01/22/17

Top communist calls to ‘make country ungovernable’

By: Trevor Loudon | New Zeal

Speaking to protesters assembled in Columbus Circle on Inauguration Day, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization Political Secretary, Steff Yorekstated, “We need to stay in the streets the entire four years opposing Trump and making the country ungovernable.”

Steff Yorek, microphone

If you doubt Yorek’s ability to make good on her threat, please check out Trevor Loudon’s latest mini-documentary below. It details, among other things, Freedom Road’s close ties to Putin’s Russia.

07/24/16

Meet Cazembe Jackson: Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s New National Organizer

By: Trevor Loudon | New Zeal

Cazembe
Cazembe Murphy Jackson is a black trans man, “a queer communist” organizing for queer and trans liberation and living wages in Atlanta, Georgia.

He is Freedom Road Socialist Organization‘s new National Organizer. Freedom Road is America’s largest “Maoist” grouping. They are the guiding force of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Recruited from a Trayvon Martin rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2012, Cazembe Jackson moved into Freedom Road front group Concerned Citizens for Justice and began to rise quickly through the Freedom Road ranks, earning a place on the organization’s powerful National Executive Committee.

With Concerned Citizens for Justice I helped to mobilize communities across race, class, religion, gender, ability, immigration status and sexual orientation. I grew up missionary Baptist. I read about all kinds of revolutionaries who loved God and who explained Jesus as a revolutionary who was executed by the state. Through my work with CCJ I discovered Freedom Road Socialist Organization and started doing political education with some local members. Since becoming a member I have participated in building and implementing curriculum for political education for all types of learners, writing organization documents, and serving on our National Executive Committee. Strategy and tactics are the most alluring parts of organizing to me. They are the two components that made me want to join a revolutionary organization. While I have seen and felt the power of prayer many times in my life, I do not think that prayer alone will cure oppression. These systems of oppression like white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, have been expertly designed to kill us. I believe in FRSO’s strategy to defeat who we have identified as the main political enemy to marginalized people in this country.

Freedom Road is targeting the South. They intend to turn the South blue through massive voter registration drives among poor black and Hispanic populations – and to create a Race War in those very same communities.

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Keep an eye on Cazembe Jackson. He looks harmless. He’s probably a very nice man. But the organization he represents is capable of doing huge damage to this country.

06/7/16

Weekly Featured Profile – Thomas Pearce

KeyWiki.org

Thomas Pearce

Thomas Pearce, based in the Louisville area, is Co-Chair of the American Indian Movement of Indiana and Kentucky. He has been organizing solidarity rallies for the trans-national Indian movement Idle No More.

He has been closely associated with the Maoist leaningFreedom Road Socialist Organization since his leadership of the Progressive Student League, the Louisville Kentuckyaffiliate of Freedom Road’s Progressive Student Network, in the late 1980’s.

Thomas Pearce helped design the “Columbus was Lost” button, back in 1992:

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It became a big fat hit among young anti-racist activists. It (and a companion tee-shirt) were designed and produced locally in Louisville, KY by Average Tom Pearce, a young American Indian Movement activist (who is still at it today, almost a quarter century later). Those buttons and shirts, along with the Columbus Discovered America—NOT tee-shirts designed by graphix ace ERK were mainstays on the Freedom Road and Progressive Student Network lit tables that year.

Thomas Pearce contributed an article to Freedom Road Socialist Organization‘s Forward Motion, January/February issue 1993, “Thinking about dynamite: at war against the lies.”

As a leader of the state Sierra Club affiliate Thomas Pearce has been an effective enemy of Kentucky’s vital coal industry. In 2011, he helped shut down a proposed coal terminal near the Ohio River in West Paducah.

“We turned out 200 people, and everyone was given signs that said NO in big letters,” says Sierra Club organizer Thomas Pearce.

“We’re organizing with area residents, who are circulating petitions,” says Pearce, who has helped create a new Beyond Coal team in the Sierra Club‘s Great Rivers Group.

Thomas Pearce is also a co-chair of the radical/union controlled Kentucky Jobs with Justice.

(Thomas Pearce|more…)

12/16/15

Weekly Featured Profile – Chris Crass

KeyWiki.org

Chris Crass

Chris Crass (formerly known as Chris Day) is aNashville, Tennessee, “anti-racist” activist, writer and speaker.

Crass, then known as Chris Day, was a member of the United Anarchist Front in Whittier in the early 1990s, which was part of the Love and RageRevolutionary Anarchist Federation. The United Anarchist Front mobilized against the Gulf War in 1991 and played a leading role organizing other white people to stand for immigrant rights and Ethnic Studies in Orange County, California. They worked in alliance with Chicano students fromMEChA and Crass worked on the underground student newspaper, the Molotov Cocktail.

Many Love and Ragers joined the Maoist/Gramsciist Freedom Road Socialist Organization in the early 2000s and Day/Crass has long been associated with that group.

Chis Day spent two years working in Zapatista occupied Chiapas on the construction of a clinic in the village of Benito Juarez-Miromar. He wrote an article about his Mexican experience for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization website, “The Zapatistas’ Long March,” Posted on October 1st, 2001.

In 2001, Day was also involved with the ultra-radical Ruckus Society.

Crass was an organizer and educator with the Catalyst Project from 2000 through 2011. The Catalyst Project, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, grew out of theChallenging White Supremacy workshop. Crass worked with Challenging White Supremacy after the 1999 WTO mass actions in Seattle, Washington to help strengthen anti-racist politics and practice in the mostly white sections of the Global Justice Movement. Movement elders and long time Maoists Elizabeth Martinez andRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz were key mentors to the younger generation organizers in theCatalyst Project.

In 2000, Crass helped form the Colours of Resistance network, which served as a think tank and clearinghouse of anti-racist feminist analysis and tools for activists in the U.S. and Canada.

After Sept. 11th, 2001, he helped to found the Heads Up Collective which brought together white anti-racist organizers in the San Francisco, Bay Area, building alliances between the majority white anti-war movement and locally-based economic and racial justice struggles in communities of color. He was also a member of the Against Patriarchy Men’s Group that “supported men in developing their feminist analysis and their feminist leadership.”

In January 2002, a group of San Francisco leftists, mainly involved with Van Jones‘ neo-Maoist Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement or the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, founded a national anti-Iraq War newspaper War Timesunder the leadership of former Weatherman Eric Mann.

Since moving to Tennessee, Crass has worked closely with local Freedom Roaders, who have a big presence in the Volunteer State.

Crass was part of the founding of the national white anti-racist network, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and served on the leadership team in 2011. In Knoxville, TN in 2012 he helped initiate Knoxville United Against Racism to bring communities together across races to protest racial profiling, the killing of Trayvon Martin and for immigrant rights. SURJ has played a very active role in galvanizing white “progressive” support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which was essentially created by BlackFreedom Road Socialist Organization supporters.

Crass’ essays have been translated into half a dozen languages, taught in hundreds of classrooms and included in over a dozen anthologies including Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, On the Road to Healing: An Anthology for Men Ending Sexism, and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. During Occupy Wall Street in 2011, he co-edited along with the Catalyst Project the Catalyzing Liberation Toolkit: Anti-Racist Organizing to Build the 99% Movement.

Crass has given talks and led workshops with thousands of people in colleges and communities around the country. As a Unitarian Universalist, he has also worked with dozens of faith-based communities around these issues including Divinity Schools and Seminaries.

(more…)

08/18/15

New Agers Back Socialist Sanders as Messiah

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The huge crowds greeting socialist Bernie Sanders in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination cannot just be attributed to large numbers of left-wingers. There is a hard-core left-wing element to the Sanders candidacy, of course. But Sanders has tapped into what used to be one of Hillary Clinton’s key constituencies, the New Age Movement. A top Sanders adviser is the influential “spiritual teacher” Marianne Williamson, whose self-help books have been heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey and sold millions.

The New Age Movement is a growing group of people in America who have broken with the Judeo-Christian tradition to instead endorse the notion of God as a mystical force inhabiting humans, the earth, or spiritual “masters.” Oprah’s website describes it somewhat differently: “For 20 years, Marianne Williamson has been a pioneer on the front lines of a worldwide spiritual movement aimed at creating a global shift in collective consciousness.”

Taking this perspective into the political realm, Williamson has advocated a Department of Peacebuilding and has created a group called the Peace Alliance to bring this about.

Constance Cumbey has written two books on the New Age Movement and says its “toolbox is mysticism,” or “altered states of consciousness,” which are said to draw people into a relationship with spiritual forces in the world that are part of a “New World Order” and global religion to be headed by an anticipated “messianic figure” of some kind.

Whatever this mean for the world as a whole, it appears that Williamson sees Sanders as the savior of the American political system.

Williamson, who writes on the Sanders-for-president website about the need for “revolutionary power,” has used her vast influence to mobilize her followers on behalf of the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. She says the Marxist presidency of Barack Obama hasn’t been radical enough. “Having invested so much hope in 2008 in a candidate who turned out in many ways to disappoint, it’s not easy to summon our internal forces for another big wave of revolutionary fervor,” she says. But Sanders, the “independent” socialist senator from Vermont, is a true revolutionary, she says. “If we all show up and exercise our power as citizens, Senator Sanders can win the presidency in 2016,” she adds.

Analyst Trevor Loudon has documented that Sanders, the only Senate member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is actually a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that backed Obama’s political career and works with openly communist groups. “DSA works very closely with three of America’s leading communist groups—the Maoist leaning Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the ‘old guard’ Communist Party USA, and the CPUSA spin-off Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism,” notes Loudon. “The four groups have even seriously considered merging in recent years.”

We have noted Sanders’ history of involvement with Communist Party-controlled groups such as the U.S. Peace Council. In the 1980s, he was part of the Soviets’ “nuclear freeze” campaign to undercut President Ronald Reagan’s military build-up.

A former nightclub singer, Williamson herself ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2014 on a platform that included abortion rights, gay rights, socialized medicine, and the need to combat what she perceives as man-made global warming, nowadays called climate change. “While a lifelong Democrat herself, Marianne ran the congressional race as an Independent, making the statement that she was not beholden to either party,” noted writer Tabby Biddle.

“While America has some serious enemies—and it’s certainly our responsibility to protect our country and our children—I believe our country’s way of dealing with security issues is increasingly obsolete,” Williamson declared. “We cannot simply rely on brute force to rid ourselves of enemies. In so doing, we overburden our military by asking them to compensate for the work that we ourselves are not doing. The only way to make peace with your neighbors is to make peace with your neighbors.”

She added that, if she won, she would co-sponsor the bill to establish a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding that would examine “non-violent problem-solving options” to global conflict. The department was to be paid for out of the defense budget.

Labeled by The Hollywood Reporter as “Hollywood’s favorite New Age Guru” because of her influence with movie producers, directors, and actors, Williamson hosted Sanders at her own feminist-oriented “Sister Giant” conference earlier this year. Described personally as a “radical feminist mother,” Williamson has a daughter whose father is not known and whom she refuses to name.

While some of the New Age rhetoric and books can be dismissed as expensive but harmless fun, it’s when these “spiritual teachers” exert political influence and address global issues that we can see a tendency that seems even more radical than the usual Marxist drivel emanating from Democratic Party politicians such as Obama.

However, there is overlap. Williamson’s proposed Department of Peacebuilding, which was to be headed by a Secretary of Peacebuilding, was introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), one of Fidel Castro’s closest friends in the U.S. Congress.

Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who also works with Williamson, had introduced a similar bill. “The intention is to develop an organized approach, tapping the intellectual and spiritual power of America to develop programs that would include teaching children the principles of peace: teaching them peace giving, peace sharing, mutuality, seeing the other person as an aspect of oneself, of teaching the inner equality of all people,” Kucinich said in a post on Williamson’s Peace Alliance website.

Like Sanders, Williamson is considered by some to be pro-Israel. But in her book,The Healing of America, she discussed how Egypt’s highest Muslim cleric had once approached her “to make sure you understand that Islam is a religion of peace.” She didn’t say whether the Muslim leader condemned and rejected the passages in the Koran that call for killing the “Infidels” who resist Islam.

She also wrote, “The creative challenge of spiritual life is to know enough about God to be hopeful. From Jesus to Buddha to Moses to Mohammed, wayshowers have risen out of the timeline of history to draw maps and pave roads to a more perfect world.” The comparison of Jesus—who led a perfect life and preached love—to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, is offensive on its face. Islam began in violence and Mohammad himself was a violent warrior.

The term “wayshowers” is common in New Age circles and refers to spiritual beings supposedly leading us into a new world of community and harmony.

When Keith Ellison became the first Congressman to take the oath of office with his hand on the Koran, Williamson commented, “Fantastic story.” Ellison, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, endorsed Williamson in her run for Congress.

For a time, Williamson and her associate Jean Houston of the Foundation for Mind Research were considered to be in Hillary Clinton’s political camp. Houston had tried to help Mrs. Clinton, when she was First Lady, “communicate” with Eleanor Roosevelt during a mystical “channeling” session.  Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote about these sessions in a book on the 1996 presidential election.

At some point, however, Cumbey says Houston and Williamson abandoned Hillary. Williamson said in 2008 that she was supporting Barack Obama and not Hillary because “I am not going to vote with my vagina.”

This was a dramatic turnaround, since Mrs. Clinton in her memoir Living Historyhad discussed hosting Williamson and Houston and other New Agers at Camp David. “You were wonderful to me back in 1994 when you invited me to the White House. It’s a memory I will treasure always, and you gave it to me,” Williamsonwrote back to Hillary in a Huffington Post article.

But the 2014 Williamson article, “An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton,” was actually prompted by Williamson’s revelation that the former First Lady was getting too close to powerful interests in society. Williamson pleaded with Clinton to, “Stop cozying up to the banks, to the chemical companies, to the military-industrial complex, to the party machine, and to all the various financiers who make up the plutocracy now ruining this country.”

The pleas apparently went unheeded, since Williamson eventually broke completely with Hillary and now promotes Sanders for president and writes for his website. Through Sanders and other such candidates, she insists, America can experience a revolution “of light, of consciousness, and love” and “break out of this ridiculous corporate straightjacket that imperils us the way it does now.”

Whatever this means, it has occurred to some on the far-left that while Sanders is taking on “corporate power and oligarchy” and calling for vast federal spending increases for social welfare programs, the “issues” section of his presidential website says absolutely nothing about foreign policy. The group called RootsAction complains that his stump speech hardly mentions the “huge military budget” and says he must challenge “militarism and ongoing war.”

Perhaps Williamson’s proposed Department of Peacebuilding will be the focus of one of Sanders’ next speeches, a development that will make the socialist senator not only look like a pawn of Williamson and the New Age Movement, but the true leader of the Loony Left.