The executive director of an activist organization modeled after Marxist community organizer Saul Alinsky was part of the team that developed a volunteers camp for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, this column has learned.
Jackie Kendall, executive director of the Midwest Academy, was on the team that organized the first Camp Obama training for volunteers aiding Obama’s campaign through the 2008 Iowa Caucuses. Camp Obama was a two-to-four day intensive course, run in conjunction with Obama’s campaign, aimed at training volunteers to become activists to help Obama win the presidential election.
Camp Obama served as an integral part of the president’s campaign volunteer staff.
Last week, this column reported that a Chicago nonprofit on which Obama served as director provided startup capital and later funding to Midwest Academy, which describes itself as dedicated to teaching the tactics of Alinsky.
Former 1960s radical and FrontPageMagazine Editor David Horowitz describes Alinsky as the “communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.”
Horowitz writes that Alinsky’s “strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what sixties radicals called ‘boring from within.’ … Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.”
Obama Friend: Socialism Has Future In U.S.
A personal friend and recent adviser to President Obama addressed a socialist conference at which he declared “socialism has a future” while urging participants to help Obama.
Cornel West, an extremist race-relations instructor at Princeton, addressed the 10th annual Young Democratic Socialists conference earlier this month. The three-day event took place at Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, named after an American socialist activist.
The meeting, entitled “Real change for a change,” described itself as a “snap shot of the current socialist movement in the United States.”
During a lengthy address available on YouTube, West declared that “socialism has a future.”
He stated, “We are at a very crucial historical moment. My dear friend Barack Obama, he needs help. He needs deep help. He needs pressure. Organized, mobilized pressure.”
Obama named West, whom he has called a personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential campaign. West was a key point man between Obama’s campaign and the black community.
West served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March and is a self-described personal friend of the Nation of Islam leader. West authored two books on race with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who was at the center of a recent controversy in which Obama criticized Gates’s treatment by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.
It was West who introduced Obama at a 2007 Harlem fundraiser attended by about 1,500 people that served as Obama’s first foray into Harlem after announcing his Democratic presidential candidacy. West introduced Obama on stage at the fundraiser after first railing against the “racist” criminal-justice system of the “American empire.”
Obama, upon taking the stage after West’s introduction, expressed his gratitude to West, calling him “not only a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, an oracle … he’s also a loving person.”
Van Jones’s Radical Green Friends
Van Jones, President Obama’s former “green jobs” czar and newly appointed Princeton lecturer, has teamed up with a coalition of extremists to push an environmental activist agenda to “transform the American economy” and bring about “social change.”
The groups working with Jones have been described as using the tactics of guerrilla communication, agitation and disruption techniques. One organization working alongside Jones, the radical Earth First! environmentalist group, has a history of violence and sabotage.
Green For All, an activist group founded and directed by Jones, joined the Energy Action Coalition, which is composed of a slew of extremist organizations, including the Ruckus Society, which states that it provides “hands-on direct action tactical skills and strategy at [its] training camps,” or will bring its training to your location.
Also in the Coaliton is Earth First!, which, according to Discover the Networks is a “radical environmentalist group with a long history of violence and sabotage.” It “pioneered sabotage tactics like tree sitting and tree spiking to thwart logging and development.”
Two Up, Two Down For TSA Post
President Obama’s pick to head the Transportation Security Administration withdrew his nomination late Friday night, making him the second of Obama’s nominees for the post to fail to win confirmation.
Retired Gen. Robert Harding blamed “distractions caused by my work as a defense contractor” that would “not be good for this administration, nor for the Department of Homeland Security.”
Questions were also raised about a multimillion-dollar government contract Harding’s company was awarded in 2004 to provide private interrogators to Iraqi prisons for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
That contract was terminated in 2005, triggering an audit that found that Harding’s company double-billed the government for more than $860,000. It ultimately reimbursed the government more than $2 million.
Harding for his part said he withdrew his nomination “with deep regret.”
Harding’s private contract dealings could have become a hot button of controversy as the Senate geared up to consider his bid for the TSA.
Obama’s original pick for the TSA job, Erroll Southers, withdrew his name from considerationin January over Republican concern Southers would attempt to unionize TSA security agents.
This journalist was also first to report that Southers had boasted to a major union that he looked forward to “joining” with them to add value to TSA security.
Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for Internet giant WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 77-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2:00-4:00.
