Subject: "The Nation" article on L. Fulani
From: Angela E Taylor <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 May 92 11:34:12 -0400

Here's the article that C. Robinson mentioned & some folks requested.
Reprinted w/o permission....good (long) reading outlining some of the
New Alliance Party's shenanigans w/every imaginable community. Enjoy!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

May 4, 1992                    The Nation.

THE NEW ALLIANCE PARTY  Dr. Fulani's  Snake-Oil Show

by BRUCE SHAPIRO

=================================================================

Bruce Shapiro is founder and director of the Grass Roots
Reporting Project, a new initiative of The Nation Institute.
Research assistance was provided by Paul Webster and Amy
Bitterman.

===============================================================

On December 7 of last year, Mayor Carrie Saxon Perry of Hartford,
Connecticut--the first African-American woman elected mayor of a
major city, a progressive Democrat whose eloquent oratory and
elegant haberdashery alike make her one of the state's most
recognizable political figures--emceed the opening of a political
campaign office on Main Street. To a substantial crowd gathered
on the office steps, she enthusiastically brought on the
candidate: "I want to introduce to you, possible--isn't that
wonderful--the next President of the United States." Mayor
Perry's candidate that day was not a fellow Democrat but Lenora
Fulani, presidential aspirant of the New York-based New Alliance
Party. Mounting the podium after Mayor Perry, Fulani delivered an
impassioned address touching briefly on political corruption,
police brutality, Haiti, capital punishment and David Duke. In
short order she raised more than $7,000 in pledges from the
crowd.

Such tributes to Fulani are becoming more and more familiar,
particularly in cities like Hartford, where she and the NAP are
little known except from fleeting stump speeches. But in cities
like San Francisco and New York, where the NAP is a familiar
presence, judgments of a different sort--"deceitful," "divisive,"
"political destroyers," "Moonies of the left echo with remarkable
consistency from the lips of activists, black and white alike,
who have encountered Fulani, the New Alliance Party and party
leader Fred Newman through more than a speech or campaign
fundraiser.

The New Alliance Party has long been controversial, thanks
largely to its practice of recruiting members through group
psychotherapy and to its alliances, over the years, with figures
as diverse as the neofascist Lyndon LaRouche and the Rev. Al
Sharpton. But in the past, the controversy could be confined,
like the NAP itself, to the narrowest political margins. No more.
As Mayor Perry's encouragement (stopping short of a formal
endorsement) demonstrated, Fulani's status as an African-American
woman and the utter absence of a consistent, clearly articulated
progressive agenda among this year's leading Democratic
presidential candidates make her a tempting protest vote in some
decidedly mainstream quarters.

Fulani's minor-party ticket will appear on the November ballot in
nearly all fifty states. Her campaign has qualified for more than
$1 million in federal marching funds, surpassing Jerry Brown's.
Week after week Fulani attracts impressive media coverage, from
respectful CNN interviews to an

all-trumpets-blaring front-page story in New York's Daily News,
complete with a half-page photo ("The 624G Longshot," said the
headline), when she was first awarded matching funds. In New
Hampshire, where she made a one-time entry into the Democratic
primary, she was featured prominently in the conservative
Manchester Union-Leader. When Fulani nearly threw the New York
primary into a tailspin by charging that Paul Tsongas had not met
the requirements of New York's byzantine ballot-access laws, she
was credited by Newsday columnist Gail Collins with "exposing the
slimy underside of our local politics." In recent weeks Fulani
and the NAP have made headlines again, shouting down Bill Clinton
in Harlem and Jerry Brown in Brooklyn for refusing to debate
Democratic protest candidate Larry Agran, whom the NAP adopted
after the New Hampshire primary.

It's time to take Lenora Fulani, Fred Newman and the NAP
seriously; they are no clones of LaRouche but a national
political phenomenon on their own terms. Much about the party
remains weirdly laughable, convincing to no one but its
adherents--like the Potemkin Village press conferences the party
held during the New Hampshire primary campaign, packed with the
NAP's own reporters, photographers and video crew. But the issues
and dangers represented by Fulani and the NAP run far deeper; to
understand them requires a journey across the fog-enshrouded
frontiers between politics, psychology and accounting.
Revolution, for Therapy and Profit

What's their real agenda? Scratch an activist or politician who
has encountered the NAP and that uneasy question lies close to
the surface. One answer comes from Fulani herself. Relaxed in a
scantily furnished lower Manhattan office between speaking
engagements, she gently mocks suggestions that she is just a
puppet of NAP leader Newman--"So, you've met my guru?"--and goes
on to deliver a two-word platform speech: "More democracy." Asked
to elaborate, she lays out a series of proposals only slightly to
the left of the League of Women Voters: universal voter
registration, inclusion of minor-party candidates in presidential
debates, revival of the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters,
"direct democracy" in the form of citizen referendums on national
issues like the budget, and an all-encompassing but vaguely
articulated "economic democracy." Try as one might to extract
something more, that's as specific (or radical) as Fulani gets.
An amiable, ingratiating Fred Newman, carrying the official title
of campaign manager, is not much more precise: "We are building a
major third party around the issue of democracy."

Another answer comes from Fulani's longer speeches and
off-the-cuff remarks in press conferences. There it becomes clear
what she is against--just about everyone else on the political
scene. There, too, hints of conspiracy whisper through her
drop-dead cool: A respected radical journalist who has criticized
Newman and the NAP since the 1970s is an F.B.I. informant
"directly motivated by the Democratic Party." A

judge kept Paul Tsongas on the New York ballot only through a
"fraud and fix from Mario Cuomo on down." The Trilateral
Commission has a stranglehold on national political life. The
U.S. economy was "assassinated" the moment the nation and its
allies abandoned the gold standard. (Right-wing populists have
long shared an obsession with returning to the gold standard,
supposedly freeing the economy from the scheming hands of
international bankers and financiers.)

But Fulani's and the NAP's real agenda is most clearly evident in
the slow, steady growth, over more than twenty years, of what
once seemed an insignificant crackpot organization. The NAP's
history begins around 1970, one of the many by-ways on the
convoluted and gloomy circuit of

post-1960s revolutionary sects. A tiny radical collective on
Manhattan's Upper West Side got the idea of organizing political
activity around a profit-making experimental encounter therapy
practice. Eventually dubbed social therapy, the scheme proved
both an effective recruiting tactic and lucrative business,
generating steady streams of adherents and revenue. (Much of this
early history was first recounted in detail by Dennis King, who
in 1977 wrote a prescient expose of the then-minuscule movement
for a West Side community newspaper.)

The intellectual and emotional leader of that original collective
was Fred Newman, a Korean War vet who'd grown up in the Bronx,
held a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Stanford and
abruptly turned to Marxism in the mid-1960s. Newman and his small
band of followers--physically occupying a communal apartment,
intellectually occupying the tumultuous intersection of
confrontational sectarian politics and radical psychology--became
obsessed with their own idiosyncratic vision of a psychotherapy
that would challenge not just individual neurosis but structural
injustice in society.

Newman and his original associates (all of them white and most of
them women) were political hard-liners who argued that only a
revolution of the working class could resolve the individual
psychic crisis; at the same time, like practitioners of est and
other distinctly un-Marxist products of the nascent human
potential movement, they believed that the road to their
revolutionary new age lay in an extreme version of confronting
the oppressor within, stripping the ego of its bourgeois,
individualistic detritus. "There are no private feelings, only
social relationships," declared one early social therapy
handbook. Replacing "bourgeois" relationships with new
revolutionary patterns of consciousness meant that virtually
every aspect of existing life--sexual orientation and partners,
domestic arrangements, employment--could be challenged at the
whim of the therapist, with accommodation a condition of
remaining in therapy. Newman referred to himself at the time as a
"benevolent despot."

Much of the "revolution" urged upon clients involved advancing
the business interests of social therapy itself--recruiting
adherents among friends, lovers and neighbors, often dangling
before them the possibility of readily available sex, and making
large financial donations to the movement s work. There was overt
political work as well, again in accordance with Newman and his
associates, who by the mid-1970s formed their own grandly named
International Workers Party, its leadership indistinguishable
from the social therapy collective. Soliciting funds on the
street and becoming a growing presence at neighborhood meetings,
the Newmanites (then numbering perhaps thirty committed members)
moved in and out of coalitions and vicious factional struggles
with other marginal groups. The most notable coalition was with
Lyndon LaRouche, already well on his journey to fascism and
feared on the left for his followers' history of violent
thuggery. Newman embraced LaRouche in 1974 as an ally and mentor,
and then broke with him several months later. Around the same
time, members started running for local political office on an
independent slate. In 1977 one social therapy
client-turned-practitioner, Nancy Ross, managed to win an Upper
West Side school board seat after reassuring neighbors, falsely,
that the by-then widely disliked International Workers Party had
been disbanded. That success led the Newmanites further into
electoral politics, where they finally emerged in 1979 as the
neutral-sounding New Alliance Party.

One New Yorker who encountered Fred Newman and social therapy in
the early years was Lenora Branch Fulani, who had been raised in
Pennsylvania and was earning a Ph.D. in developmental psychology
at the City University of New York (CUNY). By her own account,
sometime in the late 1970s she heard Newman lecture and "was very
intrigued by the progressiveness of the politics guiding his
thought." Just as Newman had been while in graduate school two
decades earlier, Fulani was struck by the discordance between her
own working-class upbringing and her present life in the academy.
She joined Newman for group therapy, ultimately leaving a black
lesbian Gestalt therapist she'd seen for years and going to work
for the Newmanites' social therapy clinic full time. She trained
as a social therapist, volunteered her remaining free time to the
NAP and appeared on the New York ballot as a candidate for
lieutenant governor in 1984. " Social therapy was this wonderful
breath of fresh air," Fulani says today. In the mid-1980s, she
and one of the original collective members took over what had
been the New York Institute for Social Therapy's satellite clinic
in Harlem, treating clients privately on a sliding-scale basis.

Old Ambitions, New Alliances

When the Newmanites metamorphosed into the NAP in 1979, they did
more than adopt a new name. They quickly adopted an overt
political agenda far more likely to win allies--and
donations--than their neo-Trotskyist rantings of the preceding
decade. It started with ballot access; New York's notoriously
restrictive election laws made the issue a sure way to win
approval and donations from civil libertarians and conventional
do-gooders. One of the more common Manhattan experiences of the
early 198()s involved being approached by polite, well-dressed
individuals and asked to sign a card or petition helping the NAP
get on the ballot in the name of democracy, and then being hit up
for a financial contribution. At the same time, the NAP adopted
an electoral strategy that Newman and Fulani eventually called
(with the same grandiosity that led to his baptizing a ragtag
commune the International Workers Party) "Two Roads Are Better
Than One": supporting the party's own electoral line but also the
campaign of any Democrat who'd accept their endorsement. Although
some New York Democrats who were awarded the NAP's support eyed
the party uneasily--like Assemblyman Frank Barbaro, who ran a
"Dump Koch" mayoral campaign in 1981--the dedication of its
workers proved an often irresistible offer.

African-Americans also fit into that original NAP strategy.
Starting in the early 1970s, Newman and his then all-white
collective embraced the notion that while they would form an
intellectual vanguard, the black community would produce
"organic" leaders of its own [see Adolph Reed, "The Rise of Louis
Farrakhan," January 21 and 28, 1991]. In practice, that theory
justified Newman's and the NAP's penchant for associating with
conservative, demagogic black leaders little interested in
independent organizing. The late Brooklyn Democratic machine boss
Vander Beatty, eventually jailed for election fraud, was one
ally. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was another, all the
more so after Farrakhan's famous denunciation of Judaism as a
"gutter religion" led Jesse Jackson to take two steps back.
(Farrakhan's anti-Semitism is "a delicate question," says Fred
Newman. "Does he have a subjective anti-Jewish attitude? No. Is
he anti-Semitic in some sense? Well, who's exempt?" Indeed,
Newman says, it is Jewish and left attacks on Farrakhan that
"produce anti-Semitism in the black community.") The Rev. Al
Sharpton became a particularly close ally when the NAP offered
its members as credibility-builders for Sharpton's Howard Beach
marches, and together with Sharpton the party promoted Tawana
Brawley long after her tale of rape and degradation by white
assailants was proved a fabrication. ("We knew 'Rev' before the
media found him," Fulani boasts.) Today, Sharpton rents office
space from the group and is even on the Newmanite extended
payroll, holding a $12,000-per-year consultant's contract with
the movement's teen talent agency. Fulani accompanied Sharpton on
a high-profile trip to Haiti last fall.

In each case, the NAP picked an ally deeply opposed to values the
party claimed to espouse (feminism and particularly gay rights,
which made its way into NAP slogans even though social therapists
had formerly attempted to "convert" gay clients) and dedicated
more to empire building and glomming the media spotlight than to
rank-and-file political participation. Each was deeply committed
to entrepreneurial capitalism in the black community rather than
to any version of socialism, and, most important, each built an
African-American base on the politics of racial and ethnic
division.

For the NAP, the watershed year was 1984, when Jesse Jackson
first ran for President. In keeping with Newman's "Two Roads"
dictum, the party supported Jackson (whom Newman had ridiculed
just a few months earlier in explicitly sexual terms) but also
ran a presidential candidate in the general election--a black
socialist-turned-NAP member named Dennis Serrette. Serrette was
on the ballot in thirty-three states and received 35,000 votes. A
year later Serrette broke with the NAP, giving an embittered
account to The Jackson Advocate of his years in the party. He
described his frustration with what he termed the party's
all-white leadership and the control he said Newman imposed on
him through social therapy. The NAP's response was a $2 million
defamation lawsuit in 1988 against the Advocate, Mississippi's
only black-owned newspaper. The case was ultimately thrown out of
court.

In the early and mid-1980s the NAP began seeking ballot status
around the country, sometimes (as in North Carolina and
Mississippi) moving its existing members into a community just
long enough to qualify to run for some local office and conduct a
fundraising canvass. Social therapy offices and party organizing
drives were established in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta
and other cities. Encountering the often daunting ballot access
requirements imposed on alternative parties by two-party state
legislatures, the NAP sued, time and again, occasionally
convincing courts to cast aside restrictions. In 1985, shortly
after Jesse Jackson founded his Rainbow Coalition, the NAP
started its own lobbying arm called the Rainbow Alliance, later
the Rainbow Lobby (about which more later). In 1988, thanks to an
ever-larger pool of therapy clients-turned-volunteers and an
ever-larger pool of contributions, the NAP managed to qualify for
matching funds and place its new presidential candidate, Lenora
Fulani, on the ballot in all fifty states.

An accomplished public speaker with a sure instinct for the
soundbite, Fulani became national chairwoman of the NAP as well
as its presidential candidate. In 1988 she traveled everywhere
with an imposing security squad of African-American women--her
own version of Farrakhan's Fruit of Islam--hinting at once of
black nationalism, gay pride and eerie robotic conformity. (This
year, the security squad is multiracial.) After loudly supporting
an often-uncomfortable Jackson campaign again in the primary
(NAPers, Jackson complained, "would often trail the campaign and
leave the  impression that it [the NAP] was our organization"),
Fulani went on to run on the NAP ticket and won 240,000 votes in
the general election. This was a considerable performance in the
world of minor-party challenges, where the standard on the left
is Eugene V. Debs's 920,000 votes in 1920. "In '88 we were out to
demonstrate our level of organization," Fulani says, adding that
even the party's worst enemies would have to concede its success
on that point. If nothing else, that performance--which owed as
much to Fulani's impassioned manner as to the accelerating pace
of fundraising--guaranteed her place as the NAP's premier
representative. Today, NAP publications feature iconic
treble-portraits of Farrakhan, Sharpton and Fulani.  The Cash
Machine

Whatever their flaws, Newman and Fulani both understand that
American political parties exist principally to raise and spend
money. Behind the NAP's growing visibility lies a carefully
engineered cash machine, founded in the social therapy practice.
The party's deliberate strategy of giving campaign contributions
the coloration of psychic healing was demonstrated one recent
evening in Brooklyn. There, the NAP gathered some 250 of the
faithful for a report on New Hampshire and, more important, for
an intense fundraising pitch. "The more you give, the more you
grow," Fulani intoned. "Take it out of your rent. It feels very,
very good."

Party members and supporters make their legitimate contributions
to NAP campaigns. At the same time, social therapy clients--among
them, all members of the party--pay their fees to Newman and the
other social therapists, who turn a portion of those fees over as
their own contribution to the party and its affiliates. That's
the basic framework. Over the years, though, this cash machine
has grown increasingly complex, spawning a series of intertwined
real estate holdings and for-profit businesses--an ad agency, a
law firm, a publishing house, a theater company, an accounting
practice and a music agency, among others--all run out of the
same cluster of Manhattan offices, all employing therapy clients
and party members who in turn channel their often-meager earnings
back to the party [see adjoining box]. Each of those businesses
also serves as a recruitment vehicle for the party itself.

The Fulani campaign's 1991 financial disclosure records show
office managers, receptionists and other low-level employees of
Newmanite businesses making contributions that are exorbitant by
the standards of most people in such positions, in many cases
hundreds of dollars a year. And that's just to one campaign; many
NAP employees also contribute to campaigns for lower office and
to associated outfits like the Rainbow Lobby. The Fulani
campaign's on-the-books political workers are paid scantily (from
$180 to $250 per week) but like other Newmanite employees manage
relatively high-rolling contributions.

It is a bewildering, ever-escalating shell game, a leveraged
buyout of the campaign finance system: Those donations from
employees and therapy clients help the party and campaigns
qualify for federal matching funds, and hundreds of thousands of
dollars of the matching funds are funneled from the party back to
the businesses through the purchase of their services. According
to federal campaign finance filings, in the latter half of 1991
at least 35 percent of the Fulani campaign's expenditures went to
those NAP-related businesses. How much money goes into the
pockets of the actual business owners-- Newman and his closest
associates--is impossible to determine from public records.

What's certain is that the New Alliance Party is big business.
According to a recent report in New York Newsday, the complete
cluster of NAP-related businesses employs some fifty-six people
and brings in at least $3.5 million a year. The East Side
Institute for Social Therapy alone reports sales in excess of
$400,000; by an account in its own newsletter, at least $240,000
a year above and beyond therapy fees comes in through telephone
canvassing by therapy adherents--donations that, because they are
used to bolster a for-profit business, are not subject to the
open-books requirements of charities and nonprofits. The Rainbow
Lobby brings in $1.5 million a year, spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars of that on other NAP-related businesses.

This remarkably efficient scheme skirts the edges of federal
election law. Campaign finance regulations clearly require that
no individual make a campaign contribution "on behalf of
another." The rules are designed to prevent, among other things,
the old practice of executives and politicos funneling
contributions through employees. The NAP's cash machine may run
afoul of this prohibition. Are social therapists making a
campaign contribution "on behalf of another" when they turn over
part of their therapy earnings from clients involved in the party
who agree to fees in part because they know how the money will be
spent? Are employees of businesses owned by party principals
making their outsized contributions "on behalf of another"? Is
the New Alliance Party in effect "double dipping," taking
campaign contributions from supporters within legal limits and
then funneling additional contributions in excess of the public
limits through businesses and cultural activities?

In a conventional political party, one that does not function
through a high degree of psychological pressure on members and
therapy clients, the answer might be ambiguous. Republicans and
Democrats, after all, have their own semiofficial polling
consultants, law firms and ad agencies. Newman himself points to
Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, "which has a whole
network of interlocking businesses.... I don't see how it is
avoidable." But the NAP is not a conventional political
organization. Except on paper, the Newmanites' party is
indistinguishable from social therapy and the numerous other
businesses to which campaign funds are directed and from which
campaign contributions flow. The question has never been properly
examined by a government agency. The Federal Elections Commission
has certified only that the Fulani campaign qualifies for
matching funds by raising at least $5,000 in contributions of
$250 or under in each of at least twenty states. But the
relationships among various NAP-Newmanite businesses, and the
question of whether NAP contributors are making a contribution
"on behalf of another," have never been considered: "No one's
ever filed a complaint," says F.E.C. spokesman Scott Moxley.

How the NAP spends its undocumented petty cash might also be
worth looking into. At a recent Jerry Brown rally in Manhattan's
Union Square, a white organizer was observed paying black
homeless men to heckle Brown on behalf of Larry Agran and wave
NAP signs.  Disruption and Deceit

Fiscal manipulation is far less dangerous than another NAP
tactic: confrontation and disruption of meaningful, effective
organizations on the left and in the African-American community,
and profoundly antidemocratic attacks on anyone deemed an
opponent.

The NAP handles its critics and presumed political opponents with
libel suits, smear campaigns and outright harassment. A New York
journalist who writes critically of the NAP is recognized on the
street by party canvassers, who chase her down the block
shouting, "We don't want you in our democracy!" Representative
Mervyn Dymally, a reliably liberal member of the Congressional
Black Caucus, is reviled as a "jackal," an "accessory to murder"
and an ally of Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko after a
fact-finding trip to that nation. When Dymally hits back in
speeches denouncing the NAP and the Rainbow Lobby, he's sued
(unsuccessfully) for $2 million. The NAP's newspaper brands
writer Ken Lawrence of The Jackson Advocate a "government agent."

Then there are the stories that surface with remarkable
consistency throughout the NAP's history, stories of stable
activist organizations overrun by blocs of party members who
attempt to steer the group into the Newmanite orbit. Sometimes
they succeed, and sometimes the only result is a bitter and
destructive factional fight. Newman, naturally, denies any
deliberate strategy: "Believe me, we are not out to piss off the
left." But the stories are legion. In 1987 members of New York's
large chapter of New Jewish Agenda, a broad-based, diverse
peace-and-justice coalition, noted an influx of Jewish NAP
members and social therapy clients. The NAPers actively tried to
recruit N.J.A. members for social therapy or the party, even
inviting them on dates in a manner reminiscent of the 1970s, when
social therapists used sex as a recruiting tool. They urged the
organization to associate itself with the Fulani campaign,
something longtime N.J.A. members were not about to do. Meeting
after meeting the number of NAP members grew, and more and more
time was taken up debating the extreme anti-Zionist proposals of
the NAP members (at various times Newman has called fellow Jews
"dirty ' "self-righteous dehumanizers" and "murderers of people
of color") rather than attending to the immediate business at
hand. Finally, N.J.A. leaders concluded that the NAP was trying
to either destroy the chapter or take over, and reluctantly,
publicly, voted to expel twenty party members after a hearing.

Similar stories arise from every community in which the NAP has
established a base. In California, NAP activists have deeply
divided that state's longstanding Peace and Freedom Party,
commandeering the San Francisco chapter while battling with
others. Groups as diverse as ACT UP, the All-African Unity Party
and the American Public Health Association report similar
experiences. During the New Hampshire primary, in which Fulani
ran on the Democratic line and garnered just 402 votes, a
grass-roots coalition in that state, New Hampshire Citizen
Action, was startled to find the NAP hijacking a
coalition-sponsored town meeting: Out-of-state party activists
somehow acquired a large bloc of tickets reserved for New
Hampshire's poor.

When the NAP can't take over an organization or movement, it
resorts to deception, creating a front group that is almost
indistinguishable in name from a more broad-based and respected
rival, sometimes even holding meetings at competing times. The
most famous example is the Rainbow Lobby, which reminds donors in
unreadably small footnotes to its fliers that it is not
affiliated with Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. The Rainbow
Lobby manages to raise more than $1 million a year, largely
through canvassing by social therapy clients and NAP supporters,
making it one of the wealthiest public-interest groups in
Washington. While it does engage in some ineffectual lobbying on
such issues as Haiti and electoral reform, much of the money is
channeled back to party campaigns and affiliated businesses.

Another example of NAP's marketing-by-deception occurred in
California's East Bay. An Asian-American organization published a
newspaper about violence toward Asians called Break the Silence.
The NAP, trying to make inroads into the Asian community, put out
its own sheet, called Breaking the Silence. Sometimes the scams
are darkly comical. Like the time the NAP sought financial
donations and endorsements for a dinner honoring A.W. Singham (a
revered CUNY professor and specialist in Caribbean history who
was a member of The Nation's editorial board until his death last
year) without telling Singham anything about it. Like the
"gallery" that enables the NAP to present its lower Manhattan
headquarters as the Castillo Cultural Center: Art covers only one
wall in a lobby, behind which are extensive social therapy and
business offices. Like the hornswoggling of Richard Serra,
Christo and other artists into donating their work for a Castillo
Cultural Center auction without once letting them in on the
event's real sponsor and beneficiary.

Such deceitful and disruptive tactics are not aimed exclusively
at the white left. In New York in 1990, for instance, NAP
challenged the ballot petitions of an independent black campaign
slate, the All-African Unity Party, claiming they lacked adequate
signatures. The A.A.U. P. ultimately remained on the ballot, but
its resources were badly drained by the confrontation. This year
Lenora Fulani publicly derided organizers of a national
conference in Washington on independent black politics as being
"on a mission of a white racist Democratic party." And Fulani
regularly refers to Jesse Jackson as "a complete sellout--Jesse
sold his soul for a show on CNN."

The disruption of important black community institutions extends
even into the realm of neighborhood-based social services. Just
ask residents of South Philadelphia about the recent experience
of Horizon House, a respected, long-established mental health
center serving that largely African-American neighborhood.
Newman's followers adopted Horizon House's thirty-two-bed
inpatient drug-and-alcohol rehab program as a proving ground for
their theories, without telling the center's administrators. It
all started with a white staff member of the program named Jim
Horton. Horton, then residential manager at Horizon House, became
deeply involved in social therapy and the NAP (ultimately running
for City Council in 1991), explaining to fellow workers that he
rode his bicycle to work rather than buy a car so he could donate
more money to the party. Two years ago Horton introduced social
therapy techniques to his clients (most of them chronic crack
users, most of them African-Americans) and to other staff
members, according to both Horizon House officials and Fred
Newman.

On the surface, social therapy seemed intriguing: It stressed
pride in the African-American heritage, encouraging clients to
see themselves as powerful individuals who could exercise some
control over the forces around them. Soon, social therapy came to
dominate the Horizon House residential rehabilitation program
(just one of many Horizon House projects, and the only one in
which social therapy was practiced). In turn Horizon House was
peddled by the Newmanites as a success story. Newman himself made
three trips to Philadelphia to speak at Horizon House and the
program was featured in the East Side Institute for Social
Therapy's 1991 fundraising mailer. The Newmanites made astounding
claims for their cure rate in Philadelphia: 85 percent of the
program's graduates were said to be drug-and alcohol-free six
months after graduation, with half holding social service jobs
and the other half employed or enrolled in G.E.D. programs. "It
was an immense success," Newman insists today.

Any drug program achieving an 85 percent success rate would win
its designer the Nobel Prize. But that estimate proved illusory.
In fact, say participants, the social therapists' "intolerance"
for anyone who was less than enthusiastic about the approach--and
the berating of skeptics in group therapy-- drove many residents
out of the program. According to Horizon House, in 1989 the drug
program graduated fourteen individuals--all people who'd
successfully completed a residency of six to twelve months. But
in the entire two years that followed--the heyday of social
therapy at Horizon House-- the program graduated just half that,
with a higher than average recidivism rate.

Finally, last October, Horizon House's management fired Horton
and banished the practice of social therapy from the residential
rehab program. In a fashion that caught the apolitical Horizon
House staff completely unawares, the Newmanites responded with a
picket line and weeks of angry, abusive telephone calls from all
over the country demanding Horton's reinstatement.

Clearly, Horizon House was one instance in which social therapy
radically failed its largely African-American clients. What's
more, many at Horizon House came to feel that what happened there
was no accident. Rather, they saw the Newmanites' approach as an
attempt to seize control of an established, reputable program in
order to advance the NAP's philosophy and interests. At Horizon
House the social therapy promoted by Lenora Fulani as the most
effective tool for helping African-Americans "break with our
adjustment . . . to our social role as victims" made victims of
African-Americans who'd turned to it for help.  Psyche Killers?

The experience of Horizon House shows the intimate connection
between social therapy and the NAP's most frightening political
tactics. The party, Newman and Fulani can't be understood without
understanding social therapy, the very heart of their belief
system and political practice. Intellectually, the movement is
linked to Lev Vygotsky, a founder of Soviet psychiatry who
criticized Freud and Piaget for their individualized, apolitical
understanding of cognitive development. Newman and his
followers--in common, it should be said, with many more
conventional psychologists and educators, particularly those
contending with the impact of race, class and
environment--embrace Vygotsky. Newman and Lois Holzman, one of
the original Upper West Side collective members, have even edited
a Vygotsky anthology, to be published this year by the respected
British house Routledge.

Now take Vygotsky's theories of social development one step
further. What could be better than a therapy that gives central
consideration to the dynamics of oppression, that leads clients
from depression, addiction and loneliness to active social and
political engagement? In that way, social therapy is opposed to
the confessional "I am helpless before my addiction" approach of
Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. "I was
moving from a working-class black family into a white, affluent
profession and experiencing immense confusion and conflict as a
result," recalls one former client. "Having a therapist raise
those issues was of immense value--at first."

The NAP thrives where political chaos is matched by a vacuum of
genuine alternative.

At first. But according to every independent account of social
therapy since Newman and his followers started out, it often--at
least for those clients deemed likely prospects for active party
membership--turns out to be something else: a tool for making
isolated, distressed individuals totally dependent on Newman and
the party for all sense of self-esteem and community. For despite
its ostensible left ideology, social therapy often functions in
reality in a fashion remarkably similar to coercive groups like
Synanon. Practically speaking, all such organizations work in the
same way: Separate the person from his or her past. Therapists
and groups of clients berate individuals for their past behavior
and values, pushing them to the point of breakdown and then
offering relief in the form of acceptance by the new therapeutic
"family." Continued acceptance and continued self-esteem depend
on the embrace of this new "family," which in turn means
volunteer work or financial contribution to the vertically
integrated therapy empire. Other identifications--whether with
feminism, the gay community, independent activist
organizations--are derided as bourgeois and self-limiting. "The
gay community as a separate entity keeps you from being gay:'
Fred Newman tells one client in a dialogue included in his most
recent book.

Some former social therapy clients describe being asked to inform
the NAP of their whereabouts at all times so they could be
contacted for party activity, or to hand their children over to
the party's care in order to devote more time to politics. Dennis
Serrette has recounted how particular clients would be targeted:
"The group converged on the victim, who generally broke down in
tears.... Topics ranged from the most personal aspects of one's
life, to the failure to adequately give oneself to the
organization." Adding to such psychic manipulation is the eerie,
nonstop reverence for Newman himself. NAP's books, newspapers and
journals are replete with tributes to the Great Man; quotes from
his plays, poetry and speeches; praise for his sexual choices
(Newman's present involvement with a party member is described in
the movement magazine Practice as "a hot, sexy relationship
without rape") and political wisdom. In a foreword to a
collection of Newman's theoretical articles, Fulani calls him
"the first person to teach me anything seriously useful about
politics and/or psychology"; his photo graces ads for a comedy
troupe performing at the Castillo Center. "When Newman was happy,
everyone was happy. When he was angry, everyone was terrified,"
Serrette testified during the Jackson Advocate libel trial.

The all-encompassing political and psychological culture of the
NAP is a classic and chilling example of what Robert Jay Lifton
calls "ideological totalism"--"an extremist meeting ground
between people and ideas" in which "the individual encounters a
profound threat to his personal autonomy." It's an issue far
broader than the NAP alone. The left has rarely confronted the
dangers posed by psychological totalitarians in the human
potential movement. Even when we disapprove of Werner Erhard and
other New Age gurus, we're nonetheless inclined to view their
presence with the polite if grumbling tolerance of neighbors on
the same avenue of opposition culture. In fact, the alliance
between political and psychological countercultures was almost
certain, sooner or later, to produce a Fred Newman: someone who
could join the human potential movement's appeal to desperate and
isolated individuals eager for a quick fix and instant community
with emotionally resonant outward symbols of social justice.  The
Big Con and the Easy Mark

So what is their real agenda? In one sense, the NAP's "real"
agenda--Fulani's vaguely reformist positions, the party's
articulated ideology--doesn't matter. What matters, what NAP is
about, is the appearance of constant activity: the
self-perpetuating frenzy of recruitment and fundraising, the
endless unread press releases, the books and magazines and plays
and films produced by the converted, for the converted or
soon-to-be-converted. Enemies are manufactured or exaggerated to
prove the party's importance. The party's raison d'etre is
twofold: to massage constantly the egos of its otherwise marginal
leadership, particularly Newman and secondarily Fulani; and to
keep supporters convinced that something important is occurring
every minute, to allow not a moment to pass in which doubt might
enter.

It is necessary, however, to maintain perspective. Fulani, Newman
and NAP have no mass following. They claim 10,000 members, but if
campaign finance forms are any indication, a few hundred
hard-core activists is a more accurate estimate. But at the same
time, several aspects of the Newmanites' campaign make them a
uniquely threatening phenomenon on the political scene. There is,
first of all, Fulani herself. Any minor party political candidate
with the personal charisma and political skill to win support
from mainstream black Democrats like Hartford's Mayor Perry is a
symbolic force to be reckoned with. In screaming for Larry
Agran's admission to Democratic debates or challenging
ballot-access restrictions, NAP and Fulani are hypocritical and
self-serving; these are the same people, after all, who will go
to court to keep anyone off the ballot whom they deem an enemy,
whether Paul Tsongas or a rival black political movement. But
they also underscore precisely how local, state and national
party machines have strangled the life from electoral politics
for decades. In that sense, NAP is poised to benefit from the
same inchoate outrage against the political system now tapped by
Jerry Brown.

What's more, the NAP as an organization is fundamentally
different from most political marginals in several important
ways. It has a steady, autonomous source of money (the social
therapy business), and its followers are far better integrated
into the mainstream of American life, with no Moonie-like flower
sales, no Charlie Manson eyes, no anti-Semitism loosely cloaked
in ravings about the Queen of England in the style of LaRouche.

Wealthy, well-organized, possessed of a conventionally
comprehensible overt platform and a clear strategy: Altogether,
there's no reason to think that the NAP will stop growing.
Indeed, the party thrives in precisely those situations in which
political chaos is matched by a vacuum of genuine, well-rooted
alternatives--in short, the current state of national electoral
politics. In that sense, the party's new visibility is a distinct
rebuke to the democratic left. The NAP and Fulani offer the false
but alluring appearance of a symbolically charged and emotionally
outraged response to the feelings of exclusion from the political
process many Americans harbor. "She addresses issues that affect
my people, and no one else seems to be doing that," a politically
experienced Hartford Board of Education member named Courtney
Gardner, who raised hundreds of dollars for Fulani, explained to
me.

Of course, it is an empty symbol. In twenty years on the
political map, the NAP has used contributions and the labor of
volunteers not to redistribute political power but to bankroll
its own intertwined enterprises. It is, in fact, more parasitical
than political: diverting the energy and funds of often
well-intentioned supporters and poisoning the efforts of those it
can't deceive.

In a year when the Democratic presidential nominee may well be
someone who golfs at a whites-only club and is willing to throw
the switch of the electric chair, Lenora Fulani's appeal will
continue to grow. But add up the ledger: psychic terrorism aimed
at party members, disruption and intimidation of opponents,
elevation of political demagogues, hoodwinking of the public, and
an ideology teetering between right and left, between provocative
symbolism and head-spinning paranoia. One cannot support Fulani,
whether with a vote or a contribution, without aiding the
jackboot movement behind her.

===============================

ACCOMPANYING SIDE  BAR

===============================

NAP Inc.

The New Alliance Party has spun off dozens of organizations
representing the party in the political, cultural and business
arenas. Here is a selection of currently active organizations
affiliated with the NAP or its leaders. (Unless otherwise noted,
all outfits are headquartered in New York City.)

POLITICS/CANVASSING
Rainbow Lobby Inc. (offices in New York, Washington, Boston,
  Chicago and 	San Francisco)
U.S.-Congo Friendship Committee
Fred Newman Associates Lenora Fulani's Committee for Fair
   Elections

PSYCHOTHERAPY/EDUCATION
East Side Center for Short-Term Psychotherapy
Washington Center for Crisis Normalization (Washington, D.C.)
Newman and Braun
Fulani, Silverman and Young
Institutes for Social Therapy (various cities)
Barbara Taylor School

COMMUNICATIONS/PUBLISHING
Castillo Communications Inc. (public relations)
Castillo International Inc. (book and multimedia publishing)
Ilene Advertising Inc.
National Alliance (national newspaper)
Practice, "The Magazine of Psychology and Political Economy"
Probe, "The Intelligence Magazine of the Working Left"

CULTURE/ENTERTAINMENT
Castillo Cultural Center Inc.
Fred Newman Productions--Budweiser Musicruise
All Star Talent Show Network
New Alliance Productions

BUSINESS/POLITICAL SERVICES
International People's Law Center
Community Literacy Research Project
Automated Business Services

++++++++++++++++++++++++end of article++++++++++++++++++++++++++