Is LA Mayor Karen Bass Still a Communist

Will a Bear sh*t in the woods?

She just went to Ghana to see the President John Mahama’s inauguration. Mr Mahama is a socialist.

Even more so. One thing a good commie must always do is find someone else to pin the failures of communism upon. The “endless revolution” always has a scape goat. That idiot mayor will just double down. It will be the bad orangeman to blame. White supremacy to blame. Structural systemic racism to blame. Too many white firefighters to blame. Global warming to blame. Exxon Mobile to blame. Not enough regulations to blame.

If I remember correctly while in Congress she directed funds to USC and in exchange got some useless graduate degree.

Has been nothing other than a congressional representative (like that takes brains or ability) and certainly has never met a payroll, managed a business, run anything AT ALL, but the Los Angeles citizens in their infinite wisdom decided she was the better pick over successful businessman Rick Caruso.

Embrace the suck, people. You picked Bass, you picked Newsom, and you picked your city council. All of these people brought you today's joyful inferno. They either unfunded, defunded, or diverted funds for more worthy things like equity rather than firemen and cops.

“Embrace the suck, people. You picked Bass, you picked Newsom, and you picked your city council. All of these people brought you today’s joyful inferno. They either unfunded, defunded, or diverted funds for more worthy things like equity rather than firemen and cops.”

I don’t believe they’re smart enough to place blame where it belongs.

https://keywiki.org/Karen_Bass

Progressive Mayors
From [Communist Party USA leader] John Bachtell, May 9, 2023:

Johnson is not alone among newly elected progressive mayors. Broad-based, diverse multi-racial people’s coalitions have helped elect a wave of new progressive mayors and elected officials in the last few years, including Johnson, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, Tishaura Jones in St. Louis, Ras Baraka in Newark, and Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Miss. Helen Gym could join this group if she is elected mayor of Philadelphia on May 16.[2]
‘Holman Group’

From Kent Wong:

I first worked closely with Rev. Lawson in the 1980s when I was staff attorney for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). A network of young activists approached Rev. Lawson to learn from his vast experience helping shape the Civil Rights Movement and to see if we could apply those lessons to labor organizing in Los Angeles. He agreed to meet with us and challenged us to apply nonviolence as a living and breathing science — and as a way of life. He explained that during the course of our lives, the majority of social justice campaigns we will work on will not succeed the first time or perhaps for years, and yet we must persevere. We went on to meet for years on a monthly basis at the Holman United Methodist Church.
We called ourselves the “Holman Group,” and our small network included California State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who was then a union organizer for the hotel workers, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of the “Free South Africa” committee, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who was then an organizer for United Teachers Los Angeles and former Councilmember Gilbert Cedillo who was then a representative for SEIU. We would never have imagined the collective impact Holman Group members would have on social and political change in Los Angeles in the years to come.[3] . . .

Cuba, communists, Venceremos Brigade

In a May 5 2005 exchange on Yahoo group Atzlannet, Los Angeles Communist Party USA organizer Rosalio Munoz revealed his own early connection to Karen Bass, and the of another communist Leroy Parra. He revealed that communists had indeed been [part of Bass’s movement, and that she had been a member of the Venceremos Brigade, whose members traveled to Cuba to do agricultural work in support of the Cuban revolution.[10]

History with Cuba
After Karen Bass graduated high school, a classmate who had traveled to Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade connected her with the program, and she decided to go. She was 19 the first time she landed in Havana, in 1973. She remembers spending her time in Cuba building houses—work she compared to that of Habitat for Humanity.

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“We built houses during the day,” Bass said, “and then we had what they called cultural activities and we called parties. There was great music, rum, dancing. And we toured the country.” Going to Cuba was a way to meet other young activists, Bass told me. “Obviously, there were Cubans there doing construction work,” she said. “But it was an opportunity for all of the various activists to get together.” She wasn’t the only future politician to join the Venceremos Brigade: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a longtime friend of hers, also went.

Bass went to see Castro speak in Revolution Square in Havana, joining “about a bazillion people” in the crowd, she said. Although she couldn’t understand him, he was “extremely charismatic.” She said she was aware then that Cuba under Castro wasn’t the utopia that some of her friends believed it to be. “I know that the crowds cheered, but I have no idea what they were cheering about—and I’m not sure if they didn’t cheer, that wouldn’t have been a problem,” she said. That was the contrast she saw between American activists and Cubans at the time. “I didn’t have any illusions that the people in Cuba had the same freedoms I did. I came home and was protesting everything; I knew that the Cuban people didn’t have the ability to do that.” She didn’t buy the Cuban government’s propaganda, she insisted. I asked whether she knew any American activists who had gotten involved in espionage or violence, and she was firm in her response: “Let me say: Hell no. No, I did not know anybody like that.”

Jeff Schatz, who met Bass on that first trip to Cuba and remains a friend, told me that he remembered her mediating between American volunteers who were getting on each other’s nerves. “She just got in there and worked to say ‘Hey, we’re out here to learn stuff. We’re out here to work and work together,” said Schatz, who added that he fell in love with the construction work he did in Cuba and decided to make a career of it. He now runs a business that specializes in building luxury homes in Malibu.

Two years after Bass’s first trip, the head of the Dade County, Florida, bomb squad testified to the Senate Internal Security Committee that interrogations of members of violent organizations in America had led his group to the Venceremos Brigade. In 1977, the FBI produced a report alleging that some members of the Venceremos Brigade received weapons training. Bass told me she has always rejected violence, and didn’t associate with any militant groups.

Bass returned to Cuba without the Brigade in the years that followed, and saw Castro speak several times. She never met him, she said. She was there eight times in the 1970s, and has been back about as many times since. That’s good evidence that she didn’t lead her life focused on building a résumé or trying to rise in politics, she argued. She never hid her association with the Brigade—she gave a “Contemporary Cuban Society” lecture on Valentine’s Day 1977 at UC Santa Barbara (tickets were $1 at the door), for which she was identified as part of the group.

The American government’s interest in the Venceremos Brigade continued for years. In 1982, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing featuring a former member of Cuban intelligence who had defected to the United States. He testified that Cuban intelligence had connected with members of the Brigade while they were in the country, and that some Americans had become sources for the Cubans. Bass says she wasn’t involved in anything like that, either.

But Bass was well enough known as a community activist, with a focus on protesting police brutality, that the local government tried to come after her because of her connections to the organization. In 1983, L.A. police chief Daryl Gates tried to link Bass to a gun-running operation, using police reports that said Bass had “returned from Cuba bringing back propaganda literature.” She told police that she had not received any military training while in Cuba, and told me that the police had fixated on her learning to use a gun for target practice during a Brigade camping trip outside L.A. “I’m angry and I’m shocked that they would use [this allegation] to try to attempt to smear me personally and the brigade,” she told the Associated Press at the time. Bass later learned that the person who taught her to use a gun during that camping trip was an undercover police officer. Looking back, she called her questioning by police “absolutely absurd,” telling me, “I never, ever, ever came near a gun in Cuba, period. Never. And frankly, I think if any of that had been true, they would have brought us all in jail.”

Bass’s interest in Cuba kept up after she became a member of the California assembly. She went to the country again in 2005, on a trip organized by the California lobbyist Darius Anderson and paid for out of her campaign account, according to campaign-finance records kept by the California secretary of state. She’s returned several times since being elected to the U.S. House in 2010. She visited Alan Gross, the USAID contractor whom Cuba accused of being a spy, during his five years in prison, and joined then–Secretary of State John Kerry when he went to Havana to raise the American flag over the reestablished U.S. embassy in 2015. President Barack Obama invited Bass—by then a key supporter of normalizing relations with Cuba—to join the presidential delegation during his historic trip in 2016. From there, she tweeted a sepia-toned photo of herself from her Venceremos Brigade trip, in sunglasses with a bandanna on her head.

Cuba has been the main issue that people who don’t want Biden to pick Bass have focused on, mostly because of a statement she made after Castro died in 2016, when she referred to him as “comandante en jefe,” which she says was a poor attempt to translate commander in chief. In Cuba, this was a phrase Castro’s government often used to praise him. When I spoke with her in early July about that statement, she told me that she somehow hadn’t fully realized how Cuba and Castro were seen in Florida, as opposed to California. She told me last week that she’s since reached out to congressional colleagues from Florida, and to Cuban American leaders, to further her understanding of the issue.[12]. . .

Our Revolution endorsement 2020

Peace Action
Peace Action endorsed Karen Bass in the 2018 election cycle.[13]

Line of March connections
Karen Bass was heavily involved with the Maoist Line of March. . .

LA Mayor Bass faces critical leadership test
questions emerge about her wildfire response
As she partied and got ego stroked in Africa
NICHOLAS RICCARDI and MICHAEL R. BLOOD, apnews.com
Updated 7:03 PM EST, January 10, 2025

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earlier this week, as hurricane-strength winds blew through bone-dry hillside subdivisions, Los Angeles saw its worst nightmare realized as long-predicted firestorms engulfed wide swaths of the nation’s second-largest city.

For Bass, the horror show was compounded by every chief executive’s worst nightmare. She was halfway around the globe, on a tax paid ego trip to Ghana as part of a presidential delegation.

As her city faced its greatest crisis in decades, the first-term mayor confronted a critical test of her leadership two years after taking office. After rushing home to help manage the city’s response, with fingers crossed she pushed back against a loud chorus of critics from near and far. “LA has to be strong, united,” Bass optimistically said at a press conference Thursday evening. “We will reject those who seek to divide us and seek to misinform.”

Bass eventually made it back to Los Angeles by military transport, but only after a more than 24-hour absence, during which critics assailed her for not being better prepared. More than 10,000 homes burned as fire hydrants ran dry because water demand was so high it drained the city’s reserve tanks.

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