Will the "democratic Left" rally to the defense of Kurt Stand? After all, the Washington labor lawyer -- arrested last week on charges he spent two decades spying for East Germany's murderous secret police force, the Stasi -- has an impeccable "democratic Left" credential. Stand is a member -- at least he was at the time of his arrest -- of the Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (the Michael Harrington socialists). And the DSA's left-wing supporters never tired of telling us during the Cold War that the organization was "nonpartisan," "anti-Communist," "just an idealistic branch of the labor movement," "the socialism of Mitterrand, not Mao."
So what does DSA honorary chairman Cornel West think about his Communist colleague? Does Barbara Ehrenreich, another honorary chair, think he's being railroaded? Why don't other DSA members -- like AFL-CIO president John Sweeney or Gloria Steinem or Rep. Ron Dellums -- come to Stand's defense? How can they sit silently by? Surely they won't submit to the capitalist yoke by throwing him off the Political Committee!
Meantime, Stand's wife, Theresa Marie Squillacote, a Pentagon lawyer who was also charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, was apparently pretty skilled at her day job. Indeed, so skilled that she was the recipient of a performance award from Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review. Squillacote led something called the "Protest Reform Working Group," which sounds oddly enough like some leftist Berlin groupuscule, badly translated into English. In fact, as explained in the New York Times, it's a group that "sought to simplify losing bidders' protests of Pentagon contracts." Ah yes, how very clever -- streamlining grievance procedures to heighten the conflict among the tentacles of the military-industrial complex. Now we understand what the vice president meant by "reinventing government."