Long piece, haven't had a chance to read yet. Looks like the usual "Globalization is great piece. And we (remember WTO head Mike Moore saying the world's poor will benefit too, not just the political-economic elites) don't see any alternative anyway so shut up you critics on the left and the right..."
Michael Pugliese
http://www.tnr.com/magazines/tnr/011700/coverstory011700.html Also this from a "Newmanite"
CORRESPONDENCE Muck and Mire
Issue date: 01.17.00 Post date: 01.10.00
TO THE EDITORS: The New Republic attempted to chronicle the 30-year journey of two controversial socialists--Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani--through the muck and mire of the American left to the new and tendentious environs of the populist Reform Party ("The Infiltrators," December 13). Unfortunately, David Grann's account is so peppered with silly and adolescent notions that the story ends up grossly distorted. Grann's account of Newman's early days on the left is what you'd expect from a TV miniseries on Patty Hearst, not from a politically sophisticated journal of commentary. Newman, the master of mind-control techniques, holes up in a communal apartment. Guns are stockpiled. A 20-person roving security squad is "prepared to use them." Followers meet in restaurants to evade the FBI. If it weren't so dangerous to paint this kind of picture, it would be laughable. Grann is so intent on invoking this imagery ("a group the FBI once considered armed and dangerous") that he neglects to report that the FBI promptly closed its investigation--which had been sparked by, in the agency's own words, "a source of unknown reliability"--because it could not substantiate the source's allegations. Also conveniently omitted is the fact that the FBI's harassment of the New Alliance Party (NAP) was forcefully denounced as "troubling" and "unjustified" by the chairman of the subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, Representative Don Edwards, in a 1993 letter to then-FBI Director William Sessions. Grann misses the point of what Newman was, and is, actually doing. Newman was a critic of the ultra-left. He provoked members of the left by exposing them as cheerleaders for the Democratic Party. Those on the left didn't like that--or his claims that some of them were doing the dirty work for the FBI and the CIA. That's why the left inaugurated the "cult" charge against him. It was a sectarian polemic by acolytes of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) that was picked up later by Democratic Party-funded "researchers" and liberal anti-populist journalists, and it has become a kind of "gospel according to St. Lexis-Nexis." Unlike the left, which never tires of talking to itself, Newman carved out an independent mass-organizing approach that broke him and his associates out of the left's prison of "political correctness." His hope was to provide the American people with new political tools--i.e., independent tools that enable them to coalesce across ideological lines to challenge the agendas of corporate and big-labor special interests. It was this strategy that led Newman, later joined by Fulani, to involve himself in independent electoral politics and specifically to build the NAP, on whose ticket Fulani ran for the presidency twice. Grann's account of the NAP, which succeeded in getting Fulani on the ballot in all 50 states--making her the first African American and first woman in U.S. history with this distinction--is likewise preposterous. According to Grann, the NAP was consumed with "infiltrating and taking over unsuspecting organizations." Far from infiltrating left groups, Fulani was beating them hands down on the ground. In 1985, she ran for mayor of New York City on the NAP line and overwhelmed the CPUSA's mayoral contender, Jarvis Tyner, more than two to one citywide. In Harlem she outpolled him eight to one. Her 220,000 votes in the 1988 presidential run dwarfed her six left-independent competitors, whose combined national total was 87,000. Grann concludes that Newman and Fulani are "power brokers in the race for president" as a function of deception and infiltration rather than successful organizing. He uses the Independence Party of New York (the Reform Party's affiliate) as a case in point. Wrong again. The IP became a legally recognized ballot-status party in 1994, when Tom Golisano polled 210,553 votes (50,000 were required) in the race for governor. Golisano met with Newman and Fulani to seek their support in that campaign. When a highly technical legal maneuver was required, Fulani's lawyers secured the ballot spot for Golisano. Fulani has brought approximately 15,000 African Americans into the IP--about ten percent of its statewide registration--and she is part of a pro-reform coalition in the party that controls 70 percent of the vote on the state committee. IP Chairman Jack Essenberg bemoans the "Marxist takeover." But there is no such thing. Fulani and the pro-reform IP coalition of which she is a part are simply more popular in the party than Essenberg is. Ultimately, Grann's complaint is that Newman and Fulani, and their brand of independent populism, are getting a "megaphone." And they are--notwithstanding the efforts to demonize them. The real "infiltrator" story is the one about the special interests who have infiltrated our political process and taken control of America. Those are the infiltrators TNR should be targeting.
JACQUELINE SALIT Political Director, Committee for a Unified Independent Party New York, New York
DAVID GRANN REPLIES: My story mentions that the FBI once considered the New Alliance Party armed and dangerous, but none of the story's allegations--including that Newman's inner circle stockpiled guns, employed a roving security band, supported regimes like Muammar Qaddafi's, infiltrated other political parties, and misused campaign funds--are based on the FBI report. In fact, those allegations come from several longtime NAP members. Most of them, including Judith Miller, the well-known author of children's books, and Dennis Serrette, the party's former presidential candidate, spoke on the record. It is they, not the FBI, who call NAP a cult. Moreover, many of the most damning allegations in the story are based on court records and campaign finance documents. And the most recent allegation--that Newman and Fulani are involved in a hostile takeover of the Reform Party--comes from people inside the Reform Party, including state party chairmen, who have watched the process firsthand for the past five years. Golisano himself, whom Jacqueline Salit cites as "a case in point" in her defense, publicly complained that Fulani was infiltrating his organization.