My article from the September 3, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:
Another Radical Obama Nominee
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama has nominated a former union organizer with a disturbingly radical background to a vitally important federal office that could manipulate unemployment figures for the Obama administration’s benefit.
The nominee in question is central banker Erica L. Groshen, an economist.
Groshen is a long-time registered Democrat whom President Obama wants to serve as Commissioner of Labor Statistics. Although Groshen says she has “a very non-political, non-partisan background,” her resume reads like that of a leftist community organizer.
She even sent her children to a cultish Communist summer camp called Camp Kinderland. The Stalinist camp was created in 1923 as “an affiliated institution of the Communist Party’s fraternal Jewish society, The International Worker’s Order, and was most probably owned by the Party itself,” according to former Marxist-turned-patriot Ron Radosh.
Radosh explained that campers are immersed in various indoctrination schemes aimed at making impressionable young people hate America.
For example, to build Marxist class consciousness campers are made to pick stones out of the road. During a UPS parcel strike campers and counselors condemned a temporary UPS employee as a scab and refused to accept delivery of packages from home.
Campers are also locked in their dorms and forced to go to group showers so they can experience the mortal terror that Holocaust victims went through. It’s not clear what exactly camp management is trying to accomplish with this activity, except perhaps to soften up campers psychologically in order to make them more susceptible to brainwashing.
Self-described “third generation Kinderland alum” Katie Halper directed a documentary film about Camp Kimberland. She acknowledges that the camp is “an egalitarian dictatorship.”
On an anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, campers assembled at a flagless flagpole to be subjected to a song about a young Japanese boy killed in one of the two atomic blasts that helped to end World War II. Camper Rachel Meeropol said it was “close to a religious experience” and that she experienced “that intoxicating combination of hope and doom.” Meeropol is a granddaughter of Communist traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during wartime.
After Camp Kinderland was attacked by conservatives earlier this year when Groshen’s connection to it was revealed, Meeropol’s father Robert, the younger son of the Rosenbergs, rushed to the camp’s defense. Robert, who never seems to stop whining about an elusive creature he calls “McCarthy-era repression,” probably thought he was doing Groshen a favor by writing that he “felt so good about sending my kids to Camp Kinderland.” If, dare to dream, the media weren’t in the pocket of the Obama administration, this comment alone could have doomed the Groshen nomination.
Camp Kinderland’s advisory board is a who’s who of America-haters.
Camp alumna Rachel Meeropol is a member. Meeropol is a senior staff attorney at the Greenwich Village-based pro-Castro public interest law firm Center for Constitutional Rights where she has worked since 2002. She defends Muslims who complain about racial profiling and does her best to keep America safe for animal rights terrorists.
Historian and Communist Party USA member Howard Zinn, who died in 2010, was an advisory board member.
A current member is Chesa Boudin, son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert who were convicted of murdering two police officers and a Brinks security guard. He was adopted by Weather Underground ringleaders and Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn when his parents went to prison. Chesa is a writer who champions Venezuela’s Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez.
Many unsavory radicals are honored at the camp. There is a theater building, “the Paul Robeson playhouse,” that is named after the radical actor-singer and winner of the International Stalin Prize. (Robeson was a frequent guest at the camp.) Bunks are named after labor leader (and convicted murderer) Joe Hill and Stalin-loving poet Pablo Neruda.
Kinderland campers are apparently not told about the camp’s subversive history.
Surrounded by Soviet hammer-and-sickle flags, poet and KGB agent Itzik Feffer spoke at Camp Kinderland in 1943, begging for money for Stalin’s Red Army. (Feffer’s loyalty to Stalin didn’t save him from a Lubyanka prison firing squad in 1952.) The Soviet national anthem was regularly sung at the camp. “Stalin’s songbird,” Pete Seeger, the iconic folk singer, was known to bring his Bolshevik banjo to the camp. Now 93, Seeger remains active in radical politics, especially environmentalism.
Kinderland was investigated by Congress in the 1950s for subversive activities. Camp attendee Stanley Wechkin testified that although he hadn’t been a Communist while at Kinderland, his experience there eventually led him to “become a Communist in succeeding years.”
More recently, Kinderlanders have participated in Occupy Wall Street events in hopes of spreading the blood-soaked gospel of social justice. In a Kinderland newsletter earlier this year camp alumnus Ron Gluck gushed, “I was moved to tears singing the same songs with the Camp Kinderland community at Occupy Wall Street (in Zuccotti Park) that I sang 60 years ago. We need to do it again!”
An article in the same newsletter elaborated on the ideological ecstasy experienced by Gluck and other Kinderlanders while they hung out with the hippies and rapists of OWS in lower Manhattan:
Dozens and dozens of Kinderland campers, staff, alumni and friends turned out to raise their voices and declare the power and the promise of the 99%. We Shall Not Be Moved; Banks of Marble; Solidarity Forever and This Land Is Your Land rang out, along with a catalogue of other high spirited movement hymns. We sang for hours, our songsheets making their way far beyond our Kinderland circle in ever widening ripples, till it seemed the whole park was singing along. It was a day of continuity and hope, as our youngest campers sang alongside alumni grandparents; as the words of the lyrics we sing all summer at camp took on new life and new meaning in the context of the Occupy movement spreading throughout the nation and the world. It really did feel like a new world might be born in the ashes of the old.
It is hard to believe that anyone other than a dedicated leftist would ever send her kids to Camp Kinderland.
But that’s not Groshen’s sole tie to radical politics. Her involvement in left-wing activism goes way back.
While studying at the University of Wisconsin in 1976 Groshen was a labor organizer. As an undergraduate she negotiated contracts and worked as union steward for a collective bargaining unit representing student workers and other campus employees.
Among the subjects Groshen taught while a graduate student at Harvard University were Labor Economics, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining. Groshen has studied wages extensively along with economic inequality, a perennial, pathological obsession of the Left.
She is openly hostile to small business. Groshen co-authored a 1998 report titled, “Small Consolation: The Dubious Benefits of Small Business for Job Growth and Wages,” for the leftist,union-backed Economic Policy Institute (whose president, Lawrence Mishel, is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a neo-communist group).
Groshen suggested small businesses unfairly exploit their workers. “[T]he average small firm gains some competitive advantage (relative to the average large firm) from the low pay, inferior benefits, and reduced job security it offers employees,” she wrote. The paper concludes:
Although much research remains to be done, clearly larger firms and establishments pay more, provide better benefits, and offer better job security. Small may be beautiful in many arenas, but it is not beautiful for workers.
Despite this out-in-the-open hostility to small business, Groshen currently works for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the same entity that used to employ Obama’s financial enforcer, the tax-cheating Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Groshen is married to academic Christopher W. Bazinet who supports the Working Families Party, a partisan arm of the far-left ACORN activist network.
Some may say that at this point the revelation that yet another Obama nominee may be concealing her sympathy for radical left-wing politics hardly seems worth raising an eyebrow over.
The Obama administration is already saturated with America-hating radicals. Obama himself is the most radical president in modern U.S. history, a red diaper baby who has spent the better part of his adult life covering up his intimate connections to the Communists and fellow travelers who raised him, mentored him, and fostered his political career.
But it does matter because the Commissioner of Labor Statistics oversees the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
America’s Community Organizer-in-Chief is painfully aware that the bureau’s reports can make or break politicians. The BLS provides key statistics on unemployment; inflation; earnings levels; projections of occupational and industry growth; productivity trends; job accidents and illnesses; consumer household expenditures; and other figures. Its most-watched statistic will be the monthly unemployment figure it will release just days before the November election.
“If she imposes her perspective on the data releases and how they’re presented to the media, she will be doing a great disservice to the country and to the professionals who work so hard at the BLS,” said
Rick Manning, a spokesman for Americans for Limited Government which has been leading the charge against the Groshen nomination.
Why take the chance?