March 5, 2012
By Aaron Klein
Klein Online:
A coalition of U.S. radical groups, including the Occupy Movement, are preparing protests to start in September, including the targeting of the Democratic National Convention that takes place that month in Charlotte, N.C.
The Occupy movement is likely to escalate months before the Sept. 3-6 event. A slew of extremist organizations, some tied to Obama, are preparing protests to coincide with major NATO and G-8 summits slated for Chicago in May.
Foreshadowing possible violent confrontations, some of the same radical trainers behind the infamous 1999 Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization have been mobilizing new protest efforts geared toward world summits.
The plans for the Democratic convention are posted on a central website, ProtestDNC.org. More than three dozen organizations, including labor, anti-war and so-called civil rights and immigrants rights groups are joining together to initiate a coalition.
The group calls for:
Good jobs for all! Economic justice now – Make the banks and corporations pay for their crisis!
Money for education, health care, housing and all human needs, not for war and incarceration!
Justice for immigrants and all oppressed peoples! Stop the raids and deportations!
The protest coalition is complaining that the city of Charlotte has already denied their requests for permits to march. The city told the coalition that the DNC itself has reserved major parks in Charlotte during the convention.
The protest website warns the radical groups will take to the streets regardless of whether permits are issued.
“Organizations including Occupy movements across the country are already planning to mobilize to be in the streets of Charlotte during the DNC,” it states.
Along with Occupy, other groups endorsing the scheduled DNC protests include the Revolutionary Students Union, the Students for a Democratic Society and Workers World Party.
One endorsing group, which calls itself the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, is also a main organizer of the protests being scheduled for Chicago’s NATO and G-8 summits in May.
The anti-FBI Committee is led by Tom Burke. It has been seeking to lead activism against the FBI’s reported ongoing terror probes of Chicago and Minnesota anti-war groups.
Burke, a former school custodian-turned-stay-at-home-father, belongs to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a group mentioned in subpoenas and search warrants issued in the same FBI terror probe.
WND previously reported Obama has ties to the Chicago anti-war activists and groups being probed by the FBI, including Hatem Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN.
While serving as a paid director of the nonprofit Chicago Woods Fund, Obama provided two grants to the AAAN.
Obama served at the Woods Fund alongside Weather Underground terrorist-group founder Bill Ayers.
AAAN was founded by a longtime Obama associate, Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, is president of the Arab American Action Network.
Meanwhile, Occupy itself has zeroed in on the upcoming NATO and G8 summits. The anti-Wall Street movement reportedly even opened a headquarters in Chicago within walking distance of the locations at which the summits are scheduled to take place.
Chicago will be the first American city other than Washington to host a NATO gathering.
It will be the first time since 1977, in London, that both NATO and the G8 will hold meetings in the same city at the same time.
Such meetings have drawn mass protests that turned violent.
The 1999 WTO event in Seattle devolved into widespread rioting in which more than 40,000 protesters, some using violent tactics, descended on the city, prompting police to use tear gas and rubber bullets. The clash became known as “The Battle of Seattle.”
The G-8 summit has similarly drawn violent protests.
A 2001 riot at a G-8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, left one person dead and hundreds injured. Also, in the run-up to a G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, police reportedly fired pepper spray at marchers who threw rocks and garbage.
Preparing for such outbreaks, the Chicago Sun-Times last July quoted Superintendent of Police Garry McCarthy saying he was training 13,000 officers under his command for mass arrests of protesters.
“We have to train for mass arrests,” McCarthy said. “We have to train 13,000 police officers in arrest procedures and containment procedures. At the same time, we will not stop patrolling the city.”
In response, radical groups held a press conference last August in downtown Chicago demanding permits to march during the world summits in May.
Joe Iosbaker of the United National Antiwar Committee, one of the groups planning protests, warned, “The wars and economic policies of the NATO and G8 nations are not just and will be met by protest.”
Iosbaker is a University of Illinois-Chicago office worker and a union steward for his SEIU local whose home was raided by the FBI last September reportedly as part of the same terror probe investigating material support for jihadist groups by Chicago groups.
Obama is also tied to Iosobaker.
WND reported Iosbaker and his wife, Stephanie Weiner, worked as leaders of the Chicago New Party, a controversial 1990s political party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new party with a socialist agenda.
Obama actively sought and received the New Party’s endorsement while running for the Illinois state Senate in 1996 as a Democrat. The New Party’s own newsletters listed Obama as a member.
Another group planning to protest at the May summits is Code Pink, which also helped to lead the 1999 WTO riots. Code Pink’s co-founder, Jodie Evans, was a fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign.
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott
*UPDATE: The White House abruptly announced Monday that it will move the upcoming G-8 economic summit from Chicago to the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland.
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