By Kyle Becker
Among the revelations was that D’Alesandro Jr., who was a
member of Congress and mayor of Baltimore, was shown to have ties to communist
organizations, including a Soviet front group.
Investigative reporter John Solomon dug through the files
and unearthed the most revealing passages on Just the News:
Elsewhere, the memo cites a “confidential source, who has
furnished reliable information in the past,” reporting that D’Alesandro
appeared onstage at a 1943 rally for the National Council of American-Soviet
Friendship, which was formed in 1943 by the Coummunist Party USA as a Soviet
front group, according to the FBI.
The following year, the memo notes, D’Alesandro was
reported as the main speaker at an event for the International Workers Order,
an insurance organization placed on a list of subversive organizations by the
U.S. attorney general in 1947 and later disbanded by order of the New York
State Insurance Department for being too closely aligned with the Communist
Party, in violation of regulations prohibiting political activity in the
industry.
The files also at times paint a picture of serious
corruption:
In the same memo, which begins on page 38 of the
collection, the agent summarizes allegations that a powerful D’Alesandro took
payoffs from applicants to the police force, and that he helped to hinder the
investigation and prosecution of crimes.
“Pelosi” author Molly Ball, in an NPR interview on “Understanding Nancy Pelosi,” only gives half the story about the future Speaker’s Baltimore roots:
One of her mentors earlier in her career, Jack Murtha,
used to say about her, don’t think she’s from San Francisco. She’s from
Baltimore. And that’s both literally true and true in a deeper sense, right?
Her father was a congressman from Baltimore and then became the mayor of
Baltimore. He came out of the machine politics of Baltimore, a Democratic city.
She was born in 1940, when her father was already in Congress. So literally
from the day she was born, she was part of this very Catholic, very Democratic,
very Italian family that was involved in the political life of the city and the
nation.
And that machine politics, as you know from Philadelphia,
was very much about the sort of tribes and factions of the city. The different
ethnicities all had their own little neighborhoods, and they all had a sort of
boss who could deliver their votes, often in exchange for something. So when
you see the kind of deal-maker that Nancy Pelosi is, when you see the kind of
negotiating that she does on Capitol Hill, I think a lot of it does trace back
to her roots in Baltimore.
It appears that the environment that molded Pelosi’s drive
for power was one part radicalism and one part machine politics. It makes
perfect sense.
Speaker Pelosi herself has taken positions indicating her
sympathy for Communists. In the 1980s, she lionized an open socialist named
Vivian Hallinan, even calling her a “role model.” Cliff Kincaid noted in a 2009
story:
Indeed, Pelosi paid tribute to Vivian Hallinan by
inserting into the Congressional Record an article saying that she had ‘opposed
U.S. policy in Central America’ under President Reagan, had ‘befriended Daniel
Ortega, Nicaragua’s [Communist] Sandinista leader,’ and had met with Cuban
dictator Castro.
“She was a role model for many of us,” Pelosi said. “If
Vincent was the lion, Vivian was the lioness.”
“My mother and Nancy were pretty close,” said Conn Hallinan, one of her sons. Vivian Hallinan would financially back one of Pelosi’s campaigns.
As Kincaid notes: “Vincent Hallinan, a lawyer who died in
1992, was a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of the National
Lawyers Guild, officially designated a front of the Communist Party, and
defended secret Communist Party member and labor leader Harry Bridges.”
Hallinan ran for president on the ticket of the
Progressive Party, which a California State Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on
Un-American Activities described as, “a creature of the Communist apparatus,
and completely dominated by the Communist Party from start to finish.”
This raises even further questions about exactly what
kind of “creature” Nancy Pelosi is.
It turns out, it’s the kind that refuses to denounce
socialism. Instead, Pelosi denies that the oppressive ideology is the
mainstream view of the Democratic Party.
Judging from her past, Nancy Pelosi knows better.
_____________________________
RELATED
ARTICLE
FLASHBACK:
Leftists Become Incandescent When Reminded of the Socialist Roots in Nazism
By Daniel Hannan | Real Clear Politics | March 13, 2014
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for
Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the
Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he
wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased,
Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver "der echte
Sozialismus": real socialism.
