According to the Washington Examiner, House Dems are ready to take on the election season with professional “race bait” training from someone who learned the art from the best. Their expert instructor, Maya Wiley, has plenty of connections current and past to make her the ideal choice.
Currently with the Center for Social Inclusion, Maya has a resume that any progressive would envy, including work with Soros’ Open Society, NAACP, Tides, and the ACLU:
Prior to founding the Center for Social Inclusion, Maya was a senior advisor on race and poverty to the Director of U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute and helped develop and implement the Open Society Foundation – South Africa’s Criminal Justice Initiative. She has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Department, in the Poverty and Justice Program of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and in the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Maya previously served on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota School of Law and the Council on Foreign Relations. She currently chairs the Tides Network Board and was named a NY Moves magazine 2009 Power Woman. In 2011 Wiley was named as one of “20 Leading Black Women Social Activists Advocating Change” by The Root.com.
Speaking of Tides, DiscoverTheNetworks reminds us that Wade Rathke was a founder and also happened to be a protege of Maya’s late father, ’60s radical George A. Wiley:
Maya Wiley, daughter of George A. Wiley, sits on the Tides Center’s Board of Directors.
The Tides Center’s Board Chairman is Wade Rathke, who is also a member of the Tides Foundation Board. Rathke, a protege of the late George A. Wiley, serves as President of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union, and is the founder and chief organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
In fact, George accomplished quite a bit, using the Cloward and Piven tactics of the day. He started the National Welfare Rights Organization, which later inspired the founding of ACORN:
Under the influence of two Columbia University School of Social Work professors, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Wiley sought to promote racial justice by providing economic opportunities for the poor. In June 1966, he organized several demonstrations that led to the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).
Steven Malanga wrote more about this in a 2006 Wall Street Journal piece:
Acorn’s roots are in the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose leader, George Wiley, believed he could use poor, unwed mothers to foment a revolution. The NWRO agitated for unlimited welfare benefits for those mothers and persuaded many urban politicians to loosen welfare eligibility requirements. This led to a more-than doubling of the welfare roles and strained local budgets. Wiley hoped to persuade the federal government to come to the rescue with massive aid. Instead NWRO’s strategy prompted a backlash against “welfare mothers” and politicians in free-spending cities like New York.
When Wiley’s welfare strategy reached a dead end he moved on to other ventures, including sending some of his troops to form a new community organization in Arkansas, infused with the same radicalism. It was a brilliant stroke: By the early ’70s billions of dollars in federal and state aid was streaming to these local groups, spurred by Republicans in Washington who reasoned that it was better to fund nonprofits than create giant federal bureaucracies to run burgeoning antipoverty programs. Little did the GOP understand that the money would finance a nationwide network of organizations that for decades have mobilized urban residents against the party’s candidates and agenda.
Clearly, Maya has a family heritage of radical revolution as well as her own vast amount of experience with the strongest progressive political machines of today. What better choice for instruction (or should we say “destruction”) could the Democratic Party ask for?
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