Red Democrats 1: Torie Osborn, California’s Near Miss Socialist

Submitted by Trevor on June 25, 2012 – 8:42 am EST

Communist and socialist sympathizers have infiltrated the US Democratic Party, from precinct level to the White House.
They use their positions, like a Marxist Mafia, to control Democratic Party structure, promote allies to important posts and candidacies, from school boards to the US Senate, and to influence party policy at local and national level.
Here’s one of them. Recent “near miss” candidate for California’s new vacant 50th Assembly District, Torie Osborn.

Torie Osborn

Torie Osborn earned her MBA at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and served as CEO for four nonprofit advocacy and philanthropic organizations. From 1997 through 2005, Torie Osborn was Executive Director of the Liberty Hill Foundation, one of the nation’s “most admired social-change foundations.” Liberty Hill funds grassroots community organizing for environmental, social and economic justice in Los Angeles County, and is led mainly by supporters of the US’ largest Marxist organization Democratic Socialists of America.
In the mid-1990s, Torie Osborn served as Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington DC, the nation’s oldest gay and lesbian civil rights organization, and from 1988 to 1992, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles, she led the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.
Since leading those organizations, Torie Osborn has served as a senior policy advisor to far left Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on homelessness, poverty and economic development. She initiated the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Partnerships that implements joint projects between government and philanthropy. Osborn also served as Chief Civic Engagement Officer for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and currently is senior strategist for California Calls, a network of 27 organizations throughout California committed to common sense government reform – including “fair tax” and budget policy.
In the early 1970s, Osborn was leader of the New American Movement, a Marxist organization formed largely from former members of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and the Communist Party USA. In 1975, she was a Vermont based member of the New American Movement National Interim Committee.
On Sunday, June 7, 1981, the Los Angeles Chapter of the New American Movement sponsored a tribute to Ben Dobbs, a NAMer and former Communist Party leader, for “his lifelong commitment to socialism.” The event was held at the Miramar-Sheraton Hotel, Santa Monica, California. Sponsors of the event included Torie Osborn.
Osborn also helped to launch the NAM affiliated magazine In These Times, as a founding staff member in the mid-1970s, while also playing leadership roles in the socialist dominated National Organization for Women.
In 1982, the New American movement became part of the newly formed Democratic Socialists of America and Torie Osborn remained closely associated with the group.
In the late 1990s, senior Los Angeles DSAers launched a movement to seek political dominance of the city.
On March 11, 1998, Los Angeles DSA leader Steve Tarzynski wrote an email to another Los Angeles DSA leader and LA Times journalist, Harold Meyerson.
Tarzynski listed 25 people he thought should be on an “A-list” of “25 or so leaders/activists/intellectuals and/or “eminent persons” who would gather periodically to theorize/strategize about how to rebuild a progressive movement in our metropolitan area that could challenge for power.”

Tarzynski listed himself, Harold Meyerson, future Congresswoman Karen Bass and a whole bunch of Los Angeles DSA affiliates including philanthropists Stanley Sheinbaum, Aris Anagnos and Paula Litt, leading labor unionists Maria Elena Durazo and her then husband the late Miguel Contreras, Santa Monica Mayor Jim Conn, and key activists Peter Dreier, Mike Davis, Bill Gallegos, Kent Wong, Peter Olney, Derek Shearer, Anthony Thigpenn and Torie Osborn.
Included in a suggested elected officials sub-group were future Los Angeles City Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, well known LA area politicians Gloria Romero, Jackie Goldberg, Gil Cedillo, Tom Hayden, Paul Rosenstein and Congressmen Xavier Becerra, Henry Waxman and Maxine Waters, plus current Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Torie Osborn, representing the DSA dominated Liberty Hill Foundation, was part of what became a successful takeover of LA politics, through her membership on the advisory board of PLAN – the Progressive Los Angeles Network.
PLAN was formally launched in December 1999. PLAN was founded and built on the success of the 1998 Progressive L.A. Conference which was co-sponsored by a number of local and national institutions and organizations including Occidental College, The Nation Institute, Liberty Hill Foundation, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The Progressive LA Conference “was an overwhelming success and gave participants a sense that the growth of a wide variety of progressive social movements had reached an important threshold. As a result, attendees and others within the progressive movement in Los Angeles expressed a desire to participate in further discussion about how to develop a common agenda that is community based, inclusive and brings together the wealth of experience and knowledge of organizers, activists, and researchers.”
PLAN became the nucleus of the alliance of labor unions, community groups and Marxist organizations that won Antonio Villaraigosa the Los Angeles mayoralty in 2005.
Wrote key DSAer Peter Dreier in DSA’s Democratic Left, Winter 2006:

Antonio Villaraigosa….He was a union organizer. He was the head of the ACLU. He came out the barrio and grew up very poor.
When he was term-limited out of the legislature he ran for the LA City Council and was elected. When he ran for Mayor the first time in 2001 he lost, but he ran again and won in 2005. Now we have a progressive mayor, thanks in large part to this impressive network of grassroots organizations, labor unions and community and environmental organizations. Many of them have lifted up some of their leaders into positions of electoral power. It’s a network of activists that work closely with elected officials… and it’s just remarkable what L.A. has become.

Torie Osborn, Antonio Villaraaigosa.

Despite endorsements from LA City Council President Eric Garcetti, old comrade Stanley Sheinbaum, the Painters and Allied Trades Union, the California Nurses Association, Bill Gallegos of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and Communities for a Better Environment, Congresswoman Karen Bass and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Torie Osborn lost the the June 5 Democratic primary to the less extreme Betsy Butler.
No doubt Torie Osborn will be back. Like rust, socialists never sleep.
Red Democrats 2 here.
Trevor Loudon blogs at TrevorLoudon.com, edits the KeyWiki website (an online encyclopedia of the US left) and is the author of a newly released book on the US President’s communist and Marxist ties Barack Obama and the Enemies Within.