A forthcoming report from the conservative organization Americans for Limited Government (ALG) details how President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) sent her children to a politically left-wing Jewish summer camp with Communist roots.
Obama nominated Erica Groshen to be the BLS commissioner in February, but this new report — obtained by The Daily Caller and set to be released on Thursday — reveals for the first time publicly that she sent her children to Camp Kinderland. The ALG report reveals how “Groshen and her husband are listed in the Kinderland Directory 2011-2012, which indicates that they sent children to the camp during the 1990s and 2000s.”
“Camp Kinderland was founded in the 1923 as a place for the children of radical Jewish activists,” the report continues.
According to New York University, some of the camp’s founders were “activists in the Communist Party,” and all “were associated with the left wing of the Workermen’s Circle.”
“From 1930 the camp operated under the auspices of a branch of the International Workers Order [IWO],” NYU researchers add.
The U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and New York state investigated the camp for its communist ties in the 1950s — something the camp’s website calls “red baiting witch hunts.” The investigation prompted Camp Kinderland to make a “legal determination” that it was not a part of the IWO.
Camp Kinderland says on its website that since then, it “has remained to this day an independent entity run as a not for profit organization.”
But, on another part of its website, Kinderland says it “is true to the vision of its founders” — which, according to NYU, included members of the Communist Party.
The camp maintains a far-left-wing political activist mindset. According to an article entitled “Occupy Kinderland” in the February 2012 camp newsletter, organizers brought “dozens and dozens” of Kimberland “campers, staff, alumni and friends” out to Zucotti Park in New York City to “Occupy Wall Street” protests.
“We sang for hours, our songsheets making their way far beyond our Kinderland circle in ever widening ripples, till it seemed the whole park was singing along,” the article reads. “It was a day of continuity and hope, as our youngest campers sang alongside alumni grandparents; as the words of the lyrics we sing all summer at camp took on new life and new meaning in the context of the Occupy movement spreading throughout the nation and the world.”
Back in 1947, camper Stanley Wechkin — who later testified before Congress about his experience at the camp — said when he first came to the camp he was not a Communist. “I think that primarily through the influence of Camp Kinderland and, more specifically, the influence of my counselor, Herbert Gutman, I did eventually become a Communist in succeeding years,” Wechkin said, adding that the Soviet national anthem was sung at the camp.
“Though campers no longer salute the flag of the Soviet Union on their way to breakfast, much remains the same at Kinderland,” the ALG report quotes Josh Nathan-Kasiz of the Jewish Daily Forward as writing. “The hardwired rituals of summer camp life, where tradition is religion and the outside world is a fantasy, have proved themselves to be perfectly suited to the preservation of a certain brand of unabashed Jewish leftism that has few contemporary analogies.”
Now that ALG has discovered that the Obama nominee sent her kids to that place, the organization is calling on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) to reject Groshen’s nomination. “Erica Groshen should never have been nominated to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics and her nomination should be summarily dismissed by the Senate HELP Committee,” ALG President Bill Wilson said in the group’s forthcoming press release.
In addition to having sent her kids to a camp with Communist roots, Groshen publicly favors more regulations on small businesses.
“Public policy, rather than favoring small business by exempting it from many forms of regulation, should strive to be size neutral,” Groshen wrote in a 1998 report she co-authored. (RELATED: Critics: Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee linked to left-wing groups)
Groshen and her co-author appear to oppose the existence of small businesses altogether, too.
“Small may be beautiful in many arenas, but it is not beautiful for workers,” Groshen and her colleague wrote.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is expected to take her nomination up in hearings soon.