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.
“99% Spring” Democratic operation?
We heard from Sage about the “socializers” (anti capitalists) taking over(sage comment, that).
But while the “anti capitalists” have held sway over Occupy Wall St, others have since the beginning been trying to co-opt it.
The drama behind the scenes with all this would make old 80s soap operas look sophisticated by comparison.
Charles Young, who has been involved with Occupy, tells of attending the “99% Spring” training session organized by Move On.org and having the sudden revelation that it was run by the Democrats:
With hindsight gained by googling “MoveOn” and “co-opt” after the fact, I can’t claim that nobody tried to warn me. Many websites with left and even liberal politics had said in so many words, “Be wary of this organization called The 99% Spring. It is a Trojan horse for the Democrats.” I just didn’t read that anywhere in a timely fashion. I’ve had a lot of stuff on my plate lately. That’s my excuse. And in my ignorance, I responded to some spam about “nonviolent direct action training” organized by MoveOn and got invited to this 99% Spring thing on April 10 at the Goddard Riverside Community Center in Manhattan. Somebody even called me all the way from San Francisco to make sure I was a sincere seeker on the left and would be attending, along with 120,000 others in training sessions around the country.
Which I did. The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.
The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.
A large man with long wavy hair combed back started the presentation with a stirring call for…the meeting to be off the record. He didn’t want any stories that would violate anyone’s privacy, and if there were any lurking journalists, they weren’t allowed to use any names and they must see him afterwards for further instruction on the ground rules. This struck an even more dysphoric note with the crowd than the Obama buttons.
WTF thought #1: This was a public event ostensibly to convince members of the public to engage in behavior that challenged the legitimacy of government authority in public and might cause angry police to beat the public crap out of them. Why would anyone risk that without trying to get publicity for their cause? Nonviolent direct action that no one knows about is like jerking off. It might make you feel better, but you’re not changing the world.
Notice Charles in his disturbance, says something quite striking here. The purpose of Occupy is not bailouts, money in politics or whatever was the initial “get” used to draw people. The purpose is to challenge the legitimacy of government authority. Get people in the streets, whatever the issue. Wall St, war, racism, Trayvon, autism, mental illness. Plumb the ranks of people who have an issue and try to bring them to the cause. Once you get them, then you can shape them through training: by marching and chanting together, you build a contingent that will do things that would not have done before.
But I digress, Charles was just discovering that someone else was working him:
WTF thought #5: The name of the large man with the wavy hair was Marc Landis. He is a District Leader for the Democrats, who were paying for use of the meeting room. He is running for City Council. According to his law firm’s website his areas of experience are: “Real Estate, Banking & Finance, Corporate & Business Law, Securities & Private Placement, Fund Formation & Investment Management Group…” His Facebook page, which is geared for his City Council campaign, makes it sound like his specialty is pro bono community work. I don’t know. He might be a nice guy, but it doesn’t take a lot of intuition to wonder if he’s really been finding a lot of inspiration in Occupy Wall Street. He’s a corporate lawyer. I can think of no reason for him to demand that the meeting be off the record other than he and his party don’t want to be publicly associated with anything radical, even it’s a pseudo-radical front group meant to steer people away from the truly radical Occupy Wall Street and into pointless activities that don’t embarrass Obama.
Next they showed a video that invited us “to tell our story” so that The 99% Spring could post us online along with hundreds of other people who had been foreclosed, bankrupted, lost their medical insurance or whatever. It appeared they all wanted to raise taxes, so that the rich would “pay their fair share.”
It was sanctimonious. It was supplicating before power. The audience looked like it wanted to puke.
And I said that the other thing I liked was that it was to the left of the Democratic Party and was pushing it from outside. There had been some mention of “the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act during the 90s” and I pointed out that it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who deregulated Wall Street.
“Excuse me,” said Landis. “We have a limited amount of time and a lot to discuss. We need to let everyone speak.”
I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t believe I spoke for more than a minute, but I habitually obey the rules in a group, so I shut up. In retrospect, I was censored. I should have demanded a discussion of the true purpose of The 99% Spring and why Obama’s Department of Homeland Security orchestrated the violent destruction of hundreds of nonviolent Occupy camps around the country last fall.
As it was, we finished going around the circle. Everyone was a teacher or writer or connected with the labor movement. Wisconsin came up a few times. Landis asked what kind of a world we wanted to see. Someone said, “Socialism” and Landis said the topic for discussion was now how to plan for a “hypothetical direct action.” Every time somebody brought up something that was actually happening, Landis insisted that our agenda was set and we were only discussing hypothetical situations. So we talked about hypothetically withdrawing money from a hypothetical evil bank, or hypothetically stopping the hypothetical fracking in the Catskills that is going to poison New York City’s hypothetical drinking water.
“I heard that Occupy Wall Street was calling for a general strike. They’re planning actions all around midtown and they’re saying that nobody should go to work that day.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Landis. “We’re talking about hypothetical situations here.”
And so it went from 6:30 to 9:30 last Tuesday night. Over half the crowd left early. Most of those who stayed appeared to be angry and mystified that they had received no training whatever in nonviolent direct action.
Charles got a lesson, but not exactly the lesson he was expecting. Had he been more aware he would have recognized it in the nature of the organizations and people that were already running actions at Occupy Wall Street. New York Communities for Change and the Working Families Party have been and are actively involved in Occupy. They are the reconstituted ACORN which has close ties to Obama. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/224610/inside-obamas-acorn/stanley-kurtz . MoveOn and Code Pink have also been involved, Code Pink since the beginning as one of the founding groups of Occupy, along with the Workers World Party and Anonymous.
As much as Charles believes he fled the co-option upon recognizing it, he still hasn’t quite figured it all out.
(The rest of Charles Young’s post may be read here: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1126)
