December 21, 2009

SF Weekly: Nationwide "community organizing" network really a secretive Marxist cult

It was G.K. Chesterton who once observed that "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." That is what immediately comes to mind reading this article by Matt Smith in the current issue of SF Weekly about the nationwide network of "community organizations" that really serve as fronts for the Marxist National Labor Federation (NatlFed). And NatlFed has no shortage of Leftist dupes willing to work on their behalf in unwitting service to their Marxist agenda.

It's a long article, but a very interesting read. No doubt there are some on the right side of the web who will try to spin this into some Obama-led conspiracy (which I won't indulge in), but what I find particularly interesting is how gullible many of these Left wing elitists really are. These are the same people who screeched about the looming theocratic takeover of America during the Bush admin, but who fall all over themselves helping scammers like NatlFed, which advocates for the violent overthrow of the US government.

The San Francisco limousine leftist set are exactly the same bozos who fell for another Marxist cult back in the late 1960s and 1970s - Jim Jones and the People's Temple. And that didn't end so well as I recall (e.g. the Marxist utopia of Jonestown).

From the article:

Why the seeming secrecy? Knowledgeable sources say that the Physicians Organizing Committee is one of several Bay Area front groups set up to disguise a strange political cult. Although a representative for the committee has denied the link, it has shared personnel with an alleged cult front group, and received a grant from the National Equal Justice Association (NEJA), a nonprofit shell corporation linked to the cult. (The committee's manager, meanwhile, has donated money to NEJA.) Committee representatives also deal with the press using a protocol consistent with rules laid down by the cult.

The cult, an umbrella organization based in New York, goes by names such as the Provisional Communist Party and the National Labor Federation, abbreviated as NatlFed. Historically, the stated goal of NatlFed is one that would likely even discomfit the Bay Area liberals the organization targets for recruiting: the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

NatlFed doesn't fit most people's idea of a cult. There's no religious dogma. Instead, it's best known for preaching leftist revolution. Yet, during its 40 years of existence, it doesn't seem to have performed a single terrorist act. Decade after decade, its members have merely gone about preparing themselves for the possibility of an eventual day of insurrection — like Pentecostals awaiting the rapture.

In the meantime, the group has undertaken charitable works that Palo Alto's Jeff Whitnack, who volunteered for the group in the 1980s until he became disillusioned, refers to as "flypaper" designed to lure young idealists. They maintain what NatlFed insiders refer to as "entities" or "mutual-benefit associations" to do food drives, recruit doctors and attorneys to provide services for low-income people, and give lectures about the need for mental health services in the Mission.

For anyone living in the Bay Area, these apparent front groups are simultaneously invisible and ubiquitous. At a recent Thanksgiving dinner I attended at a San Francisco friend's house, five of the 10 adults present had volunteered for, donated to, or been contacted by NatlFed fronts.

These groups, which the FBI has linked to NatlFed, have names that make them sound like labor unions or professional associations, among them the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals, the California Homemakers Association, and the Western Farm Workers Association.

None of the groups enter into collective bargaining agreements or are registered with the IRS as nonprofits. They do not publicly disclose their finances. They don't form close public alliances with community groups that have similar aims. They do not publish their regular activities, have Web sites, or create any public documentation of how they function. They keep themselves all but invisible — except to those they choose to contact.

"People will become involved in NatlFed, or one of its front groups, and don't even realize the group has a political agenda," cult intervention specialist Rick Ross said. "They simply feel it's a group to help the poor, not understanding the overall thrust of the group."

Former members and volunteers of seemingly NatlFed-linked groups say there's something futile and ultimately embarrassing about having performed good works for an organization that turned out to view charity as a means to a secret end.

[...]

The mastermind behind NatlFed's bizarre revolutionary philosophy was Gerald Doeden, a man known as a brilliant con man who recited Shakespeare at length and once dodged a bar tab by signing a check as Jesus H. Christ. The former Marysville disc jockey reinvented himself in the '70s as a revolutionary named Gino Perente, who claimed (falsely) to be a comrade of César Chávez and a veteran of worldwide insurrectional movements. He walked with a limp, which he told his followers was the result of a gunshot wound sustained while fighting in Latin American rebel movements (he actually limped because of a old car wreck injury).

In 1970, Perente established a base of operations at the Little Red Bookstore on Mission Street, from which he issued a declaration of war against Northern California. The following year, as part of the armed rebellion, 30 armed individuals were supposed to kidnap city officials in Berkeley and blow up the Bank of America building in San Francisco, according to his FBI file. A San Francisco Examiner article at the time said law enforcement officials considered him harmless and saw his dozen or so followers as kooks.

The comments to the article are also worth the read, including the rabid defense of NatlFed by one Michael Treece MD. Particularly interesting are the accusations that Smith's article is really insurance company propaganda. Someone else mentions that one NatlFed front receives grants from their state bar association. The following comment below the fold from someone who was involved with NatlFed illustrates how profoundly ironic this whole thing is:

From comment #15:

The truly sad part is that these self-proclaimed Marxists never actually perform the services they promise to their so-called "members." Instead, the members were simply very poor people, with no one else to turn to for help except government social services, and who were ultimately exploited for their own labor, endlessly filing notecards on contacts with potential new members and never actually receiving the assistance they were promised. I know, from firsthand experience, that this occurred because those persons were actually being used as tools for the organization's dogged recruiting efforts. There was never any program to provide effective legal assistance to these people, which was another reason why I discontinued any further contact with them.

Marxists exploiting people for their labor. Heh.