RUTH KING: AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY KURTZ
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8091,css.print/pub_detail.asp
An Interview with Stanley Kurtz, Author of “Radical-in-Chief”…Ruth King
In 1983, authors Rael Jean and Erich Isaac published “The Coercive Utopians” (Regnery). They demonstrated how, after the end of the Vietnam War and the abrogation of the draft, the radicals of the New Left of the sixties turned their attention to careers in academia, law, journalism, and “community action” projects in religious, environmental, anti-nuclear energy, and social service institutions.
On April one of that year, a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl Marx’s centennial (1818-1883).” This conference became the catalyst for Obama’s future political agenda.
Thus begins Stanley Kurtz’s dazzling and meticulously researched book “Radical- In- Chief-Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.” The opening remarks of the 1983 Conference were tellingly delivered by City University’s radical professor Frances Fox Piven, described by the author as “…..preeminent theorist, strategist, and historian of community organizing, with a keen sense of the roots of community organizing in America’s early communist and socialist movements.”
While the Reagan years were presented as a major realignment of American voters, the left realigned with the Democratic party and civil rights twinned with economic justice and the black liberation theology teamed with socialists. Kurtz reminds us that the buzz in “progressive” circles was that Blacks would become the leaders of the revived American socialist movement, and this was the path that would appeal to a young Obama, inspired by the panels, literature and radical participants in the conference.
Time had not dispelled the radicals’ view of America as militarist, evil, greedy, racist and in need of “fundamental transformation” through “stealth” socialism and their foot soldiers became the community organizers. Once, they proposed policy through organizations which they infiltrated to reshape agenda and goals. Now they implement policy in the Obama government. The author traces those post sixties radicals and the associations which shaped the political mindset and socialist agenda of the President of the United States.
Kurtz argues that the ultimate goal is a socialist welfare state and he proves his case with impressive and convincing detail and evidence. While most Americans recognize groups like ACORN, and names like Saul Alinsky, groups like the Midwest Academy, UNO (United Neighborhood Associations) and names like Alice Palmer and Robert Creamer and Ken Rolling are fairly obscure, but they played a significant role in the grooming of Barack Hussein Obama. Kurtz’s painstaking effort in connecting the dots to prove his case is simply breathtaking.
As the growth of the tea party and conservative blogs and media have demonstrated, exposure leads to an informed electorate and to public protest and determination to halt policies that are inimical to American democracy.
“Radical-In-Chief” provides this essential exposure and deserves the highest praise and widest circulation.
We are honored to interview Stanley Kurtz for Family Security Matters.
RK: In 2008, on October 15th Family Security Matters published an interview with Joe “The Plumber” Wurzlebach titled “Spread the Wealth Around” Reveals Socialist Plan for America” which occasioned an unprecedented number of visits and comments to the site. That same day in a blog titled “What Joe Doesn’t Know” where presumably the Joe in question is Wurzlebach, you state: “ACORN is a genuinely radical group. It believes in economic redistribution, the same question raised by the “Joe the Plumber” controversy.”
My question is whether despite the ridicule and harassment that Wurzlebach suffered, do you think he became an inspiration for the Tea Party and its subsequent grass roots challenge to Obama’s socialist proclivities and past?
SK: Certainly, Joe the Plumber was important, along with Reverend Wright, ACORN, Bill Ayers and a whole variety of problems that emerged during Obama’s 2008 campaign. It was very clear to a tremendous segment of the American people that through bias, inaction, and outright ridicule, the mainstream press was covering for Obama during all of these controversies. Yes, the bad faith demonstrated by the media during the 2008 campaign helped lay the groundwork for the Tea Party movement that followed.
RK: Your pre-election investigations opened Obama’s past to the public, but the media remained on his side. Could you describe how and where you were challenged and blocked from viewing critical documents?
SK: I told this story in detail in a couple of pieces published in 2008 (here and here) The gist of it is that in the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign, librarians at the University of Illinois Chicago assured me that I was free to examine the archives of The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education foundation created by Bill Ayers and run by Barack Obama. Just before I boarded a plane to Chicago to examine the archive, the library withdrew my access. After receiving a series of shifting and contradictory explanations for this change, I launched a public campaign to gain entry to the archives. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, along with other evidence, later revealed that (probably aided by a contact within the library), Ken Rolling, an old associate of Obama and Ayers, had intervened on the day I made my request to block my access. When I finally got into the archive, I entered along with major media and a phalanx of aides from both the Obama and McCain campaigns. But while the mainstream press knew all about the controversy, they refused to report it. After finding a series of documents detailing a much closer partnership between Ayers and Obama than either man had acknowledged, I was asked to appear on Milt Rosenberg’s popular Chicago radio show. Officials of the Obama campaign pressured the station to cut my appearance, while as many as 8,000 Obama supporters flooded the station with demands that I not be allowed to go on. I did appear on the Milt Rosenberg show, however, and eventually published the results of my research in several articles (here and here).
The Ayers issue posed a genuine threat to Obama, but the mainstream media largely ignored it, along with much of the evidence I turned up on other aspects of Obama’s radical background. After the campaign, I continued my research secretly, since I had learned that my access to various archives might be blocked. Two years of digging yielded far more evidence of Obama’s radicalism than even I had anticipated. Radical-in-Chief contains the results of this research.
RK: Two organizations that you write about are not as well known as ACORN. They are The Midwest Academy and UNO and yet they were instrumental in the grooming of Barack Obama. Could you describe them?
SK: The Midwest Academy is a community organizer training institute. For decades it was the command post, so to speak, of a vast national network of community organizations. The Midwest Academy was also, literally, a socialist front group. The leaders of the Midwest Academy were some of the most influential socialists in America in the post-sixties era. Nobody knows this because the Midwest Academy’s leaders believed in keeping their socialism secret. Their idea was to use community organizing as a front for creating a national “populist” and “communitarian” movement of the left that would in fact be controlled by socialists. One of my key discoveries is that Barack and Michelle Obama were both closely tied to the Midwest Academy network. The stealth-socialist leaders of the Midwest Academy network trained and funded Obama. More important, they sponsored his political career and were in many ways responsible for his rise.
These leaders were in an excellent position to know Obama’s true political beliefs. They would not have advanced his political career unless he had shared their socialist views.
United Neighborhood Organizations of Chicago (UNO of Chicago) is a largely Hispanic counterpart of the group ACORN. They used ACORN-style confrontational tactics and had an overtly anti-American ideology on a par with Reverend Wright’s. Obama’s own organization, the Developing Communities Project, was an offshoot of UNO of Chicago, and Obama worked directly with UNO for much of his time in Chicago. UNO of Chicago was also part of the larger Midwest Academy network. A very significant proportion of UNO of Chicago’s members were illegal immigrants. Yet UNO specialized in high pressure tactics designed to force taxpayer spending on its members’ needs.
RK: Before the election you stopped short of using the “S” word. In your book you state that using the strict definition of socialism for Obama would appear to be “overheated slander. ” Will you explain that to our readers?
SK: The classic definition of socialism entails total public ownership of “the means of production.” Obama has not proposed this, and that is one reason many people feel that the socialism charge is a bridge too far. In the eighties, however, many American socialists dropped the nationalization strategy in favor of a piecemeal, gradualist, and stealthy approach. Community organizing was the key to this new socialist strategy. The idea was to grab hold of the economy “from below,” through grassroots activism, rather than “from above,” through formal nationalization. ACORN’s campaign to force banks to make subprime loans to risky, low-credit customers would be an example of this socialism “from below.” ACORN’s successful banking campaign created a kind of de facto public control of a section of the financial system. Of course, ACORN’s banking campaign help lay the foundation for the subprime crisis, so the effects on the country were disastrous. As I explain in my book, despite his denials, archival evidence establishes that Obama was closely tied to ACORN. Obama channeled foundation money in ACORN’s direction, just as the group was undercutting the foundations of the banking system.
RK: Who, exactly, are the most influential post-sixties radicals who shape the political mindset and socialist agenda of the President? Are they among his unvetted czars?
SK: Many of the stealth-socialist community organizers who worked with Obama during his rise continue to work with him today, but they do so from outside of the White House. They coordinate Obama’s attempts to generate grassroots support for his policies. Obama’s organizing colleagues actually have a name for this process. They call it the “inside/outside strategy” or the “good-cop/bad-cop strategy.” The idea is to have a reasonable-seeming politician, open to compromise and receptive to all arguments, on the inside. But that same politician is supposed to closely coordinate with hardball Alinskyite organizers, who remain on the outside. Those organizers run intimidation tactics against the “good cop’s” political opponents, while remaining safely outside the halls of power, and scrutiny. Obama is not a “post-partisan pragmatist.” He is actually the classic community organizing “good cop” in a good-cop/bad-cop game.
RK: Could you explain the origin and meaning and first intention for use of “The Public Option?”
SK: Back in the late seventies and early eighties, the leaders of the Midwest Academy created a group called the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition (C/LEC). This was a classic example of an economically “populist” movement of the left created and controlled from behind by socialist community organizers. One of C/LEC’s signature proposals was to create a government-run energy corporation to “compete” with private oil and gas companies. Of course, “competition” in this context is a misnomer. A government corporation can easily drive private companies out of business through regulation and taxation. And of course government corporations don’t have to make a profit. They can just tap into taxpayers’ pockets to keep going. Knowing all this, the Midwest Academy’s leaders realized that, over time, a government energy corporation would shut the private energy industry down. So instead of openly proposing nationalization of the energy sector, they came up with this “public option” idea as a way of seeming to work within a competitive capitalist framework, while in fact scheming to drive the country toward socialism.
Robert Creamer, a key Midwest Academy leader, was a major early backer of the “public option” idea in health care. Creamer was clearly drawing on his C/LEC experience in recommending this. Obama advisor David Axelrod was a fan of the book in which Creamer made his early proposals for a healthcare public option. So this stealthily-socialist health-care public option idea has the Midwest Academy’s fingerprints all over it. The left complains that Obama traded away the public option. Yet the healthcare bill that passed works in essentially the same way. It is designed to drive people out of private insurance over time. The healthcare bill as passed is really just a slightly slower-motion form of the “public option” strategy for gradual socialist transformation.
RK: For many voters, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was an inconvenient crank. In your book you expose his political clout and involvement. Could you tell us something about this?
SK: Wright was part of Obama’s broader socialist political network. Obama attended a series of Socialist Scholars Conferences when he lived in New York between 1983 and 1985. Those conferences touted a newly-formed alliance between black liberation theology and socialism. Wright’s theological mentor, James Cone, appeared at those conferences, along with a prominent Cone follower. So when Obama met Wright and learned of his ties to Cone and black liberation theology, he would have immediately recognized Wright as part of his socialist world. Wright was a political king-maker in Chicago, and Obama’s interest in Wright was thoroughly political from the start. Wright was closely allied with Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, and Obama wanted Wright to meet with him and the mayor on various projects. Ultimately, Obama wanted Wright to help him form a religio-political movement of the left. I outline Wright’s political world in considerable detail in the book. I also present evidence that Obama had to have known about Wright’s outrageous reactions to 9/11. Those videotaped excerpts from Wright’s sermons that endlessly looped during the 2008 campaign were in no way exceptional. Obama knew all about Wright from the start. Virtually everything Obama said in his defense during the Wright affair was either egregiously misleading or an outright lie. I go through all of this, with plenty of new evidence, in the book.
RK: Thank you Stanley Kurtz for your book and for taking the time to answer our questions.
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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth S. King is a freelance writer who writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.
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