James Simpson: Questioning Conspiracy

An excerpt from Jim Simpson's latest article, the excellent remainder found at its DC Independent Examiner page:

Questioning Conspiracy

Cloward and Piven were not merely two lone sociology professors conspiring on teacher salaries to bring down America. They were prominent socialists and lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest and oldest worldwide socialist organization. Therein lay their strength, both in recruitment and resources. The leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) held seminars for activists on how to use the CPS. Cloward and Piven’s Nation article was reprinted a record 30,000 times.

These folks were not alone. And they only added to the plethora of anti-American strategies being used, building on the already utilized Alinsky method. Also, we have been infiltrated since the 1930s by the KGB and their sister agencies in other communist countries whose goal has not merely been to obtain military secrets, but much more to create a subversive infrastructure in this country. The IPS, mentioned above, is largely a KGB front. All of its principals are American communists, who, by definition, work for the communist international, still run by the KGB despite the alleged "fall" of communism.

All these groups, the think tanks, the DSA, ACORN, ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Communist Party and all their offshoots are led by people who know each other, have worked in the "movement" for years, and share the same goals, often trading places in the various organizations. It is well organized, powerful, and even deadly when necessary. Connections to foreign intelligence agencies like the KGB are well hidden, but very likely much closer than even a lot of people in the movement realize (those, like many prominent Democrats, are the useful idiots).

Finally, it doesn't take much for a conspiracy to work when you give participants a vested interest. That was an overtly stated component of the CPS. Cloward and Piven said:

First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests.

continued...

Deepak Bhargava 'Advancing Change in the Age of Obama'

New Zeal, Obama File 89

Trevor Loudon was our guest on Sentinel Radio's "The Awakening," this past, Monday, 9/28, 9-11pm ET,,, 6-8pm PT (it is archived for listening, here, also downloadable from the Sentinel Radio page in BTR).

by Trevor Loudon

Indian born, New York raised, Harvard educated, Deepak Bhargava may have seldom crossed paths with Barack Obama-but he is a key player in 44th president's movement to transform America.

Deepak Bhargava is connected to almost every aspect of the Obama movement-from George Soros to ACORN, to Democratic Socialists of America, to The Nation, to the communist dominated United for Peace and Justice, to a whole raft of "progressive" non profits.

In the video below, Deepak Bhargava opens the Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum December 10 2007 - a forum exclusively for thousands of community organizers including ACORN personnel.

Note that Obama promises to invite community organizers to the White House even before his inauguration, to contribute to setting his "agenda for change."

Deepak Bhargava's main base for activism is the Washington DC based Center for Community Change, (CCC) which he joined in 1994, after several years as legislative director for ACORN.

Bhargava became the Center's Executive Director in 2004 and has successfully pushed the organization to "develop the power and capacity of low-income people, especially low-income people of color, to change the policies and institutions that affect their lives."

Deepak Bhargava has sharpened the Center's focus on grassroots community organizing as the "central strategy for social justice and on public policy change as the key lever to improve poor people's lives."

Bhargava conceived and led the Center's work on immigration reform, which has resulted in the creation of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a "leading grassroots network pressing for changes in the country's immigration laws."

He has spearheaded the creation of innovative new projects like Generation Change, a program that recruits, trains and places the next generation of community organizers, and the Community Voting Project, which brings "large numbers of low-income voters into the electoral process."

Helping Bhargava change America, is CCC board member Heather Booth, the former Students for a Democratic Society radical, turned Democratic Party power player.

Booth runs the Midwest Academy out of Chicago-churning out hundreds of "community" and union organizers.

Booth and her husband Paul, a labor union power broker, both have close ties to the US's largest marxist organization, Democrativc Socialists of America.

As does Deepak Bhargava.

Over September 20-22 2002 Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava and Holly Sklar were billed as keynote speakers at “Confronting the Low-Wage Economy” at the First Congregational Church-Washington, DC, organized by Democratic Socialists of America.

This conference will kick off DSA’s Low Wage Justice Project, which is designed to bring the human consequences of the low wage economy to the attention of the American people.

DSA member Frances Fox Piven is the co-author of the famous Cloward-Piven Strategy developed in the 1960s-widely used by ACORN, DSA and US "community organizers" ever since.

The strategy calls for organizers to encourage the "poor" to enroll for every entitlement possible, in order to bankrupt the US government, to bring about chaos and eventual social revolution.

In his speech to the conference Deepak Bhargava refered favourably to the work of DSA founder [Michael Harrington and his book "The Other America"-which is widely credited with sparking the massive growth of US welfarism in the 1960s under Kennedy and Johnson.

So I do want to say that I enter this new period with a tremendous amount of optimism. Before nine-eleven we saw larger numbers mobilized in the streets on a whole range of issues, immigration, living wages than we'd seen in a long, long time. There is no question that nine-eleven has taken the wind to some degree out of those sails, but I think both the demographic, the organizational, the economic realities underneath that momentum at the local level are still present, and it's up to our imagination and our will to rekindle it over the next couple of years. But I think we can make great strides on this anniversary of Michael Harrington's The Other America in doing something serious about it...

Deepak Bhargava's radical ties extend in several directions.

At the higher level, Bhargava is a board member at George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI).

On November 29, 2006 Bhargava participated in a roundtable discussion at OSI New York entitled "How Do Progressives Connect Ideas to Action?"

Individuals and organizations with similarly progressive goals often dilute their power by working alone or even working at cross-purposes. As Americans who are politically left of center move forward, questions of infrastructure, communication, and collaboration are particularly important.

Participants included:

• Robert Borosage-A trustee of the far left Washington "think tank" Institute for Policy Studies and founder/CEO of Campaign for America's Future.
• Rosa Brooks Daughter of IPS Trustee and DSA member Barbara Ehrenreich. Now a senior advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy.
• Anna Burger AFL-CIO, later a Progressives for Obama endorser and key player in labor union/Obama White House dealings.
• Eric Foner DSA member.
• Katrina vanden Heuvel IPS trustee, The Nation editor.
• John Podesta Center for American Progress founder. CAP is a key source of "progressive" personnel for the Obama Administration.
• Joel Rogers Key DSA aligned "progressive" activist. A founder of the radical New Party which Obama joined in Chicago in 1995.

As of July 17, 2007 Deepak Bhargava, Center for Community Change was affiliated with United for Peace and Justice-the US peace movement umbrella group.

UFPJ was intiated to oppose the Iraq war by the Institute for Policy Studies . It is completely dominated by communists and radicals, which doesn't seem to bother Bhargava.

Also leading organizations affiliated to UFPJ in July 2007, were Communist Party members Judith LeBlanc, Rosalio Munoz, Alfred Marder and Erica Smiley, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism aligned activists Leslie Cagan, Attieno Davis, Howard Wallace and Van Gosse, DSA leaders Jason Schulman and Lucas Shapiro, Freedom Road Socialist Organization Maoists, Dennis O'Neil and Juliet Ucelli, IPSers Phyllis Bennis, Saif Rahman and Arthur Waskow and a very familiar name to readers of this blog-Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Bhargava serves on the editorial board of the The Nation--effectively the house journal of the IPS.

Fellow Editorial board members include;

• Barbara Ehrenreich DSA member, IPS Trustee, New Party and Progressives for Obama founder.
• Eric Foner DSA member.
• Lani Guinier Daughter of communist Ewart Guinier.
• Tom Hayden SDS and Progressives for Obama founder.
• Deborah Meier DSA member and speaker in 1998, with Barack Obama at the memorial service of Chicago DSA member Saul Mendelson)
• Victor Navasky IPS Trustee, The Nation.
• Marcus Raskin IPS founder.

Below is a video of Deepak Bhargava speaking at a The Nation forum in April 2009, on the prospects for "progressive" gains under Obama's "stealth agenda".

On February 26 2009, Mike Lux, Miles Rapoport of Demos, Deepak Bhargava and Gloria Totten of Progressive Majority spoke at the Center for Community Change in New York at a forum entitled "Progressives in an Obama World: The Role of the Progressive Movement in a Democratically Controlled Washington".

The forum blurb identified Obama as a "progressive" and went on to say:

Since the 2004 election, the progressive movement has built a powerful infrastructure of think tanks, media outlets and advocacy organizations. Frustrated by the conservative ascendancy and the dominance of conservative ideas, individuals and institutions have put forward new paradigms for government and promoted a bold vision for the future.

But now a progressive holds the highest office in the land. As the movement struggles to define its role in the Obama era, important questions remain unanswered: What is the role of such organizations in Washington and how can they best create political space for Obama to act? On what issues should the movement compromise and on which take strong stands? How can progressives build consensus to make their efforts more effective?

The panel will feature progressive leaders Deepak Bhargava, Miles Rapoport and Mike Lux; the speakers will draw on two new books, ‘Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era,’ and The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, as they discuss what progressives can do to create momentum for greater boldness at a time when opportunities and challenges abound.

Miles Rapoport is another former SDSer, DSA associate, ACORN defender and ardent Obama supporter. Interestingly Rapoport became president of New York "think tank" Demos in 2000-while Obama was still a founding Trustee of the organization.

Van Jones, incidentally is still listed as a Demos Trustee.

Below is another Bhargava speech from February 2009, given to the Liberty Hill foundation "Advancing Change in the Age of Obama".

Mild-mannered Deepak Bhargava is at the heart of the US social revolution.

He and Obama may never have exchanged more than a few words, but they are assuredly working for the same future.

This article originally appeared in Trevor Loudon's blog, New Zeal.

Parallel Lives? Obama's 'Go To' Man, Patrick Gaspard and New York Socialism

New Zeal, Obama File 88

Trevor Loudon was our guest on Sentinel Radio's "The Awakening," this past, Monday, 9/28, 9-11pm ET,,, 6-8pm PT (it is archived for listening, here, also downloadable from the Sentinel Radio page in BTR).

by Trevor Loudon

In June 2009 Patrick Gaspard, a Brooklyn-based, 41-year-old Democratic operative, became White House director of the Office of Political Affairs.

Patrick Gaspard’s official responsibility is to provide the president with an "accurate assessment of the political dynamics affecting the work of his administration" and to "work with powerbrokers around the country to help push the president’s agenda".

According to Rep. Gregory Meeks, "He’s a low key, behind-the-scenes, no-fingerprints kind of guy. I need something, I call Patrick. And if he calls, it’s a big deal. He’s close to the president.”

Considerable attention has been focused on Gaspard's ties to the radical community group ACORN.

This post looks at Gaspard's ties to the groups behind ACORN-the groups that helped President Obama during his Chicago days-Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party offshoot Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Patrick Gaspard was reportedly born in Kinshasa, Zaire, after his father, a political opponent of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, fled there.

Patrick Gaspard’s father moved with his wife from Haiti to "post-liberation" Zaire, when its pro-communist leader, Patrice Lumumba, appealed to French-speaking academics of African descent to teach there.

Three years after Patrick Gaspard’s birth, the family moved to New York.

Like Obama, Patrick Gaspard wrote poetry. Like Obama , Patrick Gaspard grew up admiring third world leftists and revolutionaries. He reportedly idolized Aime Cesaire, a radical poet/politician from the French colony of Martinique.

Cesaire was elected to the French Parliament with the French Communist Party, but later left to form his own leftist party in Martinique.

Cesaire also taught the anti-colonialist Marxist theorist Frantz Fanon, of whom Obama wrote admiringly in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

Patrick Gaspard got his start in politics, in the mid 1980s, organizing demonstrations in New York City for "social justice" in Haiti.

He got his first taste of campaign work in the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson-like Obama a product of the Chicago socialist machine.

Patrick Gaspard went on to David Dinkins’ first New York mayoral race, as an intern in Dinkins' office and then to City Hall, when Dinkins won the New York Mayoralty.

Dinkins was at the time, a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

In 1997, outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, also a member of Democratic Socialists of America, enlisted Gaspard for her doomed mayoral campaign against Rudy Giuliani.

After the Messinger debacle, Gaspard became chief of staff to Councilwoman Margarita Lopez, a radical feminist from the Lower East Side.

In 1999, Lopez loaned Gaspard out to help Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to organize a march in protest of the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant.

Gaspard was allegedly a key organizer of the civil disorder that followed Diallo's death.

The union was one of the central organizers of the civil disobedience that followed, and 1199 President Dennis Rivera and then-Political Director Bill Lynch asked Gaspard to coordinate those efforts.

Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199, recruited Gaspard to the union- where after some he rose to the rank of union Executive Vice President.


It is important to realize that Local 1199 is one of New York's most powerful and militant labor unions.

Founded in 1932, the union was left led from the start and was investigated in 1948 by the House Un-American Activities Committee for Communist "infiltration".

At at a March 2007 meeting to celebrate the [[Communist Party USA]] donation of its papers to New York's Tamiment Library, Steve Kramer, executive vice president of Service Employees Union [[Local 1199]], spoke of the Communist Party’s role in building and maintaining his union.

Recounting 1199’s “''disastrous”'' 1984 strike and internal strife in which “''the union almost tore itself up'',” Kramer said that but for the party’s efforts, “''1199 would have been a small union''” Today, with nearly 300,000 members, it is the world’s largest union local.

When the Communist Party split in 1991, several Local 1199 officials joined the dissenting faction and took many comrades into the breakaway Committees of Correspondence.

Among those Local 1199 officials signing the Communist Party dissenter's "An initiative to Unite and Renew the Party" document, which brought tensions to crisis point, were Paul Friedman (Local 1199 Vice President), Rafael Pizarro (Local 1199 organiser), Geoffrey Jaques (associate editor 1199 News) and Marshall Garcia (Local 1199 executive Vice President).

Friedman, Pizarro, Jacques and Garcia all went on to support Committees of Correspondence.

Pizarro also went on to help found the radical New Party, which Obama joined in Chicago in 1995.

Many other 1199ers also supported Committees of Correspondence, including Lenore Colbert (Local 1199 Vice President), Pat Harris (Local 1199 Vice President), David Kranz and Socorro Laguerra (Local 1199 rank and file), Pam Mills (Local 1199 Seattle), Bruce Richard (SEIU San Francisco, now a Local 1199 Vice President), Angela Doyle (Local 1199 Vice President) and Nelson Valdez (Local 1199 Vice President}.

Doyle, Valdez and Richard still hold senior positions with the union.

In addition, leading Committees of Correspondence member Mael Apollon is involved with the Local 1199 Child Care Fund.

Also of note is the late Merrilee Milstein , who was from 1972 to 1994, Vice President of the New England Local 1199. Milstein was a hard left activist in her own right and was married to Communist Party member Brian Steinberg.

Milstein left 1199, to become assistant to then Connecticut Secretary of State Miles Rapoport-now president of the ACORN supporting, DSA linked, New York think tank Demos.

Barack Obama was one of Demos' first Trustees when it was established in 1999.

Gerry Hudson, now a vice president of the SEIU, also got his start at Local 1199 in New York. Hudson is a member of Democratic Socialists of America and also serves on the board of the Apollo Alliance-founded by Obama's recently departed "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones.

In 2003, Patrick Gaspard was granted leave from Local 1199 to work as the deputy national field director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. After Dean was eliminated from the race, Gaspard became national field director for George Soros’ political action group America Coming Together.

Later Gaspard helped Yvette Clarke win the Congressional seat vacated by Democratic Socialists of America member and Communist Party supporter Major Owens.

Clarke is now a member of the leftist Congressional Progressive Caucus-which has long and deep ties to DSA.

In 1995 Patrick Gaspard was an organizer for the New Jersey chapter of the New Party, a creation of ACORN, DSA and Committees of Correspondence.


By 2001 Gaspard was a leading activist in the New Party offshoot, the New York Working Families Party-a DSA/ACORN/Committees of Correspondence/Communist Party collaboration.

Gaspard and Bertha Lewis of ACORN, wrote a letter to the July 2, 2001 issue of The Nation, "In the course of their letter, Gaspard and Lewis describe their extensive joint involvement in Working Families Party activities." The letter is signed, "Bertha Lewis, ACORN, WFP; Patrick Gaspard, SEIU State Council, WFP."

According to DSA's Democratic Left Summer 2001

Veterans of the left will remember that the 1968 Peace and Freedom Party and the 1980 Citizens Party arose at moments of greater left-wing strength and did not significantly alter the national electoral landscape. Nor has, unfortunately, the New Party, which many DSAers work with in states where “fusion” of third party and major party votes is possible (such as the DSA co-sponsored Working Families Party in N.Y. State).

The DSA youth wing's 2004 "Life After Bush" Conference included, "A series of well-attended workshops detailed the nuts-and-bolts of electoral activism, lead by veteran campaigners from trade unions and the NY DSA-affiliated fusion Working Families Party."

Speakers at Life after Bush included:

• Cornel West, DSA, New Party founder, 2008 member of Barack Obama's Black Advisory Council. A Progressives for Obama endorser.
• Frances Fox Piven, DSA, New Party founder, co-creator of the famous Cloward-Piven Strategy for wrecking the US economy. A Progressives for Obama endorser.
• Steve Max DSA Director of Organizing and Training, Midwest Academy Chicago.
• Leslie Cagan Committees of Correspondence, National Coordindator, United for Peace and Justice
  
• Ian Williams DSA, a correspondent for In These Times and The Nation
• Bertha Lewis, Co-Chair, Working Families Party, Executive Director, New York ACORN.

Bertha Lewis

DSA member Jay Mazur is also prominent in the Working Families Party and is also an endorser of the Progressives for Obama website.

Patrick Gaspard is still listed on the advisory board of the the WFP aligned Working Families Center, alongside:

• Working Families Party co-chair Bob Master
• Working Families Party Secretary and New York ACORN head, Jon Kest.
• SEIU's Hector Figueroa-a regular speaker at DSA's Socialist Scholars Conferences - including the 2004 event where Van Jones also spoke.
• Andrea Batista Schlesinger -on the board of the Oakland based Applied research Center which is closely aligned with Van Jones' Ella Baker Human Rights Center.
• Former Committees of Correspondence National Coordinating Committee member Nathan Newman, who recently wrote in the Daily Kos, "I knew Van (Jones) pretty well back in the early 90s when we were both involved in community organizing efforts, including involvement in a variety of left-leaning groups."
  

Barack Obama, as a young man, admired third world revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon. He went into community organizing and the DSA/Committees of Correspondence aligned Chicago left, before moving on to the White House.

Van Jones, as a young man, admired third world revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral. He went from radical community organizing into the San Francisco Committees of Correspondence and the New York DSA aligned left (like Obama, Jones was a Trustee of the DSA aligned Demos), before moving on to the White House.

Patrick Gaspard, as a young man, admired third world revolutionaries like Aime Cesaire. He went into radical organizing and mixed with the DSA/Committees of Correspondence aligned New York left, before moving on to the White House.

Parallel lives? Or just the way US socialism works?

a.k.a., Marxism, a.k.a., communism, a.k.a., tyrannically control you

This article originally appeared in Trevor Loudon's blog, New Zeal.