-
An organization founded in July 2004 to provide a “philosophical home within the Democratic Party for the progressive community”
-
Co-founded and led mostly by activists from failed 2004 presidential campaign of Cleveland Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a leader of the radical Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives
-
One co-founder is veteran left radical Tom Hayden
-
Helped install Howard Dean as head of Democratic National Committee
-
Supported by several Hollywood stars, including Ed Asner, “Mr. Grant” of The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), founded in July 2004, was “conceived as a progressive challenge to the corporate-dominated Democratic Leadership Council [DLC],” wrote Nick Jahr in The Nation, and aims to provide a “’philosophical home within the Democratic Party for the progressive [i.e., leftwing] community.’”
“Through this organization we shall endeavor, over a period of years, to build an unstoppable coalition of the hundreds of millions of Americans who would benefit from a taking back of our democracy, our economy, and our institutions from the ‘moneyed interests,’” says the PDA “Vision” statement. “We dedicate ourselves to beginning the long, patriotic, nonviolent, and ultimately unstoppable process of transforming the Democratic Party.”
PDA reflects the George McGovern, Paul Wellstone, Nation leftwing of the Democratic Party and boasts that it helped install Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“We believe that the greatest need of our nation,” says PDA’s Progressive Plan to Change America, “is to redirect the resources of our government from destruction to creation, from war to peace, from military spending to social spending, from sickness to health, from selfish desires to universal needs. The future of humanity and our planet are at stake.” [Emphasis added] This is the oldest line of the fellowing-traveling tradition of the Progressive Party which bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948 to oppose its Cold War policies against Stalin.
The core of activists who founded and run Progressive Democrats of America came from the failed 2004 presidential campaign of Cleveland, Ohio, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a leader of the radical Progressive Caucus – a group of socialist Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Kucinch advocates replacing the Department of Defense with a “Department of Peace.”
PDA’s co-founder and National Director is Tim Carpenter, who in 2004 was Deputy National Campaign Manager for the Kucinich for President Campaign, the campaign’s state coordinator in Massachusetts and its coordinator at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Carpenter comes from Orange County and is a graduate of California State University Fullerton. He describes himself as “a social and political activist who, for more than 30 years, has worked for causes such as nuclear disarmament, peace and justice, abolishing the death penalty, defending the homeless, and fighting for clean elections and campaign finance reform.”
PDA’s Political Director is Kevin Spidel, who was National Field Director for the 2004 Kucinich campaign. Prior to that he worked as Western Field Coordinator and “grassroots trainer” for Amnesty International. Spidel was co-founder of the left group Progressive Vote, which merged with PDA in fall 2004.
“The far right has the Christian Coalition, Rush Limbaugh, Heritage and Carol [sic] Rove. Now we have the PDA!” wrote Spidel. “Without the Progressive Democrats of America, we simply will not have an organized grassroots lobby to effectively counter the powerful and well funded right wing, which currently has the political strength to privatize Social Security, dismantle Medicaid and Medicare, and dramatically reduce funding for affordable housing, education, and job programs.”
PDA’s Press and Media Team Coordinator is David Swanson, who was Press Secretary for the 2004 Kucinich campaign. He worked for three years as Communications Coordinator for the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Since May 2004 Swanson has been Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), an organization of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). He also serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA.
PDA’s Promotions and House Party Coordinator is Judith Shattuck, who “studied grassroots organization at the University of Chicago with Saul Alinsky during a year-long seminar in the 60s” and managed the Kucinich campaign’s office in Washington State. Other PDA staff from the Kucinich Washington State campaign include its online newsletter editor Rita Weinstein and its information technology coordinator Nancy Ging.
Progressive Democrats of America leaves little doubt about its radical and socialist orientation. It’s short official list of “Alliances, Partners and Friends” prominently features “Frank Llewellyn, National Director, Democratic Socialists of America [DSA].” DSA is “the principal American affiliate of the Socialist International.” Congress’s Progressive Caucus, of which Rep. Kucinich is a leader, had its own pages on DSA’s Internet web site until 1999, when conservative press reports prompted both groups to conceal their connections with one another. In 2004, according to Llewellyn, most DSA members “supported Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean in the Democratic primary elections.”
Another PDA ally on its list is Tom Hayden, 1960s Marxist activist, co-founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), former husband of actress Jane Fonda, and term-limited former California State Senator. Hayden is co-founder of PDA.
Another radical on PDA’s list of allies is Rep. Barbara Lee. Perhaps the most leftwing Member of Congress, she represents Berkeley, California as the hand-picked successor of her retired former boss Rep. Ron Dellums. Prior to working for Dellums, Lee was a confidential aide to Black Panther Party “Minister of Defense” and convicted murderer Huey Newton. She was the sole congressional vote against U.S.war against the Taliban in retaliation for 9/11. In the 1980s, as Dellums’ aide, she collaborated with the Marxist dictatorship in Granada against her own country.
Another PDA ally is Jeff Cohen, the founder of leftwing “media watchdog” organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Jodie Evans is another activist high on PDA’s list of friends and allies. She was co-founder of the anti-American group Code Pink for Peace and sits on the board of directors of the extremist environmental group Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Code Pink, like PDA, works closely with United for Peace and Justice (UPJ), whose leader Leslie Cagan is an active supporter of Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Evans helped organize anti-War protests and protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.
(Aaron Rubin, PDA’s Rapid Response Action Coordinator, has worked with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and with the 2004 TrueMajorityAction propaganda campaign of Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, as coordinator of its PantsOnFire stunts to grab media attention during the presidential campaign. “Together with PDA founder Tim Carpenter,” says Rubin’s PDA official biography, “Aaron set the agenda and drove PantsOnFire II throughout the Republican National Convention in NYC.”)
Several of PDA’s closest allies are Hollywood actors. One is James Cromwell, best known for his roles as the crooked police captain in L.A. Confidential and as President Bob Fowler in the Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism movie The Sum of All Fears. Another is David Clennon, whose career includes a role in the leftwing TV series thirtysomething, which introduced the term “Politically Correct” to most Americans. Clennon is best known for playing Joshua Nankin in the anti-CIA TV series The Agency.
PDA’s Honorary Chair and “Acting President” is actress Mimi Kennedy, best known for playing the hippie mom of Dharma on the television sitcom Dharma and Greg. She was active in the Kucinich campaign in Hollywood and was a charter member of Artists United to Win Without War, among many other leftwing causes.
“The Democratic Party needs our help to regain its soul,” Mimi Kennedy said in a July 2004 PDA press release published by the leftwing Common Dreams Progressive Newswire. “If this is to be the party of peace, of universal, single payer healthcare, of fair trade, then it needs people to speak out on those issues.”
PDA reaches out to latter-day hippies and to what some harsh critics have called the “granola left – flakes, nuts and fruits.” Its list of allies includes “Caryn Hartglass, Vegetarian activist.” (Dennis Kucinich is a vegetarian.) PDA’s “Volunteer Coordinator, and Acting Chair of Policy Task Force on Spirituality/Values” is Nicoli Bailey, who describes herself as host of “the on-line radio show Your Planetary Connection…exploring geopolitics, philosophy, poetry, myth, and planetary and solar system cycles within the context of astrological wisdom.” PDA, as a political movement with its own staff astrologer, might therefore fairly be described as a “big net” organization that also has stars in places beyond movies and television.
Ed Asner, who played Mr. Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, has been an active supporter and fundraiser for Progressive Democrats of America. Asner is also a proud card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America and an outspoken advocate for socialism.
Cindy Asner, his wife, is on PDA’s short list of friends and allies. Ms. Asner also sits on the Board of Directors of the Free Press Action Fund along with the founders of the leftwing “media reform” organization Free Press, John Nichols of The Nation and Robert McChesney. McChesney, in turn, sits on the board of the Monthly Review Foundation and until 2004 was co-editor of the openly Marxian journal Monthly Review.
Another who sits with Cindy Asner on the Free Press Action Fund board is Linda Foley, President of the Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, who in spring 2005 accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq.
And another board member is Norman Solomon, a former head of FAIR and now Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), a pro-active left media-spinning organization on whose board McChesney sits.
On July 29, 2004, PDA National Director Tim Carpenter was a moderator at a gathering of approximately 1,000 progressives at Roxbury Community College in Massachusetts. This conference, “Beyond Boston: Building the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party,” featured among its invited speakers former Vermont Governor and failed Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. John Conyers (D.-Michigan)(whose senior legislative aide Joel Segal works closely with PDA), Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D.-Illinois), Jackson’s father the Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute (AAI) and brother of pollster John Zogby. Others who spoke to the cheering college gymnasium crowd included Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, and founder of the anti-Iraq War group Win Without War former Maine Democratic Congressman Tom Andrews.
The organization Muslims for Kucinich described this gathering as “the first-ever Progressive Democratic Convention.”
“Chris Owens, son of Brooklyn Congressman Major Owens, came to [a January 2005 Washington D.C. PDA progressive] summit looking for inspiration,” wrote Nick Jahr in The Nation. “’This is not an easy thing, to be a ‘progressive’ Democrat,’” said Owens. “’We have a struggle within our party and we have a struggle within our country.’ Owens stayed through the weekend and seemed ready to fight.” His father Rep. Major Owens is both a member of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives and a card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America.
“We are underfunded and have no available paid positions at this time,” said the PDA website as of June 2005. “Only 2 staff and 2 interns currently get paid, and over 20 people put 40 to 100 hours a week into PDA. If you would like to volunteer email our volunteer coordinator.” It did not reveal what pay, bonuses, benefits, expense accounts and other perks and emoluments Tim Carpenter receives for keeping this cattle-like herd of far-left political mavericks under the control of the Democratic Party that needs them so desperately as voters, donors and activists.
Progressive Democrats of America may have an influence bigger than its claims of poverty suggest. As moderates continue to abandon an increasingly-extreme Democratic Party, the leftwing activists who remain become an ever-larger proportion of the party’s core. This, in turn, makes the Democratic Party even more extreme, which will prompt even more moderates to go elsewhere. PDA’s plans and efforts to take over the Democratic Party thus may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
PDA has, according to its Political Director Kevin Spidel, become “one of the fastest growing political organizations in the country.” (This is not necessarily difficult when an organization starts from zero and enlarging from one member to two constitutes 100 percent growth.)
PDA has made itself a squeaky wheel on the Democratic Party’s covered wagon going left. PDA sharply criticized DNC Chairman Howard Dean for telling an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) gathering in Minneapolis on April 20, 2005 that, with regard to U.S. forces in Iraq, “Now that we’re there, we’re there and we can’t get out. The President has created an enormous security problem for the United States where none existed before. But I hope the president is incredibly successful with his policy now that he’s there.”
PDA’s Tim Carpenter urged Howard Dean to reverse his statement and call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. To this end, Carpenter announced that PDA would work with United for Peace and Justice to flood congressional offices with telephone calls during the week following Memorial Day 2005.
PDA at the California Democratic Annual Convention in April 2005 fought for three days to add a plank to the party platform promising troop withdrawal from Iraq “at the earliest possible time.” According to PDA National Director Tim Carpenter, this effort “faced severe pressures to water down or derail the resolution by more hawkish Democrats, including delegates associated with the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who tried to ‘pull’ the resolution from the party platform report…. Delegates representing former presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark also tried unsuccessfully to weaker the resolution.”
In the end, PDA persuaded the California Democratic Party to vote against the war, thereby giving hope and encouragement to Islamist terrorists to keep fighting against America.
PDA in December 2004 also joined forces with Jesse Jackson, Rep. John Conyers and other “progressives” in challenging the Ohio vote count that, by a margin of more than 100,000 votes, re-elected Republican President George W. Bush. For Progressive Democrats, democracy is acceptable only when the people vote for them.
If Progressive Democrats of America continues to score such successes, it could soon attract big money from the likes of George Soros and other billionaire leftists behind the “Shadow Party” on which the Democratic Party now depends for money, the mother’s milk of its politics.
“PDA,” wrote Jahr in The Nation, “may represent the advent of the grassroots organization that the Rainbow Coalition failed to sustain. This time around it’s a movement that doesn’t depend on the charisma of a Jackson or a Kucinich or a Dean.”
The logo of Progressive Democrats of America is the head of a green donkey inside a circle. It remains to be seen whether this green donkey will come predominantly to symbolize environmentalism, seasickness, a new springtime for socialism in American politics, money or jealousy.
