Part 1 here.

So where is my evidence that Judy Chu, Congressional Representative of California’s 32nd District, is a long term affiliate of the former Communist Workers Party and its still surviving networks?

The first significant evidence of Chu’s ties to the CWP comes through a long forgotten far left umbrella group, the Federation For Progress.

The Federation For Progress described itself in an undated brochure released circa late 1983 or early 1984. It was one of several attempts in the 1970s and ’80s to create a new US Marxist united front organization – this time by the Communist Workers Party.

“We’ve been fighting our own separate battles as our very survival is at stake in the 80’s. It’s time for greater unity. Formed in August, 1982, the Federation For Progress has brought people together of all races and from all movements, working for a brighter future. The linking of movements and a multi-issue focus are this decade’s organizing agenda… Our goal is to help create a people’s movement for progress and a program that, together with your efforts and organization, we can actually implement. We stand on the frontlines for human rights and oppose U.S. militarization and intervention. The Federation For Progress is a farsighted leadership organization. Our members come from the movement streams of Equality, Peace, Freedom, and Justice. Tomorrow, these thousands of grassroots streams will become a mighty river in the struggle for human liberation. Be a part of making history today. Build the Federation For Progress. Together we will forge a powerful united group able to resist today’s atrocities –boat people and homeless; soup lines and unemployed persons; unwelcome immigrants; frozen corpses of senior citizens; glazed, alienated, stone young people; evictions; layoffs; foreclosures; nuclear build-up; 007; El Salvador; Beirut; Grenada; Apartheid; young marine corpses returned home dead. Brothers and sisters, there is no separation by gender, race, ethnicity or class. There is no distance between these issues. There is a common cause, a common source. The voices of our elders cry out to us. Our children’s eyes plead to us. Our pained frightened hearts speak to us. We have the courage, the commitment to move forward. The Federation demands there be a future. Join us to shape it.!”

The FFP put a half-page ad in the socialist weekly newspaper, In These Times in the July 14-27, 1982 issue, p. 8, entitled: “A natural follow-up to June 12: A national conference July 30-August 1 at Columbia Un., in New York City.”

It was a follow-up conference to the major “anti-defense lobby” march and protest in New York on June relating to the U.N. Second Special Session on Disarmament.

The ad listed FFP’s “Interim Executive Committee” – the first name on the list was “Judy Chu, Professor Asian-American Studies, Los Angeles.”

Other Committee members listed included:

Michio Kaku – nuclear physicist. This may surprise many, as Kaku is now an internationally known scientist and commentator. Kaku has a lifelong connection to communist causes and in the 1970s he was a leader with Jerry Tung of a Maoist group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization – which became the Communist Workers Party in 1979. Jerry Tung led the CWP, almost certainly assisted by Kaku.

Frances Hubbard – teacher of community health and social medicine, City University of New York. As Frances Borden, Hubbard had been a Communist Party supporter in the 1940s. By the ’80s, Hubbard was supporting the CWP. In 1981, Mark Loo, a Chinese-American member of the CWP, his party comrade Rodney Johnson and sympathetic unionist David Boyd were charged with the attempted bombing of the National Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO) in San Diego, California. A cocktail party in support of the NASSCO3, was held at ultra radical Ramsey Clark‘s house in New York on July 10. Sponsors of the event included Haywood Burns, a radical lawyer once married to Jennifer Dohrn, the sister of Weather Underground terrorist leader Bernadine Dohrn, Chicago labor leader and Communist Party member Abe Feinglass and Frances Borden Hubbard.

Manning Marable – Professor of Political Economy. Marable also sponsored the New York event to benefit the NASSCO3. A life long socialist, Marable was a leader of several Marxist groups, including the Black Radical Congress, the Communist Party spin-off Committees of Correspondence, the New American Movement and Democratic Socialists of America. The later two organizations worked closely with the CWP at different times.

Musheer Robinson – Executive Director, Black and Latino Workers Health & safety Resource Center, Newark, NJ – at the time, Robinson was a member of North Jersey Democratic Socialists of America. Later, Robinson would go on to a stellar career in business. He has visited Communist China more than 60 times and specializes in helping Chinese companies set up businesses in the United States. Now a Baton Rouge, Louisiana consultant, Robinson has worked with dozens of major US companies including Ford, GM and General Electric Appliances. This is perfectly in line with CWP policy. The pro-China communist group urged many of its members to penetrate the US business community, in order to work for the revolution from the inside.

Endorsers of the FFP project included life long Communist Party USA member Anne Braden and Democratic Socialists of America members Frank Wilkinson, Noam Chomsky, Rep. Ron Dellums, and Bernard Demczuk, Maoist radical Yuri Kochiyama, veteran Trotskyist Sidney Lens, Communist Workers Party member Nelson Johnson – representing the Coalition Against Black Genocide, plus long time CWP affiliate Brenda Sunoo, of the UCLA branch of Federation For Progress.

Several other CWP affiliates were involved in the Federation. Dan Siegel, for instance, a co-leader of the Party with Jerry Tung, served on the Federation For Progress’ Executive Committee. Siegel, incidentally, was until recently, the legal advisor to Oakland California mayor Jean Quan, herself a former member of the CWP

In the mid-1980s, the CWP changed its traditional pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist tactics, for a new approach based on the theories of Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci. The organization also changed its name in 1985, to the innocuous sounding New Democratic Movement and embarked on a deliberate long range plan to infiltrate American civil society, business, churches and the Democratic Party, to the benefit of the revolution and their Chinese allies.

Meg Anderson, A CWP member from Indiana, wrote a letter: “How will we move into civil society?” to the CWP internal bulletin, The Expert Red, February 1985, which examined the practicalities of the Party’s new Gramsci inspired program. Anderson’s references to the FFP reveal how important the organization was to the CWP.

The main thing being understood about Gramsci’s ideas is that we have to be able to take part in life as other people do, thus moving ourselves beyond a limited world of our own making to the world that exists. The question still remains about what party visibility will mean… For example in the church there are progressive organizations whose program is even higher than our transitional demands in some ways. What shall I propose to their members? That they all joint he Party? Or should I ask the key movers to join, and we meet secretly to act in director’s role? It seems to be be the same role as FFP would play. Does that mean we virtually turn the FFP into the party, or vice a versa?

Judy Chu was still a leader of the Federation For Progress in 1984, as this letter to Dr. Juan Antonio Samaranch and his fellow members of the International Olympic Committee, proves. The Federation was part of a leftist coalition complaining to Samaranch about the alleged racism of two IOC board members.

Federation For Progress was a Marxist oriented organization under the control and direction of the Communist Workers Party.

The CWP was a violent, ultra-secretive, highly security conscious, Maoist revolutionary organization.

How could Judy Chu hold a leadership position in the Communist Workers Party’s key front organization, if she were not a paid up Party member, or at least a highly trusted Party friend?

Maybe one of America’s thousands of brave and honest reporters could ask Judy Chu a simple question?

“Have you ever been a member of the Communist Workers Party, or any other Marxist group?“

Part 3 here

Trevor Loudon is author of Barack Obama and the Enemies Within and is nearing completion of a new title: “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress.”