The “peace director” of the October 2 “One Nation Working Together” rally says that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, military aid to Israel should be ended, and that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons as long as the U.S. has them. He also says that Marxists are invited to participate at his upcoming rally.
Michael McPhearson, one of the key organizers of the event and former executive director of Veterans for Peace, tells Accuracy in Media, “I’m not all that concerned if you’re a Republican, Democrat, or Marxist or Communist, whatever,” he said. “I just want us to work together to make our country better. That’s what I look at—not if you’re a socialist.”
The October 2 rally in Washington, D.C. is designed to counter the Tea Party, a grass roots movement of citizens devoted to limited government, and the recent “Restoring Honor” rally in the nation’s capital sponsored by Fox News personality Glenn Beck.
Questioned on the involvement of communist groups, McPhearson shot back, “What is radical? We are trying to bring everybody together under one tent. In the United States everybody has a voice and speaks their opinion.” He said the Tea Party has its own share of controversial people.
McPhearson’s Facebook page highlights President Obama as being among his favorites. (Clicking on “Barack Obama” takes you to the President’s own Facebook page).
McPhearson’s role in the October 2 event, which is being advertised as featuring hundreds of thousands of people gathering at the Lincoln Memorial “to demonstrate our re-commitment to change,” is so important that the “peace and anti-war voice” of the rally has its own “One Nation Working for Peace” website.
“This one is going to be big!” it says of the planned demonstration. “Be there and help write a new page in the history of social struggle in the U.S.”
Its demands are:
- Jobs, Peace, Justice
- Bring Our Troops and War Dollars Home
- Fund Jobs, Not War
- End War, Rebuild America
- End the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Now! — Bring Our War Money Home
The “national campaign manager” of the October 2 demonstration is Reverend Leah Daughtry, described on her website as “a nationally recognized teacher, preacher, speaker, organizer, leader, and Democratic strategist.” Her work for the Democratic Party includes serving as Chief Executive Officer of the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee and Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee.
The mainstream media, however, can be expected not to highlight the fact that the Democratic Party and its constituency groups, which are running the rally, have made common cause with communist groups dedicated to the destruction of the American system and withdrawing U.S. military power from the Middle East in the face of global Islamic terror.
McPhearson, controversial in his own right, confirmed his participation in the 2008 national convention of the Black Radical Congress, a gathering that included representatives of the Communist Party, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. The theme of the event was “Forging a Black Liberation Agenda for the 21st Century.”
McPhearson said he spoke to the gathering on the subject of veterans issues.
The group’s website highlights former Communist Party official Angela Davis and Black Panther head Stokely Carmichael as examples of “black people working in radical ways to create change.” It says, “From the slave rebellions of the 19th century to contemporary figures in black radicalism like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Angela Davis, a tradition of radical behavior colors the African American story.”
Wright, who was Obama’s pastor for 20 years, is an advocate of liberation theology and has publicly praised Marxism. He has claimed that AIDS is a U.S. plot to kill black people and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al Qaeda that cost the lives of almost 3,000 Americans were caused by U.S. foreign policy.
The ACLU has posted a letter it sent to the FBI on behalf of McPhearson and various “peace” and Muslim activists suggesting they had been improperly monitored by the FBI. McPhearson, the letter says, had “traveled to Iraq, Italy and Turkey as part of a peace delegation” in 2003 and 2004 and was “detained at the airport.”
Another article on the ACLU website provides additional details, saying that McPhearson traveled to Iraq as a Veterans for Peace delegation member in December 2003, attended an international peace conference in Turkey in January 2004, and attended a peace conference in Bologna, Italy, before returning to the U.S.
In response to a recent Justice Department Inspector General report on FBI investigations of certain domestic groups, the FBI said that it never targeted any group or individual “based on the exercise of a First Amendment right” and that its “authority to investigate criminal conduct or national security threats” was not questioned.
McPhearson now works out of New Jersey for the National Conference for Community and Justice and married Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey ACLU, in a ceremony that received sympathetic coverage for the two “peace activists” from the New York Times. The paper even ran a photo of them holding hands in front of the Statue of Liberty.
Nationally, the “One Nation Working Together” campaign operates out of the headquarters of USAction, a recent recipient through its USAction Education Fund affiliate of $300,000 from the Open Society Institute (OSI) of billionaire George Soros.
In this area of “grassroots organizing and civic engagement,” the OSI also awarded $300,000 to the Gamaliel Foundation, the Chicago-based group that gave Obama his start in community organizing.
USAction was founded by veteran left-wing activist Heather Booth, now a member of the group’s board. She is the wife of former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) officer Paul Booth, now the Executive Assistant to the president of the 1.6 million member American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union. Heather Booth officially serves as “senior advisor” to the “One Nation Working Together” campaign.
The SDS spawned the terrorist Weather Underground of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who supported Obama’s initial run for public office in Chicago.
In addition to USAction, the official “partners” of the October 2 rally include the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), National Council of La Raza, the Campus Progress affiliate of the Center for American Progress, Green for All (the Van Jones group), the American Federation of Teachers, Pax Christi, Rainbow Push, Color of Change, United for Peace and Justice, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, AFSCME, Queers for Economic Justice, and ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).
These “partner organizations” have their logos featured on the “One Nation Working Together” site.
ANSWER is a communist front that switched its affiliation from the Workers World Party (WWP) to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) when members of the former left to join the latter. For example, Brian Becker is a former WWP member who joined the PSL and now functions as the national coordinator of ANSWER. Its website promotes the October 2 rally, supports accused traitor Bradley Manning, urges the release of five imprisoned Cuban spies, and promotes a book calling Israel a pawn of the U.S. “empire” in the Middle East.
McPhearson has a number of affiliations as well. A former executive director of Veterans for Peace, he is a “co-convenor” of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and sits on a “steering committee” of the organization that includes such figures as Judith LeBlanc of the Communist Party, Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange and Code Pink, and David Meieran of the Thomas Merton Center.
Although it claims to represent veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Veterans for Peace has helped organize demonstrations directly in support of Bradley Manning, the Army soldier and troubled homosexual activist charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. Officials say his actions undermined the war effort and risk the lives of American soldiers and foreigners assisting the U.S. abroad.
Veterans for Peace (VFP) is an official part of the Bradley Manning Support Network.
When leftist “historian” Howard Zinn passed away earlier this year, VFP paid tribute to him, noting that Zinn had been a member of the organization since the late 1980s. Zinn was exposed through his FBI file, released after his death, as a secret Communist Party member who lied about it to the FBI.
The “Peace Table” that McPhearson has assembled for the upcoming demonstration includes the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a spin-off from the old Moscow-run Communist Party; Code Pink, which supports the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela; the American Muslim Association of North America; the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation; and the U.S. Peace Council, the American affiliate of the old Soviet front World Peace Council.
“We are the umbrella structure organizing to make sure the issues the peace movement works on every day are visible on October 2nd and a part of the overall agenda for this new movement,” the group’s website says.
United for Peace and Justice was founded by Leslie Cagan, who was identified as a member of the revolutionary Venceremos Brigades which went to Cuba in the early 1970s for indoctrination. She was the coordinator of a U.S. delegation to Cuba for the 1997 World Festival of Youth and Students, a communist-controlled affair that staged an anti-American tribunal. Cagan was also a long-time officer of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS).
As we have previously reported, former congressional investigator Herbert Romerstein, an expert on communist activities, said most of the members of the Committees of Correspondence came out of the Communist Party, where they functioned as stooges of the Soviet Union until the fall of that dictatorship. He said it had “a close working relationship with the Stalinist remnants in the former East Germany, now called the Party of Democratic Socialism…” Romerstein said these were the people who ran the concentration camps and the Communist Party apparatus in East Germany.
Romerstein also cited evidence that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Cagan organized the first meetings to plan opposition to any United States military action against those responsible.
CCDS says it is marching on October 2 for:
- Jobs and Sustainable Economic Recovery
- Funding of Community Needs Not Militarism—Bring War $$$ Home!
- Immediate Withdrawal of All Troops, Contractors, and Bases from Iraq and Afghanistan
- Justice, Civil Rights and a Renewable Energy Future
Next year the CCDS is organizing a “socialist study tour” of communist Vietnam. A key CCDS official and organizer these days is Carl Davidson, also formerly with SDS, who played a key role in forming the “Progressives for Obama” group. It has renamed itself “Progressive America Rising.”
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and may be contacted cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
Graphic images added by Gulag Bound
Ben Franklin said “Those that would trade security for liberty deserve neither”.
Of course wea ll want peace but at what cost? Peace at the cost of liberty, living under Sharia law, living under dictatorships, living under communism?
Give me liberty or give me death.
What is wrong with you people? Why don’t you expose the fascists that work within the Tea Party. White supremacists such as the John Birchers and the Council of KKKonservative Citizens (sic) are free from criticism?
That is a double standard. If you knew your history, you would realize that socialists and communists have always been at the forefront of the struggle to HELP people, while their opponents have always been anti-Semitic, racist scum. It is no secret socialists and communists endorsed the Oct. 2 protest. When will the so-called Tea Part (tea baggin’ bigots) admit their ties to the fascist scum that have no place on this earth except for six feet underground???
Illustrative comment, above.