Charles Barron trounced in NYC Democratic Congressional primary, demands recount
Charles Barron isn’t taking the loss well.
He lost badly to Hakeem Jeffries in the 8th district Congressional Democratic primary race, which is primarily Brooklyn. Jeffries, who was endorsed by party leaders, got 71.9 percent of the vote. Barron, endorsed by the unions and outgoing Congress member Ed Towns, received 28.1 percent of the vote, which translated to about 10,000 votes.
In part, the election was a bit of a test of the strength of the unions, the local union DC-37 and parent AFSCME, who objected to Jeffries’s pro-charter-school stand.
But also included in the mix was Barron’s long history of making incendiary remarks, everything from calling Thomas Jefferson a pedophile to making remarks about Jews and gay people, as well as supporting dictators. He has spoken of wanting revolution and fighting capitalism, noting that he does not want Obama to do anything to fix the economy, since that would only prolong capitalism. He has called Israel a “terrorist state”, and been endorsed by David Duke. He supported OWS including an action to take a man’s home, that was characterized as “taking a home back from the banks”.
See more background here.
His severe loss did nothing to gag his venom. He denounced the media as “really lowlife scum” and he refused to concede defeat.
“At the risk of sounding like a sore loser, honesty compels me to say there will be no congratulatory statement to the opposition tonight, only because of the way the campaign was run,” Barron was quoted as saying by the New York Daily News.
“We had them scared from the very beginning,” Barron claimed. “There’s something bigger than politics and that’s a movement. A movement of the people. We have that here tonight. When we launched this campaign, we knew we were going up against…the entire New York Democratic political leadership.”
While Jeffries espouses support such things as charter schools, he also had the support of the Working Families Party(rebranded ACORN).
Congressional candidate Charles Barron praises wealth redistribution, revolution, attacks Thomas Jefferson, claims “MLK was Democratic Socialist”
Charles Barron, current New York City Council member, is running for Congress from NY. He is running against Hakeem Jeffries in the Democratic primary. Since NYC is so heavily democratic, it is likely that the primary will decide the ultimate winner. Barron already has received support from many unions.
A lot has been written about Barron. A lot of reasons to not want to vote for this man- supporter of dictators(like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez), anti Israel, anti semitic according to pantheon of NYC Democrats who have come out against him, anti capitalist, pro socialist, former Black Panther, pro OWS, etc. Perhaps most of all, not really changing the blight that has had such an effect on his district where he has been city council member since 2001.
Here are a few more reasons:
In this video from 2009, Barron praises MLK as being for “equitable redistribution of wealth”, saying “Dr. King wasn’t just a dreamer, he was a radical, a Democratic Socialist”.
He then goes on to say “we need to get revolutionaries in office, we need to get radicals in office” and talks about the group he belongs to- Operation Power- which is working on that.
The video is uploaded by a socialist organization, Cleveland FIST, and that man introducing Barron in the beginning is Larry Holmes, current first secretary of the Worker’s World Party(communist organization). See more about Larry, his view of the Occupy movement, and recruiting for communism here.
This next video, from a radical conference, Barron talks about how radicals must gain/seize power through the “tactic” of electoral politics to deal with the evils of capitalism. At around 11:56, he talks about how he refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag at city council meetings, because “I cannot pledge to a lie”, calls Thomas Jefferson “a slave holding pedophile”, repeats what he said previously- “I want to slap the first white man I meet for my black mental health” at a reparations rally, at ~38:54 “we should nationalize Con Ed and automobile industry”, “revolution can and will happen in America, capitalism is a failure, it never has worked, can’t work, wouldn’t work and I want to see it in my lifetime”. “If Barack Obama is successful in stabilizing this economy, we are in trouble. Because successful means he’ll be patching up capitalism, trying to fix it.” He says until we are post racism and post capitalism, we should not stop fighting capitalism.
Barron with his support of radicals and redistribution sounds a bit like our friends in Occupy. And it is no coincidence that he has been a supporter. As council member from East New York, he came out in December to support Occupy’s seizure of a foreclosed home in his neighborhood. With huge fan fare, Occupy and Barron announced they were installing a “homeless family” into the house, taking it back from the banks.
Except it was all a lie and Charles Barron knew it.
The house was not foreclosed, it was still owned by single dad Wise Ahadzi who was in negotiations with his bank to try to hold onto the house. See more on the story here. OWS tried to put Ahadzi off, saying we will help you but they never did. Ahadzi said Barron was aware of this, yet went along with this charade on the media.
After all the fanfare, the lie began to unravel. OWS never moved the “homeless family” in, but rather had OWS squatters living in the house. Those squatters basically gutted and destroyed the inside of the house. When this hit the NY Post, OWS had a strategy meeting about what to do approach the PR fallout. The meeting included OWS members who were part of New York Communities for Change and the Working Families Party(both ACORN derivatives) and they talked about how to mitigate the fall out, including getting the “homeless father”, OWS member, into the home. After it became a political hot potato, Barron then turned on OWS, throwing them under the bus in the Post. He talked about how they came from “outside the neighborhood” and the squatters weren’t wanted. He apparently hoped that people forgot his support and knowledge from just a couple of months before.
Apparently Wise Ahadzi wasn’t important enough for OWS or Barron to help. It was okay to “redistribute” his wealth. Now he is left with a destroyed home. Thank you, OWS and Charles Barron.
Single dad Wise Ahadzi with his two daughters.
