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Melanie S. Payne (wife of great-uncle Charles Payne)

Charles Payne, Payne's son, Richard Payne, and Payne's wife, Melanie Payne

Campaign contributions:

Charles Payne
Melanie Payne

Melanie presently works as Administrator for the Chicago Institution For Psychoanalysis (on an IRS return, she is listed as "keeper of the books"). In the same position a few years ago she was paid by them under her company name Payne & Partners Inc. It appears that this company may not be in operation at present.

NOTE: Not a strong connection below, BUT it is a connection & may lead to other associations.

Advances in Consumer Research Volume 3, 1976 Pages 434-436
PREPARING FOR GROUP INTERVIEWS
Melanie S. Payne, Elrick and Lavidge, Inc.
ABSTRACT -

Proper preparation for group interviews is essential to achieve meaningful study results. Responsibility for conducting the groups should be given to a well-trained qualitative researcher whose job it is to understand the research objectives and how the results will be used. Other aspects of preparation include writing the discussion guide and supervising recruitment of respondents. Prior to the groups, decisions must also be made concerning where the sessions will be held and the type of audio or video recording that will be done.

PREPARING FOR GROUP INTERVIEWS

We have just heard from Al Goldman about the development of interviews and the way they are used, and shortly Myril Axelrod will discuss the procedures that should be followed when conducting groups. Once you have decided that groups are the proper research tool to use and before you actually run the sessions, considerable attention should be devoted to preparing for them. Because group interviewing appears to be such an easy thing to do and the process itself seems so casual, the important step of preparation is often neglected and left to chance.

NOTE: Below from New Zeal. It is long (and not new), but such strong, unbroken associations, I couldn't bring myself to snip.

David Axelrod was born in New York in 1955 to leftish parents Joseph and Myril Axelrod.

In the 1940s MYRIL AXELROD wrote for a left leaning magazine PM. Though not officially a communist publication, several Marxists (including labour editor Leo Huberman) and Communist Party members worked on the paper.

The Traditional Values Coalition reported March 4, 2008:
"Former Communist Eugene Lyons, writing in The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, noted that PM’s staff included a former editor of the Daily Worker; another was former editor of The Communist; and a third was a leader of the Communist Youth League; a fourth was a Soviet government official; and a fifth was the former staff cartoonist for the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA."

PM’s Washington, D.C. correspondent I.F. Stone was later identified as involved in Soviet Intelligence operations.

Incidentally one of PM’s writers, Earl Conrad, also wrote for the leftist magazine Negro Story, as did Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party member who was later to mentor the teen-age Barack Obama in Hawaii.

David Axelrod’s own mentor was a well known Chicago journalist/political activist named Donald C. Rose.

From the Chicago Tribune: "In his early years as a political consultant, Axelrod, following in the footsteps of his mentor, the political strategist Don Rose, carved out a reputation for himself as a skillful specialist working for local progressive candidates...says Rose. "I think he's a principled, generally progressive guy... .""

Axelrod first met Rose in the early 1970s while studying political science at the University of Chicago and working as a reporter on the Hyde Park Herald

Around that time Rose edited and co-owned a small newspaper called the Hyde Park Kenwood Voices. The paper's radical tone suited the neighbourhood. It tended to follow the Communist Party line campaigning for example to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Voice's co-owner, the late David S Canter had personal experience with the committee, being hauled before it and named as a Communist Party member in the late 1960s.

Canter and Don Rose took the young David Axelrod under their wing. They took it upon themselves to "mentor" and "educate...politically", a the young journalist. Don Rose later wrote a reference letter for Axelrod that helped win him the internship at the Chicago Tribune which launched his career.

Rose was a member of a Communist Party front at the time, the Alliance to End Repression.

The Alliance was set up to abolish the Chicago Red Squad, the police unit charged with monitoring communist and radical organisations.

Rose's personal Red Squad file accused him of being a "member of the anarchists".

The Alliance's executive director was Communist Party member Richard Criley. Further Party members involved included Abe Feinglass, Jack Spiegel, Jesse Prosten and Norman Roth.

Other radicals active in the Alliance included former Communist Party member Milton Cohen (later a founder of Chicago DSA), Quentin Young, Timuel Black and Rabbi Arnold Wolf. All three went on to join or support DSA and to form close personal friendships with Barack Obama.

Quentin Young, incidentally became the family physician to both the Obama and the Bill Ayers/Bernardine Dohrn households.

Don Rose also went on to chair another Communist Party front, the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, succeeding comrade Richard Criley.

Rose had been radical since the 1940s when he joined Henry Wallace's communist controlled Progressive Party.

In the '50s Rose was involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament and in the '60s was involved in the civil-rights movement. He was Dr. Martin Luther King’s Chicago press secretary for several...[years?]

In 1968 Rose was asked to serve as press secretary to the Chicago Mobilization Committee---the Students for a Democratic Society/Communist Party influenced alliance that wreaked havoc at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention. It was during these violent times that Rose coined the famous phrase-"the whole world is watching"

Through the mobilization Committee Rose met Marilyn Katz, the SDS security officer for the demonstrations.

By the late 1970s Rose was linked to the Chicago coalition of former Trotskyists, Socialist Party members and communists that would in 1982 form Democratic Socialists of America.[DSA]

In 1982 David S Canter and nine others invited black Democratic Congressman Harold Washington to stand for the Chicago mayoralty. Washington had a long history with Chicago's communists and socialists. When he accepted, the Communist Party and DSA formed a multi-racial alliance behind Washington.

The alliance targetted black voters in a huge voter registration drive on the city's south side.

Rose, Katz and Canter all worked on the successful campaign and all later secured jobs in Washington's administration.

In 1987 Washington successfully re-stood, aided by a young political adviser named David Axelrod.

Though Washington died in office shortly after, the communist/socialist alliance lived on.

In 1992 the alliance elected the Communist/DSA friendly Carol Moseley Braun to the US Senate.

In 2004 it helped put Barack Obama into the same Senate seat. In 2008 it is campaigning hard to put Obama in the White House.

According to Salon January 2008:
"When Barack Obama was 22 years old, just out of Columbia University, he took a $10,000-a-year job as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It was a shrewd move for a young black man with an interest in politics..."

The politician who truly set the stage for Obama's rise was also a South Side congressman: Harold Washington, who was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983...In New York, Obama read about Washington's victory and wrote to City Hall, asking for a job. He never heard back, but he made it to Chicago just months after Washington took office...

Washington dropped dead of a heart attack in his second term. But the confidence he instilled in black leaders became a permanent factor in Chicago politics. His success inspired Jesse Jackson to run for president in 1984, which in turn inspired Obama, who was impressed to see a black man on the same stage as Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Washington also strengthened the community organizations in which Obama was cutting his teeth, says Ransom.

Obama's Project Vote, which put him on the local political map, was a successor to the South Side voter registration drive that made Washington's election possible.

Chicago has two unique advantages, says political consultant Don Rose. First, it's in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois' voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Chicago's Carol Moseley Braun beat two white men to win the 1992 Democratic Senate primary, precinct captains in white Chicago neighborhoods and the suburbs whipped up votes for her in the general election.

"They had to go out and sell the black person to demonstrate that the party was still open," says Rose, who sees "direct links" from Washington to Moseley Braun to Obama.

Rose, Canter and Axelrod both worked on Moseley Braun's 1992 campaign. Marilyn Katz worked with Obama on Project Vote, the huge voter registration drive that ensured Moseley Braun's victory.

By the early 2000s Rose, Katz and another Obama associate and former SDS member Carl Davidson had formed Chicagoans Aainst the War in Iraq.

It was this group that organised the 2002 Chicago anti war rally where Obama famously came out strongly against the Iraq War.

The speech was a major turning point in Obama's career. Obama carefully consulted David Axelrod before staking out his position.

Katz incidentally is now an Obama fundraiser and an endorser of the Progressives for Obama website. Carl Davidson helped found the organisation moderates its website.

New Zeal