Controversial New Video of Obama’s Pastor

Controversial New Video of Obama’s Pastor

*Editor's Note: The Wright video linked to in Cliff Kincaid's column, Controversial New Video of Obama's Pastor, has been deleted. But the same video can still be viewed on YouTube in three parts. Here are part one, part two, and part three. We do not know why the original video was taken down, but have our suspicions.

A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S.

In an article in the socialist Monthly Review, "Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle," McChesney declared, "Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism."

In the video, which captures Wright's appearance at a September 17, 2009, anniversary celebration of Monthly Review, Wright said that while the "corporate media" provide a "binary lens" of the world, in such terms as "communist versus Christian," Monthly Review offers what it calls "no-nonsense Marxism."

He added: "You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism."

He called America "land of the greed and home of the slave."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, as Obama was trying to distance himself from figures such as Wright and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, Wright gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and repeated a discredited Soviet propaganda claim that the U.S. Government had manufactured the AIDS virus to kill black people.

The McChesney introduction of Wright provides more insight into the political network, based largely in Chicago, that launched Obama's political career and still influences him.

A professor at the University of Illinois, where Bill Ayers is also employed, McChesney was an editor of Monthly Review but now serves as a contributor to the publication and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation.

Fox News' Glenn Beck, who has focused critical public attention on McChesney's influence in the "media reform" movement and on the Obama Administration, has noted that McChesney co-authored another piece for Monthly Review, "A New New Deal Under Obama?," in which he said, "In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles."

Ironically, McChesney's Free Press organization has received at least $1 million from the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros, a mega-capitalist who seems to have dedicated his life to overturning the system that made him wealthy.

At the 2007 Free Press "National Conference for Media Reform," Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) launched a vicious attack on conservative talk radio, saying that the survival of America was itself at stake because of "neo-fascist" and "neo-con" talk-show hosts led by Rush Limbaugh.