Obama at anti-war protest, 2002 (Source: Verum Serum)
Yesterday Joel Pollack at Big Government reported on how Barack Obama led #OccupyChicago style protests in Chicago in 1988.
From Stanley Kurtz’s essential Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, pp. 117-8:
Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties [in 1988]: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.
We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO [United Neighborhood Organization, a largely Mexican group] of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.
…Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP [Developing Communities Project, a black group organized by Obama] marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protestors, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while [Mary-Ellen] Montes [of UNO] told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.”
It wasn’t an isolated incident.
In his early years as a community organizer, Barack Obama sued banks and lenders to ease lending practices.
He also led protests at banks.
State Sen. Barack Obama and Fr. Michael Pfleger led a protest in January 2000 against the payday loan industry demanding the State of Illinois to regulate loan businesses. (NBC 5 Week of January 3, 2000)
Barack Obama not only participated in #OccupyChicago protests – He led them.