The Hawaii Marxist Who Mentored President Obama On General Motors

Forbes:  President Barack Obama has confidently told the successful that they wouldn’t be where they are without the help of others. “You didn’t get there on your own,” says the president....

...Obama left out some salient facts about Frank Marshall Davis. Among them, Davis joined Communist Party USA in Chicago during World War II (his Party number was 47544). He became extremely active in Party circles and even wrote for and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Communist Party publication there, the Chicago Star. He left Chicago in 1948 for Hawaii, where he would write for the Party publication there, the Honolulu Record. Those writings reveal a man fully loyal to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party line, and often bare an uncanny resemblance to Obama’s own rhetoric, whether Davis was bashing Wall Street, big oil, big banks, corporate executives and their “excess profits” and “greed” and their “fat contracts,” the wealthy and “millionaires,” GOP tax cuts that “spare the rich,” and on and on.

Particularly interesting, however, and worthy of the attention to readers of this publication, were Frank Marshall Davis’s writings incessantly demonizing General Motors.

In the Chicago Star, Davis and his comrades eviscerated GM every chance they had. The Star, for instance, mocked the claims of Winston Churchill—incidentally, Davis, like Obama, did not like Churchill—that an Iron Curtain was being erected by Stalin in Europe; to the contrary, the Star maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by the likes of General Motors. The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, scoffed Frank Marshall Davis in his usual incendiary language, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.” The Chicago Star carried headlines claiming that GM itself was a “branch of U.S. imperialism.”

Frank Marshall Davis saw GM as a sinister force, and was unrelenting in his anti-GM crusade for years to come. He was particularly indignant at GM’s profits, which he felt were too high. According to Davis, GM, like America as a whole, was good at manufacturing one thing: “we have manufactured a national horror of socialism.”

In a January 26, 1950 column, titled, “Free Enterprise or Socialism,” Davis framed an America on the verge of another Great Depression, with a “virtual dictatorship of Big Business” being the culprit. Zeroing in on the “tentacles of Big Business,” Davis cut loose on GM:

Alfred Sloan of General Motors announced that his gigantic company made a profit last year of $600,000,000, more than any other corporation in history. Over the years, General Motors has swallowed up or knocked out car manufacturer after car manufacturer so that today less than a handful of competitors remains. Free enterprise, eh?

 Obviously, a business that can show a profit in one year of $600,000,000 is in a position to control government. When we remember that the directors and major stockholders of one industry also shape the policies of banks and other huge corporations, it is easy to see that the tentacles of Big Business control just about everything they think they need to insure continued profits…. For many years now we have been living under the virtual dictatorship of Big Business which all but drove us to ruin in 1929….

Government policy is fixed in Wall Street and transmitted through the corporation executives….

Davis was irate that “firms [such] as General Motors could make $600,000,000 profit while unemployment skyrocketed.”

read … Frank Marshall Davis