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Jerryifcation and Oakland Schools
Recent Oakland Tribune article confirmed that Jerry Brown, Don Perata and FCMAT politically orchestrated the state takeover of the Oakland School District. From Prop 13 to 10 K, Jerry Brown has a history of pitting school children against his cronies...
Crony Profits Prioritized over Children's Education
by Frederico Antonio Salazar
(originally published in The Commemorator)
While the federal government passed another $350 billion tax cut for the wealthy in June, school districts around the nation announced more teacher layoffs, cutbacks in the number of school days and the cutting of yet more programs.
Although President Bush says, “No Child Left Behind,” his agenda seems to be making sure that no money is left behind either as his cronies at Bechtel, Halliburton and APL feast off of lucrative government contracts.
Bush has led the nation from an unprecendented government surplus of $10 billion to an historic federal deficit of $450 billion, and Governor Davis has led California into a $38 billion deficit.
With leadership like this, is it really any surprise that our schools are bankrupt as well?
The recent $100 million state buyout of the Oakland Unified School District may have made history for its size, but it is merely a continuation of the systemic assault on public school children that was institutionalized with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Hailed by conservatives as a “tax revolt,” Prop. 13 was really a sinister wedge used to forever divide Californians by pitting landowners against the state’s public school system.
The measure, written by a landlord attorney, put a cap on property taxes and shifted responsibility for collecting and allocating tax money from local governments to the state, irreversibly hampering local communities’ ability to adequately care for their citizens.
By cutting revenues, Prop 13 crippled state public education (as well as other services), cutting school funding in half overnight, and consequently, California has gone from being among the top five states in the nation to among the bottom ten in per-pupil education spending.
It is no wonder why, in the past 25 years since Prop. 13’s passage, California academic achievement in grades K-12 has likewise gone from top 5 in the nation to bottom 10.
While proponents of the “tax revolt” are quick to boast that Prop. 13 benefits low and middle income homeowners the most, they fail to point out that only 1 out of every four dollars lost to local governments remained in the pockets of residential homeowners.
According to Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, “Commercial property owners reaped 40 percent of the savings, while over a third of the benefits from the property tax reduction went back to the state and federal government in the form of higher income taxes.”
Local governments were left with nothing but an increased dependence on the politicians in Sacramento. The state got all the money and made all the rules, and local communities just had to make do, often competing with each other for funding, and operating within strict spending restrictions.
In response, 25 of the state’s 58 counties passed so-called “Boston Tea Party” Resolutions in 1993; mostly symbolic legislation where the county purportedly refuses to send locally collected tax revenues to Sacramento. None have actually withheld money as of yet.
Also in 1993, the Compton Unified School District was seized by the California Department of Education in the third of what has now become six state takeovers.
Marketed as a remedy for mismanagement and corruption, the Compton model, last administered by state overseer Randolph Ward (the fifth to hold that post in Compton), prioritized fiscal solvency at the expense of the students.
Although fiscal solvency was restored, and the District was handed back to local control in 2003, the state takeover ultimately left the district still lagging academically, with less than 20% of the original state-mandated changes completed.
In 1997, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California filed a class action lawsuit against the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for failure to properly manage Compton USD and provide adequate education and a safe environment for its students.
The filing alleged that students were “deprived of basic educational opportunities” available to children in other districts, and cited a lack of textbooks, toilet paper, habitable facilities and certified teachers.
An LA Times article quoted then Gubernatorial Education Advisor Maureen DiMarco as saying, “If these schools were prisons, they would be shut down.”
In 2000, the suit was settled out of court, with the state guaranteeing that students from even the poorest districts would be guaranteed the right to an equal education opportunity under the state constitution.
The Richmond and Emeryville School districts were also taken over by the state in the 90s.
West Contra Costa School Board member George Harris III summed up the experience in a recent Oakland Tribune article: “What the state takeover did to our district, what we found out that no one really knew before, was that the number one priority of the State Office of Education was not the education of our children.”
In Oakland, a crisis occurred due to a lack of resources due in large part to local officials who had another agenda.
Immediately after assuming the position of Oakland Superintendent of Schools in 1997, Carole Quan was attacked by new State Senator Don Perata.
Despite raising academic performance, decreasing dropout rates and stepping up the pace of the district’s efforts to repair aging and neglected school buildings, Perata, who spent more time attacking Quan in the press than he did getting funding for the district, eventually succeeded in forcing her out of office in 1999.
Said Quan in response to Perata’s attacks, “It’s difficult when you have to cut a dollar a thousand ways.”
Two decades after signing Prop. 13 into state law as Governor, Jerry Brown mounted a successful campaign for Mayor of Oakland. The Bay Area housing market was hot at the height of the Dot.com boom, and the former governor promised to “redevelop” the downtown area so that it would be “more livable” for all of the outsiders flocking to the region.
Once elected, Brown unveiled his “10K Initiative” to attract 10,000 new high-income residents to Oakland by redeveloping 7 cluster areas in and around Downtown. Of course, such a plan required evicting the current residents of those cluster areas, and Brown diligently set about his work of “Jerryfication.”
Under Prop. 13, property is taxed at a fixed rate, and assessed at the market value at the time of the purchase. The only way for a city to get more tax dollars out of a property is for the property to be sold when its market value is higher. This is the motive for Brown’s agenda of evicting old Oakland residents in favor of newer ones.
Brown then entered into a five-year contract with the federal government that would allow the city to take over control of properties seized by the feds, and used this contract to create a mobile police command center to harass Oaklanders into submission (or run them out of town). This, as the infamous “Riders” were making headlines with a high-profile police corruption scandal.
In 2000, Dennis Chaconas assumed the reigns of an Oakland School District that was a perennial cellar dwellar in terms of performance.
Himself a product of Oakland schools, Chaconas set about the monumental task of improving the district within the tight fiscal confines brought about by Prop. 13.
Chaconas successfully experimented with small schools, and raised teachers’ salaries to be competitive in the region. An influx of credentialed teachers, a dropout rate that was cut in half and rising test scores throughout the district gave credence to his reforms, but his refusal to cut costs in other budget areas were about to catch up with him.
When a new accounting system was installed in 2002, it showed a $27 million debt that had gone unnoticed in the previous system.
To make matters worse, the district also mishandled a $40 million commercial loan when it faced a payroll crisis in 2002.
Oakland District Controller Romi Selfaison, Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan and independent auditing firm KPMG all failed in their responsibility to monitor the district’s finances, but a large chunk of the blame can be attributed to “Jerryfication.”
Mayor Brown’s 10K initiative eroded the district’s enrollment as blue collar families were sent packing in favor of childless professionals.
Since state funding is allotted based on actual enrollment, but district budgets have to be made based on projections of the coming year’s enrollment, Brown’s three-year “Any Cause” eviction campaign came home to roost in the form of a $15 million deficit for Oakland schools.
Seizing on the opportunity, Sen. Perata launched an assault on Chaconas through the media.
The day after Chaconas released a controversial recovery plan for the district that would allow him and the school board to remain in power under the supervision of a state-appointed trustee, Perata told the Oakland Tribune that Chaconas had “done virtually nothing” for Oakland schools.
Although only the County Board of Education had the power to hire and fire superintendents, Perata was demanding the head of a second one in five years.
Despite his fiscal shortcomings, community groups rallied around Chaconas, whom they felt was good for academics and essential programs in the district. After all, his main contribution to the district’s debt was that he spent money in an effort to make the schools better for the students.
Chaconas was simply trying to do the same thing that Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy purports to do, which is put fully credentialed teachers in classrooms. Such a task in an urban district operating under the budget restraints of Prop. 13 is obviously impossible without additional funding.
Yet once again, Perata chose to attack an overwhelmed superintendent rather than flex his considerable political muscle to help Oakland kids.
Perata, who has designs on the Mayor’s office, is Senate Majority Leader, and is considered to be the front-runner to be the next Senate President.
He is basically one of the most powerful people in Sacramento, yet he did nothing to bring more funds into the District.
He co-authored a bill with Wilma Chan to maintain local control of the district, but did nothing to muster the seven votes needed to pass it out of the Senate Education Committee. He only submitted the bill to cover up for his public attack on Chaconas, and then let it die in committee.
In contrast, however, Perata’s bill seeking a $100 million bailout (district officials felt that they only needed about $35 million) from the state passed, despite being considered an “urgency” measure that required two-thirds approval in both the Senate and Assembly.
Before Governor Davis even signed off on the buyout though, Perata was already trying to sell off the District Headquarters property to help his friend at City Hall proceed with his 10K initiative, which targeted the property as one of its redevelopment cluster areas.
Perata claimed that the Lake Merritt Channel property could contribute $30 million to the district’s empty coffers, calling it “a really outstanding piece…for housing it would be really spectacular.”
Meanwhile, even though he had absolutely no say in the matter, Brown began actively maneuvering behind the scenes to try to handpick the overseer himself, and his first choice was a first-year graduate from a right-wing foundation that trains business executives to be superintendents.
Fortunately, it wasn’t his choice.
The state took control of Oakland schools in June, and appointed an overseer to implement their finances-before-academics agenda: Randolph Ward.
Chaconas was fired, the school board has been relegated to an advisory role, over a thousand workers have been pink slipped and several generations of Oakland children will now go through the school system without any parental control or oversight.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who appointed Ward, ordered the overseer to “put himself out of business as soon as possible.”
However, it took Compton 10 years to pay back a $20 million state loan. How can it be possible for Oakland to pay off a $100 million loan in even twice that amount of time?
The damage has been done.
The Prop. 13 “tax revolt” guaranteed that California’s public schools would forever be underfunded, and now that lack of funding has allowed the state to take local control of schools away from Oakland.
Since the politicians weren’t willing to fight for local control of Oakland schools, it is now even more important for the community to participate in the education of their children.
In wealthy communities, parents take up the slack through private schooling, PTA fundraising or non-profit foundations.
Lower income communities don’t have those same resources.
After touring Fremont and Castlemont High Schools in East Oakland, an emotional overseer Ward told a community forum that the schools “couldn’t have been a place where we send our children.”
Three years after an ACLU lawsuit proved that Ward’s Compton schools weren’t either, the resignation in his voice didn’t contain even a hint of optimism.
“I’m going to be honest with you, the state didn’t do a lot for us, we did a lot for ourselves,” said Compton High School science teacher Maxine Kemp.
If there is to be any hope for the future in Oakland, we will need to as well.
by Frederico Antonio Salazar
(originally published in The Commemorator)
While the federal government passed another $350 billion tax cut for the wealthy in June, school districts around the nation announced more teacher layoffs, cutbacks in the number of school days and the cutting of yet more programs.
Although President Bush says, “No Child Left Behind,” his agenda seems to be making sure that no money is left behind either as his cronies at Bechtel, Halliburton and APL feast off of lucrative government contracts.
Bush has led the nation from an unprecendented government surplus of $10 billion to an historic federal deficit of $450 billion, and Governor Davis has led California into a $38 billion deficit.
With leadership like this, is it really any surprise that our schools are bankrupt as well?
The recent $100 million state buyout of the Oakland Unified School District may have made history for its size, but it is merely a continuation of the systemic assault on public school children that was institutionalized with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Hailed by conservatives as a “tax revolt,” Prop. 13 was really a sinister wedge used to forever divide Californians by pitting landowners against the state’s public school system.
The measure, written by a landlord attorney, put a cap on property taxes and shifted responsibility for collecting and allocating tax money from local governments to the state, irreversibly hampering local communities’ ability to adequately care for their citizens.
By cutting revenues, Prop 13 crippled state public education (as well as other services), cutting school funding in half overnight, and consequently, California has gone from being among the top five states in the nation to among the bottom ten in per-pupil education spending.
It is no wonder why, in the past 25 years since Prop. 13’s passage, California academic achievement in grades K-12 has likewise gone from top 5 in the nation to bottom 10.
While proponents of the “tax revolt” are quick to boast that Prop. 13 benefits low and middle income homeowners the most, they fail to point out that only 1 out of every four dollars lost to local governments remained in the pockets of residential homeowners.
According to Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, “Commercial property owners reaped 40 percent of the savings, while over a third of the benefits from the property tax reduction went back to the state and federal government in the form of higher income taxes.”
Local governments were left with nothing but an increased dependence on the politicians in Sacramento. The state got all the money and made all the rules, and local communities just had to make do, often competing with each other for funding, and operating within strict spending restrictions.
In response, 25 of the state’s 58 counties passed so-called “Boston Tea Party” Resolutions in 1993; mostly symbolic legislation where the county purportedly refuses to send locally collected tax revenues to Sacramento. None have actually withheld money as of yet.
Also in 1993, the Compton Unified School District was seized by the California Department of Education in the third of what has now become six state takeovers.
Marketed as a remedy for mismanagement and corruption, the Compton model, last administered by state overseer Randolph Ward (the fifth to hold that post in Compton), prioritized fiscal solvency at the expense of the students.
Although fiscal solvency was restored, and the District was handed back to local control in 2003, the state takeover ultimately left the district still lagging academically, with less than 20% of the original state-mandated changes completed.
In 1997, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California filed a class action lawsuit against the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for failure to properly manage Compton USD and provide adequate education and a safe environment for its students.
The filing alleged that students were “deprived of basic educational opportunities” available to children in other districts, and cited a lack of textbooks, toilet paper, habitable facilities and certified teachers.
An LA Times article quoted then Gubernatorial Education Advisor Maureen DiMarco as saying, “If these schools were prisons, they would be shut down.”
In 2000, the suit was settled out of court, with the state guaranteeing that students from even the poorest districts would be guaranteed the right to an equal education opportunity under the state constitution.
The Richmond and Emeryville School districts were also taken over by the state in the 90s.
West Contra Costa School Board member George Harris III summed up the experience in a recent Oakland Tribune article: “What the state takeover did to our district, what we found out that no one really knew before, was that the number one priority of the State Office of Education was not the education of our children.”
In Oakland, a crisis occurred due to a lack of resources due in large part to local officials who had another agenda.
Immediately after assuming the position of Oakland Superintendent of Schools in 1997, Carole Quan was attacked by new State Senator Don Perata.
Despite raising academic performance, decreasing dropout rates and stepping up the pace of the district’s efforts to repair aging and neglected school buildings, Perata, who spent more time attacking Quan in the press than he did getting funding for the district, eventually succeeded in forcing her out of office in 1999.
Said Quan in response to Perata’s attacks, “It’s difficult when you have to cut a dollar a thousand ways.”
Two decades after signing Prop. 13 into state law as Governor, Jerry Brown mounted a successful campaign for Mayor of Oakland. The Bay Area housing market was hot at the height of the Dot.com boom, and the former governor promised to “redevelop” the downtown area so that it would be “more livable” for all of the outsiders flocking to the region.
Once elected, Brown unveiled his “10K Initiative” to attract 10,000 new high-income residents to Oakland by redeveloping 7 cluster areas in and around Downtown. Of course, such a plan required evicting the current residents of those cluster areas, and Brown diligently set about his work of “Jerryfication.”
Under Prop. 13, property is taxed at a fixed rate, and assessed at the market value at the time of the purchase. The only way for a city to get more tax dollars out of a property is for the property to be sold when its market value is higher. This is the motive for Brown’s agenda of evicting old Oakland residents in favor of newer ones.
Brown then entered into a five-year contract with the federal government that would allow the city to take over control of properties seized by the feds, and used this contract to create a mobile police command center to harass Oaklanders into submission (or run them out of town). This, as the infamous “Riders” were making headlines with a high-profile police corruption scandal.
In 2000, Dennis Chaconas assumed the reigns of an Oakland School District that was a perennial cellar dwellar in terms of performance.
Himself a product of Oakland schools, Chaconas set about the monumental task of improving the district within the tight fiscal confines brought about by Prop. 13.
Chaconas successfully experimented with small schools, and raised teachers’ salaries to be competitive in the region. An influx of credentialed teachers, a dropout rate that was cut in half and rising test scores throughout the district gave credence to his reforms, but his refusal to cut costs in other budget areas were about to catch up with him.
When a new accounting system was installed in 2002, it showed a $27 million debt that had gone unnoticed in the previous system.
To make matters worse, the district also mishandled a $40 million commercial loan when it faced a payroll crisis in 2002.
Oakland District Controller Romi Selfaison, Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan and independent auditing firm KPMG all failed in their responsibility to monitor the district’s finances, but a large chunk of the blame can be attributed to “Jerryfication.”
Mayor Brown’s 10K initiative eroded the district’s enrollment as blue collar families were sent packing in favor of childless professionals.
Since state funding is allotted based on actual enrollment, but district budgets have to be made based on projections of the coming year’s enrollment, Brown’s three-year “Any Cause” eviction campaign came home to roost in the form of a $15 million deficit for Oakland schools.
Seizing on the opportunity, Sen. Perata launched an assault on Chaconas through the media.
The day after Chaconas released a controversial recovery plan for the district that would allow him and the school board to remain in power under the supervision of a state-appointed trustee, Perata told the Oakland Tribune that Chaconas had “done virtually nothing” for Oakland schools.
Although only the County Board of Education had the power to hire and fire superintendents, Perata was demanding the head of a second one in five years.
Despite his fiscal shortcomings, community groups rallied around Chaconas, whom they felt was good for academics and essential programs in the district. After all, his main contribution to the district’s debt was that he spent money in an effort to make the schools better for the students.
Chaconas was simply trying to do the same thing that Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy purports to do, which is put fully credentialed teachers in classrooms. Such a task in an urban district operating under the budget restraints of Prop. 13 is obviously impossible without additional funding.
Yet once again, Perata chose to attack an overwhelmed superintendent rather than flex his considerable political muscle to help Oakland kids.
Perata, who has designs on the Mayor’s office, is Senate Majority Leader, and is considered to be the front-runner to be the next Senate President.
He is basically one of the most powerful people in Sacramento, yet he did nothing to bring more funds into the District.
He co-authored a bill with Wilma Chan to maintain local control of the district, but did nothing to muster the seven votes needed to pass it out of the Senate Education Committee. He only submitted the bill to cover up for his public attack on Chaconas, and then let it die in committee.
In contrast, however, Perata’s bill seeking a $100 million bailout (district officials felt that they only needed about $35 million) from the state passed, despite being considered an “urgency” measure that required two-thirds approval in both the Senate and Assembly.
Before Governor Davis even signed off on the buyout though, Perata was already trying to sell off the District Headquarters property to help his friend at City Hall proceed with his 10K initiative, which targeted the property as one of its redevelopment cluster areas.
Perata claimed that the Lake Merritt Channel property could contribute $30 million to the district’s empty coffers, calling it “a really outstanding piece…for housing it would be really spectacular.”
Meanwhile, even though he had absolutely no say in the matter, Brown began actively maneuvering behind the scenes to try to handpick the overseer himself, and his first choice was a first-year graduate from a right-wing foundation that trains business executives to be superintendents.
Fortunately, it wasn’t his choice.
The state took control of Oakland schools in June, and appointed an overseer to implement their finances-before-academics agenda: Randolph Ward.
Chaconas was fired, the school board has been relegated to an advisory role, over a thousand workers have been pink slipped and several generations of Oakland children will now go through the school system without any parental control or oversight.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who appointed Ward, ordered the overseer to “put himself out of business as soon as possible.”
However, it took Compton 10 years to pay back a $20 million state loan. How can it be possible for Oakland to pay off a $100 million loan in even twice that amount of time?
The damage has been done.
The Prop. 13 “tax revolt” guaranteed that California’s public schools would forever be underfunded, and now that lack of funding has allowed the state to take local control of schools away from Oakland.
Since the politicians weren’t willing to fight for local control of Oakland schools, it is now even more important for the community to participate in the education of their children.
In wealthy communities, parents take up the slack through private schooling, PTA fundraising or non-profit foundations.
Lower income communities don’t have those same resources.
After touring Fremont and Castlemont High Schools in East Oakland, an emotional overseer Ward told a community forum that the schools “couldn’t have been a place where we send our children.”
Three years after an ACLU lawsuit proved that Ward’s Compton schools weren’t either, the resignation in his voice didn’t contain even a hint of optimism.
“I’m going to be honest with you, the state didn’t do a lot for us, we did a lot for ourselves,” said Compton High School science teacher Maxine Kemp.
If there is to be any hope for the future in Oakland, we will need to as well.
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The Commemorator aka The Black Panther Commemorator is published by the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panter Party (CCBPP), a front group of the National Labor Federation (NATLFED).
The CCBPP operates out of the Bay Area Alternative Press (BAAP) on Alcatraz Ave. BAAP is another front for NATFED that presents itself as an autonomous, coordinating organization for a varietty of grass-roots efforts. In fact, all of the organizations that operate out of BAAP are controlled by the NATLFED.
Furthermore, the CCBPP has nothing to do with the Black Panther Party. None of the members are former Panthers and the group uses the Panther name and logo in its attempts to broaden a base of support for NATLFED in Black and low-income communities.
What NATLFED's exact purpose is is unclear. Some view it as a political cult while more conspiracy minded folks view it as a COINTELRPO type operation. Anyone who is an activist should be extremely wary of working with these people or providing them with ANY personal information.
For more info please see:
http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed/
Welcome to the Internet site with the whole story about the political cult the National Labor Federation, aka the Provisional Communist Party, aka the Formation.
Hot news after its NYC headquarters was raided by police in November 1996, NATLFED actually has been active for 27 years in dozens of small fronts across the country. NATLFED fronts, using innocent names like "Western Service Workers Association," "Eastern Farm Workers Association," "Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals," and "Women's Press Collective," lure liberal volunteers from communities and colleges into brainwashed separation from their families, jobs, and friends.
In addition to reading published articles and locating the fronts near you, you are welcome to leave a public or private testimonial on our Feedback page about your NATLFED experience.
Jargon
NATLFED fronts (secretly called entities) have a bewildering variety of names, but they all use the same jargon.
Some words are known only by elite members, who are called cadre; others are familiar to even tabular volunteers, who are not yet drawn into the inner circles. If you aren't sure if you or someone you know is involved in a NATLFED front, listen to the jargon.
Some words are derived from communist vocabulary; others are unique to NATLFED, codified in NATLFED's secret organizational manual, The Essential Organizer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
benefits program: Claimed program or programs for organizing people as members and providing them with medical, dental, legal, food, and clothing.
blister group: Subgroup of an entity. "Think of a blister. It's something that comes out of something else." -- Doorway to a Cult?, City Paper.
blue-sky briefing: Meeting held in an open field to avoid feared electronic eavesdropping.
bucket drive: Begging, sometimes with actual buckets to fill, for food, clothes, and cash.
cadre: A committed, Provisional Communist Party-dedicated member of the cult. "A cadre's life goal and the organization's goal are the same. A cadre's lifestyle is the same as the organization lifestyle." -- The Essential Organizer
canvassing: A term common to all political groups for soliciting support. NATLFED canvassing is unique in its strident demands on front volunteers and cult members to canvass, and for the strident tone of canvassers toward potential donors. NATLFED canvassing can be door-to-door, or it can be street tabling -- if the latter, often in front of banks and supermarkets.
the Cave: see NOC.
CDR: The office supervising committed members, who are called cadre.
Central Committee: Governing body of the Provisional Communist Party.
constitution: Putatively governing document of the cult. The Essential Organizer actually has more day-to-day relevance. The constitution includes a death penalty and says that you may criticize and leave the organization only within your first year, after which either is forbidden.
COSHAAD: West Coast base of national operations for NATLFED. Located in San Francisco. See also NOC.
de-ad: Design and Advertising. Office or person in charge of creating and distributing promotion for an entity.
device: A "superficial tactic . . . used in the case of surprise or phenomena in place of a tactic." -- The Essential Organizer
directing back to the structure: Reporting a fellow member's infraction to a superior.
DOT: The time a NATLFED member has been committed to the inner organization, as distinct from the time the person was simply volunteering.
edu ("ed-yoo"): A lecture.
entity: A front of the national organization. Entities solicit resources for themselves and for the national organization, and recruit volunteers into cult membership. Publicly called a mutual benefit association.
The Essential Organizer: The secret, micromanaging organizational manual of NATLFED.
FIIN: Financial input, a form or system for managing expenses and income. Also a technique to raise money: "A FIIN tactic."
FOP: Friend of the Party. Aware of the Provisional Communist Party and in agreement with its politics, but not ready to join.
fraction: Organizational subdivision. NATLFED is a fraction of the Provisional Communist Party. Another fraction is Military Fraction.
input: Materiel needed and collected by cadre to make an entity or loco function. Example: money, new cadre, cars, documents, etc.
inspiration: "To make data become systemically inductive. Example: a new cadre signs up with the operations unit. The material is inspired to CDR which consults with the cadre and maps out a training program. The data is then inspired to DATA for interior filling. It is then inspired for example to FIIN where the cadre will undergo training in the financial matters of the group." -- The Essential Organizer
labor college: Regular series of lectures, at any location, to one person or to a group, on strata organizing. Sometimes a large gathering with formalities to impress new or potential recruits with NATLFED's sense of revolutionary mission.
line: Political theory or propaganda.
line tape: easily erasable audiocassette copy of national NATLFED speeches, distributed to entities.
loco: Unit of NATLFED activity not limited to an entity. Can also be an area to be targeted for NATLFED activity. For example, an urban rather than rural region is a loco for Western Service Workers Association, not Western Farm Workers Association.
member: NATLFED calls "member" someone who signs up to be part of a mutual benefit organization. Such "members" are little involved: they still have normal lives and are barely indoctrinated with the public goal of the group (to organize without revolution), never mind the secret goal (to organize with revolution). Cult watchers would call "members" people who accept the secret goal of the group and have structured their lives around it. NATLFED calls such people cadre.
MF: see Military Fraction.
Military Fraction: Paramilitary subgroup of inner party; the official soldiers.
mutual benefit organization: Public name for a recruiting entity. MBAs claim to be unionlike groups offering benefits to the needy in exchange for membership of $0.62 a month (said to be the average wage of a farm worker in the early 1970s). MBAs beg donations of cash or supplies from local residents and businesses. The needy receive negligible aid, however, and when they do get aid they are expected to return the favor with exhausting support of the MBA. Most resources are kept by the organization. When aid is given, it is to maintain the illusion of MBAs as charitable to the poor, or to propagandize, as in free mass Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners followed by lectures about strata organizing.
National Labor Federation: the network of local entities. NATLFED is a fraction of the Provisional Communist Party, the central, controlling core of the cult.
NATLFED: See National Labor Federation.
NOC: East Coast base of national operations for NATLFED. Pronounced "knock"; stands for "National Office Central." Located in Brooklyn. Often called the Cave in press reports, but "cave" is a police term for any suspected group's headquarters, and reporters have talked more to police more than to cult members. One room of NOC is indeed called the Cave, though. See also COSHAAD.
the Old: Nickname for late founder Gino Perente.
OPS: Operations manager. Also synonym for "operations" in general.
ordinate: Supervisor of any given, more junior member of the Provisional Communist Party. Fuctions as a mentor and indoctrinator. "Apprenticeship program: You don't use critical analysis. Do it the way you're told, even if you think it's wrong. If it's wrong, go back to the person who issued the orders and say 'I did it the way you said and it came out wrong.' You have one opinion -- that's the one you're told to have by your ordinate." -- internal memo dated 4/15/83
POPS: National headquarters. Could be either COSHAAD or NOC.
position: "An organizational attitude. We regard outside inquiry from a position of distrust. Our position on inside inquiry is to relay usable information. Do not burden with useless information. Never ask to know more than you need to know if you agree with the goals and strategy of the group. It's unfair to burden a comrade with unneeded information and also unprofessional. The standard answer to any question you have not been instructed to answer is 'It's not my department.' Unless you have been instructed to answer . . . no other answer is in order and no other answer is fair. There is a department to answer questions. Shut your fucking mouth unless you are told to impart information to someone as cadre assignment. It is nobody's fucking business, not even yours." -- The Essential Organizer.
pro: Procurement, i.e. obtaining supplies.
pro-phone: Procurement phoning.
process: "The combination of a certain group of tactics brought together [and] designed to care for a certain need. Example: if a building catches fire everyone knows you are supposed to scream . . . jump in the air . . . run in circles . . . piss . . . moan . . . and run out of the door and into the night. Now you may do any of these things by themselves . . . they are independent tactics. But when you do them all together, programmed in that order, that combination of tactics is known as the fire process. . . ." -- The Essential Organizer.
propaganda: "Information released at a time or a manner to sustain, create, or enforce an effect. Example: for us to write in the newsletter nice things about reformist groups is propaganda, because by doing it we hope that the reformists realize we are willing to talk to at least establish polemics . . . even if they are ignorant, self- serving assholes . . . or think we are, whatever the current dialectic of position may be." -- The Essential Organizer.
Provisional Communist Party: The core of the cult. Centrally governs all branches of the greater organization, of which NATLFED is its largest and most active fraction. Only committed, viable party members are officers of an entity, but volunteers of an entity may know nothing of the Party or even of NATLFED. Also known as the Communist Party of the U.S.A, Provisional; Provisional Party of Communists, the Formation, etc.
speg: Speaking engagement.
status: Current level or time frame of importance granted. Can include documents (EXTERIOR, EYES ONLY), people (FULLTIMER, TABULAR), or plans (SUSPENDED, STRATEGY CHANGE)
strata/systemic organization: The putative form of alternative labor organizing by a mutual benefit organization. Claims to focus on groups of people disenfranchised by traditional labor organization.
suspence [sic]: An item in a strategy that requires action at a later date.
systemic: "In reference to work being done within the system or in a manner or pattern insited [sic] by the procedure of the system." -- The Essential Organizer.
tabular: A low degree of committment. A "tab" volunteer is reliable for regular support but has not become a committed NATLFED member. "Tabular is passive practice." -- The Essential Organizer.
tactic: "A method of changing position toward a goal in a strategy. The first tactic in EFWA was to get cadre, the second was to get an office, the third was to run a canvas, the fourth was to hold a meeting of members contacted in the canvass. . . ." -- The Essential Organizer
temporal: Information not in traffic or suspence; concluded business. "Paid bills are temporal." -- The Essential Organizer
trafficking: A system of tight bureaucracy in which members fill forms for every action, even for something as simple as using the downstairs bathroom in the organization's Brooklyn headquarters. "The traffic person sits near the back of the apartment. When you come in, you report to traffic. If you want to leave, you have to get permission from traffic. Everything you do has to go through traffic." -- Service Group Linked to "Cultic" Organization, Williams Record. The Essential Organizer on traffic: "Work that the system must do and the inspiration direction it takes inspirations stops in an input dialectic. Example, new cadre care: OPS file -> cadre file -> cadre file to DATA file -> cadre assignment to suspence directive -> suspence directive to tactical assignment -> assignment to status change. That is the route one [record] card travels as a person joins EFWA, accepts a job, reports the job, is instructed in the job, does the job, and progresses to take on more responsibility on the new knowledge acquired while doing the job."
viable: A high degree of commitment. A viable volunteer comes in on a regular schedule, as opposed to the occasional volunteer, who is called tabular. The more viable a NATLFED member is, the more politically reliable she or he is.
vol: Volunteer.
workers benefit council: Not significantly different from mutual benefit organization.
See also this article from the "East Bay Express"
http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed/articles/shadowpo.html
Shadow Politics
by Paul Rauber
Express (East Bay, CA), 5/18/84
Maybe you missed it, but the Revolution was set to begin on February 18. Not everyone was in the know. Some of those who were include inner circle people in Oakland's California Homemakers Association and Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals. The Communist Party USA (Provisional) Order of Lenin knew about it: that's the clandestine revolutionary party behind the local groups--an organization which a number of former members say is more like a cult than a political party. They'd been talking it up for years: "the 33-month plan for Revolution," pinpointed down to the day. What saved the group the embarrassment of cultists when the flying saucers don't arrive on schedule was the fact that the FBI also knew about the February 18 deadline for the Revolution. It wasn't too surprising, then, when FBI agents, backed by shotgun-toting New York City police, break down the doors at the Brooklyn offices on February 17. An FBI spokesperson said the group had been under investigation for seven months. No one was arrested, but the FBI carted off loads of documents from the offices of the group's lawyer, housed in the same brownstone building. A grand jury has now been appointed to investigate the organization.
You may have met them outside the Safeway at College and Claremont, asking for donations for the California Homemakers Association (CHA). Maybe they came to your door or approached you at work. If you're a medical or legal professional, you may have been approached by a colleague to join either the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals (CCMP) or the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals (CCLP). Many people in the Bay Area are dimly aware of these groups, all of which are members of a national organization called the National Labor Federation, or NATLFED. Although many of the groups claim to represent unorganized workers, they have never sought recognition as a bargaining unit. Not much is known about them, even by their own members.
NATLFED is the public umbrella organization that serves as a cover for a clandestine revolutionary group variously known as the Communist Party USA (Provisional) Order of Lenin, the American Bolshevik Party, the Party of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party. The names are interchangeable. To insiders, it's known simply as "the Formation." Front groups like the CHA or CCMP are known as "entities." NATLFED has some 45 such entities throughout the US, with special concentrations of strength in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, San Diego, and the Bay Area.
When people join an entity, they are not told of the clandestine inner organization until a "political commissar" decides they are ready to be recruited. The hundreds of local shops and individuals who donate money and goods to NATLFED entities are not told of the groups' revolutionary purpose. NATLFED has infiltrated a major church voluntary service organization, effectively seizing control of the group in an effort to funnel idealistic young people in NATLFED entities. Insiders boast of secret ties to Cuba, the Sandinistas, labor unions, and mainline political organizations. The Formation has a military wing, though even its own members have a hard time taking it seriously. NATLFED maintains extensive files not only on its own members but on other leftist activists across the country; some of these files are now in the hands of the FBI.
Behind the organization is a shadowy figure variously known as Jerry Doeden, Eugenio Perente, Vic Perente, Vic Elder, "the Old." Although NATLFED portrays itself as a revolutionary organization when it is not portraying itself as a social service organization, it has many features that are most commonly associated with cults, including rigorous indoctrination procedures and stringent group discipline. "They're very sophisticated," one former member told me. "Don't ever underestimate them--that's the worst mistake a person could make."
The California Homemakers Association has an office in West Oakland, right across the street from the Oakland Main Post Office on Seventh Street. It's a classic shabby storefront, with a painting on the front of a black woman rolling up her sleeves above the CHA slogan, "HERE TO WIN, HERE TO STAY." CHA, like other NATLFED entities, calls itself a "mutual benefits association." Membership in CHA supposedly entitles members to free medical and dental care, emergency food, welfare advocacy, and free legal advice. How much in the way of actual services provided is open to question, as is the ultimate disposition of funds collected by the group. Since the CHA is not registered as a non-profit organization, its records are not available to public scrutiny. The CHA turned down repeated requests for interviews in connection with this article, even after I complied with their request for a formal proposal on Express letterhead. I was later to find that NATLFED has a deliberate policy of evading press inquiries.
Former members acknowledge that the group does provide some services. "They're still doing what they've always done," said one former member rather defensively, "organizing the lowest of the low. It's people on welfare helping other people on welfare." CHA distributes some food, and the CCMP on 14th Avenue just down from Highland Hospital claims to conduct a program of "comprehensive medical benefits." When I called them to try to get details on the benefits available, the woman on the phone was evasive, wanting to know why I was calling and whether I could come to a general meeting. According to people who have left the organization, the benefits programs serve primarily as recruiting arms for the secret political Formation. One four-year veteran we'll call Alan Jeffers (he spoke to me on the condition his real name not be used, fearing for the safety of his family) explained how he used to used the food benefits program to lure volunteers into a deeper commitment to the organization.
"People come in, they say, 'Jeez, there wasn't enough food this week.' I'd say, 'That's right, man, because we didn't have the people to do the phoning this week, to go do the pickups. You want to change it?" The benefits programs, Jeffers says, are designed for failure and liberal guilt. "You see these things that need to be changed, and they put it on you."
Alan Jeffers was a cadre coordinator, overseeing the political and practical training of volunteers. He describes how he subjected volunteers, often young kids fresh out of college, to a psychologically sophisticated dialectical process to increase their commitment and move them deeper into the organization. "For instance, if you get a liberal type, they get you working on a benefits case they know you could never solve. They take a person who has a real problem: an old lady who doesn't have enough food or can't heat her house. They have you attempt to the welfare office and attempt to solve the problem. You get really frustrated." Although Jeffers decided to break with the organization, and harbors a considerable amount of bitterness toward it, he still admires the non-rhetorical indoctrination process. "They talk to you after you've made your own conclusions. Bring up anything you disagree with--that's fine. Your contradictions are exactly what enables them to move with you and take you a step further."
There are many levels of membership in NATLFED, an organization often described as onionlike in from. On the periphery are the thousands of people like those at CHA who at one time or another sign a membership card, which is supposed to entitle them to free benefits. In 1981, NATLFED was claiming a membership of 7,000 in the Bay Area, 16,000 throughout the state and 100,000 nationwide. The vast majority of these people are in the dark about the organization's revolutionary agenda. Nevertheless, according to former CHA member Steve Moore (interviewed along with his wife Chris after they left the group in 1981), the Formation believes that "the membership will support them when the revolution comes, even though they will not be actively participating."
The next level of membership is "tab vols": tabular volunteers, those who come into the office on an irregular basis. Tab vols participate in door-to-door canvassing, bucket drives outside supermarkets to collect money, and, above all, constant phoning. "They call for their needs," says Jeffers. "Whether it's for printing, paper, food, they call them all. I can virtually guarantee you that they've called many times all the businesses in Oakland."
In an interior NATLFED document I obtained, the following definition is given a "tab": "A person who has volunteered to accept a certain status, who is functioning within the role of the status but has not yet been made viable to that role . . . in other words, the cadre is not yet a party of organization within the role. Tabular is passive practice."
The next step up from tab vol is to be a "viable volunteer," a volunteer who comes into the office on a regularly scheduled basis. Ex-members describe the relentless pressure put on them to increase their commitment. Chris Moore says she was on a schedule from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. and not sleeping. "I tried to get out once and they came to talk to me for about four hours. I had told them I'm not coming in anymore so forget it. So they came over to the house at nine o'clock in the evening and started screaming at the window for about five minutes. I was annoyed. Then they came and started knocking on my windows. so rather than start a scene I let them in, and they talked to me for about four hours."
The Moores describe a typical day as CHA volunteers:
Chris: "You come in at 9:00 a.m., you get a daily battle plan, they sit everybody down and they tell them what they're going to do. Maybe in the morning you'd do 'pro-phone'--procurement phoning--where you'd try to get car parts or any kind of resources. In the afternoon you'd either do a canvass or a bucket drive. Then you'd come back, eat, maybe do reading. They had this reading list. Then you would phone. Then you had all these forms to fill out."
Steve: "Because all the information you would gather had to be processed. What we're telling you here is not supposed to be told to anyone else in any organization; it's a massive breach of security, and we're supposed to be killed for saying it."
Chris: "By their military cadre."
Another induction arm of the Formation is the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, whose office is at 2205 14th Avenue in Oakland. Jeff Whitnack was volunteer coordinator for the CCMP in early 1981. An unreconstructed rowdy and former garbageman with a back problem, Whitnack joined the group as he was burning out on a new career as a medical technician. He lives in the Oakland flats with a number of friends and a very very large Doberman, appropriately called Rodan.
During his short career with NATLFED, Whitnack worked eighteen-hour days for both CHA and CCMP. For a variety of reasons he left the organization. Since that time he has launched a one-man crusade to expose the group, which he sees as a potentially dangerous cult--collecting documents, consulting with other former members, running up enormous phone bills. His investigation of the Formation prompted them to send out a special "phone answering protocol" entitled "ABACUS LINE PROJECTION VIZ REQUESTS FOR INTERVIEWS FROM WHITNACK AND OTHER ALLEGED REPORTERS." The memo explains some of the difficulty I encountered in trying to get a response from CHA: "The following line applies to Whitnack and any other would-be reporters with an interest in facets of the scope of the organization beyond its local entity, seeking interviews: 'No problem, we'll certainly deal with the making of arrangements for an interview. If an interview is desired, it's arranged for in the standard manner that professional people utilize in the business of giving or doing interviews . . . Place a call on our national message service [give them the number if they agree to use this process]. You'll receive a letter in return, requesting your credentials on your publication's letterhead, stating your interest, type of interview requested, etc.'" Phone volunteers are instructed not to dally on the phone with inquisitive reporters: "There's nothing to gain through the phone calls except to deliver the line. The value of Operation Abacus is in its offense-- time spent on the phone with Whitnack or punks of his ilk is a waste of Formation time. DO NOT BE DETERRED INTO ANY OTHER TOPICS OF CONVERSATION, PERIOD."
Whitnack describes his job with CCMP as "passing the big fish on up the ladder; finding the big fish and the little fish, separating them, but keeping the little fish--people we weren't really going to recruit--keeping them coming in, to keep the appearance up of a community organization." The purpose of the CCMP, he says, was to attract a certain social group: socially concerned medical students, [text missing] technicians. "They'd use that to say, 'Hey, this doesn't work. If we had a hundred of these CCMP's across the country, or even in this county, we couldn't solve the health care problems. What's it going to take?' Well obviously, what's it going to take? A revolution."
Once the volunteer has been maneuvered into suggesting revolution as the only logical solution, it's time for the party pitch. Whitnack was originally recruited through what the Formation calls an "additional arena." He was working with a group collecting medical supplies to send to Nicaragua when he was approached by a doctor in the group, who took him aside and painted a revisionist picture of the Sandinista revolution in which the Sandinistas were described as working through mutual benefit associations very like CHA and CCMP. "Would you have joined the Sandinistas if you had lived in Nicaragua then?" the doctor reportedly asked. "I maintain there's such a group in this country." Whitnack was given the CHA phone number, told to call and say he was "a friend of Carlos." In retrospect, Whitnack sees this as what he calls a "locking mechanism": "If people are scared or think it's hokey, they don't call. It's a one-way screening filter." But, early in 1981, Whitnack did call, and after a tour of the CHA and CCMP offices joined the CCMP, soon quitting respiratory therapy school to work for them full time.
Prospective members are often impressed by the apparent size, formality and organizational sophistication of the secret group. Volunteers already identified as receptive to the party line are taken to a large meeting. This meeting-- called the National Labor College--may be a gathering of up to three hundred people at a local church or university. The rooms are guarded by beefy guys in paramilitary uniforms. Locally, the National Labor College meets every two weeks, with cadre coming from as far away as Oregon and San Diego. Classes are conducted by Western Regional Political Commissar, Mark Levine, a former sociology professor from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Chris Moore recalls that at one class the assembly was told, "You don't have to worry about the Nazis; it's the people that are here that you've got to worry about." And the inference was it's the rest of the left . . . Everybody besides them on the left is referred to as a social democrat, and a social democrat is a fascist. All these people are social fascists. Everybody on the left except for them."
New recruits are given a colorful (and highly confidential) organizational history of the Formation. The party draws a pedigree for itself directly back to Lenin, by way of a breakaway faction from the Communist Party USA called the Progressive Labor Party. They claim a formal link with the government of Cuba, although the Cubans vigorously deny it. Such simple contradictions are easy for the faithful to explain away. "Of course they would [deny it]," says Alan Jeffers, whose departure from the group is recent enough to still color his use of pronouns. "Of course they would: we're a provisional party. They agree that our analysis is the most sophisticated theoretically in the world today. When we take power then they'll deal with it. I don't know--there's no way for me to tell what's true and what isn't."
The official history claims that after visiting Cuba in the early '60s, eighteen Formation members went on to Guatemala and participated in a disastrous Che Guevara style "foco" guerrilla campaign. Back in the U.S., they claim to have joined the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. During the San Francisco State Strike (which they take credit for), another leftist group--most versions say it was the Progressive Labor Party--picketed one of their meetings. In response, the story goes, Formation members went out and shot seven of the picketers, "to impress them with the seriousness of the situation," as Chris Moore was told in a class. In her version of the story, however, it was the Revolutionary Communist Party that was shot up.
From there, the future NATLFED cadre claimed to have formed the backbone of the Venceremos organization, during which time they claimed to have developed a plan to free a bunch of prisoners from all over the state, send them to training camps in the country, and then launch the Revolution. Formation leaders like to talk about the military training in the good old Venceremos days; when you were done, they claim, you'd go out with your instructor and kill an enemy of the people.
The Venceremos line struck Whitnack as odd at the time, as he had actually known some people in that group, and the description given by the Formation didn't jive with his personal knowledge. Besides, he says, "There was no way that all the people in Venceremos went out and killed an enemy of the people; if they had, the Readers Digest would still to this day be writing articles about it."
What is actually known about the organization is not so grandiose, but hardly less colorful. The party's leader is known to be one Jerri Doeden, who is now going by the name Eugenio--or Gino--Perente, or E. Perente Ramos. (Many top Formation people adopt Hispanic names: Diane Runkle, one of Perente's inner circle, is now Diane Ramirez.) According to Whitnack's research, Perente was born Gerald William Doeden in 1937. His place of birth is open to question, but most accounts agree that he is the son of an old Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the late '50s, Doeden turned up in the Northern California town of Marysville, where he became something of a town character, signing checks "Jesus H. Christ" and quoting large portions of Shakespeare in all-night Marysville diners. It was also at this time that his notoriously bad driving led to a serious accident that severely disabled his legs. Whitnack quotes a close friend of Doeden from the late '60s, who described him as an "extraordinarily sensitive, sad crippled genius, with an enormous amount of anger."
By the early '70s, Doeden had opened the Little Red Bookstore on Mission Street in San Francisco and founded the "National Liberation Front Continental Armed Services Division" of the group LARGO, the "Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organizations." In early March 1971, LARGO sent out mimeographed communiques warning that a "fully trained, equipped and manned army of revolution will be operating in Northern California" beginning on March 15. It was, in effect, a declaration of war. But nobody took this posturing very seriously. A U.S. Justice Department official dismissed Doeden in a March 10, 1971 San Francisco Examiner article as "small potatoes." "While he boasts of having hundreds of automatic weapons and talks of his legions now undergoing guerrilla training in the hills," said the unnamed official, "the fact is he has scarcely half a dozen dedicated followers, and most of them can be classified as kooks."
Doeden faded away, but turned up the next year on Long Island, where he organized the Long Island Farm Workers Association, which has since become the Eastern Farm Workers Association (EFWA). Doeden/Perente claims to have run the United Farm Workers boycott office in New York City, but the UFW disavows any connection with him. One of the latest NATLFED "entities" is the Texas Farm Workers Union, for whom Vicente E. M. Perente-Ramos is listed as business agent.
The true identity of Gino Perente is a closely guarded Formation secret. An interior memo dated December 26, 1981, gives a rambling repudiation of the "slander" printed in 1977 by Public Eye, an investigative journal based in Chicago that focuses on the cults of both left and right. In the seven-page Formation memo, the taboo name of Jerri Doeden is never mentioned, but there are some rare quotes from Perente himself (NATLFED tries to avoid putting things down on paper; Perente's speeches are distributed on easily erasable cassettes called "line tapes." "[text missing] don't blame it on the cops. They do it for a living. I started this in '58--'53 actually, I was born young. Name-calling doesn't do it. Some guy calls him pig, will call you CIA, and some poor bastard will get whacked for it. This is work, dammit."
Perente has now built a nationwide network of "entities," most of them self-described "mutual benefits organizations" like CHA or CCMP. The connection of these entities to the revolutionary Formation is one of Perente's most closely guarded secrets. Ironically, the fullest record of the organization's breadth was betrayed by NATLFED itself, during the course of its attempted takeover of the National Council of Churches-sponsored Commission on Voluntary Service and Action (CVSA).
To understand the CVSA operation, it is important to remember the contention that the raison d'etre of NATLFED entities is the recruitment of volunteers into the revolutionary party. In this light, CVSA was a fat chicken sitting on the fence: a small, poorly organized, volunteer-run organization whose major asset was its yearly directory of opportunities for full-time volunteer service, Invest Yourself. Distributed nationwide, Invest Yourself has provided free listings of church and non-profit organizations for 37 years. A typical user might be a student fresh out of college looking for a socially productive way to spend the summer.
In 1975, a young woman called Diane Ramirez joined CVSA's board, representing the Eastern Farm Workers Association. Due to her hard work and apparent dedication, she soon rose to be co-chair. CVSA was suffering serious financial difficulties at the time, so it was only too glad when Ramirez offered the free services of a group called the National Foundation for Alternative Resources to produce Invest Yourself. NFAR took over the production of the book, and the 1982 edition included, along with groups lie the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Oxfam America, a total of 41 organizations that have since been identified as NATLFED entities, fronts for Perente's Communist Party USA Provisional Wing. The publication reveals the secret family jewels, complete with names, addresses, and self-descriptions.
Among the groups listed in Invest Yourself were the California Homemakers Association, Western Service Workers Association in San Diego, Santa Cruz, Anaheim, Sacramento, Redding, and Oakland. Other local NATLFED entities in the 1982 edition include the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals in Sacramento; the CCMP in Oakland, Sacramento, and Marysville; the National Equal Justice Association in San Diego; the Shasta County Food Committee and Community Service Center; and the Workers Community Service Center in [text missing].
CVSA soon started getting complaints from volunteers who had had unpleasant experiences with the NATLFED entities. According to an article in the Christian Century by associate editor Jean Caffey Lyles, the CVSA treasurer was unable to get satisfactory explanations for several large withdrawals from the Invest Yourself checking account. CVSA also became a conduit for tax deductible donations to the Eastern Farm Workers Association. Although board members had their doubts about the direction their organization was taking, their suspicions did not solidify until CVSA secretary Wilbur Patterson was contacted by Jeff Whitnack, who supplied him with information on NATLFED's aims and techniques. All of a sudden the pieces fit into place, and Patterson and his colleagues
[page of text missing]
ing to swallow the party line: volunteers are not told the whole story until their credulity has been proven. Take the business about political commissars, for instance. "'Political commissar'! The word itself sounds like something out of Boris and Natasha on the Bullwinkle show," explodes Whitnack. "If they told you straight out, 'We have a political commissar,' you'd bust up. I would have. But once you get in, and there's three hundred people there, all this talk and formality, it makes sense."
The main danger posed by groups like NATLFED, Coates believes, "is the loss of individual freedom, the inability to test reality. You really become a pawn in the leader's hands . . . Once you've been in the group for awhile, the individual personality almost evaporates. The individual relies on the group for all his positions." In NATLFED entities, the leadership takes charge of the most personal details, including sexual problems, which Chris Moore says were supposed to be taken to the political commissar.
NATLFED does not fit the common perception of a cult. Many think of cults as having an exclusively religious orientation, which NATLFED lacks. On the other hand, there are precedents for cult involvement in politics: the work by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church with right-wing refugee organizations is a prime example. Another disconcerting aspect of the NATLFED organization is that, while it provides a place for the aimless and confused, many of its members are professional people. Doctors donate their services, and the group can also count on free legal help from its member lawyers.
A local psychologist with considerable expertise in dealing with cults (he asked not to be named) says that it is a common misunderstanding that you have to be either muddleheaded or gullible to join a cult. "Cult recruitment is very sophisticated," he told me. "Virtually anyone, under the right circumstances, can join a cult." The recruitment process used by the psychologically astute cult assesses the vulnerabilities and strengths of the potential recruit, utilizes the vulnerabilities and turns the strengths to its own advantage. "If you have a strong desire to serve the needy," he says, "if you have particularly powerful criticism of the economic system of this country and are concerned about how the poor are exploited, that strength of character can also become your weakness."
Alan Jeffers worked as a recruiter for the CCMP. He fixed me with a firm stare across the coffee table. "I've recruited doctors myself, talking to them just like this, eye to eye." Jeffers says he would work on the doctor's sense of medical ethics. "I'd say, 'It must be frustrating for you, working in a county hospital, seeing people drop like flies as they exit the door." Jeffers says that the Bay Area's public hospitals are fertile grounds for recruiting doctors, especially when it's the doctors themselves who do the recruiting.
Our anonymous psychologist agrees that NATLFED has all the marks of a cult. "It has a charismatic leader, a unique and unquestioned body of teaching. It has a social process that exhausts people, weakens their ability to evaluate information negative to the group, and promotes a kind of emotional and mental polarization that images the critical faculties." The danger, he says, is to both the individual and society "assaulted by this kind of fascist, unthinking knee-jerk submission to an unaccountable charismatic authority."
Alan Jeffers quit the group when he decided Gino Perente was a nut, and realized the Formation was not able to carry out its revolutionary program. Now, he says, he wants "to cut them off at the root, to go out into the community and say, 'Look, they're using this food to teach a political lesson to people. you may or may not disagree: that's up to you, but this is what it really is. I just thought you should know because you're donating money, goods, and services to them.'" Jeffers wants to make it clear that his political ideas have not shifted to the right. "If they can't get the support of the community, the organic support, there's no way this organization is going to survive, no way."
After Whitnack left the group, the Oakland political commissar reportedly told him, "Whatever you have, you're going to lose it." Although he says they've never lifted a finger at anybody, he worries about the stored-up energy. "I know there's hundreds of people who put their whole thing in there. They have weapons, they have a military faction, there is a mentality there . . . believing that they are the revolution. They aren't just going to go away."
If the FBI decides to treat NATLFED as a legitimate political organization, on can easily imagine how some of its boasts could be turned against the whole of the American left: all Ronald Reagan needs is the discovery of a pervasive and well-connected internal enemy. The FBI break-in into their lawyer's office (housed in the same building as "POPS") in New York raises some obvious constitutional questions, and the instinct on the left is to close ranks in support of the group under attack. Attorney William Kunstler described the FBI action as being "beyond the bounds of all morality." He says that "taking the files, which are supposed to be subject to the attorney/client privilege, and then removing them to some unspecified location where agents can pore over these files violates every concept of the Constitution that I know. I think this claim of a new terroristic organization is poppycock."
If, on the other hand, NATLFED is labeled as a cult, what does that mean to our perception of other groups of super-dedicated revolutionaries like the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party. For Whitnack, the difference is a question of deception. "Take the Communist Party USA for example," he says. "Gus Hall, Angela Davis, their basic motivation for why they're in the group are the same as a lot of people at the lower echelons. While some of the people may work eighteen hours a day, they don't tend to quit their jobs. They have their own life. You can talk to these people outside of their party. Whereas in the National Labor Federation, Gino's cult, the leadership is inherently disrespectful of the membership. The reason why the bulk of the people thing they're in the group has nothing to do with what the leadership is planning." The public is also deceived about the nature of the group. "Their clandestinity is not to hide them from the police," says Whitnack. "It's to hide them from the public."
NATLFED exists and thrives to the extent it does partly because of a vacuum on the left. What other organization offers medical and legal professionals an opportunity to exercise their better social instincts? NATLFED builds on the alienation that comes from discussing class politics in chic Berkeley cafes. Whitnack recalls being impressed by the big National Labor College meetings he attended in Oakland: "I saw these older black women from West Oakland who'd just gotten out from church, and these white kids for Oregon, these firefighter types who looked like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I remember thinking, 'This is what a revolution here would look like.'" Like Alan Jeffers, Whitnack says leaving NATLFED as not changed his political perspective. He is still looking forward to the Revolution. "When I left the group, I said, 'Look, this isn't an honor society. This ruling class is out there, you hate them, they fuck with your life, you fuck with them. It's a long-term thing: don't get frustrated. Sure the left is too bourgeois, the working class has been bought off, but that will undo itself . . . IT'S NO REASON TO GO JOIN A CULT."
The CCBPP operates out of the Bay Area Alternative Press (BAAP) on Alcatraz Ave. BAAP is another front for NATFED that presents itself as an autonomous, coordinating organization for a varietty of grass-roots efforts. In fact, all of the organizations that operate out of BAAP are controlled by the NATLFED.
Furthermore, the CCBPP has nothing to do with the Black Panther Party. None of the members are former Panthers and the group uses the Panther name and logo in its attempts to broaden a base of support for NATLFED in Black and low-income communities.
What NATLFED's exact purpose is is unclear. Some view it as a political cult while more conspiracy minded folks view it as a COINTELRPO type operation. Anyone who is an activist should be extremely wary of working with these people or providing them with ANY personal information.
For more info please see:
http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed/
Welcome to the Internet site with the whole story about the political cult the National Labor Federation, aka the Provisional Communist Party, aka the Formation.
Hot news after its NYC headquarters was raided by police in November 1996, NATLFED actually has been active for 27 years in dozens of small fronts across the country. NATLFED fronts, using innocent names like "Western Service Workers Association," "Eastern Farm Workers Association," "Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals," and "Women's Press Collective," lure liberal volunteers from communities and colleges into brainwashed separation from their families, jobs, and friends.
In addition to reading published articles and locating the fronts near you, you are welcome to leave a public or private testimonial on our Feedback page about your NATLFED experience.
Jargon
NATLFED fronts (secretly called entities) have a bewildering variety of names, but they all use the same jargon.
Some words are known only by elite members, who are called cadre; others are familiar to even tabular volunteers, who are not yet drawn into the inner circles. If you aren't sure if you or someone you know is involved in a NATLFED front, listen to the jargon.
Some words are derived from communist vocabulary; others are unique to NATLFED, codified in NATLFED's secret organizational manual, The Essential Organizer.
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benefits program: Claimed program or programs for organizing people as members and providing them with medical, dental, legal, food, and clothing.
blister group: Subgroup of an entity. "Think of a blister. It's something that comes out of something else." -- Doorway to a Cult?, City Paper.
blue-sky briefing: Meeting held in an open field to avoid feared electronic eavesdropping.
bucket drive: Begging, sometimes with actual buckets to fill, for food, clothes, and cash.
cadre: A committed, Provisional Communist Party-dedicated member of the cult. "A cadre's life goal and the organization's goal are the same. A cadre's lifestyle is the same as the organization lifestyle." -- The Essential Organizer
canvassing: A term common to all political groups for soliciting support. NATLFED canvassing is unique in its strident demands on front volunteers and cult members to canvass, and for the strident tone of canvassers toward potential donors. NATLFED canvassing can be door-to-door, or it can be street tabling -- if the latter, often in front of banks and supermarkets.
the Cave: see NOC.
CDR: The office supervising committed members, who are called cadre.
Central Committee: Governing body of the Provisional Communist Party.
constitution: Putatively governing document of the cult. The Essential Organizer actually has more day-to-day relevance. The constitution includes a death penalty and says that you may criticize and leave the organization only within your first year, after which either is forbidden.
COSHAAD: West Coast base of national operations for NATLFED. Located in San Francisco. See also NOC.
de-ad: Design and Advertising. Office or person in charge of creating and distributing promotion for an entity.
device: A "superficial tactic . . . used in the case of surprise or phenomena in place of a tactic." -- The Essential Organizer
directing back to the structure: Reporting a fellow member's infraction to a superior.
DOT: The time a NATLFED member has been committed to the inner organization, as distinct from the time the person was simply volunteering.
edu ("ed-yoo"): A lecture.
entity: A front of the national organization. Entities solicit resources for themselves and for the national organization, and recruit volunteers into cult membership. Publicly called a mutual benefit association.
The Essential Organizer: The secret, micromanaging organizational manual of NATLFED.
FIIN: Financial input, a form or system for managing expenses and income. Also a technique to raise money: "A FIIN tactic."
FOP: Friend of the Party. Aware of the Provisional Communist Party and in agreement with its politics, but not ready to join.
fraction: Organizational subdivision. NATLFED is a fraction of the Provisional Communist Party. Another fraction is Military Fraction.
input: Materiel needed and collected by cadre to make an entity or loco function. Example: money, new cadre, cars, documents, etc.
inspiration: "To make data become systemically inductive. Example: a new cadre signs up with the operations unit. The material is inspired to CDR which consults with the cadre and maps out a training program. The data is then inspired to DATA for interior filling. It is then inspired for example to FIIN where the cadre will undergo training in the financial matters of the group." -- The Essential Organizer
labor college: Regular series of lectures, at any location, to one person or to a group, on strata organizing. Sometimes a large gathering with formalities to impress new or potential recruits with NATLFED's sense of revolutionary mission.
line: Political theory or propaganda.
line tape: easily erasable audiocassette copy of national NATLFED speeches, distributed to entities.
loco: Unit of NATLFED activity not limited to an entity. Can also be an area to be targeted for NATLFED activity. For example, an urban rather than rural region is a loco for Western Service Workers Association, not Western Farm Workers Association.
member: NATLFED calls "member" someone who signs up to be part of a mutual benefit organization. Such "members" are little involved: they still have normal lives and are barely indoctrinated with the public goal of the group (to organize without revolution), never mind the secret goal (to organize with revolution). Cult watchers would call "members" people who accept the secret goal of the group and have structured their lives around it. NATLFED calls such people cadre.
MF: see Military Fraction.
Military Fraction: Paramilitary subgroup of inner party; the official soldiers.
mutual benefit organization: Public name for a recruiting entity. MBAs claim to be unionlike groups offering benefits to the needy in exchange for membership of $0.62 a month (said to be the average wage of a farm worker in the early 1970s). MBAs beg donations of cash or supplies from local residents and businesses. The needy receive negligible aid, however, and when they do get aid they are expected to return the favor with exhausting support of the MBA. Most resources are kept by the organization. When aid is given, it is to maintain the illusion of MBAs as charitable to the poor, or to propagandize, as in free mass Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners followed by lectures about strata organizing.
National Labor Federation: the network of local entities. NATLFED is a fraction of the Provisional Communist Party, the central, controlling core of the cult.
NATLFED: See National Labor Federation.
NOC: East Coast base of national operations for NATLFED. Pronounced "knock"; stands for "National Office Central." Located in Brooklyn. Often called the Cave in press reports, but "cave" is a police term for any suspected group's headquarters, and reporters have talked more to police more than to cult members. One room of NOC is indeed called the Cave, though. See also COSHAAD.
the Old: Nickname for late founder Gino Perente.
OPS: Operations manager. Also synonym for "operations" in general.
ordinate: Supervisor of any given, more junior member of the Provisional Communist Party. Fuctions as a mentor and indoctrinator. "Apprenticeship program: You don't use critical analysis. Do it the way you're told, even if you think it's wrong. If it's wrong, go back to the person who issued the orders and say 'I did it the way you said and it came out wrong.' You have one opinion -- that's the one you're told to have by your ordinate." -- internal memo dated 4/15/83
POPS: National headquarters. Could be either COSHAAD or NOC.
position: "An organizational attitude. We regard outside inquiry from a position of distrust. Our position on inside inquiry is to relay usable information. Do not burden with useless information. Never ask to know more than you need to know if you agree with the goals and strategy of the group. It's unfair to burden a comrade with unneeded information and also unprofessional. The standard answer to any question you have not been instructed to answer is 'It's not my department.' Unless you have been instructed to answer . . . no other answer is in order and no other answer is fair. There is a department to answer questions. Shut your fucking mouth unless you are told to impart information to someone as cadre assignment. It is nobody's fucking business, not even yours." -- The Essential Organizer.
pro: Procurement, i.e. obtaining supplies.
pro-phone: Procurement phoning.
process: "The combination of a certain group of tactics brought together [and] designed to care for a certain need. Example: if a building catches fire everyone knows you are supposed to scream . . . jump in the air . . . run in circles . . . piss . . . moan . . . and run out of the door and into the night. Now you may do any of these things by themselves . . . they are independent tactics. But when you do them all together, programmed in that order, that combination of tactics is known as the fire process. . . ." -- The Essential Organizer.
propaganda: "Information released at a time or a manner to sustain, create, or enforce an effect. Example: for us to write in the newsletter nice things about reformist groups is propaganda, because by doing it we hope that the reformists realize we are willing to talk to at least establish polemics . . . even if they are ignorant, self- serving assholes . . . or think we are, whatever the current dialectic of position may be." -- The Essential Organizer.
Provisional Communist Party: The core of the cult. Centrally governs all branches of the greater organization, of which NATLFED is its largest and most active fraction. Only committed, viable party members are officers of an entity, but volunteers of an entity may know nothing of the Party or even of NATLFED. Also known as the Communist Party of the U.S.A, Provisional; Provisional Party of Communists, the Formation, etc.
speg: Speaking engagement.
status: Current level or time frame of importance granted. Can include documents (EXTERIOR, EYES ONLY), people (FULLTIMER, TABULAR), or plans (SUSPENDED, STRATEGY CHANGE)
strata/systemic organization: The putative form of alternative labor organizing by a mutual benefit organization. Claims to focus on groups of people disenfranchised by traditional labor organization.
suspence [sic]: An item in a strategy that requires action at a later date.
systemic: "In reference to work being done within the system or in a manner or pattern insited [sic] by the procedure of the system." -- The Essential Organizer.
tabular: A low degree of committment. A "tab" volunteer is reliable for regular support but has not become a committed NATLFED member. "Tabular is passive practice." -- The Essential Organizer.
tactic: "A method of changing position toward a goal in a strategy. The first tactic in EFWA was to get cadre, the second was to get an office, the third was to run a canvas, the fourth was to hold a meeting of members contacted in the canvass. . . ." -- The Essential Organizer
temporal: Information not in traffic or suspence; concluded business. "Paid bills are temporal." -- The Essential Organizer
trafficking: A system of tight bureaucracy in which members fill forms for every action, even for something as simple as using the downstairs bathroom in the organization's Brooklyn headquarters. "The traffic person sits near the back of the apartment. When you come in, you report to traffic. If you want to leave, you have to get permission from traffic. Everything you do has to go through traffic." -- Service Group Linked to "Cultic" Organization, Williams Record. The Essential Organizer on traffic: "Work that the system must do and the inspiration direction it takes inspirations stops in an input dialectic. Example, new cadre care: OPS file -> cadre file -> cadre file to DATA file -> cadre assignment to suspence directive -> suspence directive to tactical assignment -> assignment to status change. That is the route one [record] card travels as a person joins EFWA, accepts a job, reports the job, is instructed in the job, does the job, and progresses to take on more responsibility on the new knowledge acquired while doing the job."
viable: A high degree of commitment. A viable volunteer comes in on a regular schedule, as opposed to the occasional volunteer, who is called tabular. The more viable a NATLFED member is, the more politically reliable she or he is.
vol: Volunteer.
workers benefit council: Not significantly different from mutual benefit organization.
See also this article from the "East Bay Express"
http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed/articles/shadowpo.html
Shadow Politics
by Paul Rauber
Express (East Bay, CA), 5/18/84
Maybe you missed it, but the Revolution was set to begin on February 18. Not everyone was in the know. Some of those who were include inner circle people in Oakland's California Homemakers Association and Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals. The Communist Party USA (Provisional) Order of Lenin knew about it: that's the clandestine revolutionary party behind the local groups--an organization which a number of former members say is more like a cult than a political party. They'd been talking it up for years: "the 33-month plan for Revolution," pinpointed down to the day. What saved the group the embarrassment of cultists when the flying saucers don't arrive on schedule was the fact that the FBI also knew about the February 18 deadline for the Revolution. It wasn't too surprising, then, when FBI agents, backed by shotgun-toting New York City police, break down the doors at the Brooklyn offices on February 17. An FBI spokesperson said the group had been under investigation for seven months. No one was arrested, but the FBI carted off loads of documents from the offices of the group's lawyer, housed in the same brownstone building. A grand jury has now been appointed to investigate the organization.
You may have met them outside the Safeway at College and Claremont, asking for donations for the California Homemakers Association (CHA). Maybe they came to your door or approached you at work. If you're a medical or legal professional, you may have been approached by a colleague to join either the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals (CCMP) or the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals (CCLP). Many people in the Bay Area are dimly aware of these groups, all of which are members of a national organization called the National Labor Federation, or NATLFED. Although many of the groups claim to represent unorganized workers, they have never sought recognition as a bargaining unit. Not much is known about them, even by their own members.
NATLFED is the public umbrella organization that serves as a cover for a clandestine revolutionary group variously known as the Communist Party USA (Provisional) Order of Lenin, the American Bolshevik Party, the Party of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party. The names are interchangeable. To insiders, it's known simply as "the Formation." Front groups like the CHA or CCMP are known as "entities." NATLFED has some 45 such entities throughout the US, with special concentrations of strength in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, San Diego, and the Bay Area.
When people join an entity, they are not told of the clandestine inner organization until a "political commissar" decides they are ready to be recruited. The hundreds of local shops and individuals who donate money and goods to NATLFED entities are not told of the groups' revolutionary purpose. NATLFED has infiltrated a major church voluntary service organization, effectively seizing control of the group in an effort to funnel idealistic young people in NATLFED entities. Insiders boast of secret ties to Cuba, the Sandinistas, labor unions, and mainline political organizations. The Formation has a military wing, though even its own members have a hard time taking it seriously. NATLFED maintains extensive files not only on its own members but on other leftist activists across the country; some of these files are now in the hands of the FBI.
Behind the organization is a shadowy figure variously known as Jerry Doeden, Eugenio Perente, Vic Perente, Vic Elder, "the Old." Although NATLFED portrays itself as a revolutionary organization when it is not portraying itself as a social service organization, it has many features that are most commonly associated with cults, including rigorous indoctrination procedures and stringent group discipline. "They're very sophisticated," one former member told me. "Don't ever underestimate them--that's the worst mistake a person could make."
The California Homemakers Association has an office in West Oakland, right across the street from the Oakland Main Post Office on Seventh Street. It's a classic shabby storefront, with a painting on the front of a black woman rolling up her sleeves above the CHA slogan, "HERE TO WIN, HERE TO STAY." CHA, like other NATLFED entities, calls itself a "mutual benefits association." Membership in CHA supposedly entitles members to free medical and dental care, emergency food, welfare advocacy, and free legal advice. How much in the way of actual services provided is open to question, as is the ultimate disposition of funds collected by the group. Since the CHA is not registered as a non-profit organization, its records are not available to public scrutiny. The CHA turned down repeated requests for interviews in connection with this article, even after I complied with their request for a formal proposal on Express letterhead. I was later to find that NATLFED has a deliberate policy of evading press inquiries.
Former members acknowledge that the group does provide some services. "They're still doing what they've always done," said one former member rather defensively, "organizing the lowest of the low. It's people on welfare helping other people on welfare." CHA distributes some food, and the CCMP on 14th Avenue just down from Highland Hospital claims to conduct a program of "comprehensive medical benefits." When I called them to try to get details on the benefits available, the woman on the phone was evasive, wanting to know why I was calling and whether I could come to a general meeting. According to people who have left the organization, the benefits programs serve primarily as recruiting arms for the secret political Formation. One four-year veteran we'll call Alan Jeffers (he spoke to me on the condition his real name not be used, fearing for the safety of his family) explained how he used to used the food benefits program to lure volunteers into a deeper commitment to the organization.
"People come in, they say, 'Jeez, there wasn't enough food this week.' I'd say, 'That's right, man, because we didn't have the people to do the phoning this week, to go do the pickups. You want to change it?" The benefits programs, Jeffers says, are designed for failure and liberal guilt. "You see these things that need to be changed, and they put it on you."
Alan Jeffers was a cadre coordinator, overseeing the political and practical training of volunteers. He describes how he subjected volunteers, often young kids fresh out of college, to a psychologically sophisticated dialectical process to increase their commitment and move them deeper into the organization. "For instance, if you get a liberal type, they get you working on a benefits case they know you could never solve. They take a person who has a real problem: an old lady who doesn't have enough food or can't heat her house. They have you attempt to the welfare office and attempt to solve the problem. You get really frustrated." Although Jeffers decided to break with the organization, and harbors a considerable amount of bitterness toward it, he still admires the non-rhetorical indoctrination process. "They talk to you after you've made your own conclusions. Bring up anything you disagree with--that's fine. Your contradictions are exactly what enables them to move with you and take you a step further."
There are many levels of membership in NATLFED, an organization often described as onionlike in from. On the periphery are the thousands of people like those at CHA who at one time or another sign a membership card, which is supposed to entitle them to free benefits. In 1981, NATLFED was claiming a membership of 7,000 in the Bay Area, 16,000 throughout the state and 100,000 nationwide. The vast majority of these people are in the dark about the organization's revolutionary agenda. Nevertheless, according to former CHA member Steve Moore (interviewed along with his wife Chris after they left the group in 1981), the Formation believes that "the membership will support them when the revolution comes, even though they will not be actively participating."
The next level of membership is "tab vols": tabular volunteers, those who come into the office on an irregular basis. Tab vols participate in door-to-door canvassing, bucket drives outside supermarkets to collect money, and, above all, constant phoning. "They call for their needs," says Jeffers. "Whether it's for printing, paper, food, they call them all. I can virtually guarantee you that they've called many times all the businesses in Oakland."
In an interior NATLFED document I obtained, the following definition is given a "tab": "A person who has volunteered to accept a certain status, who is functioning within the role of the status but has not yet been made viable to that role . . . in other words, the cadre is not yet a party of organization within the role. Tabular is passive practice."
The next step up from tab vol is to be a "viable volunteer," a volunteer who comes into the office on a regularly scheduled basis. Ex-members describe the relentless pressure put on them to increase their commitment. Chris Moore says she was on a schedule from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. and not sleeping. "I tried to get out once and they came to talk to me for about four hours. I had told them I'm not coming in anymore so forget it. So they came over to the house at nine o'clock in the evening and started screaming at the window for about five minutes. I was annoyed. Then they came and started knocking on my windows. so rather than start a scene I let them in, and they talked to me for about four hours."
The Moores describe a typical day as CHA volunteers:
Chris: "You come in at 9:00 a.m., you get a daily battle plan, they sit everybody down and they tell them what they're going to do. Maybe in the morning you'd do 'pro-phone'--procurement phoning--where you'd try to get car parts or any kind of resources. In the afternoon you'd either do a canvass or a bucket drive. Then you'd come back, eat, maybe do reading. They had this reading list. Then you would phone. Then you had all these forms to fill out."
Steve: "Because all the information you would gather had to be processed. What we're telling you here is not supposed to be told to anyone else in any organization; it's a massive breach of security, and we're supposed to be killed for saying it."
Chris: "By their military cadre."
Another induction arm of the Formation is the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, whose office is at 2205 14th Avenue in Oakland. Jeff Whitnack was volunteer coordinator for the CCMP in early 1981. An unreconstructed rowdy and former garbageman with a back problem, Whitnack joined the group as he was burning out on a new career as a medical technician. He lives in the Oakland flats with a number of friends and a very very large Doberman, appropriately called Rodan.
During his short career with NATLFED, Whitnack worked eighteen-hour days for both CHA and CCMP. For a variety of reasons he left the organization. Since that time he has launched a one-man crusade to expose the group, which he sees as a potentially dangerous cult--collecting documents, consulting with other former members, running up enormous phone bills. His investigation of the Formation prompted them to send out a special "phone answering protocol" entitled "ABACUS LINE PROJECTION VIZ REQUESTS FOR INTERVIEWS FROM WHITNACK AND OTHER ALLEGED REPORTERS." The memo explains some of the difficulty I encountered in trying to get a response from CHA: "The following line applies to Whitnack and any other would-be reporters with an interest in facets of the scope of the organization beyond its local entity, seeking interviews: 'No problem, we'll certainly deal with the making of arrangements for an interview. If an interview is desired, it's arranged for in the standard manner that professional people utilize in the business of giving or doing interviews . . . Place a call on our national message service [give them the number if they agree to use this process]. You'll receive a letter in return, requesting your credentials on your publication's letterhead, stating your interest, type of interview requested, etc.'" Phone volunteers are instructed not to dally on the phone with inquisitive reporters: "There's nothing to gain through the phone calls except to deliver the line. The value of Operation Abacus is in its offense-- time spent on the phone with Whitnack or punks of his ilk is a waste of Formation time. DO NOT BE DETERRED INTO ANY OTHER TOPICS OF CONVERSATION, PERIOD."
Whitnack describes his job with CCMP as "passing the big fish on up the ladder; finding the big fish and the little fish, separating them, but keeping the little fish--people we weren't really going to recruit--keeping them coming in, to keep the appearance up of a community organization." The purpose of the CCMP, he says, was to attract a certain social group: socially concerned medical students, [text missing] technicians. "They'd use that to say, 'Hey, this doesn't work. If we had a hundred of these CCMP's across the country, or even in this county, we couldn't solve the health care problems. What's it going to take?' Well obviously, what's it going to take? A revolution."
Once the volunteer has been maneuvered into suggesting revolution as the only logical solution, it's time for the party pitch. Whitnack was originally recruited through what the Formation calls an "additional arena." He was working with a group collecting medical supplies to send to Nicaragua when he was approached by a doctor in the group, who took him aside and painted a revisionist picture of the Sandinista revolution in which the Sandinistas were described as working through mutual benefit associations very like CHA and CCMP. "Would you have joined the Sandinistas if you had lived in Nicaragua then?" the doctor reportedly asked. "I maintain there's such a group in this country." Whitnack was given the CHA phone number, told to call and say he was "a friend of Carlos." In retrospect, Whitnack sees this as what he calls a "locking mechanism": "If people are scared or think it's hokey, they don't call. It's a one-way screening filter." But, early in 1981, Whitnack did call, and after a tour of the CHA and CCMP offices joined the CCMP, soon quitting respiratory therapy school to work for them full time.
Prospective members are often impressed by the apparent size, formality and organizational sophistication of the secret group. Volunteers already identified as receptive to the party line are taken to a large meeting. This meeting-- called the National Labor College--may be a gathering of up to three hundred people at a local church or university. The rooms are guarded by beefy guys in paramilitary uniforms. Locally, the National Labor College meets every two weeks, with cadre coming from as far away as Oregon and San Diego. Classes are conducted by Western Regional Political Commissar, Mark Levine, a former sociology professor from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Chris Moore recalls that at one class the assembly was told, "You don't have to worry about the Nazis; it's the people that are here that you've got to worry about." And the inference was it's the rest of the left . . . Everybody besides them on the left is referred to as a social democrat, and a social democrat is a fascist. All these people are social fascists. Everybody on the left except for them."
New recruits are given a colorful (and highly confidential) organizational history of the Formation. The party draws a pedigree for itself directly back to Lenin, by way of a breakaway faction from the Communist Party USA called the Progressive Labor Party. They claim a formal link with the government of Cuba, although the Cubans vigorously deny it. Such simple contradictions are easy for the faithful to explain away. "Of course they would [deny it]," says Alan Jeffers, whose departure from the group is recent enough to still color his use of pronouns. "Of course they would: we're a provisional party. They agree that our analysis is the most sophisticated theoretically in the world today. When we take power then they'll deal with it. I don't know--there's no way for me to tell what's true and what isn't."
The official history claims that after visiting Cuba in the early '60s, eighteen Formation members went on to Guatemala and participated in a disastrous Che Guevara style "foco" guerrilla campaign. Back in the U.S., they claim to have joined the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. During the San Francisco State Strike (which they take credit for), another leftist group--most versions say it was the Progressive Labor Party--picketed one of their meetings. In response, the story goes, Formation members went out and shot seven of the picketers, "to impress them with the seriousness of the situation," as Chris Moore was told in a class. In her version of the story, however, it was the Revolutionary Communist Party that was shot up.
From there, the future NATLFED cadre claimed to have formed the backbone of the Venceremos organization, during which time they claimed to have developed a plan to free a bunch of prisoners from all over the state, send them to training camps in the country, and then launch the Revolution. Formation leaders like to talk about the military training in the good old Venceremos days; when you were done, they claim, you'd go out with your instructor and kill an enemy of the people.
The Venceremos line struck Whitnack as odd at the time, as he had actually known some people in that group, and the description given by the Formation didn't jive with his personal knowledge. Besides, he says, "There was no way that all the people in Venceremos went out and killed an enemy of the people; if they had, the Readers Digest would still to this day be writing articles about it."
What is actually known about the organization is not so grandiose, but hardly less colorful. The party's leader is known to be one Jerri Doeden, who is now going by the name Eugenio--or Gino--Perente, or E. Perente Ramos. (Many top Formation people adopt Hispanic names: Diane Runkle, one of Perente's inner circle, is now Diane Ramirez.) According to Whitnack's research, Perente was born Gerald William Doeden in 1937. His place of birth is open to question, but most accounts agree that he is the son of an old Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the late '50s, Doeden turned up in the Northern California town of Marysville, where he became something of a town character, signing checks "Jesus H. Christ" and quoting large portions of Shakespeare in all-night Marysville diners. It was also at this time that his notoriously bad driving led to a serious accident that severely disabled his legs. Whitnack quotes a close friend of Doeden from the late '60s, who described him as an "extraordinarily sensitive, sad crippled genius, with an enormous amount of anger."
By the early '70s, Doeden had opened the Little Red Bookstore on Mission Street in San Francisco and founded the "National Liberation Front Continental Armed Services Division" of the group LARGO, the "Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organizations." In early March 1971, LARGO sent out mimeographed communiques warning that a "fully trained, equipped and manned army of revolution will be operating in Northern California" beginning on March 15. It was, in effect, a declaration of war. But nobody took this posturing very seriously. A U.S. Justice Department official dismissed Doeden in a March 10, 1971 San Francisco Examiner article as "small potatoes." "While he boasts of having hundreds of automatic weapons and talks of his legions now undergoing guerrilla training in the hills," said the unnamed official, "the fact is he has scarcely half a dozen dedicated followers, and most of them can be classified as kooks."
Doeden faded away, but turned up the next year on Long Island, where he organized the Long Island Farm Workers Association, which has since become the Eastern Farm Workers Association (EFWA). Doeden/Perente claims to have run the United Farm Workers boycott office in New York City, but the UFW disavows any connection with him. One of the latest NATLFED "entities" is the Texas Farm Workers Union, for whom Vicente E. M. Perente-Ramos is listed as business agent.
The true identity of Gino Perente is a closely guarded Formation secret. An interior memo dated December 26, 1981, gives a rambling repudiation of the "slander" printed in 1977 by Public Eye, an investigative journal based in Chicago that focuses on the cults of both left and right. In the seven-page Formation memo, the taboo name of Jerri Doeden is never mentioned, but there are some rare quotes from Perente himself (NATLFED tries to avoid putting things down on paper; Perente's speeches are distributed on easily erasable cassettes called "line tapes." "[text missing] don't blame it on the cops. They do it for a living. I started this in '58--'53 actually, I was born young. Name-calling doesn't do it. Some guy calls him pig, will call you CIA, and some poor bastard will get whacked for it. This is work, dammit."
Perente has now built a nationwide network of "entities," most of them self-described "mutual benefits organizations" like CHA or CCMP. The connection of these entities to the revolutionary Formation is one of Perente's most closely guarded secrets. Ironically, the fullest record of the organization's breadth was betrayed by NATLFED itself, during the course of its attempted takeover of the National Council of Churches-sponsored Commission on Voluntary Service and Action (CVSA).
To understand the CVSA operation, it is important to remember the contention that the raison d'etre of NATLFED entities is the recruitment of volunteers into the revolutionary party. In this light, CVSA was a fat chicken sitting on the fence: a small, poorly organized, volunteer-run organization whose major asset was its yearly directory of opportunities for full-time volunteer service, Invest Yourself. Distributed nationwide, Invest Yourself has provided free listings of church and non-profit organizations for 37 years. A typical user might be a student fresh out of college looking for a socially productive way to spend the summer.
In 1975, a young woman called Diane Ramirez joined CVSA's board, representing the Eastern Farm Workers Association. Due to her hard work and apparent dedication, she soon rose to be co-chair. CVSA was suffering serious financial difficulties at the time, so it was only too glad when Ramirez offered the free services of a group called the National Foundation for Alternative Resources to produce Invest Yourself. NFAR took over the production of the book, and the 1982 edition included, along with groups lie the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Oxfam America, a total of 41 organizations that have since been identified as NATLFED entities, fronts for Perente's Communist Party USA Provisional Wing. The publication reveals the secret family jewels, complete with names, addresses, and self-descriptions.
Among the groups listed in Invest Yourself were the California Homemakers Association, Western Service Workers Association in San Diego, Santa Cruz, Anaheim, Sacramento, Redding, and Oakland. Other local NATLFED entities in the 1982 edition include the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals in Sacramento; the CCMP in Oakland, Sacramento, and Marysville; the National Equal Justice Association in San Diego; the Shasta County Food Committee and Community Service Center; and the Workers Community Service Center in [text missing].
CVSA soon started getting complaints from volunteers who had had unpleasant experiences with the NATLFED entities. According to an article in the Christian Century by associate editor Jean Caffey Lyles, the CVSA treasurer was unable to get satisfactory explanations for several large withdrawals from the Invest Yourself checking account. CVSA also became a conduit for tax deductible donations to the Eastern Farm Workers Association. Although board members had their doubts about the direction their organization was taking, their suspicions did not solidify until CVSA secretary Wilbur Patterson was contacted by Jeff Whitnack, who supplied him with information on NATLFED's aims and techniques. All of a sudden the pieces fit into place, and Patterson and his colleagues
[page of text missing]
ing to swallow the party line: volunteers are not told the whole story until their credulity has been proven. Take the business about political commissars, for instance. "'Political commissar'! The word itself sounds like something out of Boris and Natasha on the Bullwinkle show," explodes Whitnack. "If they told you straight out, 'We have a political commissar,' you'd bust up. I would have. But once you get in, and there's three hundred people there, all this talk and formality, it makes sense."
The main danger posed by groups like NATLFED, Coates believes, "is the loss of individual freedom, the inability to test reality. You really become a pawn in the leader's hands . . . Once you've been in the group for awhile, the individual personality almost evaporates. The individual relies on the group for all his positions." In NATLFED entities, the leadership takes charge of the most personal details, including sexual problems, which Chris Moore says were supposed to be taken to the political commissar.
NATLFED does not fit the common perception of a cult. Many think of cults as having an exclusively religious orientation, which NATLFED lacks. On the other hand, there are precedents for cult involvement in politics: the work by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church with right-wing refugee organizations is a prime example. Another disconcerting aspect of the NATLFED organization is that, while it provides a place for the aimless and confused, many of its members are professional people. Doctors donate their services, and the group can also count on free legal help from its member lawyers.
A local psychologist with considerable expertise in dealing with cults (he asked not to be named) says that it is a common misunderstanding that you have to be either muddleheaded or gullible to join a cult. "Cult recruitment is very sophisticated," he told me. "Virtually anyone, under the right circumstances, can join a cult." The recruitment process used by the psychologically astute cult assesses the vulnerabilities and strengths of the potential recruit, utilizes the vulnerabilities and turns the strengths to its own advantage. "If you have a strong desire to serve the needy," he says, "if you have particularly powerful criticism of the economic system of this country and are concerned about how the poor are exploited, that strength of character can also become your weakness."
Alan Jeffers worked as a recruiter for the CCMP. He fixed me with a firm stare across the coffee table. "I've recruited doctors myself, talking to them just like this, eye to eye." Jeffers says he would work on the doctor's sense of medical ethics. "I'd say, 'It must be frustrating for you, working in a county hospital, seeing people drop like flies as they exit the door." Jeffers says that the Bay Area's public hospitals are fertile grounds for recruiting doctors, especially when it's the doctors themselves who do the recruiting.
Our anonymous psychologist agrees that NATLFED has all the marks of a cult. "It has a charismatic leader, a unique and unquestioned body of teaching. It has a social process that exhausts people, weakens their ability to evaluate information negative to the group, and promotes a kind of emotional and mental polarization that images the critical faculties." The danger, he says, is to both the individual and society "assaulted by this kind of fascist, unthinking knee-jerk submission to an unaccountable charismatic authority."
Alan Jeffers quit the group when he decided Gino Perente was a nut, and realized the Formation was not able to carry out its revolutionary program. Now, he says, he wants "to cut them off at the root, to go out into the community and say, 'Look, they're using this food to teach a political lesson to people. you may or may not disagree: that's up to you, but this is what it really is. I just thought you should know because you're donating money, goods, and services to them.'" Jeffers wants to make it clear that his political ideas have not shifted to the right. "If they can't get the support of the community, the organic support, there's no way this organization is going to survive, no way."
After Whitnack left the group, the Oakland political commissar reportedly told him, "Whatever you have, you're going to lose it." Although he says they've never lifted a finger at anybody, he worries about the stored-up energy. "I know there's hundreds of people who put their whole thing in there. They have weapons, they have a military faction, there is a mentality there . . . believing that they are the revolution. They aren't just going to go away."
If the FBI decides to treat NATLFED as a legitimate political organization, on can easily imagine how some of its boasts could be turned against the whole of the American left: all Ronald Reagan needs is the discovery of a pervasive and well-connected internal enemy. The FBI break-in into their lawyer's office (housed in the same building as "POPS") in New York raises some obvious constitutional questions, and the instinct on the left is to close ranks in support of the group under attack. Attorney William Kunstler described the FBI action as being "beyond the bounds of all morality." He says that "taking the files, which are supposed to be subject to the attorney/client privilege, and then removing them to some unspecified location where agents can pore over these files violates every concept of the Constitution that I know. I think this claim of a new terroristic organization is poppycock."
If, on the other hand, NATLFED is labeled as a cult, what does that mean to our perception of other groups of super-dedicated revolutionaries like the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party. For Whitnack, the difference is a question of deception. "Take the Communist Party USA for example," he says. "Gus Hall, Angela Davis, their basic motivation for why they're in the group are the same as a lot of people at the lower echelons. While some of the people may work eighteen hours a day, they don't tend to quit their jobs. They have their own life. You can talk to these people outside of their party. Whereas in the National Labor Federation, Gino's cult, the leadership is inherently disrespectful of the membership. The reason why the bulk of the people thing they're in the group has nothing to do with what the leadership is planning." The public is also deceived about the nature of the group. "Their clandestinity is not to hide them from the police," says Whitnack. "It's to hide them from the public."
NATLFED exists and thrives to the extent it does partly because of a vacuum on the left. What other organization offers medical and legal professionals an opportunity to exercise their better social instincts? NATLFED builds on the alienation that comes from discussing class politics in chic Berkeley cafes. Whitnack recalls being impressed by the big National Labor College meetings he attended in Oakland: "I saw these older black women from West Oakland who'd just gotten out from church, and these white kids for Oregon, these firefighter types who looked like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I remember thinking, 'This is what a revolution here would look like.'" Like Alan Jeffers, Whitnack says leaving NATLFED as not changed his political perspective. He is still looking forward to the Revolution. "When I left the group, I said, 'Look, this isn't an honor society. This ruling class is out there, you hate them, they fuck with your life, you fuck with them. It's a long-term thing: don't get frustrated. Sure the left is too bourgeois, the working class has been bought off, but that will undo itself . . . IT'S NO REASON TO GO JOIN A CULT."
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