It is a crying shame that MSM including Fox News failed to properly Vet Barack Obama 2008... as a journalist should...fair, balanced and with facts supporting the evidence rather than taking the easy proverbial 'High Road' ...The right and proper thing to do...and hows the right thing to do working out for ya' mainstream ~so called journalist? 4 years of pure chaos !
Retro article filed by:
Cliff Kincaid —
February 18, 2008
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 ####.” 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?
Addendum:
Security Implications? Obama's Man Axelrod Was Mentored by Marxist Radicals
New Zeal ^
| Sept. 11, 2009
| Trevor Loudon
Few would dispute that Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod are two of President Barack Obama's key advisors.
I
wrote here that Valerie Jarrett's father-in-law Vernon Jarrett, worked
with Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, in at least three
communist dominated organizations in late 1940s Chicago.
Davis then went on to eventually mentor the young Barack Obama in Hawaii.
David Axelrod too has connections that that stretch back to post War Chicago communism.
While
a New Yorker by birth, David Axelrod studied political science at the
University of Chicago in the early 1970s. Later, while a start-out
journalist with the Hyde-Park Herald, Axelrod was mentored by two older
journalists cum political activists, Don Rose and David S Canter.
According to the Chicago Tribune
In
his early years as a political consultant, Axelrod, following in the
footsteps of his mentor, the political strategist Don Rose, carved out a
reputation for himself as a skillful specialist working for local
progressive candidates...says Rose. "I think he's a principled,
generally progressive guy... ."
From 1966 until 1975 Don Rose and
his partner David S Canter co-owned a small newspaper called the Hyde
Park Kenwood Voices. The paper's radical tone suited the neighbourhood.
It tended to follow the Communist Party line-campaigning for example to
abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
The paper
sympathetically covered the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention and the SDS
convention that gave birth to the Weather Underground.
It gave a
voice to prominent figures of the Hyde Park left. These included several
future Obama mentors such Abner Mikva, Leon Despres, Timuel Black and
Quentin Young.
Racy photos of Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, have surfaced in
vintage fetish and bondage magazines. The photos, taken at Frank
Marshall Davis’ house in Honolulu, help illustrate the intimate
relationship between Dunham and Davis. Is he Obama’s real father?
Weary of defending in court the Constitutional eligibility of their
man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Democrat Party has finally admitted
Barack Obama is not qualified to be president of the United States– and
that it doesn’t matter.
