http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=109486
Prof with ties to radical White House associates says president
understands socialism
September 10, 2009
By Aaron Klein
NEW YORK Many of the people working with President Obama are
Marxists or socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party,
according to a socialist Columbia University professor with strong
ties to Obama's radical associates, including Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers.
"What makes Obama different is that he has also been a community
organizer. He has read left literature, including my works, and he
understands what socialism is," wrote Manning Marable, professor and
founding director of the Institute for Research in African American
Studies at Columbia University.
"A lot of the people working with him are, indeed, socialists with
backgrounds in the Communist Party or as independent Marxists,"
Marable wrote in a December 2008 piece published in the Socialist Review.
In the article, Marable contends "Obama is not a Marxist or a
socialist he is a progressive liberal."
"Obama represents a generation of what might be called post-racial
black politicians by which I mean they espouse a politics that
minimizes matters of race. They do not like to talk about race and
subsume it under the rubric of poverty and class."
Speaking to WND today, Marable refused to identify the individuals
working with Obama he wrote were socialists with Communist Party backgrounds.
He said, however, those individuals strongly believe Obama would
change the "tenor of politics within the Democratic party."
"I think the point I was making is that there are a number of people
with left histories who were early participants in Obama's
mobilization. They have a strong belief in Obama as a candidate with
the possibility of changing the tenor of politics within the
Democratic Party," he told WND.
Nine months after Marable's remarks on communists working with Obama,
the president's controversial environmental adviser, Van Jones,
resigned amid reports Jones was an admitted black nationalist and
radical communist.
Marable has been teaching at Columbia since 1993, 10 years after
Obama graduated from the college.
Marable was not commenting as an outside observer. The Columbia
professor is intimately connected to many of Obama's radical
associates and even was a founding member of the Socialist New Party.
WND previously reported newspaper evidence showing Obama was a member
of the party.
The New Party sought to elect members to public office with the aim
of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new
political party with a socialist agenda a history that might grant
substance to Marable's comments to WND today about hopes Obama will
change the "tenor" of the Democratic party.
WND last month interviewed a founder of the New Party, Marxist
activist Carl Davidson, who recalled Obama's participation with his group.
In 2007, Marable was elected chair of Movement for a Democratic
Society, or MDS, an arm of the radical Students for a Democratic
Society from which the Weatherman terrorist organization later splintered.
Some Weathermen terrorists, including Ayers, participate in Marable's
MDS. In November 2007, for example, WND found that Ayers participated
in an MDS panel entitled, "Resisting endless war."
The New Zeal blog, meanwhile, found that Marable held leadership
roles in the Communist Party offshoot, Committees of Correspondence
for Democracy and Socialism.
Also, Marable in 1998 helped found the Black Radical Congress, where
he worked with controversial race scholar Cornel West, an Obama
friend who introduced the politician at his first campaign stop in
Harlem. WND disclosed that during that 2007 introduction, West first
railed on stage against the "racist" U.S. criminal justice system of
the "American empire."
West, currently a professor at Princeton University, served as an
adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a 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 remarked on Gates' being
handcuffed by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.
Marable, in the mean time, has been a regular speaker at an annual
socialist conference, the Socialist Scholars Conference, which is
usually held at Cooper Union in New York. It has been reported that
in the early 1980s, Obama attended socialist conferences at Cooper
Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.
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