-26T07:45:00.012-04:00

H.G. Wells - 'One World' socialist, racist

'Liberal fascism' sounds like an oxymoron – or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis." - Daniel Pipes, reviewing "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg

The following is excerpted from Wikipedia, whose entry is far more complete and heavily footnoted.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer most famous today for his science fiction novels The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, and The Island of Dr Moreau. He was a prolific writer and produced works in many genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. It is less well-known that Wells was an outspoken socialist, his later works becoming increasingly political and didactic.

Private life

In 1891 Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, but left her in 1894 for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he married in 1895. He had two sons by Amy: George Philip (known as 'Gip') in 1901 and Frank Richard in 1903.

Progressive eugenics

During his marriage to Amy, Wells had liaisons with a number of women, including the American birth-control activist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger. In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society; and in 1914, a son, Anthony West, by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, twenty-six years his junior. In spite of Amy Catherine's knowledge of some of these affairs, she remained married to Wells until her death in 1927. Wells also had liaisons with Odette Keun and Moura Budberg.

Wells' influence on progressive President Theodore Roosevelt

Wells' typical-progressive bleak vision of the future in The Time Machine is said to have inspired Theodore Roosevelt's progressivism. Our nation's first prog President "was saddened by the inexorable cruelty of class prejudice and how the tale spun into a future of lack of sharing and caring." Roosevelt invited Wells for a White House visit that was recounted in Wells' autobiography in a passage that reveals his progressive influence:

"It is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly this undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey (to the US.) After all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings, which is America, convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfillment whatever? . . .Is America a giant childhood of gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable years -- may be, indeed, altogether until the end -- man's social history? I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled toward this, but it is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of a pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.

"That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort of apology for his life, against the doubts and scepticisms that, I fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man who is intellectually alive. He mentioned my TIME MACHINE. . .He became gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying the pessimism of that book as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden movements of his he knelt forward in a garden chair -- we were standing, before our parting, beneath the colonnade -- and addressed me very earnestly over the back, clutching it and then thrusting out his familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.

"'Suppose, after all,' he said slowly, 'that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. THAT DOESN'T MATTER NOW. The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's worth it, even so.' . . .

"I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying, 'The effort -- the effort's worth it,' and see the gesture of his clenched hand and the -- how can I describe it? - - the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind at that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence, amidst complexities and confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting -- and his setting is the White House with a background of all of America.

"I could almost write, with a background of all the world; for I know of no other tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the GOODWILL in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind."

from Wells, H. G. - EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1934, (pp. 648-49)

Militaristic progressivism

Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells wrote Floor Games (1911) followed by Little Wars (1913). Little Wars is recognised today as the first recreational wargame and Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as "the Father of Miniature War gaming."

Politics

Wells called his political views socialist, but he occasionally found himself at odds with other socialists. He was for a time a member of the Fabian Society, but broke with them as he intended them to be an organisation far more radical than they wanted. He later grew staunchly critical of them as having a poor understanding of economics and educational reform. He also ran as a Labour Party candidate for London University in the 1922 and 1923 general elections, but even at that point his faith in that party was weak or uncertain.

His most consistent political ideal was the World State. He stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward he considered a world-state inevitable. The details of this state varied but in general it would be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to advance solely by merit rather than birth. He also was consistent that it must not be a democracy. He stated that in the same period he came to realise a world-state was inevitable, he realised that parliamentary democracy as then practised was insufficient. Wells remained fairly consistent in rejection of a world-state being a parliamentary democracy and therefore during his work on the United Nations Charter he opposed any mention of democracy. He feared that the average citizen could never be educated or aware enough to decide the major issues of the world. Therefore he favoured the vote be limited to scientists, organisers, engineers, and others of merit. At the same time he strongly believed citizens should have as much freedom as they could without consequently restricting the freedom of others. These values came under increasing criticism from the 1920s and afterwards.

That said, he remained confident of the inevitability of a planned world state well into the 1930s. Lenin's attempts at reconstructing the shattered Russian economy, as his account of a visit (Russia in the Shadows; 1920) shows, also related towards that. This is because at first he believed Lenin might lead to the kind of planned world he envisioned. This despite the fact that he was a strongly anti-Marxist socialist who would later state that it would've been better if Karl Marx was never born. The leadership of Joseph Stalin led to a change in his view of the Soviet Union even though his initial impression of Stalin himself was mixed. He disliked what he saw as a narrow orthodoxy and obdurance to the facts in Stalin. However he did give him some praise saying, "I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest" and making it clear that he felt the "sinister" image of Stalin was unfair or simply false. Nevertheless he judged Stalin's rule to be far too rigid, restrictive of independent thought, and blinkered to lead toward the Cosmopolis he hoped for.

In the end his contemporary political impact was limited. His efforts to help form the League of Nations became a disappointment as the organisation turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent World War II. The war itself increased the pessimistic side of his nature. In his last book Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea. He also came to call the era "The age of frustration." He spent his final years venting this frustration at various targets which included a neighbour who erected a large sign to a servicemen's club. As he devoted his final decades toward causes which were largely rejected by contemporaries, this caused his literary reputation to decline. One critic said, "Mr. Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message."

Wells, like many in his time, believed in the theory of eugenics. In 1904 he discussed a survey paper by Francis Galton, co-founder of eugenics, saying "I believe ... It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." Some contemporary supporters even suggested connections between the "degenerate" man-creatures portrayed in The Time Machine and Wells's eugenic beliefs. For example, this is what Irving Fisher, the economist, said in his 1912 presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association: "The Nordic race will ... vanish or lose its dominance if, in fact, the whole human race does not sink so low as to become the prey, as H. G. Wells images, of some less degenerate animal!"

Our Progressive Century (3)

2008-03-22T08:00:00.005-04:00

Theodore Roosevelt - Movement leader

The first political leader of the Progressive movement remains one of the most active and colorful actors ever on our nation's political stage. He dominated U.S. politics at the onset of Our Progressive Century. Racist, militaristic, self-promoting, anti-business, turncoat, relentless, and ultimately divisive - Theodore Roosevelt articulated the fundamental characteristics of Progressivism that still animate the movement today. The following is excerpted from Wikipedia, whose entry is far more complete and heavily footnoted.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) was the twenty-sixth President of the United States, and a leader of the Republican Party and of the Progressive Movement.

As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt prepared for and advocated war with Spain in 1898. In 1901, as Vice President, the 42 year-old Roosevelt succeeded President William McKinley after McKinley's assassination by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. He is the youngest person to become President. He was a Progressive reformer who sought to move the dominant Republican Party into the Progressive camp.

After 1906 he attacked big business and suggested the courts were biased against labor unions. In 1910, he broke with his friend and anointed successor William Howard Taft, but lost the Republican nomination to Taft and ran in the 1912 election on his own one-time Bull Moose ticket. He beat Taft in the popular vote and pulled so many Progressives out of the Republican Party that Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in 1912, and the conservative faction took control of the Republican Party for the next two decades. His image stands alongside Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.

The Roosevelts had been in New York since the mid 18th century and had grown with the emerging New York commerce class after the American Revolution. Unlike many of the earlier "log cabin Presidents," Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family. By the 19th century, the family had grown in wealth, power and influence from the profits of several businesses including hardware and plate-glass importing. The family was strongly Democratic in its political affiliation until the mid-1850s, then joined the new Republican Party. Theodore's father, known in the family as "Thee", was a New York City philanthropist, merchant, and partner in the family glass-importing firm Roosevelt and Son. He was a prominent supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the Union effort during the American Civil War. His mother Mittie Bulloch was a Southern belle from a slave-owning family in Savannah, Georgia and had quiet Confederate sympathies.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude (22nd of 177) from Harvard in 1880, and entered Columbia Law School. When offered a chance to run for New York Assemblyman in 1881, he dropped out of law school to pursue his new goal of entering public life.

Roosevelt was a Republican activist during his years in the Assembly, writing more bills than any other New York state legislator. Already a major player in state politics, he attended the Republican National Convention in 1884 and fought alongside the Mugwump reformers; they lost to the Stalwart faction that nominated James G. Blaine. Refusing to join other Mugwumps in supporting Democrat Grover Cleveland, the Democratic nominee, he debated with his friend Henry Cabot Lodge the plusses and minuses of staying loyal or straying. When asked by a reporter whether he would support Blaine, he replied, "That question I decline to answer. It is a subject I do not care to talk about." Upon leaving the convention, he complained "off the record" to a reporter about Blaine's nomination. But, in probably the most crucial moment of his young political career, he resisted the very instinct to bolt from the Party that would overwhelm his political sense in 1912. In an account of the Convention, another reporter quoted him as saying that he would give "hearty support to any decent Democrat."

Views on race

The Winning of the West (1889–1896), Roosevelt's frontier thesis stressed the racial struggle between "civilization" and "savagery." He supported Nordicism, the belief in the superiority of the "Nordic" race, along with social Darwinism and racialism. Excerpts:

- "The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages."

- "The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages."

- "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people."

- "..it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races."

- "The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar."

As President, Theodore Roosevelt promised to continue McKinley's program, and at first he worked closely with McKinley's men. His 20,000-word address to the Congress in December 1901, asked Congress to curb the power of trusts "within reasonable limits." They did not act but Roosevelt did, issuing 44 lawsuits against major corporations; he was called the "trust-buster."

Roosevelt firmly believed: "The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce." Inaction was a danger, he argued: "Such increased supervision is the only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one hand or a still more radical policy on the other."

His biggest success was passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906, the provisions of which were to be regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). The most important provision of the Act gave the ICC the power to replace existing rates with "just-and-reasonable" maximum rates, with the ICC to define what was just and reasonable. Anti-rebate provisions were toughened, free passes were outlawed, and the penalties for violation were increased. Finally, the ICC gained the power to prescribe a uniform system of accounting, require standardized reports, and inspect railroad accounts. The Act made ICC orders binding; that is, the railroads had to either obey or contest the ICC orders in federal court. To speed the process, appeals from the district courts would go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In response to public clamor (and due to the uproar cause by Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle), Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, as well as the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. These laws provided for labeling of foods and drugs, inspection of livestock and mandated sanitary conditions at meatpacking plants.

Theodore Roosevelt was the fifth Vice President to succeed to the office of President, but the first to win election in his own right. (Millard Fillmore ran and lost on a third-party ticket four years after leaving office and Chester Arthur was denied nomination by his party in 1884). After Senator Mark Hanna, McKinley's old campaign manager, died in February 1904, there was no one in the Republican Party to oppose Roosevelt and he easily won the nomination. When an effort to draft former president Grover Cleveland failed, the Democrats were without a candidate and finally settled on obscure New York judge Alton B. Parker. The outcome was never in doubt. Roosevelt crushed Parker 56%-38% in the popular vote and 336-140 in the Electoral College, sweeping the country outside the perennially Democratic Solid South. Socialist Eugene Debs got 3%. The night of the election, after his victory was clear, Roosevelt promised not to run again in 1908. He later regretted that promise, as it compelled him to leave the White House at the age of only fifty, at the height of his popularity.

Republican Party rift

Roosevelt certified William Howard Taft to be a genuine "progressive" in 1908, when Roosevelt pushed through the nomination of his Secretary of War for the Presidency. Taft easily defeated three-time candidate William Jennings Bryan. Taft had a different progressivism, one that stressed the rule of law and preferred that judges rather than administrators or politicians make the basic decisions about fairness. Taft usually proved a less adroit politician than Roosevelt and lacked the energy and personal magnetism, not to mention the publicity devices, the dedicated supporters, and the broad base of public support that made Roosevelt so formidable. When Roosevelt realized that lowering the tariff would risk severe tensions inside the Republican Party—pitting producers (manufacturers and farmers) against merchants and consumers—he stopped talking about the issue. Taft ignored the risks and tackled the tariff boldly, on the one hand encouraging reformers to fight for lower rates, and then cutting deals with conservative leaders that kept overall rates high. The resulting Payne-Aldrich tariff of 1909 was too high for most reformers, but instead of blaming this on Senator Nelson Aldrich and big business, Taft took credit, calling it the best tariff ever. Again he had managed to alienate all sides. While the crisis was building inside the Party, Roosevelt was touring Africa and Europe, so as to allow Taft to be his own man.

Unlike Roosevelt, Taft never attacked business or businessmen in his rhetoric. However, he was attentive to the law, so he launched 90 antitrust suits, including one against the largest corporation, U.S. Steel, for an acquisition that Roosevelt had personally approved. Consequently, Taft lost the support of antitrust reformers (who disliked his conservative rhetoric), of big business (which disliked his actions), and of Roosevelt, who felt humiliated by his protégé. The left wing of the Republican Party began agitating against Taft. Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin created the National Progressive Republican League (precursor to the Progressive Party (United States, 1924)) to defeat the power of political bossism at the state level and to replace Taft at the national level. More trouble came when Taft fired Gifford Pinchot, a leading conservationist and close ally of Roosevelt. Pinchot alleged that Taft's Secretary of Interior Richard Ballinger was in league with big timber interests. Conservationists sided with Pinchot, and Taft alienated yet another vocal constituency.

Roosevelt, back from Europe, unexpectedly launched an attack on the federal courts, which deeply upset Taft. Not only had Roosevelt alienated big business, he was also attacking both the judiciary and the deep faith Republicans had in their judges (most of whom had been appointed by McKinley, Roosevelt or Taft.) In the 1910 Congressional elections, Democrats swept to power, and Taft's reelection in 1912 was increasingly in doubt. In 1911, Taft responded with a vigorous stumping tour that allowed him to sign up most of the party leaders long before Roosevelt announced.

Election of 1912

Republican Primaries

Late in 1911, Roosevelt finally broke with Taft and LaFollette and announced himself as a candidate for the Republican nomination. But Roosevelt had delayed too long, and Taft had already won the support of most party leaders in the country. Because of LaFollette's nervous breakdown on the campaign trail before Roosevelt's entry, most of LaFollette's supporters went over to Roosevelt, the new progressive Republican candidate.

Roosevelt, stepping up his attack on judges, carried nine of the states with preferential primaries, LaFollette took two, and Taft only one. The 1912 Primaries represented the first extensive use of the Presidential Primary, a reform achievement of the progressive movement. However, these primary elections, while demonstrating Roosevelt's popularity with the electorate, were in no ways as important as primaries are today. First of all, there were fewer states where the common voter was given a forum to express himself, such as a primary. Many more states selected convention delegates either at party conventions, or in caucuses, which were not as open as today's caucuses. So while the man in the street still adored Roosevelt, most professional Republican politicians were supporting Taft, and they proved difficult to upset in non-primary states.

Formation of the Bull Moose Party

At the Republican Convention in Chicago, despite being the incumbent, Taft's victory was not immediately assured. But after two weeks, Roosevelt, realizing he would not be able to win the nomination outright, asked his followers to leave the convention hall. They moved to the Auditorium Theatre, and then Roosevelt, along with key allies such as Pinchot and Albert Beveridge created the Progressive Party, structuring it as a permanent organization that would field complete tickets at the presidential and state level. It was popularly known as the "Bull Moose Party," which got its name after Roosevelt told reporters, "I'm as fit as a bull moose." At the convention Roosevelt cried out, "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." Roosevelt's platform echoed his 1907–08 proposals, calling for vigorous government intervention to protect the people from the selfish interests.

“To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - 1912 Progressive Party Platform, attributed to him and quoted again in his autobiography where he continues "'This country belongs to the people. Its resources, its business, its laws, its institutions, should be utilized, maintained, or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.' This assertion is explicit. ... Mr. Wilson must know that every monopoly in the United States opposes the Progressive party. ... I challenge him ... to name the monopoly that did support the Progressive party, whether ... the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust, the Harvester Trust, the Standard Oil Trust, the Tobacco Trust, or any other. ... Ours was the only programme to which they objected, and they supported either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Taft...”

While Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 14, 1912, a saloonkeeper named John Schrank shot him, but the bullet lodged in his chest only after penetrating both his steel eyeglass case and passing through a thick (50 pages) single-folded copy of the speech he was carrying in his jacket. Roosevelt, as an experienced hunter and anatomist, correctly decided that since he wasn't coughing blood the bullet had not completely penetrated the chest wall to his lung, and so declined suggestions he go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for ninety minutes. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." Afterwards, probes and X-ray showed that the bullet had traversed three inches (76 mm) of tissue and lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle but did not penetrate the pleura, and it would be more dangerous to attempt to remove the bullet than to leave it in place. Roosevelt carried it with him until he died.

Due to the bullet wound, Roosevelt was taken off the campaign trail in the final weeks of the race (which ended election day, November 5). Though the other two campaigners stopped their own campaigns in the week Roosevelt was in the hospital, they resumed it once he was released. The overall effect of the shooting was uncertain. Roosevelt for many reasons failed to move enough Republicans in his direction. He did win 4.1 million votes (27%), compared to Taft's 3.5 million (23%). However, Wilson's 6.3 million votes (42%) were enough to garner 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt had 88 electoral votes to Taft's 8 electoral votes. (This meant that Taft became the only incumbent President in history to actually come in third place in an attempt to be re-elected.) But Pennsylvania was Roosevelt's only Eastern state; in the Midwest he carried Michigan, Minnesota and South Dakota; in the West, California and Washington; he did not win any Southern states. Although he lost, he won more votes than former presidents Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore who also ran again and also lost. More important, he pulled so many progressives out of the Republican party that it took on a much more conservative cast for the next generation.

Roosevelt angrily complained about the foreign policy of President Wilson, calling it "weak." This caused him to develop an intense dislike for Woodrow Wilson. When World War I began in 1914, Roosevelt strongly supported the Allies of World War I and demanded a harsher policy against Germany, especially regarding submarine warfare. In 1916, he campaigned energetically for Charles Evans Hughes and repeatedly denounced Irish-Americans and German-Americans who Roosevelt said were unpatriotic because they put the interest of Ireland and Germany ahead of America's by supporting neutrality. He insisted one had to be 100% American, not a "hyphenated American" who juggled multiple loyalties. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Roosevelt sought to raise a volunteer infantry division, but Wilson refused.

Roosevelt's attacks on Wilson helped the Republicans win control of Congress in the off-year elections of 1918. Roosevelt was popular enough to seriously contest the 1920 Republican nomination, but his health was broken by 1918, because of the lingering malaria. His son Quentin, a daring pilot with the American forces in France, was shot down behind German lines in 1918. Quentin was his youngest son and probably the most liked by him. It is said the death of his son distressed him so much that Roosevelt never recovered from his loss.

Roosevelt appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

* Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – 1902
* William Rufus Day – 1903
* William Henry Moody – 1906

Progressive leader's "firsts in the nation"

In 1902, in response to the assassination of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to be under constant Secret Service protection.

In 1906, Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Enviro biofuel mandate: Progressive eugenics

2008-03-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space - facetiously - that an effective response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide would be to cut the world's food consumption by half. This could be achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days.

Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure that delivers the planet's food. But beyond this, the food industry's billion or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate buy-out, I suggested:

"At first, there is a net increase in CO2 'costs' as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings."

Perhaps I shouldn't joke. A scheme to kill off the world's poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental "experts," and is showing promising results. The tactics are cleverer than mine, by half.

"Biofuel" is the means. By turning much of the planet's limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale. Thanks to massive First-World subsides for biofuel, and regulations requiring increases in the biofuel component of oil consumption, the tonnage of the world's crops being fed into biofuel production appears, from various estimates, to be growing about five times faster than the amount being fed into human mouths. The turnover is accelerating.

Even in the economically advanced West, the rise in food prices has become noticeable. My observant reader will find signs in the supermarket, where dairy prices lead an advance that must necessarily spread -- for wholesale prices are outstripping retail prices in food across the board. The secondary effect of the monetary inflation this re-ignites is in itself beginning to cause economic havoc.

But we, who spend (in North America) less than 15 per cent of our incomes on food, can nevertheless survive if that proportion doubles or triples.

It is in the poorest countries, where people often spend more than half their income obtaining food, that a doubling or tripling of prices is fatal. And note, the supply of food does not need to halve in order to double prices. It only has to fall, consistently, a little behind demand.

Please don't take my word for this. The United Nations' World Food Programme and various other collectivist agencies are already becoming eloquent on the subject. In a statement to the European Parliament last week, the executive director of the WFP explained that their own cost of obtaining food for distribution to the world's hungry had risen by 40 per cent since last June. They are not predicting a catastrophe. They are experiencing one.

And all this is happening for what? So that we, the rich, can feel some smug environmentalist satisfaction while pumping biofuel into our cars.

The economics of biofuel are distorted by subsidies representing about half of production costs. It is more expensive than refining oil, not only in cash, but in environmental fallout - for there are more production stages to be passed through.

Cheap gas we are not going to get. The world's oil prices have much more to do with the OPEC cartel than any shortage of reserves or supply. Huge new reservoirs have come to light (most recently off the coast of Brazil), and there were already huge unexploited reserves (such as Alberta's tar sands). But by choking down supply, a fraction behind growth in demand, OPEC can keep the whip hand for the foreseeable future.

Biofuel has joined the list of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental scares. That list began with the DDT scare in the early 1960s. Tens of millions have died from malaria and other diseases that could have been eradicated by spraying with this pesticide.

The triumph of "environmentalism" is symptomatic of the madness that has gripped our power elites, under the thrall of "political correctness" - for there is real insanity in creating an actual and predictable disaster, to avert an imaginary one.

Noting food riots already in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico, and food rationing in Pakistan and China, the Indian development economist Deepak Lal writes: "For the Western 'good and the great,' their academic acolytes and the pop stars grandstanding to save Africa and to end poverty, this latest Western assault on the world's poor by their promotion of biofuels to replace food on the limited land in the world, can only evince contempt."

David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.

(canada.com)

Kremlin gets re-created

2008-03-19T07:30:00.000-04:00

Russian president Vladimir Putin is planning to recreate a new, bigger and better version of his old office when he moves out of the Kremlin to become prime minister in May. Accustomed to the comfortable trappings of power after eight years at the top, Mr Putin is intent on being a prime minister to be reckoned with.

The office has been progressively weakened since Boris Yeltsin's armed stand-off with an unruly parliament in October 1993, but Mr Putin will still be in charge of developing the national budget, managing the economy, taking care of social policy and guaranteeing national security.

In 1993 the confrontation over who ruled Russia ended then with tanks shelling the White House, seat of the parliamentary administration that overlooks the Moscow river a couple of miles west of the Kremlin.

Now Mr Putin is beefing up the role as Russia enters an almost unprecedented period of collective rule with two power centres: his as prime minister and Dmitry Medvedev's a president.

Mr Putin, a 55 year old black belt in martial art judo, has kicked serving prime minister Viktor Zubkov out of his fifth floor suite of offices to allow builders to start work on refurbishing the offices more in keeping with a man who served two terms at the very top.

Mr Zubkov, a 68 year old former collective farm manager from Mr Putin's old St Petersburg circle, meekly moved his cabinet meetings two floors down.

The fifth-floor makeover – taking place under the watchful eye of the powerful 20,000 strong Federal Protection Service, successor to the KGB's 9th department that safeguards the security of the president, top officials, the Kremlin and other key government installations – will recreate the style of Mr Putin's old Kremlin office.

"Putin's new workplace with be very similar to his Kremlin office – a place he is used to and comfortable with," one Kremlin insider told Russian newspaper Tvoi Dyen.

The refurbished offices will include a sports room to allow Mr Putin to keep up with his judo regime – he holds a black belt in the oriental martial art – and a resting area, allowing him to stay overnight if necessary.

"The offices will be done up in a modernist style as Putin loves practicality, with elements of Russian traditional architecture."

Mr Putin has already decreed that a new version of his favourite classic white cloth upholstered army chair – which makes his look taller than his 5' 7" frame – be included in the new furnishings and fittings.

Mr Zubkov's downsizing came soon after Mr Putin – still very much president until Mr Medvedev's inauguration due on May 7 – issued a startling decree formally dubbing Mr Medvedev as "president elect but not yet fulfilling his duties".

The decree also ordered full Kremlin security service protection for Mr Medvedev and a new official residence.

Mr Medvedev will enjoy "necessary" protection but not to the same level as that afforded the serving president, a senior Kremlin source told newspaper Kommersant.

The move underlines fears that Mr Putin will keep his 42 year old protégé firmly under tabs.

Kremlin insiders say that Mr Medvedev – who has worked udner Mr Putin since their days managing the St Petersburg city hall property portfolio under mayor Anatoly Sobchak in the early 1990s – has informally agreed to step down in 2012 to make way for Mr Putin's return as president.

The Russian constitution forbids a three-term presidency but does not prevent a return to power after such an absence.

Mr Putin plans to keep an eye on Mr Medvedev to ensure that despite his liberal image he sticks to the 'Putin plan', Andrei Kolesnikov, a Kremlin reporter and author of two books on Mr Putin

It won't be an easy job though.

"Medvedev is his own man. He is tough – even tougher than Putin. Putin always thinks about about how his decisions may affect people. Medvedev does not. He is a cold technocrat. More rational than Putin who tends to be more emotional," Mr Kolesnikov, 41 said.

"The idea that Mr Medvedev is weak is just a myth. People who believe this just do not know who Dmitry Medvedev really is."

But Mr Putin has a plan for that.

Last month (Feb) he insisted that the Constitution gave considerable powers to the prime minister, suggesting he intended to play a larger role than he permitted those in the office during his eight years in power.

"The president is the guarantor of the Constitution and sets the main directions of domestic and foreign policy. But the highest executive authority in the country is the government, which is led by the prime minister," Mr Putin said.

Mr Medvedev, 42, like the trained civil lawyer he is, has been choosing his words carefully.

"The president has his powers; the prime minister has his," Mr Medvedev said last week. "These powers come from the Constitution and current legislation, and nobody is planning to change this."

Russia's last period of collective leadership came in 1953 in the wake of Stalin's death – the 55th anniversary of which Russians marked last week.

Then murderous security apparatus chief Lavrenty Beria shared power as deputy prime minister with Nikita Krushchev, who took the role of Communist Party leader.

The uneasy arrangement lasted three months and ended with Beria's arrest and subsequent execution.

There is little likelihood of something similar happening in today's Russia, but Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev's relationship will be put to the test in the coming months with observers predicting possible instability at the very least.

The Constitution gives the Russian president broad authority over foreign, defence and security policy, while putting the prime minister in charge of day-to-day implementation, especially on economic and social policy.

The president serves as commander in chief of the armed forces and head of the Security Council, which oversees defense and security policies. The so-called power ministries and intelligence agencies report directly to the president including the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Federal Security Service, the Defence Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Emergency Situations Ministry.

As President Medvedev could conceivably fire Putin but most observers sees that as a remote possibility.

In the meantime as he waits patiently to take office Mr Medvedev is keeping the mood light.

He has no firm plans yet on his own Kremlin office makeover, but according to his spokeswoman, Natalya Timokova, it is likely to be a teenaged-boy dream.

"He will certainly have the latest in modern computers and communications technology such as a large screen monitor for video conferencing with regional leaders across Russia," she said, before adding with a laugh: "Visitors might expect to hear Black Sabbath or Deep Purple playing on his music system if the meeting is informal."

- Nick Holdsworth writes about Russian politics and society for the London Sunday Telegraph, about higher education and academic affairs for global internet weekly University World News and about film and television as Eastern Europe Bureau Chief for Variety.

(en.epochtimes.com)

Communists cheer on Progressive Dems

2008-03-18T18:00:00.000-04:00

“I never looked at the primaries before, but this year they got my notice,” a former factory worker now stuck in a low-wage health care job exclaimed to me recently. She stays glued to the election news on TV whenever she can.

A few days later at a MoveOn house party calling voters in Texas, the woman sitting next to me smiled and said quietly, “I better listen for a while — I haven’t done this for 30 years.”

Both women are typical of voters all over the country. They’re scared about the economic security of their families and worried about the future for their kids and grandkids. They want the war in Iraq to end. They’re registering to vote, changing parties where need be, and braving rain, sleet and snow to vote in the primaries.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a friend across the country. “Especially the young people getting engaged to make a change.”

What will it take to change course in our country?

The Take Back America annual conference convenes Mar. 17 to map out its national progressive agenda. The meeting comes at the completion of the fifth year of the Iraq war.

Economists now agree that as long as the resources of the nation are squandered on the occupation of Iraq, it will not be possible to pursue an agenda of green job creation, health care for all, affordable housing or funding public education. The economy and the war are interlinked, and voters, including in swing states, are angry and aware.

Republicans have chosen as their nominee one who envisions staying in Iraq for 100 years and who supports pre-emptive war regardless of the consequences. John McCain is in lockstep with U.S.-based global corporations who are out to dominate the world, destroy our constitutional rights, and drive down wages, benefits and economic security here at home.

McCain represents a continuation of Bush or worse.

Hillary Clinton’s statement that only she and McCain are tested to take an emergency call at 3 a.m. is wrong and dangerous. It raises false doubts about Barack Obama and runs the risk of discouraging voter turnout or sending swing voters back to the Republicans in the general election.

A fear campaign cannot serve to change the course of the country. Hope, not fear, is the agent of progressive change. Racism, bigotry and anti-immigrant bashing also stand in the way of changing course.

A poll released by USAction last month found swing voters favorable to an Invest in America’s Future program which redirects spending from the Iraq war and tax cuts for millionaires “to invest in our own people.”

In Illinois’ 14th Congressional District, voters stunned the political world by electing Democrat Bill Foster to fill the seat vacated by former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Obama campaigned for Foster as “the change we need.” This victory shows solid red districts can be turned blue in November.

In Maryland’s 4th Congressional District, progressive Donna Edwards’ decisive primary victory over Democratic incumbent Al Wynn proved a strong program to end the war and change priorities can win. “Our messages of change and returning Congress to focus on the interests of working families resonated loudly and clearly with voters all across our district,” she said.

Like the Texas primaries, changing the course of our country is a two-step process. First, it will take a groundswell of voters to deliver a landslide victory in November for a Democratic president and to expand the Democratic majority in the House and Senate. But that is just the beginning.

The energy, finance, pharmaceutical and military corporations will be hard at work to secure another Republican administration. Win or lose, they will exert their pressure on the next president and Congress. Corporate control can only be rolled back by organized grassroots pressure from union, African American, Latino, women, youth, senior, peace and environmental voters.

Labor’s campaign for the right to organize, and coalition organizing by peace and community groups for such needs as “not-for-profit” universal health care, affordable housing, equal quality public education, safe, clean energy and green job creation are at the heart of achieving a change of course in our country.

At the top of the list to change direction is bringing all the troops home from Iraq and establishing a new foreign policy for real security based on peaceful negotiations and nuclear nonproliferation.

It will take the organized participation of millions like the women I spoke with last week, and the young people standing up across this country, for a landslide victory in this historic election.

- Joelle Fishman (chairs the Communist Party USA Political Action Commission and is also chair of the Connecticut Communist Party.

(cpusa.org)

Our Progressive Century (2)

2008-03-14T07:00:00.002-04:00

Herbert Croly, collectivist icon

Our Progressive Century continues with a salute to the intellectual founder of Progressivism, the writer Herbert Croly.

This icon of Collectivism was the inspirational adviser to FDR's brain trust, and to our nation's only true Progressive presidents - Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He was a champion of anti-capitalists, labor organizations, and proponents of unlimited government.

from Wikipedia:

Herbert David Croly (1869 - 1930) was a liberal political author. He was born in New York City to Jane Cunningham Croly and David Goodman Croly. His mother wrote for the New York World and edited Demorest's Monthly. His father was a reporter for the New York Herald and the New York World.

Croly began his studies at the City College of New York in 1884. In 1886 he enrolled at Harvard University, but left in June 1888 without receiving a degree. He became editor of the Architectural Record from 1900 to 1913. In 1914, at the request of the co-founders of the New Republic, Willard and Dorothy Straight, he become the first editor, with Walter Lippmann as his young assistant. He remained as editor from the founding until his death in [1930].

In 1909 his book, The Promise of American Life, was published (click here to read The Promise of American life online). This book is said to "offer a manifesto of Progressive beliefs" which "anticipated the transition from competitive to corporate capitalism and from limited government to the welfare state".

Croly's work influenced Theodore Roosevelt (who borrowed the "new nationalism" slogan), Woodrow Wilson, and the architects of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1985 historian David Levy published the first biography of Croly, Herbert Croly and the New Republic.

Quotes

* "The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created." [wikipedia]

* "As a type the non-union laborer is a species of industrial derelict. He is the laborer who has gone astray and who either from apathy, unintelligence, incompetence, or some immediately pressing need prefers his own individual interest to the joint interests of himself and his fellow-laborers. From the point of view of a constructive national policy he does not deserve any special protection. In fact, I am willing to go farther and assert that the non-union industrial laborer should, in the interest of a genuinely democratic organization of labor, be rejected; and he should be rejected as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds in his garden for the benefit of fruit-and flower-bearing plants." [The Promise of American Life]

Progressive politics cited

2008-03-11T15:00:00.006-04:00

"Good afternoon. Over the past nine years, eight years as attorney general and one as governor, I’ve tried to uphold a vision of progressive politics that would rebuild New York and create opportunity for all. We sought to bring real change to New York and that will continue.

Today, I want to briefly address a private matter. I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and that violates my — or any — sense of right and wrong. I apologize first, and most importantly, to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better. I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good and doing what is best for the State of New York. But I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family. I will not be taking questions. Thank you very much. I will report back to you in short order. Thank you very much."

- N.Y. Democrat Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Monday, March 10

(cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)

Our Progressive Century (1)

2008-03-10T11:45:00.009-04:00

Our Progressive Century is a series on this blog honoring the iconic leaders and events that forged America's proud progressive tradition ... Our Progressive Century reconnects us with the historic foundations of a movement in American politics said to be in resurgence.

We begin not in the United States with an American, but in Germany.

Otto Von Bismarck, The Iron Chancellor

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, Prince of Bismarck (1815-1898) was a Prussian and German statesman of the 19th century.

As Minister-President of Prussia from 1862–90, he oversaw the unification of Germany. From 1867 on, he was Chancellor of the North German Confederation. When the second German Empire was formed in 1871, he served as its first Chancellor, gaining the nickname "Iron Chancellor". [Wikipedia]

"Bismarck inspired American progressives in myriad ways ... First, he was a centralizer, a uniter, a European Lincoln who brought disparate regions and factions under the yoke of the state, heedless of dissent. Second, he was the innovator of top-down socialism, which pioneered many of the welfare state programs the progressives yearned for: pensions, health insurance, worker safety measures, eight-hour workdays, and so on. Bismarck's efficiency at delivering programs without the messiness of "excessive" democracy set the precedent for the idea that "great men," modernizers, and "men of action" could do what the leaders of decadent and decaying democracies could not.

"Moreover, Bismarck's socialism from above gelded classical liberalism in Germany and helped to hobble it around the globe. Bismarck wanted to forestall greater socialist or democratic radicalism by giving the people what they wanted without having them vote for it. To this end he bought off the left-leaning reformers who didn't particularly care about limited government or liberal constitutionalism. At the same time, he methodically marginalized, and in many cases crushed, the classical or limited-state liberals (a similar dynamic transpired in the United States during World War I).

"Hence, in Germany, both left and right became in effect statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to impose its vision on society. Liberlism, defined as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government, slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR, a liberalism defined by economic entitlements ..." - from Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg (2007), p.217-218

Book Review: The life of Claudia Jones

2008-03-08T17:00:00.001-05:00

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Carole Boyce Davies (Duke University Press, 2008; $22.95)

Claudia Jones is not a name that comes to mind when thinking about African-American feminist theorists and activists. Hopefully, this memoir of her life and achievements will change that.

Jones was a communist, Marxist-Leninist to be precise, a union activist, a feminist and an anti-racist activist. She integrated the ideas of those theories into activism and practice, in the United States for the majority of her life and in London, England.

At the beginning of Left of Karl Marx, Davies provides the reader with an abbreviated chronology of Jones' life, then divides the book into chapters focusing on different aspects of Jones' life: her radical writing as a journalist, her activism within the Communist Party USA, her prison writings, mostly in the form of letters and poems that she wrote, her arrests and her imprisonments in the United States, her deportation to London, England, and how she continued her work there until she died.

Jones died in London at the age of 49 of heart failure. Poor health had plagued her throughout her life, and imprisonment, it could be argued, accelerated her death. Her ashes are buried literally to the left of Karl Marx's tombstone in Highgate Cemetery, London.

Jones was born in Trinidad in 1915 and emigrated to the United States in 1924. She had tuberculosis as a young woman, and suffered from inadequate medical attention throughout most of her life. She worked manual labour positions such as laundry and factory work, and became involved in working class politics.

Jones first joined the Communist Party in 1936 at the age of 21 and was active in the Youth Movement. She was an avid writer and journalist and wrote for many newspapers throughout her life, many of them focusing on issues related to black Americans, working class life, and the role of women in the Communist party.

In the introduction, Davies talks about how Jones' life and work were very much ahead of her time, and relevant to the politics of anti-oppression, and linked oppressions that modern feminist and left movements struggle with to this day. Davies describes the black subject, such as Claudia Jones, as a body that can challenge the status quo from several subject locations:

The radical black subject, male or female, challenges the normalizing of state oppression, constructs an alternative discourse, and articulates these both theoretically and in practice. This is a resisting black subject…resisting dominating systems organized and enforced by states, organizations and institutions in order to produce a complicit passive people and to maintain exploitative systems. The revolutionary subject works in a movement geared toward dismantling that oppressive status.

Jones talked about the "superexploitation" of black working-class women. Davies explains: "She brought an explicitly women's rights orientation to the politics of the Communist Party USA." Davies assesses Jones as part of the canon of Black transnational theorists such as Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, and Angela Davis, as well as radical organizations of the time such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization. For Jones, the ideas and practices were inseparable, "that our current geopolitical locations are products of multiple historical processes, many of which we had no control over, which have produced us, as subjects, in various 'nation-states' of the world."

The Communist Party was illegal in the United States during the time of Jones' activism. In 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began a file on her, obtained by Davies under the Freedom of Information Act. Despite harassment and threats, Jones continued her writing and activism, rising to the level of Editor-in-Chief of the Weekly Review, the Communist Party newspaper in 1943, Editor of the Negro Affairs section of the Daily Worker in 1946, and was elected a full member of the National Committee of Communist Party USA in 1946 as well.

In January 1948, Jones was arrested for the first time, and was threatened with deportation to Trinidad. While out on bail she spoke at May Day rallies across the country, and worked on issues relating to the working class, peace, equality and black women. She recruited for the Party, even as the FBI continued to gather evidence to be used for her deportation hearing.

In 1953, Jones was convicted for one year and a day, a shorter sentence than two other women arrested with her, due to her health issues. She was released after serving nine months, and her deportation order came shortly afterwards. In London she was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain and continued with the work she loved, including, in 1958, founding the newspaper West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News.

Davies makes a number of references to the parallels of Jones' treatment in the United Stated during the era, the McCarthy Era, and the recent restrictions on civil liberties within the United States since September 11, 2001. Parallels include imprisonment and deportation based on nothing more than affiliations with certain groups considered to be (current) enemies of the United States, the enacting of the USA-Patriot Act in 2001 whose full name is "Uniting and Strengthening American by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."

The criminalization of communism took place under very similar circumstances, in which the Internal Security Act (1950), also known as the McCarran Act, shares similar clauses to parts of the Patriot Act, specifically that all communists register with immigration authorities and local police.

This is a dense, academic, and thorough book about the life of a Black feminist theorist that more people should know about. It is my hope that this is the start of a revival of Jones' life and work. This is a must read for any women's studies class, as well as American history, politics and other disciplines. Highly recommended.

(rabble.ca)

Progressive century to be examined

2008-03-05T14:00:00.009-05:00

The Progressive Era (1890-1920) was marked by a deep desire for political change and a preference for government activism. The Progressive movement led to the New Deal and persists in its raw form even today.

A new series, Our Progressive Century, will start here soon - to honor the iconic leaders and events that forged America's proud progressive tradition ... and reconnect us with the historic foundations of a movement in American politics said to be in resurgence.

According to Wikipedia, characteristics of progressivism include:

- Belief in obligation to intervene in economic and social affairs

- Belief in ability of experts and in efficiency of government intervention

The progressive philosophy and the Progressive Era actions taken by government have critics, too. The changes during this era that political and industry figures implemented to bring about "progress" have negatively affected birthing and family, schooling, law, journalism, food production and distribution, and many other areas of life.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Voters looking carefully for distinctions

2008-03-02T08:20:00.005-05:00

Forty years ago, third-party presidential candidate George Wallace cackled that there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Gov. Wallace, who was a stanch Democrat most of his life, could have been describing the distinctions between his party's presidential candidates in 2008.

Democrats may protest, but the reality is they have a choice of candidate, not of platform. Evidence of the similarities between Senators Clinton and Obama abound in the ratings awarded by assorted interest groups. Project Vote Smart (www.votesmart.org) compiles many of these evaluations.

Mrs. Clinton was given a 100 percent rating by both NARAL Pro-Choice America (previously conducting its nefarious business under the more straightforward name of the National Abortion Rights Action League) and Planned Parenthood for her 2006 votes. By golly, so was Mr. Obama.

For 2005-2006, the National Right to Life Committee awarded Mr. Obama a zero. Shockingly, that's what Mrs. Clinton was also given. The National Taxpayers Union evaluated Mr. Obama at 16 percent for 2006. Now here's a major distinction; Mrs. Clinton's rating was 17 percent.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State obsesses over its paranoid delusion that the so-called Religious Right is imposing its theological views on the public by governmental action. This lunacy extends to efforts to limit Christmas celebrations and even banning government workers from using the word Christmas. Barry Lynn, the organization's director, gleefully notes: "The good news is that in December if you say 'Happy Holidays' you're touching upon an important holiday of almost everyone. You're a little early for Chinese New Year but the truth is you generally hit Ramadan, you hit Hanukkah, you hit Christmas, you even hit the Winter Solstice for pagans."

Winter Solstice for pagans, now there's a burning concern. Given the organization's liberal slant, it's not unexpected that for 2006 it awarded Senator Obama a 100 percent rating. Senator Clinton was also perfect in the group's view.

The duo was also faultless for the 2005-2006 period in the eyes of the National Education Association, a teachers' union devoted to leftist indoctrination and fat salaries, and, for 2006, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.

A few years ago, the "chair" of the Communist Party USA political action committee cited two "progressive organizations" working to push the Democratic Party leftward. They were the Alliance of Retired Americans and the Campaign for America's Future. Both groups conferred 100 percent ratings on Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in 2006.

Also that year, the two senators racked up identical voting records with the Americans for Democratic Action (95 percent), the Service Employees International Union (94 percent), and the AFL-CIO (93 percent). They didn't do so well with the traditional values crowd; the Family Research Council gave them both zeroes.

Some groups, such as Citizens for Global Solutions, assign letter grades rather than a numeric rating. Until a few years ago, Citizens for Global Solutions was known as the World Federalist Association. Its aim, one-world government, didn't change. The 2007 grade for Barack Obama was an A+. Joining him as class valedictorian was Hillary Clinton.

Both Democratic candidates opposed John Roberts's and Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court and favored more federal money for embryonic stem cell research. Two years ago, they voted for a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Now, however, both of them are against it, with the Illinois senator noting that "this is an area where Senator Clinton and I almost entirely agree." What a surprise.

Barack Obama sharply criticizes Hillary Clinton's judgment on some issues — Iraq, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and how they'd implement their socialized medicine schemes come to mind — yet the differences they have even there can be gauged with a micrometer. So it is with almost everything.

To be certain, the candidates differ in some ways. They're not alike in terms of style or emphasis or from whom they swipe their speech material. On policy matters, though, there's not a dime's worth of difference. Somewhere, George Wallace must be smiling.

- This Michael Bates column appeared in the February 28, 2008 Reporter Newspapers.

Michael M. Bates has written a weekly column of opinion — or nonsense, depending on your viewpoint — since 1985 for the (southwest suburban Chicago) Reporter Newspapers. Additionally, his articles have appeared in the Congressional Record, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Mensa Journal. He has been a guest on Milt Rosenberg's program on WGN Radio Chicago, the Bruce Elliott show on Baltimore's WBAL, the Jim Sumpter show on the USA Radio Network and the New Media Journal's Blog Radio. As a lad, Mike distributed Goldwater campaign literature and since then has steadily moved further to the Right. He is the author of "Right Angles and Other Obstinate Truths." In 2007, he won an Illinois Press Association award for Original Column.

(renewamerica.us)

Barack's movement cred checks out

2008-03-01T07:00:00.001-05:00

In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama’s life as a “secret smoker” and how he “went to great lengths to conceal the habit.” But what about Obama’s secret political life? It turns out that Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending “socialist conferences” and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a “hard-core academic Marxist,” which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his “poetry” and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.”

The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What’s more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting in March of 2007.

Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.

You won’t find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama now on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama’s most controversial activity. At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as “left-leaning.”

But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama’s own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had “some modest notoriety once,” was “a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago…” but was now “pushing eighty.” He writes about “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.

This “Frank” is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II—even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.” Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That’s not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The communists knew who “Frank” was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the Davis-Obama relationship.

Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”

Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man’s mentor, influencing Obama’s sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.

As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had “migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”

It was in Chicago that Obama became a “community organizer” and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.

The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.

Both communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist International, then called the “First International.” According to Pierre Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, “It was he [Marx] who formally launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure...”

Apparently unaware that Davis had been publicly named as a CPUSA member, Horne said only that Davis “was certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]—if not a member…”

In addition to Tidwell’s book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis’s Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says that Davis, however, would later claim that he was “deeply troubled” by the pact.

While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or when Davis ever left the party.

However, Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.” Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,” Obama wrote.

For his part, Horne says that Obama’s giving of credit to Davis will be important in history. “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, Living the Blues and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside,” he said.

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the “Frank” in Obama’s book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.

In an analysis posted online, she notes that Davis, who was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, brought “an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world” and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She described him as a “socialist realist” who attacked the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Davis, in his own writings, had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a secret member of the CPUSA, had suggested that he take a job as a columnist with the Honolulu Record “and see if I could do something for them.” The ILWU was organizing workers there and Robeson’s contacts were “passed on” to Davis, Takara writes.

Takara says that Davis “espoused freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics.”

Is “coalition politics” at work in Obama’s rise to power?

Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.

“Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle,” Chapman wrote. “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”

Let’s challenge the liberal media to report on this. Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?

(newswithviews.com)