Loudon: More Weathermen For Obama

Cross posted from The Real Barack Obama who cross posted Trevor Loudon’s piece. Loudon has full credit for this article.

 
The Obama File 33 More Weathermen For Obama by Trevor Loudon, posted September 30, 2008, on his blog, The New Zeal, is cross-posted at RBO with the author’s permission. Loudon’s first Obama File was posted January 12, 2008. Trevor writes:

My last three posts have looked at Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) and the organisation’s relationship to Barack Obama and his campaign.

Despite its innocuous sounding name, MDS (founded August 2006) is a coalition of former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) its terrorist splinter the Weather Underground and three Marxist organisations, Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Every one of these strands has supported Barack Obama since at least the mid ’90s — some even further back.

Today many MDS activists are working in the Obama campaign, particularly through the MDS offshoot, Progressives for Obama (P4O).

Much as been written about the links between Barack Obama and his “patrons” former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

I’ve shown that Dohrn has been an MDS board member, while her husband Ayers is at least an active supporter.

That’s two known former terrorists involved in MDS, but there are at least three more in the MDS/Progressives for Obama orbit — Jeff Jones, Howie Machtinger and Mark Rudd.
Ayers, Dorhn, Jones, Machtinger and Rudd are old revolutionary comrades. In the late ’60s the five were key leaders of the faction of SDS that split to form the Weather Underground. All attended the famous 1969 Flint War Council that effectively gave birth to the Weathermen faction of SDS.

All were virulently anti-American in their radical heyday.

Bernardine Dohrn has been accused of planting a bomb that killed San Francisco policeman Brian V. McDonnell. When police raided a Weathermen bomb factory in Pine Street San Francisco in 1970, they found the fingerprints of Ayers, Machtinger and Rudd.
All are still radicals today and all are proven Obama supporters.

This post profiles the three neglected Weathermen in the MDS/Progressives for Obama network-Jones, Machtinger and Rudd.
Who is Jeff Jones?

According to Jeff Jones’s own website

Jeff Jones went to his first rally against the Vietnam War in 1965. Within a year, he had quit Antioch College to become a fulltime organizer for Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1966 he traveled to Cambodia to meet with high-level leaders of the NLF. In 1967 and 1968 he served as SDS Regional Organizer for New York City. In 1969, he was elected, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son.

Jeff Jones serves on the board of MDS. Jeff Jones is also a signed up supporter of Progressives for Obama.

^{Jeff Jones right, at the MDS Conference New York City February 2007}
Who is Howie Machtinger?

Today Howard Machtinger is director of Teaching Fellows at the University of North Carolina.

According to Frontpage Magazine

Machtinger was on the barricades at Columbia University in 1968 and was one of the founders of the Weather Underground. He co-authored a tome that stated, “At the right moment, revolutionaries within the United States were to wage a ‘people’s war’ and attack from within. The government would fall and ‘world Communism’ would eventually be instituted.” He also spoke about “how the black liberation movement is so far advanced at this point that the only thing left for white revolutionaries is to support blacks by fighting cops as a diversionary tactic.”

Machtinger is not a confirmed member of MDS, but does contribute to Next Left Notes, which is edited by MDS board member and Progressives for Obama endorser Tom Good.
Ayers, Dohrn and Rudd are also Next Left Notes contributors.

Machtinger has signed on as a supporter of progressives for Obama, on the same page incidentally as yet another former Weatherman, Steve Tappis. Further along Jennifer Dohrn—sister of Bernardine Dohrn–has also signed up.

Machtinger is also the author of a widely distributed essay entitled Obama and the Left:

If we, as a Left, are content to smugly and dismissively critique the Obama phenomenon, we trade self-fulfilling sectarianism for the chance at political impact. A victory for Obama will not only be a boon for the African-American community and for people of color, it will offer a unique opportunity for the development of an organized and aggressive Left movement that retains its independence at the same time that it is willing to risk everyday involvement in the strange world of American politics.
If we just critique, we will miss a moment that may not come again for a while. If our politics are meaningful, effective, and get to the root of problems, we should put them to the test in political work that connects to large numbers of people struggling to find direction in an increasingly dangerous world. Something wonderful is happening. We must be alive to it. I hope we can figure out how to relate to it effectively before we consign ourselves to continued marginalization.

Who is Mark Rudd?
Today Mark Rudd¹ is a New Mexico school teacher.
From Mark Rudd’s website:

As he traveled the country, from the fall of 1968 to the summer of 1969, Mark met many other activists in SDS who were thinking along the same lines as he, that SDS could move from anti-war resistance to full-scale socialist revolution…

White students would reject their “white skin privilege” and actually begin armed struggle against the U.S. government; this, in turn, would attract broad youth support as the struggle increased, following the Cuban model. This theory became fully articulated in a paper presented to the SDS National Convention in Chicago in June, 1969, authored by a collective of eleven, of which Mark was a member. Its title was “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” from which Mark’s faction of SDS became known as “The Weathermen.”

That convention proved to be SDS’ last. Following a titanic ideological battle concerning “the correct revolutionary direction,” a split occurred between the Weathermen and allies grouped around the National Office and a competing faction of Maoist Progressive Labor Party members and their allies. When it was all over, Mark found himself elected National Secretary of SDS, along with comrades Billy Ayers as Educational Secretary, and Jeff Jones as Inter-organizational Secretary, and the Weathermen in control of the National Office backed by a small number of chapters around the country…

A few national SDS leaders had met with Vietnamese and Cubans to find out about their resistance to U.S. imperialism. Out of these meetings came an invitation for SDS to send a group of students to Cuba in January, 1968. Because of his active work with the chapter, Mark was invited by the National Office to join the trip, which was openly defying the U.S. government’s ban on travel to Cuba. He accepted, working out a month-long absence with his professors…

Mark met young Cubans in positions of responsibility such as running schools and farms and medical institutions who were fired up with revolutionary enthusiasm: they were remaking society along non-capitalist lines, creating socialism! Meeting with Vietnamese delegates in Cuba, he learned about the nature of the resistance to American aggression, that these people believed they would inevitably drive the Americans from their country, no matter how long it took. As if to prove their point, the Tet Offensive was raging at the time in Vietnam, giving the lie to the American military’s claims that they were winning the war. His group was told by a Vietnamese diplomat in Havana, “The American people will eventually tire of the war and the troops will have to be withdrawn.”

 

 

 

 

 

According to the FBI Mark Rudd’s trip to Cuba also involved terrorist training in camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine.

Today Mark Rudd serves on the board of MDS. Rudd is also an endorser of Progressives For Obama.

^{Mark Rudd addressing the MDS Conference New York City February 2007}

Clearly Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are not the only former Weathermen backing the Senator from Illinois.
Add their old comrades Jeff Jones, Howie Machtinger, Mark Rudd and even Steve Tappis to the mix and you are starting to get beyond coincidence.

That former terrorists are working with Marxist groups to elect Barack Obama is beyond doubt.
Should US voters know this?