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Alice Palmer
Communist
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Obama's Political Mentor |
In 1995, Alice Palmer represented the state's 13th District, and decided to run for
the United States Congress. She hand-picked Barack Obama to run to replace her.
Palmer
introduced her chosen successor to a few of the
district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on
the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former
members of
the terrorist Weather Underground.
"I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers'
house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and
running for Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician
and advocate for single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama)
as her successor."
Ten years earlier, Palmer was an executive board member of the U.S.
Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group,
an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.
Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly,
part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only
thing it would have frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority.
In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an
article for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily
World, now the People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience
attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
and how impressed she was by the Soviet system.
Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages
and better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most
recent five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning."
She praised their "comprehensive affirmative action program, which they
have stuck to religiously -- if I can use the word -- since 1917."
Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job
matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing
and free medical care. Because Soviet school curricula were
established at the national level, she said, "there is no second-class
'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the
inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in
the United States."
Well, Alice lost the congressional race to Jesse Jackson, Jr., and decided that she wanted to
hang onto that hard-won state senate seat. Most of the community
leaders tried to persuade Obama to withdraw and wait his turn. He was a
newcomer after all.
Obama said no. He had every right to do so, but he decided to fight her
for the nomination instead of stepping aside in deference to her.
Instead Obama performed his first real act of political jujitsu.
He sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice
Palmer's signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her
off the ballot altogether. And indeed, some of Alice's signatures
were fake. The aides also found enough other fake signatures on
opponents' ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.
"They began the tedious process of
challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of
state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the
city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one
of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot."
Obama ran unopposed in the primary.
By the time Barack Obama walked handily into his state senate seat,
everyone there knew him as "the man who knocked off Alice Palmer."
Quite a feat indeed for the newcomer, the young whippersnapper with the
odd name. |
| Was Obama's Political Mentor A Soviet "Agent
Of
Influence" |
New Zeal blog draws our attention to
Alice Palmer, a Chicago based
academic, activist and former friend, employer and political ally of
Barack Obama.
In the mid 1990s Alice Palmer, then an Illinois
State Senator, employed Obama has her chief of staff, when she attempted
an ill-fated run for the US Congress.
Obama was part of Friends
of Alice Palmer, alongside controversial property developer Tony Rezko
and Democratic Socialists of America
members Danny Davis, Betty Wilhoitte and Timuel Black-also a member of
Committees of Correspondence).
Later Palmer introduced Obama
as designated successor to her Illinois State Senate seat, in the living
room of former Weather Underground terrorists
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,
while DSA member, former communist and long time Obama friend Quentin
Young looked on.
The Palmer/Obama relationship soured after
Obama refused to step down when Palmer decided she wanted her State
Senate seat back, after her Congressional bid failed.
Obama went
on to win the seat unopposed, after he knocked Palmer and his other
rivals off the ballot, by challenging the legitimacy of their nominating
signatures.
Alice Palmer was the first rung of Obama's ladder to
power.
It has long been known that Alice Palmer was a communist
front activist, as were many in Obama's orbit.
More seriously
however-new evidence shows that Alice Palmer had high level connections
behind the "Iron Curtain" and may have been a Soviet "agent of
influence" -- that is, a conduit of Soviet propaganda and policy, to the
US and the "third world".
What is the evidence?
Continue
reading
here . . . |
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Copyright Beckwith 2010
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