Diane Schrader
The cult classic film “Blue Velvet” focused on the seedy goings-on under the surface of American suburbia. To illustrate this, a disturbing opening scene depicted an All-American house with flowers growing next to the ubiquitous picket fence… and then the camera dropped down under the flowers, into the grass, then below the grass, to show the swarming insects and worms under the surface.
This creepy scene brings to mind a whole network of seedy insects and worms that the mainstream media successfully ignored during the 2008 presidential campaign. The Fourth Estate had a crucial job to do, which was vetting the candidates, and in the case of Obama, they utterly failed. So it fell to author Stanley Kurtz to peel back the sod, so to speak, and reveal the dark side underneath. And that’s what he does in his bombshell new book Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (Click here to order at Amazon). Attention, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, New York Times, et al – this is called “investigative reporting.” You may want to familiarize yourself with the concept. Kurtz has proven, for those who still might question it, that our Prez is indeed a socialist, by almost any possible definition. But perhaps even more importantly, he has exposed the “community organizer” agenda that dare not go by its own name (socialism), as well as the role played by the religious Left and professional race-baiters. So what kind of ugly little squirmies did he find? Well, this list of worms, hiding behind rhetoric designed to mask their true politics, doesn’t even include unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and “God D**n America” Jeremiah Wright! So here for your reading pleasure, a partial list of the under-the-radar connections – the bugs and worms, if you will – that should have been exposed to America… oh, about three years ago:
1. Ken Rolling
Rolling’s a hard-lefty with religious credentials – a master’s degree in theology. As Kurtz points out, American socialism today relies heavily the Catholic Left, in particular, and Rolling has close ties to that movement. He also has multiple ties to Obama through foundations where they worked together (along with Bill Ayers), and worked with our president in his younger days on so-called school reform, which as Kurtz meticulously details, is really just another Leftist code phrase for taking control of institutions from the grassroots level up. (Plus side: They did want to take school control away from teacher unions. Minus side: They wanted to give control to “community” groups like ACORN!) What’s more, as an administrator for the “we never heard of it before but certainly should have” socialist Midwest Academy, he was able to funnel a great deal of money to Obama’s “community organizing” causes, including “school reform.”
As Kurtz reports, the socialist sympathies of this longtime ally of Obama are crystal clear. Representing the Midwest Academy and a related group called Citizen Action, Rolling visited Nicaragua in the eighties to support the Marxist Sandinista regime, which his organization idealized as “neighborhood democracy” in action – and invited Sandinista leader Milagros Leyton to speak to his groups in the United States in 1985. Rolling even put Leyton up in his own home. Bear in mind, history has proven that this bunch was both brutal and bloodthirsty, as even the New York Times was forced to admit some years later.
Rolling has one more big claim to fame, far more recently. Back in the summer of 2008, when author Kurtz was already trying to do the job of the MSM, he attempted to examine records from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, another Left-leaning foundation headed by Obama and Ayers. Kurtz was repeatedly assured by officials at the University of Illinois Chicago Library, where the records were housed, that he would be allowed access. However, just before he boarded a flight to Chicago, top library officials intervened to bar his access. Kurtz was forced to undertake another investigation, simply to uncover what had happened to make them change their minds. Using, among other things, Freedom of Information Act requests, he was able to piece together the story, and Ken Rolling was at the center of it. Rolling apparently chose the day Kurtz was going to arrive to begin a series of legal claims to withdraw the records from university control.
A coincidence? I think not.
2. Alice Palmer
Palmer was Ken Rolling’s partner at Citizen Action, also had ties to the Midwest Academy, and became a state senator in Illinois. Ah, but not just ANY state senator. The state senator who handpicked Obama to be her successor. Why is this relevant?
Because, as Kurtz reveals, Palmer “was a hard Marxist”:
“…for several years, Palmer edited an opinion magazine called New Deliberations that was obviously socialist in character (sample article title: Socialism Is the Only Way Forward). Obama critic David Freddoso has already reported Palmer’s attendance in 1986 at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, followed by her praise of the USSR and criticism of the United States in the Communist People’s Daily World. Palmer’s papers are filled with similar material—an engraved invitation to the first anniversary celebration of the Marxist revolution in Grenada, for example. It is, of course, both disturbing and revealing that Palmer had originally hand-picked Obama as her successor after lengthy consultations with the future president.”
Disturbing, to say the least. And you know where she announced Obama as her hand-picked successor? At that much downplayed (by Team Obama) meeting at the home of Bill Ayers and his fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn.
What if, back in the summer of ’08, Newsgirl Couric, for example, had taken it into her empty little head to do a little digging on THIS issue rather than snarking about what magazines Sarah Palin was reading? Certainly would have been nice to have someone connect the dots between a Soviet-loving Communist and our Democratic candidate, no?
3. & 4. Greg Galluzzo & Mary Gonzales
Obama counts this married couple among his mentors. They were also bankrolled by Ken Rolling’s Left-leaning foundations, and Galluzzo and his wife play a big role in organizations that have adopted the stealth strategy of taking over from the bottom up (at one conference the couple headlined a panel called “Organizing through Existing Institutions”).
Galluzzo and Gonzales are community organizers in the tradition of Saul Alinsky, according to Kurtz, who notes that they tend to keep their political beliefs to themselves in order to advance their cause:
“They make a point of presenting themselves as pragmatists in search of ‘commonsense solutions for working families.’ Organizers trained by Obama’s mentor Greg Galluzzo have perfected this stance—consciously suppressing radical jargon (which they freely use among themselves), clothing their leftist programs in the language of traditional American democracy, and making sure to present themselves in both dress and demeanor as average citizens, rather than as the sixties-style radicals many of them once were… Alinskyites work to steer popular dissatisfactions in the direction of their leftist goals.”
One of their nasty tactics is to “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” as they’ve shown over and over again. Galluzzo was involved in several ugly situations including pressuring a Chicago school board member to support the building of a new school by besieging him at home, as Kurtz details in his book.
Galluzzo is now head of the Gamaliel Foundation, which Kurtz describes as an “influential network of neighborhood organizations to which Obama has long been tied.”
It’s a group that purports to mix “faith and democracy,” but their faith seems a bit misplaced:
And listen to what a former Gamaliel organizer has to say:
“Staff were pitted against each other by Galluzzo and Gonzalez… Galluzzo used to give a cultish advanced training seminar titled ‘Walking the Edge of Immorality’ where he repeatedly stated ‘the ends justifies the means’ and nonchalantly told us that to have an impact on society we had to be willing to ‘lie, cheat, and steal for the greater good’… The final straw for me was when Galluzzo sent out a weekly report with a reflection that we organizers needed to promote a noble myth to our churches that our work was about justice, God, and peace even though we really knew it was about power… I left Gamaliel disillusioned and disgusted by what seemed to me to be pure evil… I should have exposed them then. I had a duty to do so. We can’t content ourselves with feelings of moral superiority while people with corrupt principles are out there building power. We ignore these bad apples to our own peril.”
According to his own people, Galluzzo is a bad apple – and he’s one of Obama’s prized mentors.
5. Robert “Bob” Creamer
Another bad apple is Robert Creamer, who has served a prison term for tax evasion and bank fraud after all manner of dirty doings in Chicago politics (is that redundant?). He is married to uber-Left uber-spender Representative Jan Schakowsky (at least they’re too old to breed, I pray), and is buddy-buddy with a top Obama advisor, David Axelrod. Creamer actually helped found the socialist Midwest Academy, and was a leader in its most important offshoot group. He also is a former radical with the infamous SDS – Students for a Democratic Society, the group that gave us both Mr. Jane Fonda (Tom Hayden) and Bill Ayers. Funny how the same names just keep poppin’ up.
At the Huffington Post, Creamer writes (lovingly) about the Obama administration. He should love it – he deserves a great deal of credit for its existence. He trained Obama campaign volunteers at a organizer training camp (Obama’s campaign group, Organizing for Obama, is now known as Organizing for America, and its intention, according to Kurtz, is to build “a grassroots movement to support his legislative program.”)
And you know that Obamacare thing that pretty much everybody hates? Well, Creamer deserves credit for that, too! Some have even called him the “architect of Obamacare,” and he has certainly been one of the biggest proponents of the health care “public option.”
Most recently, he and his wife have been up to their usual election hijinks – basically, urging their fellow Leftists to use illegal voter intimidation tactics.
6. Harry Boyte
Kurtz labels Boyte the “theorist” favored by Midwest Academy types. Certainly Boyte is the brains behind the idea of a “populist-communitarian movement” that is in fact quietly controlled, behind the scenes, by socialists. Kurtz makes a powerful case that the young Obama probably studied Boyte’s work, and first encountered him at the Socialist Scholars Conferences that the President has admitted to attending back in the mid-80s as a young man. There is little doubt they met at many points, as Boyte ended up being the one who crafted the Obama grassroots campaign strategy.
Boyte really is the voice of stealth socialism, and Kurtz shows why he’s dangerous. Boyte advocated using:
“the language and ethos of traditional American communities—including religious language—to promote a ‘populist’ version of socialism. Portraying heartless corporations as enemies of traditional communities, thought Boyte, was the only way to build a quasi-socialist mass movement in the United States. Socialists could quietly help direct such a movement, Boyte believed, but openly highlighting socialist ideology would only drive converts away.”
Boyte was a student of America’s socialist past, and had noted that “some of America’s most ‘progressive’ legislation of the 1930s was enacted at the state level using this stealth socialist strategy.” He was one of the authors of a pamphlet called “Socialism and the Coming Decade,” and has also stated that “every social proposal that we make must be couched in terms of how it will strengthen capitalism.” Huh? Well, Kurtz says that’s a telling admission:
“While… Boyte long(s) for the day when political taboos melt and they can argue for the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in openly socialist terms, they effectively admit to manufacturing shaky free market rationalizations for measures they support on socialist grounds… deceptive socialist intentions really do stand behind legislation justified in the language of free enterprise.”
It is Boyte’s successful strategy that has the media and other Lefties mocking anyone who calls Obama a socialist. They have commandeered language for the express purpose of deceitfully shielding their true intentions.
7. & 8. John Cameron and William McNary
We’ll finish up, this time, with a couple more seasoned political veterans from the “colorful” Chicago scene. John Cameron and William McNary were both key officials with Citizen Action.
Cameron, who wrote A Socialist’s Guide to Citizen Action (nobody can accuse him of hiding too much), first encountered Obama when our Prez was serving as an Illinois state senator, according to Obama biographer Sasha Abramsky (an author very friendly to the president). Her revelation is interesting in light of the fact that Judicial Watch says Obama avoided leaving a paper trail with his state senate records, leading Kurtz to weigh in:
“If Obama was hiding something, it was probably his close and continuing relationship with the radical community organizations he’d worked with for years prior to his political career.”
Biographer Abramsky also confirms the “close friendship and political alliance” between Obama and longtime Citizen Action legislative director William McNary, who now heads USAction, which describes itself as “a grassroots organization fighting for justice through affordable health care, high quality public education, strong environmental policies, fair taxation…” Well, you get the idea. They’re “organizing to win justice for all” – haven’t we heard all this from every other socialist we’ve profiled here? By the way, here’s McNary at a speaking engagement. Pictures tell the story, don’t they?
But socialism isn’t the whole story with McNary. He’s spoken several times to the CPUSA (that’s the Communist Party in the U.S.). And, he’s been profiled, sympathetically, in the CPUSA propaganda newspaper:
“No matter the issue, if it affects working people, William McNary, president of USAction, is there, fighting the good fight for social and health security, quality public schools and against the right-wing agenda.
And why does this matter? Because, again McNary is a close friend of Obama. As noted New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon pointed out, Obama probably consulted McNary at several points throughout his career to solicit advice.
We are known by the company we keep. Barack Hussein Obama, as Stanley Kurtz has overwhelmingly proven, has long surrounded himself with leftists on the far end of the leftist spectrum; in particular, he has been influenced by those who promote socialism at every turn, while cloaking it in more populist terms designed to anesthetize the American public to their desired dismantling of America as we know it. This truly is the seedy, squirming underbelly of the current Obama regime. It is high time we dig it up and expose it to the light of day. We owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude for doing exactly that.
More on Kurtz and his research soon.
Diane Schrader is a former television news producer. She lives in Los Angeles.
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