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BARACK

H.

OBAMA

THE

UNAUTHORIZED

BIOGRAPHY

Webster Griffin Tarpley

2008

BARACK H. OBAMA: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Copyright © Webster Griffin Tarpley, 2008

All Rights Reserved

Published by Progressive Press

P.O. Box 126, Joshua Tree, Calif. 92252,

www.ProgressivePress.com

Length: 264,000 words.

Typeset left-justified in 11 pt. Times New Roman, for optimum value and ease of reading.

Classification: Nonfiction, Politics, Biography

ISBN: 0-930852-91-5. EAN: 978-0-930852-91-7

DIGITAL

ADVANCE

REVIEW

EDITION

September 2008

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tarpley, Webster Griffin

Barack H. Obama: the unauthorized biography / Webster Griffin Tarpley

ISBN-13: 978-0-930852-91-7 (Digital), 978-0-930852-81-8 (Offset edition)

1. Obama, Barack. 2. Presidential candidates – United States.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: OBAMA FROM THE FORD FOUNDATION TO THE TRILATERAL

COMMISSION..............................................................................................................................4

CHAPTER I: OBAMA’S ROOTS IN POLYGAMY AND THE FORD FOUNDATION..............12

CHAPTER II: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND RECRUITMENT BY ZBIGNIEW

BRZEZINSKI ..............................................................................................................................37

CHAPTER III: FOUNDATION-FUNDED RACISM IN CHICAGO: JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND

MICHELLE .................................................................................................................................91

CHAPTER IV: APPRENTICESHIP WITH FOUNDATION-FUNDED TERRORISTS: AYERS

AND DOHRN............................................................................................................................134

CHAPTER V: OBAMA’S HEART OF DARKNESS: REZKO, AUCHI, ALSAMMARAE, AND

CHICAGO GRAFT....................................................................................................................182

CHAPTER VI: GRABBING A SENATE SEAT WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS

TRILATERAL FRIENDS..........................................................................................................215

CHAPTER VII: THE HOPE POPE AND HIS TRILATERAL MONEY MACHINE..................265

CHAPTER VIII: “OUR SOULS ARE BROKEN” – “FEEL, DON’T THINK! BE VISCERAL!” –

MICHELLE OBAMA, POSTMODERN FASCIST IDEOLOGUE.............................................287

CHAPTER IX: OBAMA’S TRIUMPH OF THE WILL: THE 2008 PRIMARIES .....................309

CHAPTER X: OBAMA: A LOOMING WORLD TRAGEDY ...................................................369

CHAPTER XI: OBAMA AS SOCIAL FASCIST.......................................................................393

APPENDICES ...........................................................................................................................415

NOTES ......................................................................................................................................426

INTRODUCTION: OBAMA FROM THE FORD

FOUNDATION TO THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION

You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that poverty is closer to the root of the problem than

color. – Robert F. Kennedy, 1968

This book marks my first foray into the field of presidential candidate biography since the

publication of my George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992). I have been impelled to

return to the business of presidential candidate biography by a profound sense of alarm and national

emergency, because of the threat to the American people and to the future survival of the world

posed by the Trilateral Commission puppet and Manchurian candidate, Barack Hussein Obama.

During the early months of 2008, I issued a series of articles which analyzed the dynamics of

Obama’s postmodern coup d’état from the standpoint of comparing the Illinois Messiah’s lemming

legions and Kool-Aid cult fanatic following with the incipient and inchoate fascist movement which

coalesced around the young Benito Mussolini between 1919 and 1922, in a period of crisis similar

to the one we are traversing today. These articles were supplemented by a theoretical introduction

restating the basic characteristics of a fascist mass movement, and also by an extended comparison

between Obama’s campaign platform and the record in office of Jimmy Carter, who is the most

recent example of a puppet president controlled by the Trilateral-Rockefeller banking elite. I also

benefited from valuable contributions from my friends Bruce Marshall and Jonathan Mowat.

The resulting book was entitled Obama the Postmodern Coup: the Making of a Manchurian

Candidate, and was offered to the public for the first time on Monday, April 7, 2008, thanks to the

superlative efforts of the eminent publisher John Leonard of Progressive Press in California. Our

original intention had been to include a biography of the mystery candidate Barack Hussein Obama,

but in the end we decided that it was better to issue a first volume well in advance of the April 22

Pennsylvania primary. Now, a few months later, we are delivering a second installment in the

continuing process of exposing and unmasking the enigmatic Messiah Obama. We ask for the

reader’s indulgence for the fact that this book had to be assembled in haste, but we are confident

that it contains the concepts necessary to understanding the threat posed by Obama, from the

standpoint of elementary class consciousness.

THE ONLY STUDY BASED ON AN EXPLICIT CLASS ANALYSIS

OF ELITISTS VS. WORKING PEOPLE

The 2008 campaign has been remarkable for having had the great merit of focusing attention on

the issue of class, elitism, and oligarchy, with Obama furnishing the obvious villain on the elitist

side. This book is a product of the anti-oligarchical or American school of historical writing. The

analysis is conducted from the standpoint of the New Deal tradition. Class consciousness as used

here means first of all the method exemplified by Plato in his Republic, above all awareness of the

abuses of the one (tyranny), the few (oligarchy), and the many (mob rule or ochlocracy). Our world

is generally a world of oligarchy, which is now threatening to pass through an interlude of mob rule

and then into tyranny. This book is also based on the class analysis of Machiavelli’s Discourses,

which is infinitely superior to that of Marx. In Machiavelli’s terms, the Obama campaign is a

project of the nobility (gentiluomini) and the urban bankers (ottimati or patrizi, in Britain as well as

the US) to mobilize the city mob, especially excitable youth (plebe) against the middle class

(popolo), under extreme crisis conditions. This book is also founded on the experience of the

Introduction: Obama from the Ford Foundation to the Trilateral Commission 5

Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal as the most recent successful historical model in how to organize

the American people to deal with a world economic depression.

A critical unauthorized biography of Senator Barack Hussein Obama is all the more urgent today

because nothing competent in this line has been forthcoming so far. Back in 1991, when I began

writing the unauthorized biography of George Bush the elder, I found that the biographical literature

about the candidate was rather limited. There was a campaign biography from 1980, a campaign

biography from 1988, and some biographical essays for 1992. These had all been generated from

Bush family documents and printouts. There were also a limited number of critical studies, which

were either very brief, incomplete, or useless for other reasons. Another biography of Bush the

Elder which appeared after the election turned out to be just another cover-up. But all in all, the

biographical literature was relatively limited, and there were no real autobiographies, memoirs or

books written by the candidate.

With Obama, the picture is radically different. Obama is a word-monger. The candidate himself

claims to be the author of not one but two books, although it is clear that he has had much help from

the ghost-writing staff of the Trilateral-Bilderberg combine. The first is a long autobiographical

memoir entitled Dreams from My Father, which Obama sent into the world back in 1995. This

book documents Obama’s obsession with the polygamous Kenyan father who showed no interest in

him, with race and racism, and above all with himself. It is a document which already suggests that

the author is not just a racist, but also a deeply troubled existentialist megalomaniac, since it is

surely a rare man who writes his own autobiography before he has reached the age of 35, when he

still has accomplished absolutely nothing. This is the book which we define as Obama’s

postmodern Mein Kampf. Obama is also the author of a more conventional catalog of campaignoriented

political positions The Audacity of Hope, with its title drawn from one of the ranting

sermons of Obama’s racist guru and hatemeister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

1995: DREAMS FROM MY FATHER – OBAMA’S POSTMODERN MEIN KAMPF

The first time I heard Obama speak, the first words that passed through my mind were, “slippery

as an eel.” This is the main problem with the things that Obama himself has written, as well as with

his campaign in general. Both books written by Obama make it their primary business to deceive

the reader, for obvious purposes of political gain. Dreams is designed to mislead about the

candidate himself, while The Audacity of Hope seeks to muddy the waters concerning his political

ideas and policies. Far too often the audacity of hope that we are promised turns out to be nothing

more than the mendacity of dope, on the part of a candidate whose mental impairment owing to

narcotics abuse during his college years is certainly comparable to that of the notorious George W.

Bush — as we can see in Obama’s striking inability to speak coherently in the absence of the glass

plates of a Teleprompter sitting in front of his nose.

The Audacity of Hope has been described by the reactionary Ann Coulter as Obama’s dime-store

Mein Kampf. This is accurate in at least one way, since both books deal with the quest for racial

identity and the need to overcome the various barriers to the assertion of that identity. Well before

Miss Coulter had come on the scene, I had published an article on the Internet referring to Obama’s

postmodern Mein Kampf, which represents a more exact description of Obama’s actual ideology

and world outlook, which is that of an existentialist reader of the Third World pro-terrorist

ideologue, Frantz Fanon. Obama’s book is also an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Alex

Haley’s Roots. Obama’s memoir may thus be described as Roots lite, but with the identity trip being

carried out by a Fanon-style existentialist.

6 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

THE MENDACITY OF DOPE

But the books by Obama himself are only the beginning of the cloud of obfuscation and deception

which envelops the Perfect Master. There are easily two dozen biographical studies of the Illinois

Senator, and they are almost without exception characterized by fawning adulation, adolescent hero

worship, and messianic hagiography. They add up to so many versions of the Life and Miracles of

St. Barack the Good. I have found it easy to dispense with the vast majority of these meretricious

and venal little books. One or two exceptions do stand out: there is, for example, Shelby Steele, a

kind of black neocon, who makes many intelligent observations about Obama’s character.

Then there are the hard-line neocon critics of Obama. Some of them have managed to perform

an important public service by forcing the odious figures of the gangster Tony Rezko, the Reverend

Jeremiah Wright, the terrorist William Ayers, and the terrorist Bernardine Dohrn — all of whom

belong to Obama’s immediate social circle — into the public eye in the face of hysterical opposition

by NBC, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the other assorted media whores

for Obama. But, for any task of analysis more complicated than the straight exposing and outing of

Obama’s rogues’ gallery of personal friends and associates, the neocon methods break down and

often lapse into absurdity. The biggest absurdities are that Obama is really a Moslem, or else that

Obama is really a Marxist AND Communist.

We state emphatically here at the outset: Obama is a creature and puppet of finance capital and

of the Wall Street bankers and investment bankers, as represented by the Trilateral Commission,

Bilderberger Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones Society, Ford Foundation, and

Chicago School of Friedmanite economics. The family business which Obama inherited from his

mother (a Ford Foundation anthropologist and counterinsurgency operative who also worked for the

World Bank and the US Agency for International Development) was to work for foundations. And

this is what Obama has done in his life, working at various times for or with the Gamaliel

Foundation, the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and other

foundations and entities which notoriously look to the Ford Foundation for guidance and leadership.

Obama is best described as a foundation-bred counterinsurgent, that is to say an operative in the

service of the US financier ruling class whose task it is to wreck and abort any positive outcomes

that might be forthcoming from the political ferment which is shaking the globe, and above all from

the deep political upsurge which is clearly at hand in this country.

Obama claims to be a uniter, but the simplest empirical survey will show that he is the most

explosive divider seen in this country in decades, since he has succeeded in splitting both the

Democratic Party and the US population in general according to the classic fault lines of white

against black, black against Hispanic, black against Asian, black against Jewish, men against

women, old against young, rich against poor. Having seen Obama accomplish all of this in less

than a year and a half on the campaign trail, we can confidently predict that an Obama presidency

would in all probability put the United States well on its way to civil war. Giving Obama and his

financier controllers the White House would represent an act of national suicide for this country,

with the most catastrophic implications for the world as a whole. This analysis is corroborated by

the fact that Obama, alone among all the protagonists of the 2008 presidential contest, possesses

either a postmodern fascist mass movement, or a very plausible facsimile thereof. These are the

lemming legions who are not supporting a program of measures that the government might take, but

who are hysterically loyal to and obsessed with Obama as a fantasy figure and charismatic savior –

in other words, as an emerging fascist leader. As those who lived through Italy in 1922 and

Germany in 1933 remind us in the writings they have left behind, there is simply no comparison

between a normal, corrupt, bourgeois parliamentary regime and a fascist seizure of power. These

Introduction: Obama from the Ford Foundation to the Trilateral Commission 7

are qualitatively distinct, and set Obama apart from all of his competitors in a way that we can only

ignore at our own very great peril.

The only way to conduct a satisfactory analysis of the Obama agitation is to use a class

standpoint, rather than a racial criterion or an outlook based on gender. Obama is an operative for

the finance oligarchs. The Democratic Party bureaucracy is supporting Obama and opposing

Senator Clinton because this is the decree of Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission, the

Bilderberger group, the Ford Foundation, Skull and Bones, the Chicago School, the Council on

Foreign Relations, and other ruling class institutions. The Democratic Party bosses like Howard

Dean and Donna Brazile are not supporting Obama because they care about what happens to black

voters. The Democratic Party has proved repeatedly that it cares nothing whatever about the fate of

black voters. At the same time, it is very naïve to assume that the explanation for the slander

campaign of the controlled corporate media against Hillary Clinton is that the media whores for

Obama are motivated by misogyny and hatred of women. That may be a factor in individual cases,

but the main reason the controlled media are vilifying Senator Clinton is that they have been

ordered by their Wall Street paymasters to do so. The main issues in this contest are class issues,

and not racial or gender issues. Blue-collar working-class voters are not generally opposed to

Obama because of race, but rather because they can sense in his elitism and condescension that he is

a candidate loyal solely to the dictates of the financiers.

The phalanx of right-wing radio commentators who call themselves conservatives is attempting

to portray Obama as an ultraliberal, “the most liberal senator in the Democratic Party,” according to

a study produced by National Journal. This is a very weak, tired, unconvincing way to deal with

Obama, and it is ultimately a loser. This is not very scary, and to do justice to the horrifying reality

of the Obama threat, it ought to be very scary indeed. To say that Obama is a liberal, as Rush

Limbaugh incessantly does, is to say that he is just more of the same, from the same tired old

playbook of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. If Obama is just the latest liberal and there is

nothing new under the sun, then ho-hum. This approach fatally underestimates how radically

different and how extremely dangerous Obama really is. Sean Hannity does a little better with his

mantra of “Stop the radical.” But it soon turns out that this means radical liberal, which is also not

going to launch a thousand ships against Obama.

The first instinct of most right-wingers is to look at Obama’s middle name of Hussein, and

perhaps at his Moslem father and step-father and at his time in school in Indonesia, and announce

that Obama is a Moslem. But this will hardly do. Obama’s father and step- father were united not by

the Koran, but rather by their shared devotion to Johnny Walker, which increased as they got older.

And if Obama himself were a secularized Moslem, so what? Voters have a right to know Obama’s

religious history in full detail, but there is no religious test for office. But Obama is something very

sinister indeed. Obama himself is either an atheist, or much more likely a Satanist of the apostate

Jeremiah Wright-James Cone-black liberation theology school, a Christian heresy which places

racist hatred instead of charity at the center of its edifice of faith. Wright is ultimately the high priest

of a death cult. Obama is, more precisely, an existentialist fascist made of equal parts 1969

Weatherman race war theory and Frantz Fanon’s cult of violent Third World rebellion. This is what

low-income blue collar voters in West Virginia have understood far better than all the effete snobs

who profess postmodernism at Harvard.

The other approach is to paint Obama as a Marxist and communist, in the Cold War McCarthyite

tradition. Here is an article by Dana Milbank, a decadent member of Skull and Bones who frequents

the Keith Olberman Grand Guignol propaganda show on MSNBC-Obamavision, also known as the

Brzezinski network. Milbank is a cynical cataloguer of the politically grotesque. The following is

8 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Milbank’s satire of a group of aging and rabid neocons who gathered recently in a Washington café

to review the evidence that Obama was a communist, a Marxist, and a subversive. This group,

assembled by America’s Survival Inc., met in the basement of Ebenezer Coffee House at Second

and F streets NE. Milbank writes:

Here are some things we can look forward to learning about Barack Obama: that he was

mentored in high school by a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party; that he

launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home of a terrorist and a killer; that while

serving as a state senator, he was a member of a socialist front group; that his affiliations are so

dodgy that he would have trouble getting a government security clearance; that there is reason

to doubt his “loyalty to the United States.” “We believe that any public figure with links to

foreign and hostile interests should be asked to explain those associations,” the organizer, Cliff

Kincaid, told about two dozen conservatives and a few reporters. “In the case of Obama, a

relatively new figure on the national scene, we submit the facts suggest that he would have

serious difficulty getting a security clearance in the United States government. An FBI

background check was once used to examine one’s character, loyalty to the United States, and

associations.” “He’s a member of an organization [that is] openly a front for two socialist

groups,” reported another participant, Trevor Loudon. “Obama was raised and educated in a

very Marxist-rich environment, which often would limit his worldview,” reported a third, Max

Friedman. But the star of the show was the ancient Herbert Romerstein, who once plied his

trade for the Un-American Activities committee. “We decided to start going back and seeing

what things influenced him even before he was born,” Romerstein announced without a trace of

irony, before tying Obama to the Communist Party of the 1930s in Hawaii and Soviet spies on

the island. “This is the atmosphere that young Barack Obama grew up in.” The smoking gun?

Obama’s “mentor” during his teens, according to Kincaid, was “a key member of a Sovietcontrolled

network that was sponsored by Moscow and active in Hawaii.” “The Weather

Underground terrorists,” Romerstein added, “were instrumental in getting him into office in the

first place.” “It’s clear that the communists and the socialists are backing him,” Kincaid

confirmed. It was beginning to sound like a UFO convention. But the panelists took it seriously,

firing questions back at the audience. “Was Barack Obama working for Bill Ayers?” Kincaid

wondered aloud. Romerstein demanded: “How come for 20 years he sat in the pews and

listened to a raving anti-American racist? How did he bring his two young children to this

church to hear Wright rave on?” The evidence was compelling enough for participant Friedman.

For him, the Rosetta Stone was Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who Friedman alleged

was the protégé of a man with “a Communist Party-front record” in Chicago. “The more I look

at this, I’m seeing there are a lot of red-diaper babies around here,” he deduced. “By putting

these pieces of the puzzle together, I’m beginning to see something much bigger.” (Dana

Milbank, “Obama as You’ve Never Known Him!” Washington Post, May 23, 2008.)

This treatment shows how easy it is for a lightweight elitist scribbler like Milbank to satirize

these neocon critics of Milbank’s Perfect Master. Even a superficial flack like Milbank has no

trouble making these poor neocons look like relics from the hated and notorious House Un-

American Activities Committee who are daring to pollute the sublime dream of today’s golden

youth.

Obama has only the vaguest echoes of his mother’s vague devotion to old Karl Marx (the British

agent whose case officer was David Urquhart of the British Foreign Office). Obama is most

emphatically a product of the foundations and their cult of social manipulation and political

subversion, but always in the service of a social order centered on Wall Street. Obama is himself an

Introduction: Obama from the Ford Foundation to the Trilateral Commission 9

operative of finance capital at the highest level. If his hardware comes from the Ford Foundation

where his mother was employed, Obama’s software comes from the Trilateral Commission, the

Bilderberger group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the RAND Corporation, Skull and Bones, the

Chicago school of economics – in other words, the highest levels of the Anglo-American financier

oligarchy. If Mussolini started off as an agent of the British and French embassies and of certain

Venetian financiers, and Hitler began his career as an agent for German military intelligence,

Obama’s pedigree is the complex of institutions we have just stated. Obama is connected to Wall

Street by a million adamantine threads. Obama’s main controller, guru, adviser, and handler is none

other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who ran the catastrophic Trilateral administration of

Jimmy Carter thirty years ago. Such is the reality of Obama as he emerges from these pages.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND IS INDISPENSABLE

In order to understand Obama and the congeries of foundation-funded racist and terrorist

provocateurs and international gangsters who represent his immediate social circle, some significant

historical background is indispensable. Obama’s mother worked for the Ford Foundation, and

Obama has worked for foundations like the Gamaliel, the Joyce, the Woods, and the Annenberg

Chicago Challenge all his life. But what do foundations do? Emphatically, they do not practice good

works of charity; they deal in cynical social and political manipulation in the service of the ruling

class. So it is necessary to explain the strategic doctrine which has governed the activities of the US

foundation community since the 1960s, especially in the framework of Reagan’s Executive Order

12333, which privatized the US intelligence community into front companies, law firms, and

especially foundations.

The public now knows that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church, where the incendiary

doctrine of black liberation theology, a school atypical of the black church, is proclaimed. But

where do Wright and his sidekicks Otis Moss III and Dwight Hopkins come from? Are they an

authentic and spontaneous expression of the black church, or are they controlled assets deployed in

a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy by foundations and divinity schools that represent the most

parasitical interests in Wall Street? The historical approach is the only way to clarify these issues.

Obama claims to be an apostle of bipartisan cooperation and the transcendence of legislative

wrangling and haggling. His background in this regard is real, but it is not what the public thinks.

Obama is a product of the infamous Illinois bipartisan Combine, a joint venture by the Illinois

Republican and Democratic Parties to savagely loot the people of that state. Obama’s godfathers

include not just corrupt machine pols like Mayor Daley and Governor Blagojevich, but also the

Levantine gangsters and underworld figures Rezko, Auchi, and Alsammarae, all part of what the

FBI has been probing under the heading of Operation Board Games. Obama’s bosom buddy Rezko

is now a convicted felon, having been found guilty on June 5, 2008 on 16 of 24 counts in Chicago

federal court, including for scheming to get kickbacks out of money-management firms wanting

state business, and a contractor who wanted to build a hospital in northern Illinois. Auchi and

Alsammarae are also convicted felons. Obama’s long history in graft and corruption make him the

most corrupt and dirtiest presidential candidate in many decades.

Americans have now been told that the 1960s Weatherman terrorist bombers and provocateurs

(and foundation operatives) Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have sponsored Obama’s career as a

foundation asset and later as a holder of elective office. But what were the Weathermen? And, were

Ayers and Dohrn honest revolutionaries who chose terrorism, or were they intelligence community

operatives sent in to destroy the student movement and peace movement by taking over Students for

10 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

a Democratic Society (SDS) in the wake of the New York City teachers’ strike, and then scuttling

SDS from within, in a matter of months? Only historical background can clarify the question of how

Obama’s penchant for associating with known criminals makes him the most radical subversive

ever to get this close to the presidency.

The public is being urged to regard Obama as a politician of phenomenal organizational ability

because of his ability to game the absurd rules of the Democratic Party. But what if Obama had

been a protected asset of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Trilateral Commission since about 1981-

1983, and a man whose entire career has been fostered and promoted by the Trilateral-Bilderberger

Wall Street group? What if Obama’s campaign ran on Rockefeller-Soros Trilateral cash, with the

backing of the matchless Trilateral network of media whores and agents of influence? Here again,

adequate historical background is necessary.

The last time that the Trilateral Commission fielded a relatively unknown puppet with the goal

of seizing power through an insurgency based on surprise, the result was the catastrophic presidency

of Jimmy Carter, who turned foreign affairs over to Brzezinski, while placing economic policy in

the hands of Trilateral agent Paul Adolph Volcker, who destroyed what was left of the US industrial

economy. Today Obama is attempting to profile himself as something of an economic populist.

Only an appeal to history can show how today’s Trilateral puppet Obama will go beyond

yesterday’s Trilateral puppet Carter, this time imposing austerity in the name of third world

solidarity, sacrifice in the name of global warming, and perhaps even reparations for racism. As

with Carter, the beneficiaries will be the Rockefeller-Soros Wall Street interests.

Obama promises hope and change, but his campaign bears uncanny similarities to the early days

of Italian fascism in 1919-1922. Only historical background can show the many parallels between

Obama and the young Mussolini.

This book is not an invitation to contemplation. It is a call to mobilize. At this writing, we are at

the half-way point in a postmodern fascist coup in the United States. There is still time to prevent

this coup from succeeding.

In January 1933, just before Hitler seized power, people in Germany were as careworn and

overwhelmed and overstressed as many Americans feel today. A combination of bankers and

corporate chiefs had decided they needed more than a dictator; they needed a dictator with his own

private army of street fighters, the storm troopers. The Social Democrats (the SPD) were a huge

mass party backed up by trade unions, sports clubs, women’s groups, and their own self-defense

corps, but they dithered and dawdled and talked about a general strike, and never did anything. The

communists (the KPD) were also a large mass party, with a big organization of unemployed

workers, and their own self-defense corps of armed veterans. But the communists were convinced

that they had been living under fascism for a long time, and that the Social Democrats were really

social fascists and therefore even worse than Hitler. So nobody called a general strike to stop Hitler

when this would have been possible. Many of the SPD and KPD leaders who refused to mobilize

against the National Socialist seizure of power soon had to flee the country when their parties were

outlawed and their members expelled from the parliament by the Nazis. Many of those who stayed

behind were either assassinated in the streets, or died in concentration camps. Perhaps we can learn

something from this chilling example of the importance of mobilizing while mobilization is still

possible.

If this book attracts some readers, the Obama campaign will inevitably attempt to vilify me as a

racist. I therefore state formally that I am not a racist, but just the opposite. I am convinced that race

is a mystification with no scientific basis whatsoever. Politics and government based on race are

Introduction: Obama from the Ford Foundation to the Trilateral Commission 11

sure to fail. My own standpoint is the universality of the human personality, with all persons being

ontologically equal. I lived the first years of my life in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a town

which, thanks in part to a large population of abolitionists living there, had largely achieved racial

integration in the decades following the Civil War. I lived on the same street where W.E.B. DuBois

had grown up by the Housatonic River and close to the integrated school he attended c.1870.1 I later

lived in Flushing, New York, a part of north Queens which had been the site of the first formal

demand for religious tolerance in North America – the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657. In the

1950s, this community was thoroughly integrated down to my Cub Scout troop, where the den

mother was Mrs. Andrew Jenkins, a black lady and the mother of one of my friends. Flushing was

so tolerant that, around the time of the New York World’s Fair of 1964, it began to attract residents

from the Far East, and now hosts a large Chinese community. So I reject any charge of racism. At

the same time, I reject the absurd taboos which the bankrupt ideologues of foundation-style

multiculturalism and political correctness are seeking to impose, since these are forms of insidious

class prejudice against the working people of all races in this country. In many ways, this book

continues the critique of foundation-based multiculturalism from a New Deal standpoint which was

offered by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger in his The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a

Multicultural Society. Those who actually read this book will be able to evaluate my argument that

racism in the United States today is very largely the product of a deliberate and cynical divide-andconquer

policy carried forward above all by the foundations and by the oligarchs and elitists who

control them – that is to say, by precisely those groups who have created Obama. We need a return

to the New Deal and a Marshall Plan for the cities, not another fruitless discussion about race of the

kind proposed by Obama. To finish off racism, we will need full employment, something which has

hardly been seen in this country since 1945. Full employment is also the key to solving most of the

problems associated with the flows of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, since a return to

economic progress will immediately create a labor shortage that will put these issues in the proper

perspective. To obtain an economic recovery for the benefit of all the people from the present Bush

world economic depression, we will need updated versions of New Deal programs, and on the way

to getting them we will need to break the power of the foundations, who will attempt to maintain the

fragmentation and subjection of the US population by every means at their disposal. This book, it is

hoped, will represent a step towards exposing the destructive elitist manipulation of society by the

foundations and the sinister intentions of the leading foundation operative on the scene today,

Obama.

CHAPTER I: OBAMA’S ROOTS IN POLYGAMY AND THE

FORD FOUNDATION

How can I refuse the best education? – Barack Hussein Obama Senior

For many Americans, Barack Hussein Obama is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Never in recent American history has a candidate so little known approached the presidency. The

only recent comparison is offered by Jimmy Carter, and Carter — who had served as governor of

Georgia for four years — was an open book in comparison to Obama. After Carter had entered the

White House, voters were shocked to realize that they had elected a mystery man — they had

bought a pig in a poke. George W. Bush was another little-known candidate: he too talked about

being a uniter and not a divider, promised a foreign policy based on humility, and pledged to govern

in the spirit of compassionate conservatism. Here too, the reality turned out to be much different.

Back in 1991, I realized that even though George H. W. Bush had been occupying the White

House for a number of years, there was no critical and unauthorized biography of him. I therefore

set out to write such a critical biography, which still stands today as the only non-apologetic study

of his life. My present task is to offer readers a chance to get to know Obama before they make the

irrevocable decision to grant him state power in the midst of one of the most severe crises this

country has ever known.

As we have suggested elsewhere in this book, one way to parse the speeches and promises of

presidential candidates is to examine their advisers, handlers, and controllers, since many of these

will make their way into the cabinet and into the White House palace guard. Another important

method is to examine the candidate’s financial backers, and we will do so. A third approach is to

bear in mind the famous dictum that biography is destiny — meaning that the life experience of any

individual is bound to exert a profound influence on the way that person will tend to use the powers

of a public office. It is mainly this third approach which we will implement in this section, seeking

to assemble what is known about the life of Obama with a view to extracting clues about what kind

of a president he might be.

The guiding principle of the present treatment is that when a politician is seeking to get his hands

anywhere near the famous button which can be used to launch worldwide thermonuclear war, when

that politician is in effect demanding life-and-death power over American voters and their families,

then there are no limits to the public’s right to know anything and everything about all facets of that

politician’s life, without exclusions of any sort. For a presidential candidate, there is and can be no

private sphere. Everything is fair game. Researchers are not only allowed to delve into the

candidate’s background in every conceivable way — they are imperatively obligated to do so.

BARRY WHO?

Obama presents unprecedented difficulties for the presidential biographer. His clever handlers,

controllers, and managers seem to have understood very well that a candidate with a resume, a

voting record, and a history of past performance can very easily find that these things become

liabilities when they are scrutinized by the opposition research of political adversaries, or simply by

journalists in general. Any record at all is apt to become grist for the opponent’s attack machine.

Obama appears to have been advised by Senator Daschle that it is better not to stay in the Senate

very long before running for president, since every vote that a Senator makes can represent a policy

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 13

commitment which is going to offend some group or stratum in the voting public. Ironically, it

turns out that in politics, the best resume is often no resume at all. Obama represents this approach

in an extreme form. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who with her usual cynicism has

rushed to join media swoon for the Illinois Senator, has called Obama “the 46-year-old virgin.” The

columnist Spengler of the Asia Times observes that “We know less about Senator Obama than about

any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton

helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard

Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with

the wishful thinking of those around him.” (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008) Obama’s halfsister,

Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher from Hawaii, says cryptically, “He’s a very cool

customer.” The candidate himself admits: “I am an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams.”

(Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)

Indeed, Obama would appear to stand for nothing, with no principles, no commitments, no

loyalties, and no real program. In spite of this, Obama did not spring fully armed from the head of

Zbigniew Brzezinski, nor did he rise from the foam of the ocean. He does have a past, and it is to

this past and its lessons that we now turn.

So little is known about the life of Obama that wild rumors have proliferated about who he really

is. Is he a devout Moslem? Is he an Iranian agent? Is he a Marxist crypto-revolutionary? The

conclusion of the present study is that he is none of these. Obama is certainly an ambitious and

ruthless demagogue who can be counted on to be wholly unscrupulous in his pursuit and exercise of

power. He is the creature of those intelligence circles which we may describe as the foundationfunded

Left CIA. Obama is the wholly-controlled puppet of these circles. He has been chosen for

his current task first of all because of his uncanny anthropologist’s ability to size up and profile his

interlocutors for the purpose of duping them all and manipulating them the more efficiently. He

brings to his political campaign the detachment of an anthropologist doing field work: he treats

American voters as mere ethnographic material, mere grist for his power machine. Obama is at

heart a cosmopolitan, meaning that he would seek to float above the various constituent groups of

the US population in the same way that the supernational and cosmopolitan Prince Metternich

sought to float above the subject nationalities of the Austrian Empire until he was forced to flee to

London in 1848. Obama’s connection to the American people is as tenuous as that of such figures

as the German Nesselrode, the Greek Kapodistrias, and the Sardinian Pozzo di Borgo, when they all

found themselves working for the Foreign Ministry of the supernational Russian Empire. Obama is

also reminiscent of those Coptic Christians like the Boutros-Ghali family whom the British

habitually chose as top-level civil servants during their protectorate over Egypt. Imperial regimes

have often chosen to govern large populations through ethnic minorities, and an Obama

administration would give the United States a taste of this kind of rule for the first time.

THE MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Underneath Obama’s cool and aristocratic detachment, however, there lurks a deep resentment

against the broad strata of the American people. It is not a hatred of Wall Street bankers, of CIA

assassins, of war criminals, nor of mercenaries who kill people in countries far away. It must

unavoidably be described as a hatred of the American people themselves, and it is therefore a

sentiment which any responsible person must strongly condemn. Despite his evasive denials,

Obama has a real elective cultural affinity for the “God damn America” outlook expressed by his

pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Based on the research embodied in this study, we can

confidently predict that a future Obama administration would impose austerity, sacrifice, and

14 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

foreign wars on the American people with a wanton cruelty which has not been seen so far, not even

under Bush the younger. It is because of their accumulated anti-American animus that Obama and

his wife have been selected by the circles of the Trilateral Commission for their current attempts to

carry out a postmodern coup d’état, leading in turn to what we must designate as postmodern

fascism.

Obama is a disciple neither of Mohammed nor of Marx. He comes rather from the school of

Frantz Fanon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His relation to Rousseau is especially close: both the

Rousseau of the noble savage who is the patron saint of modern anthropology, and the Rousseau of

the collective will, who is the guiding spirit of modern totalitarian liberalism.

Obama’s world is the left wing of the US intelligence community as it emerged in the wake of

President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 of 1982. It is a world composed of the Ford Foundation

and other foundations specialized in social engineering, social manipulation, social control, and

political counterinsurgency against possible challenges to the system of oligarchical financier

domination of national affairs. It is a world populated by former Weatherman terrorists, black

cultural nationalists, radical Palestinians on the CIA payroll, and left liberal ideologues financed by

the foundations or even by the defense budget. It is the world of the National Endowment for

Democracy, the Soros Foundation, and the veterans of the Jimmy Carter Administration.

BIRTH AND FAMILY

Many sources allege that Barack Hussein Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu,

Hawaii. But even this most basic fact of Obama’s existence is highly controversial, and as this book

goes to press, is a contested issue in the courageous law suit of Philadelphia lawyer Philip J. Berg,

who asserts that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and accordingly cannot be

considered qualified for the presidency.2 His father, Barack Obama, Senior was a member of the

Luo tribe or people from Nyanza Province, Kenya, in East Africa. His mother was Stanley [sic] Ann

Dunham, an American woman who would later became an anthropologist and a consultant for the

World Bank. Obama’s parents met when they were both students at the East-West Center of the

University of Hawaii at Manoa. When Barack Obama was only two years old, his father abandoned

his wife and young son in Hawaii and went to Harvard University, where he obtained a doctorate in

economics, and later returned to Kenya to become a government official. Barack Obama would see

his father only once more in his life.

Barack Obama is listed as the author of two books: Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race

and Inheritance (1995), and The Audacity of Hope (2006). From the first of these works, a number

of themes emerge. First of all, Obama is obsessed with himself. His books do not really represent

programs or promises concerning things that he wants to do for the American public, or to improve

the state of the world. They are concerned above all with his own mental states, yearnings, desires,

and confusions. Secondly, Obama is obsessed with the trauma of having been abandoned by his

father at the age of two, and with the vicissitudes of having grown up as a fatherless boy with all the

problematic syndromes this may imply. He was also later abandoned by his mother. Thirdly,

Obama is obsessed with his African roots; he may at times portray himself as being multicultural,

but his real center of gravity is his Afrocentrism. He is thus a radical subjectivist, and a

postmodernist. His thoroughgoing postmodernism means that he espouses a method of thought

which no American president has thus far represented. These are important things to bear in mind

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 15

as we proceed. Since Obama accords so much importance to his own African background, it is

legitimate to follow him back to his grandfather.

GRANDFATHER OBAMA FROM KENYA:

UNCLE TOM OF BRITISH COLONIALISM

Obama’s grandfather was named Hussein Onyango Obama, who was born about 1895 in Kandu

province, Kenya, and died in 1979. He practiced traditional polygamy and had at least three wives:

Helima, who was childless; Akumu, who was the mother of Sarah Obama and Barack Hussein

Obama, Sr.; and Auma Obama. He also claimed to have married a woman in Burma when he lived

there as the servant of a British officer during World War II. Grandfather Obama belonged to the

Luo tribe. For those who may be scandalized by the idea that the candidate belongs to a tribe, we

can establish this fact by referring to Obama’s own writings. In Dreams from My Father, Obama

travels to Kenya. Here he meets a vendor, an old woman, who tries to make him pay the tourist

price for a necklace. One of Obama’s relatives intervenes to help him avoid paying the inflated

price reserved for foreigners. The dialogue goes like this: ‘“She says that you look like an American

to her.” “Tell her I’m Luo,” I said, beating my chest!”’ (Dreams 310) So Obama, based on his own

memoir, has a strong sense of tribal identity.

The Luo or Lwo people are a Nilotic group from the eastern Sudan whose language (sometimes

called Dholuo) belongs to the Nilo-Saharan language family. The Luo are one of the most numerous

ethnic groups of East Africa, and specialize in agriculture, livestock raising, and fishing. Their

demographic center of gravity is the northeastern shore of Lake Victoria. They currently inhabit

areas of five nations, including the southern Sudan, northern Uganda, eastern Congo, western

Kenya, and part of Tanzania. The Luos are tall and thin Nilotic peoples of haughty and aristocratic

bearing, like the Tutsis. Folklore attributes to the taller Nilotics like Tutsis and Luos the desire to

dominate the shorter Hutu and Kikuyu peoples. Michelle Obama, in the initial transcripts of her

infamous “whitey” tape of July 2004, reportedly takes a strong position in favor of the Tutsi, which

is the very essence of the overall line of Anglo-American imperialism in this part of Africa, which

has always been to support the Tutsi against the Hutu. Some famous Luos include the Kenyan

politician Tom Mboya (assassinated by a Kikuyu in 1959), former Uganda president Milton Obote,

and the infamous butcher Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a new dark ages

terrorist rebel group which operates in Uganda. The traditional ideological profile of the Luo is that

they are clever but sometimes lethargic, and addicted to show-boating. The Luo are currently

receiving US-UK imperialist support against the majority Kikuyu people in the tribal-ethnic power

struggle unleashed inside Kenya. The Luo represent one of the micro-nationalities which Zbigniew

Brzezinski intends to liberate in the course of his “dignity” campaign against the nation-state. The

advantages for the imperialists of backing the Luo are obvious: if an independent Kurdish state

would carve Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, a Luo state would carve Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Kenya,

and Tanzania.

OBAMA’S LUO TRIBE: SMART, LAZY, SHOWBOATERS

What kind of people are these Luo? Modern Americans have an idea of the ideology or

mentality of the French, Germans, Italians, Russians, Chinese, and so forth, but what are Luos like?

A standard work on Luo mentality is A.B.C. Ocholla-Ayayo’s Traditional Ideology and Ethics

Among the Southern Luo (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1976). Ochollo-

Ayayo is a Luo writing a profile of the mentality and culture of his own people. Since Obama has

16 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

spoken about his grandmother as a “typical white person,” we may perhaps be allowed here to use

this same method of sampling to make some generalizations about the Luo. Let us use the first Luo

we meet, in this case Ochollo-Ayayo himself, as a typical Luo person, and factor in the analysis he

provides as well as critical reactions to his work, some of them also from Luos. In this way we may

get at least a few insights into Luo ideology and mentality.

The overall profile of the Luo is that they are clever, lazy, and love showboating. Ochollo-Ayayo

goes further, writing about “virtue boasting,” which comes complete with virtue songs and virtue

names or praise names. The Luo cultivate witchcraft and sorcery, although they have increasingly

turned in recent decades to independent churches. The Luo have been studied for the practice of

geophagy (dirt eating) among children.

In a review of Hans-Egil Hauge’s Luo Religion and Folklore (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974),

Ocholla-Ayayo lectures Hauge about using the wrong terminology in a discussion of polygamy

among the Luo: “Rather than saying that the Luo are polygamous, it would have been more

accurate to say that they practice polygyny [meaning, they have multiple wives at the same time].

The word ‘polygamy’ is ambiguous. It is also inaccurate that ‘by counting the number of huts one

can tell from a distance how many wives a man has,’” since some huts do not correspond to wives,

but may be used for other purposes, such as sleeping quarters for children. Ocholla-Ayayo, who

taught at Khartoum in the Sudan, is so pedantic that he berates Hauge, who published his book in

1974, for not citing a book that Ocholla-Ayayo published two years later, in 1976.

Much of this review is devoted to a discussion of the evil spirits (jachien), and especially the

jajuok otieno, the night-runner or evil spirit who comes to steal cattle. This is an issue treated in

Obama’s Dreams. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the famous British intelligence figure and professor of

sociology at Oxford, did field work among the Luo in 1936, and produced articles like “Marriage

Customs of the Luo of Kenya” and “Ghostly Vengeance of the Kenya Luo,” Man 133 (1950). Evil

spirits are often those of grandparents who afflict grandchildren because these latter have failed to

carry out their filial duties. The night-runners become a large issue in Obama’s memoir (Dreams

435 and passim). Ocholla-Ayayo’s work is a “brittle inventory” of Luo norms, discussing questions

like pastoralism, the role of cattle and their value, kinship, polygamy/polygyny, and the premises of

Luo reasoning.

Ocholla-Ayayo’s critics tell us more than he does. These reviewers are themselves

anthropologists who deal in academic jargon, but they cannot suppress bursts of annoyance and

resentment at the author because of his pedantic, pompous, lecturing and hectoring method. One

reviewer writes that while the data presented by Ocholla-Ayayo are worthwhile, “the mannered and

often incoherent fashion in which they are presented is likely to alienate even the most welldisposed

of readers.” (Elizabeth Hopkins, ASA Review of Books 5 [1979], 216) This same reviewer

finds this Luo writer’s “belabored pronouncements” to be “verging at times on the tautological.”

There is also a tedious parade of erudition which the reviewer finds insufferable: “One must also

lament Ocholla-Ayayo’s determination to validate the monograph to the scholarly community. The

consequence is an accretion of self-conscious citations in which a hagiography as diverse as

Galatians, David Hume, and Adam Smith is invoked, as well as a multitude of modern

philosophers, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and jurists. Frequent and gratuitous

references to university mentors also prove regrettably intrusive and distracting.” This reviewer

concludes that the “fragmented, a temporal presentation of the material and the author’s failure to

explore the behavioral as well as the normative dimensions of traditional Luo ideology seriously

undermine its value for the general reader.” The lack of historical analysis is a key defect.

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 17

Obama’s grandfather is described as a strange, hard, autocratic and cruel man. (Dreams from My

Father 397, 406) “It is said of him that he had ants up his anus, because he could not sit still…. he

was very serious always. He was always curious about other people’s business, which is how he

learned to be a herbalist.” (Dreams 397) He was very fastidious and compulsively clean.

Grandfather Obama lived at the time that the British colonialists first arrived in Kenya. Grandfather

Obama was one of the first to imitate the practices of the British: at one point he went away for

some months, and came back wearing European trousers, shirts, and shoes. Kandu province is

located in the interior of Kenya, closer to Lake Victoria than to the Indian Ocean. When the British

arrived in Kandu they began setting up a colonial administration with a district commissioner. The

Kenyans “called this man Bwana Ogalo, which meant “the Oppressor” … he surrounded himself

with Luos who wore clothes like the white man to serve as his agents and tax collectors.” (Dreams

399) One of those who went to work for the British during this time was grandfather Obama, who

“had learned to read and write, and understood the white man system of paper records and land

titles. This made him useful to the white man, and during the war [World War I] he was put in

charge of road crews. Eventually he was sent to Tanganyika, where he stayed for several years.”

(Dreams 400) When grandfather Obama returned to Kandu, he staked his claim to a plot of land,

but he soon departed for Nairobi, where he again went to work for the British.

Obama’s grandfather worked in Nairobi as a butler and cook for the British. He “was popular

with employers and worked in the estates of some of the most important white men, even Lord

Delamere.” (Dreams 401) Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, was the undisputed political

boss of the British colony of Kenya from about 1900 until his death in 1931; he was known as the

Kenyan equivalent of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, meaning that he was the dominant political

personality of the colony. He had huge estates in the Rift valley. According to Wikipedia, “It is

believed that on one of these Somaliland hunting trips, Delamere coined the term “white hunter” –

the term which came to describe the professional safari hunter in colonial East Africa.” The relation

with Lord Delamere is the first sign of anything extraordinary in the entire Obama clan. If Obama

seizes the presidency, it will be due in some measure to the fact that his grandfather chose to go to

work for the leading British imperialist politician in that part of the world.

Using his earnings, grandfather Obama was able to buy land and cattle in Kandu. He was very

strict about his property, and emerges as an obsessive-compulsive personality. He was also choleric

and violent, and was known for harshly beating his wives and any men who offended him. He was

often involved in shouting matches with his British employers, and once beat one of them with a

cane; he was fortunate to get off with a fine and a warning. He was so violent to his wife Akumu

that she tried repeatedly to get away from him, and finally deserted him for good, leaving behind the

young child who would become Barack Obama’s father.

A BATMAN IN THE BRITISH ARMY

During World War II, grandfather Obama accompanied the British Army captain who was his

employer as cook and servant. He was attached to a British regiment and was stationed in Burma,

Ceylon, Arabia, and Europe. When he returned to Kandu, he was economically well-off. When he

was almost 50, he decided to move to Alego, the family’s ancestral home. At that time Alego was

bush country, but grandfather Obama’s ability as a farmer allowed him to build up a successful

farming business. Grandfather Obama seems all in all to have had a Hobbesian temperament; he is

quoted as saying: “The African is thick. For him to do anything, he needs to be beaten.” (Dreams

407) Grandfather Obama appears to have started his life as a follower of traditional animist or

totemic religion. What Grandfather Obama “respected was strength — discipline…this is also why

18 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

he rejected the Christian religion…For a brief time, he converted [to Christianity], and even

changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your

enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins. To [him] this was foolish sentiment,

something to comfort women. And so he converted to Islam — he thought its practices conform

more closely to his beliefs,” Barack is told by his grandmother. (Dreams 407) According to some

accounts, he had been exposed to Islam during some time spent in Zanzibar. It was upon converting

to Islam that Grandfather Obama took the name Hussein, which lives on as the middle name of his

grandson, the current presidential candidate. Much of what we learn about Grandfather Obama

comes from Sarah, his third wife; this is the person Obama calls his grandmother. She is not,

however, a blood relative. Sarah Obama describes herself as a devout lifelong Muslim: “I am a

strong believer of the Islamic faith,” she has told interviewers.

Until his first visit to Kenya in the 1990s, candidate Obama had known very little about his

grandfather. The one thing he did know was that his grandfather had opposed his father’s decision

to marry the white woman Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii around 1960. Around this one incident,

the future candidate Obama has built an image of his grandfather as a proud Afrocentric race

patriot. Barack Hussein Obama, as the thorough postmodernist that he is, attempts in his writings to

derive his sense of personal identity not so much from his own achievements as an individual as

from his family and ethnic group. In Dreams from My Father, he tells of his bitter disappointment

with the reality of his grandfather’s life: “I knew that, as I had been listening to the story of our

grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had always

been of an autocratic man — a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent

man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule. There was no real basis for this image, I now

realized — only the letter he had written to Gramps saying that he didn’t want his son marrying

white. That, and his Muslim faith, which in my mind had become linked with the Nation of Islam

back in the states. What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words

to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House n****r.” (Dreams 406)

FATHER: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA SENIOR, “DRUNKEN LECHER”

Of all of Grandfather Obama’s wives, it was Akumu who asserted herself the most, constantly

contradicting her husband and arguing with him. Because of this, Akumu was frequently beaten,

and made several attempts to run away. She disappeared for the last time when Barack Obama

Senior was nine years old. She went back to her family, found a new husband, and went away with

him to what was then called Tanganyika. Obama Senior was therefore raised by Sarah, another of

Grandfather Obama’s wives.

Several weeks after Akumu had fled from her harsh life with Grandfather Obama, Obama Senior

and his elder sister attempted to rejoin their mother. For almost two weeks they trudged along the

primitive roads of rural Kenya, sleeping in the fields and begging for food. They were both starving

when a passerby took them in and sent for Grandfather Obama. This was their last attempt to find

their mother, Akumu. Obama Senior was profoundly traumatized by losing his mother at the age of

nine; he “could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone

that I [Grandmother Sarah] was his mother, and although he would send Akumu money when he

became a man, to the end of his life he would always act coldly towards her.... Barack [Senior] was

wild and stubborn like Akumu.” (Dreams 413)

Barack Obama Senior is described as highly intelligent and quick to learn, but also very

mischievous. After Senior’s first day at the Mission school in the village, he told grandfather

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 19

Obama that he did not want to attend school because he already knew everything that was being

taught, and the teacher was a woman. Grandfather Obama shared this contempt for women, so

Senior was sent to a school 6 miles away where the teacher was a man. Only after this male teacher

beat him repeatedly did Senior learn to accept a woman teacher. Senior was often a truant, not

attending school for weeks on end, but mastering the entire subject matter just before the final

exams and coming in first in the class.

During World War II, many Kenyans were inducted into the British Army. When they returned

home, they began to support the cause of independence from colonial rule. Grandfather Obama

agreed with the demand for independence, but he refused to become associated with the

independence movements. He argued that Africans could never defeat British troops. “How can

the African defeat the white man,” he told Senior, “when he cannot even make his own bicycle? ...

That is why the black man will always lose.” (Dreams 417) Despite his refusal to join the

independence movement, Grandfather Obama was arrested by the British and held in a

concentration camp for more than six months because one of his personal enemies, an employee of

the British district commissioner, had settled a score by placing his name on the list of dangerous

subversives. When he finally returned home, his health was broken.

OBAMA SENIOR EXPELLED FROM PREP SCHOOL FOR HANKY-PANKY

Obama Senior had taken the entrance examination for the Maseno Mission School, an elite

college preparatory institution which very few Africans were allowed to attend. He was admitted to

this school and seemed to have a great future ahead of him, but he soon encountered disciplinary

problems. He insisted on violating the rules by bringing girls into his dormitory. He and his friends

stole chickens and yams from nearby farms because the dormitory food was not to their liking. At

first the teachers were indulgent because Senior was such a good student, but he was caught one too

many times and was expelled. When he returned home he was severely beaten by Grandfather

Obama, who forced him to go to Mombasa and take a job in the office of an Arab merchant. He

quarreled with the Arab and had to take a job that paid much less. He worked for a time as a

goatherd. This is the origin of BHO’s claim to be a son of a goatherd. Eventually Senior moved to

Nairobi and found work as a clerk for the British railway authority. He attended a pro-independence

meeting, and was arrested and jailed for a few days by the British. During this time Senior married

his first wife, Kezia, and soon had two children, Roy and Auma. At this time he was employed as

an office boy by an Arab merchant named Suleiman.

Up to now we have been forced to rely on candidate Obama’s own account of these events.

From this point on, we can begin to supplement this with other sources. A more detailed view of

Senior and Kezia’s early years is provided by some British journalists: ‘At 18, Barack Hussein

Obama Sr. (Senior) married a girl called Kezia from the local village. It was Kezia who remained

his one true love and to whom he always returned. She was a 16-year-old schoolgirl while Senior,

two years older, had just got his first proper job as an office clerk in Nairobi. Senior convinced

Kezia to elope with him to Nairobi. Her father, a local driver, was furious. Kezia said: “He did not

like Obama. My father and brothers came to Nairobi to bring me back. They said I had to go back to

school. When I wouldn’t, they said they would never speak to me again. Barack was also worried

about what his father (Grandfather Obama) would think because I was so young, but he gave us his

approval. He sent my mother and father 14 cows for my dowry.” Kezia and Barack Sr. set up home

in Jericho, a section of Nairobi created for government employees, and began a family. First son

Roy was born in March 1958.’ (London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

20 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

In contrast to the media swoon of total adulation and uncritical acceptance of Obama here in the

United States, the British Daily Mail stresses that much of the account given in Dreams from My

Father is disingenuous and untrue. They comment: “Indeed, by offering up a conveniently plotted

account of his personal history in this way, he might even have made a pre-emptive strike on those

sure to pose the awkward questions that inevitably face a serious contender for the White House.

Yet an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that, for all Mr Obama’s reputation for

straight talking and the compelling narrative of his recollections, they are largely myth.” (London

Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

Senior’s life began to change when he encountered two American women missionary teachers.

They helped him to sign up for a correspondence course leading to a secondary school certificate.

He took the equivalency test at the US Embassy, and passed. He then applied to numerous

universities in the United States, and in 1958 won a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Senior,

then aged twenty-three, left as soon as possible for Hawaii, deserting his pregnant wife and son,

who took refuge with Grandmother Sarah. Thus, when Senior married Stanley Ann Dunham, he

was a bigamist from the point of view of US law.

These years represented an acute phase of the Cold War struggle between the United States and

the Soviet Union. At about this time, the Soviets created the Patrice Lumumba University in

Moscow as a special institution for the education and indoctrination of African students. The

Soviets sought actively to recruit the future leaders of African countries and bring them to Moscow

for a free university education in the hopes that they would remain sympathetic to the Soviet cause

during the rest of their careers. We must assume that a few were also recruited by the KGB. The

United States intelligence agencies carried out similar operations on a somewhat more decentralized

basis for the recruitment of young prospective African leaders as agents of US influence. The

recruitment of Obama Senior by the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa could

very well have occurred within the framework of such a US effort. In fact, we are told that Obama

Senior and Stanley Ann Dunham met for the first time in a Russian class. Some commentators have

concluded from that that candidate Obama’s mother was a Soviet or communist sympathizer. There

is probably some truth in that thesis. But Obama Senior may have been studying Russian as part of

a US-backed program aimed at making him at the very least a US sympathizer in Kenyan society,

and perhaps something more. At any rate, it is quite possible that the spirit of the CIA hovered over

candidate Obama’s parents at the time of their wedding, if there was one. The marriage of Obama

Senior with Ann Dunham must be regarded as highly unusual at a time when interracial marriage

was still illegal in many U.S. states. There was, however, a high statistical correlation between

interracial marriage and proximity to the Communist Party.

OBAMA SENIOR: AN ABUSIVE POLYGAMIST AND EGOMANIAC

The Daily Mail account stresses that even though the image of Senior presented in candidate

Obama’s first book is hardly sympathetic, it is nevertheless an attempt to present this unattractive

individual in the best possible light: “We have discovered that his father was not just a deeply

flawed individual but an abusive bigamist and an egomaniac, whose life was ruined not by racism

or corruption but his own weaknesses. And, devastatingly, the testimony has come from Mr

Obama’s own relatives and family friends. Relatives say he was already a slick womaniser and,

once in Honolulu, he promptly persuaded a fellow student called Ann - a naive 18-year-old white

girl - to marry him. Barack Junior was born in August, 1961.” (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a

bigot - what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail,

January 27, 2007)

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 21

Part of candidate Obama’s technique in composing his reminiscences of his fugitive father is

unquestionably to project backward into the world of almost half a century ago the categories of

race, Afrocentrism, and multiculturalism which were not in fact operative in those days in the ways

that the current candidate suggests. As the British series points out, ‘“Mr Obama Junior claims that

racism on both sides of the family destroyed the marriage between his mother and father. In his

book, [candidate Obama] says that Ann’s mother, who went by the nickname Tut, did not want a

black son-in-law, and Obama Senior’s father didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white

woman. In fact Ann divorced her husband after she discovered his bigamous double life. She

remarried and moved to Indonesia with young Barack and her new husband, an oil company

manager. Obama Senior was forced to return to Kenya, where he fathered two more children by

Kezia. He was eventually hired as a top civil servant in the fledgling government of Jomo Kenyatta

- and married yet again. Now prosperous with a flashy car and good salary, his third wife was an

American-born teacher called Ruth, whom he had met at Harvard while still legally married to both

Kezia and Ann, and who followed him to Africa. A relative of Mr Obama says: “We told him

[Barack] how his father would still go to Kezia and it was during these visits that she became

pregnant with two more children. He also had two children with Ruth.” It is alleged that Ruth

finally left him after he repeatedly flew into whisky-fuelled rages, beating her brutally. Friends say

drinking blighted his life - he lost both his legs while driving under the influence and also lost his

job. However, this was no bar to his womanising: he sired a son, his eighth child, by yet another

woman and continued to come home drunk. He was about to marry her when he finally died in yet

another drunken crash when Obama was 21.”’ (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot - what the

US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

The eyewitness accounts of Obama’s first trip to Kenya assembled by the Daily Mail suggest

that candidate Obama was filled with shock and consternation when he realized that his fantasy

picture of his absentee father did not correspond to anything real: ‘Mr Obama’s 40-year-old cousin

Said Hussein Obama told The Mail on Sunday: “Clearly, Barack has been very deeply affected by

what he has learned about his father, who was my father’s older brother. You have to remember that

his father was an African and in Africa, polygamy is part of life. We have assured Barack that his

father was a loving person but at times it must be difficult for him to reconcile this with his father’s

drinking and simultaneous marriages.” Said adds: “His father was a human being and as such you

can’t say that he was 100 per cent perfect. My cousin found it difficult when he came here to learn

of his half-brothers and sisters born to four different mothers. But just as Africans find the Western

world strange so Americans coming here will find Africa strange.”’ (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk

and a bigot - what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail,

January 27, 2007)

For years, candidate Obama had attempted to interpret the little he knew about his father’s life in

terms coherent with popular radical books like Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In reality

Obama Senior might have been a sad and deluded drunk out of Eugene O’Neill: ‘Far from being an

inspiration, the father whom Mr Obama was coming to know seemed like a total stranger. In his

book, he attempts to put the best face on it. His father, he writes, lost his civil service job after

campaigning against corrupt African politicians who had “taken the place of the white colonials.”

One of Obama Senior’s former drinking partners was Kenyan writer Philip Ochieng. Ochieng says,

however, that his friend’s downfall was his weak character. Although charming, generous and

extraordinarily clever, Obama Senior was also imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his

brain and his wealth, he said. “He was excessively fond of Scotch. He had fallen into the habit of

22 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

going home drunk every night. His boasting proved his undoing and left him without a job, plunged

him into prolonged poverty and dangerously wounded his ego.”

Ochieng recalls how, after sitting up all night drinking Black Label whisky at Nairobi’s famous

Stanley Hotel, Obama Senior would fly into rages if Ruth asked where he had been. Ochieng

remonstrated with his friend, saying: “You bring a woman from far away and you reduce her to

pulp. That is not our way.” But it was to no avail. Ruth sued for divorce after her husband

administered brutal beatings. In fact he was a menace to life, said Ochieng. “He had many

extremely serious accidents. Both his legs had to be amputated. They were replaced with crude false

limbs made from iron. He was just like Mr Toad [from The Wind In The Willows], very arrogant on

the road, especially when he had whisky inside. I was not surprised when I learned how he died.”’

(Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his

father,” London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

The Daily Mail was able to track down Obama Senior’s third wife. ‘Ruth refused to comment on

the abuse charges when we tracked her down to the Kenyan school where she now works. She said:

“I was married to Barack’s father for seven years so, yes, you could say Barack is my stepson.

Barack’s father was a very difficult man. Although I was married to him the longest of any of his

wives he wasn’t an easy person to be around.” Mr Obama has acknowledged that his father

grappled with a drinking problem. But with a gift for words that makes Mrs Clinton’s utterances

seem stiff and stale, he has turned it into another component of the myth. Drink, he says, like drugs

is one of “the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul.”’ (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot -

what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail, January 27,

2007)

This other American wife is named Ruth Nidesand. The son she had with Obama Senior, who is

therefore Obama’s half-brother, has been located by the British press in China. We read: ‘Barack

Obama’s half-brother has been helping to promote cheap Chinese exports in a low-profile business

career while the Democratic senator has been winning worldwide fame in his race for the White

House. He has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid public attention and his family links remain

unknown to most of his acquaintances in Shenzhen, a border boomtown in southern China where he

has lived since 2002. Mark Ndesandjo is the son of Barack Obama’s late father and his third wife,

an American woman named Ruth Nidesand who runs the up-market Maduri kindergarten in

Nairobi.3 Obama, however, refers to him simply as “my brother” and says he was the only

uncontested heir after their father, a Kenyan, died in a car crash in 1982.’ (Sunday Times, July 27,

2008)

As for the rest of Obama’s eight to ten siblings: ‘The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it

had found George Hussein Onyango Obaa living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the

outskirts of Nairobi. Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke

for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic

contender. "No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less

than a dollar a month." According to Italy's Vanity Fair his two metre by three metre shack is

decorated with football posters of the Italian football giants AC Milan and Inter, as well as a

calendar showing exotic beaches of the world. Vanity Fair also noted that he had a front page

newspaper picture of his famous brother - born of the same father as him, Barack Hussein Obama,

but to a different mother, named only as Jael. He told the magazine: "I live like a recluse, no-one

knows I exist." Embarrassed by his penury, he said that he does not does not mention his famous

half-brother in conversation. "If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related.

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 23

I am ashamed," he said. For ten years George Obama lived rough. However he now hopes to try to

sort his life out by starting a course at a local technical college. He has only met his famous older

brother twice - once when he was just five and the last time in 2006 when Senator Obama was on a

tour of East Africa and visited Nairobi.’ (Daily Telegraph, August 21, 2008) Obama has often

paraded his devotion to the poor, to the “least of these” in Gospel terms. But although Obama talks

a good game of charity, it appears that he has never given a penny to this wretched man who lives in

poverty and despair made more acute by the contrast with his half-brother, the glittering

international celebrity. If Obama’s black African brother gets no charity from Barky and Michelle,

what can the American people expect except snake-like cruelty?

The Daily Mail account of Obama Senior in Kenya concludes with the finding that candidate

Obama has been permanently traumatized by his discovery as an adult in his mid-30s of the sordid

details of his father’s actual biography. These details are worthy of attention, since psychological

dramas, reaction formations, and related forms of psychological vulnerability have often been used

in the recent past by the various White House palace guards to manipulate and control elected

presidents. We must therefore pay special attention to the Daily Mail’s conclusion that: ‘Family

members and acquaintances believe that the real cloud over Mr Obama’s life has been the discovery

that his father was far from the romantic figure that his mother tried to portray. A family friend said:

“He is haunted by his father’s failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual

and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken

lecher.” This ugly truth, say friends, has made Mr Obama ruthlessly determined to use every

weapon that he has to succeed, including the glossily edited version of his father’s story. “At the

end of the day Barack wants the story to help his political cause, so perhaps he couldn’t afford to be

too honest,” said Ochieng.

Significantly, it was only four years after his father’s death that Mr Obama travelled to his

father’s ancestral Kenyan village. There he learned the full story of his father’s life and met some of

his relatives. One of his half-sisters, Auma, is now a council worker in southern England, but some

of his other relatives are still living in huts in the village, without plumbing or electricity, farming a

few scrawny goats and chicken and growing fruit and maize. They speak the tribal Luo language

and depend on handouts from family members who have emigrated to the UK and the United States

for their few luxuries, notably the transistor radios that they use to follow Mr Obama’s rocketing

political fortunes. He has positioned himself as a devout Christian (having found God, he says, after

years as an atheist) ….”’ (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidential

hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

Candidate Obama writes in Dreams of My Father, “Someone once said that every man is trying

to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that

may explain my particular malady.” Candidate Obama may therefore be aware to some degree of

the psychological drama which he exhibits. But this still leaves important questions: Has he ever

grown up? Does he have the psychological strength necessary for independent and autonomous

action, as mandated by the constitutional powers of the president enumerated in the U.S.

Constitution? Due in large part to the adulation and propitiation of Obama by the controlled

corporate media, these life-and-death questions are far from having been answered.

MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, STANLEY DUNHAM, KANSAS ATHEIST

Obama’s maternal grandparents came from Wichita, Kansas. His grandfather, Stanley Dunham,

the person he calls Gramps, had worked on oil rigs during the great depression of the 1930s. Stanley

24 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Dunham had far less social standing than Madelyn Dunham, who came from a somewhat better

family; this class divide between a worker and petty bougeoise caused tension during their

marriage. According to one account, Madelyn Dunham’s family had been slaveholders: “one of

Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who

were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Kentucky. The same records show that one of

Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.”

(Wikipedia) “When World War II came, Stanley enlisted in the Army. Madelyn became a Rosiethe-

Riveter at Boeing Co.’s B-29 production plant in Wichita. And Stanley Ann Dunham arrived in

late November 1942. (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) After the war, Stanley went to college

with the help of the G.I. Bill, and bought a house with a subsidized loan from the Federal Housing

Program. Stanley and Madelyn Dunham would eventually live in 13 different places.

Stanley Armour Dunham is described by Obama as something of a freethinker or bohemian,

presumably meaning that he dabbled in atheism, which was considered something radical in the

early 1960s. He inclined toward the Unitarian Universalist point of view of religious syncretism,

and was proud that his church was able to draw on the sacred texts of five great world religions.4 He

was friendly with several Jews, Obama tells us, and liked to listen to Nat King Cole. (Dreams 17)

Grandfather Stanley was sympathetic to black issues and causes; Obama tells us that he had

suffered some insults himself because “he looked like a ‘wop.’” (Dreams 21) Later on, as we will

see, he took Barack Obama with him when he went to visit a group of black communists in Hawaii

around 1970. Stanley Dunham died in 1992.

MADELYN “TOOT” DUNHAM – GRANDMOTHER

Madelyn Dunham is called Tutu or Toot or Tut in Obama’s reminiscence and in other accounts;

this is the word for grandparent in the Hawaiian language. (Dreams 7) Interestingly, the Obama

campaign has refused to facilitate interviews by interested journalists with Madelyn Dunham: “the

Obama campaign declined to make Madelyn Dunham, 84, available.” (Chicago Tribune, March 27,

2007) For some reason, the Obama campaign has been very reluctant to allow Madelyn Dunham to

interact with the press. Do they think that a white grandmother would cause resentment among

blacks, or is there something that they are hiding? Madelyn Dunham is now well-known as the

grandmother whom Obama threw under the bus in his desperate maneuvering in the wake of the

explosion of the Jeremiah Wright “God damn America” scandal in mid-March 2008.

MOTHER: STANLEY ANN DUNHAM, PRO-COMMUNIST ANTHROPOLOGIST

Obama’s mother was unquestionably the greatest single influence on his formative years. Her

legal name was indeed Stanley Ann Dunham. She was named Stanley by her father because he had

wanted very much to have a son. This incongruous gesture recalls the predicament of “A Boy

Named Sue” in the humorous song by Johnny Cash. Obama makes some attempt in his

reminiscences to portray his mother as a bland Eisenhower-era middle American from Kansas, but

this once again represents typical disingenuous window-dressing. Obama’s attempt to spin his

mother into something she was not has even been noted in the normally deferential Chicago

Tribune account: ‘Implicit in [Obama’s portrayal of his mother] is this message: If you have any

lingering questions or doubts about the Hawaiian-born presidential candidate with a funny name,

just remember that Mom hails from America’s good earth. That’s the log cabin story, or his version

of Bill Clinton’s “Man from Hope.” That presentation, though, glosses over Stanley Ann Dunham’s

formative years, spent not on the Great Plains but more than 1,800 miles away on a small island in

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 25

the Pacific Northwest. Obama visited the Seattle area last October, and in a speech to a Democratic

Party rally at Bellevue Community College, he mentioned that his mother attended Mercer Island

High School before moving on to Hawaii. In Dreams, Obama wrote that the family moved to

Seattle “long enough for my mother to finish high school.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007)

In reality, Ann Dunham started out as something of a bluestocking, a nonconformist and radical

who was profoundly ill-at-ease with the superficial normalcy of the Eisenhower years. She was a

left liberal, a feminist and a parlor atheist. The Dunham family moved to the Seattle area in the mid-

1950s, and it was there that Ann Dunham attended Mercer Island High School, where not just the

existentialists Sartre and Kierkegaard, but even “The Communist Manifesto” were in the

curriculum. Coming as she did from a heterodox and nonconformist family, it is not surprising to

find Ann Dunham described as having been both a communist sympathizer and a liberal. Obama

thus qualifies in some sense as a red diaper baby.

Madelyn and Stanley, originally Methodist and Baptist respectively, along with their daughter

joined the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue, Washington. ‘“In the 1950s, this was

sometimes known as ‘the little Red church on the hill,” said Peter Luton, the church’s senior

minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and

passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) Ann Dunham

actively embraced the cause of skepticism and freethinking. ‘“She touted herself as an atheist, and it

was something she’d read about and could argue,” said Maxine Box, who was Dunham’s best friend

in high school. “She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking

about things that the rest of us hadn’t.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) Ann Dunham also

showed a lively interest in international politics, quite possibly with a tendency to sympathize with

the Moscow line: ‘“If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley

would know about it first,” said Chip Wall, who described her as “a fellow traveler. . . . We were

liberals before we knew what liberals were.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) “Fellow traveler”

is a term used during the McCarthy era to describe a communist sympathizer.

The “fellow traveler” issue became prominent at Mercer Island High School when Ann was

studying there, thanks to one of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Committee on Un-

American Activities, the infamous HUAC. ‘In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school

board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he

had been a member of the Communist Party. At Mercer High School, two teachers — Val Foubert

and Jim Wichterman — generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to

challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught

English. His texts were cutting edge: “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Organization Man,” “The Hidden

Persuaders,” “1984” and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27,

2007) As we can see, there is nothing communist about these texts, which are variously libertarian,

British intelligence, foundation-funded, and simple muckraking, but Foubert and Wichterman must

have loomed as a new Lenin-Trotsky or Stalin-Mao duo in the provincial imaginations of the local

parents. ‘Wichterman taught philosophy. The hallway between the two classes was known as

“anarchy alley,” and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman’s teachings,

including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third rail of the

1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn’t stop there.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27,

2007)

With Stanley always looking for better opportunities, the family moved to Hawaii. Ann Dunham

“began classes at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and shortly after that…had fallen in love with a

26 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

grad student. He was black, from Kenya and named Obama.” (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007)

Ann married Obama Senior when she was 18 years old. They met in a Russian language class,

which may or may not indicate sympathy for Soviet communism (it could have indicated a desire to

join the intelligence community): each one could have been there for many reasons, including

training by a US intelligence agency. One person who knew Barack Obama Senior and Ann

Dunham and their social set in those days is the Democratic Congressman Neil Abercrombie, who

has recalled that ‘while Obama was impatient and energized, Stanley Ann, whom Abercrombie

described as “the original feminist,” was endlessly patient but quietly passionate in her arguments.

She was the only woman in the group.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007)

Those who had known Ann Dunham as an independent woman not interested in marriage and

children were surprised by her sudden decision to marry Obama Senior. ‘“I just couldn’t imagine

her life changing so quickly,” said [one such friend], thinking about her independent-minded friend

who had disdained marriage and motherhood.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) Evidently the

irresistible appeal of a husband from the third world had eclipsed Ann’s feminism. Ironically, the

third world turned out not to be the repository of unalloyed goodness which a disciple of Rousseau

would have expected. The original feminist Ann Dunham would soon find herself the victim not

just of a bigamist but of a polygamist who would abandon her and her infant son without a second

thought. Barack Obama today bears the mental scars of this experience.

Grandfather Onyango, back in Kenya, was fiercely opposed to Obama Senior’s marriage. He

wrote the Dunhams a ‘“long, nasty letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage.” This

former house servant for the British colonialists “didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white

woman.” His main argument was that this American girl would never agree to return to Kenya and

live under conditions of polygamy. Onyango wrote: “How can you marry this white woman when

you have responsibilities at home? Will this woman return with you and live as a Luo woman?

Will she accept that you already have a wife and children? I have not heard of white people

understanding such things. Their women are jealous and used to being pampered. But if I am

wrong in this matter, let the girl’s father come to my hut and discuss the situation properly. But this

is the affair of elders, not children.”’ (Dreams 422)

Ann Dunham may have felt compelled to get married because she was already pregnant. As we

read in one journalistic account; ‘Six months after they wed, another letter arrived in Kenya,

announcing the birth of Barack Hussein Obama, born Aug. 4, 1961. Despite her husband’s

continued anger, Sarah Obama said in a recent interview, she “was so happy to have a grandchild in

the U.S.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) There is also some question about the documentation

and thus of the legality of the marriage of Obama Senior to Ann Dunham. This wedding may not

have been properly documented, as Obama himself tells us. “How and when the marriage occurred

remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama

writes in Dreams. In other words, this may have been a common law marriage.5 The implication is

that presidential candidate Barack Obama may be an illegitimate child born outside of wedlock, or,

in plain English, a bastard.6

A FEMINIST DOORMAT FOR A POLYGAMIST

The later Congressman Neil Abercrombie sensed at the beginning that this marriage was not

destined to last. Obama Senior was self-absorbed and self-centered, and evidently regarded the

marriage as a mere temporary convenience for the time of his stay in Hawaii: ‘Obama was one of

the most ambitious, self-focused men he had ever met. After Obama was accepted to study at

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 27

Harvard, Stanley Ann disappeared from the University of Hawaii student gatherings, but she did not

accompany her husband to Harvard. Abercrombie said he rarely saw her after that. “I know he

loved Ann,” Abercrombie said, but “I think he didn’t want the impediment of being responsible for

a family. He expected great things of himself and he was going off to achieve them.”’ (Chicago

Tribune, March 27, 2007)

In 1963, Obama Senior abandoned his wife and infant son in order to enter a doctoral program in

economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His decision can only be

characterized as cruelly egotistical and irresponsible. Obama Senior had received two fellowships.

One was to pursue a doctorate in economics at the New School for Social Research in New York

City. This fellowship was generous enough so as to permit both Ann and baby Barack to

accompany him to New York. The Harvard fellowship was smaller, reportedly not sufficient to

support Ann and her baby. Obama Senior callously argued that he had no choice but to accept the

Harvard fellowship. As Ann Dunham later told her son Barack: ‘“He received two scholarships, one

in New York, which paid enough to support all three of us. Harvard had just agreed to pay tuition.

‘How can I refuse the best education?’ he told me. That’s all he could think about, proving that he

was the best.”’ (Dreams 126)

Naturally, Obama Senior and/or Ann could have supplemented the fellowship with a part-time or

full-time job if the main goal had been to keep the family together. Once it was clear that Obama

Senior was determined to abandon his family, Ann could have sued him for divorce and child

support payments, since Obama Senior’s polygamous outlook had no standing under US law.

Instead of acting to assert the best interests of her infant child, Ann Dunham chose supinely to let

herself be abused and mistreated by Obama Senior, who thus emerges as a monster of egomania.

Ann was apparently so deluded by her relativistic and Rousseauvian ideological categories that she

was unable to fight for her son’s future.

Barack Obama glosses over Obama Senior’s abandonment of his mother in detached prose in the

passive voice: “A separation occurred, and he returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the

continent.” (Dreams 10) Obsessed with his racialist ideology, Obama chooses not to recognize that

his mother was treated as a doormat, and was too weak to assert herself against the outrageous

actions of Obama Senior. Perhaps Obama’s contempt for women is rooted in his mother’s craven

willingness to capitulate to the selfishness of Obama Senior. For Ann Dunham, Rousseau was much

more powerful than feminism when it really mattered. When Obama was about to visit Senior in

Kenya for the first time, poor Ann Dunham told Obama: I hope you don’t feel resentful towards

him…It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him.” (Dreams 125) This

account is at variance with the fact of abandonment, and shows that even after many years, Ann

refused to accept the reality of the outrageous treatment she had received, and of her own failure to

fight for her son.

It is worth noting in passing that Obama qualifies as a fatherless young boy who was also

abandoned by his mother before the age of 10. This pattern produces a psychological profile full of

debilitating psychological complexes, including the obsessive quest for an ersatz or substitute

father, and the need to be assured of one’s own personal worth by a series of sexual partners, be

they male or female. The last president to exhibit this pattern was William Jefferson Blythe III, the

posthumous son better known as Bill Clinton, whose father was killed in an automobile accident

before he was born. For some time after that, young Bill Clinton lived with his grandparents while

his mother allegedly worked as a nurse in another city. Bill Clinton’s case of this syndrome was

complicated by the fact that his stepfather, Roger Clinton, was an alcoholic who physically abused

28 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

the future president’s mother. Bill Clinton’s need to obtain the validation of his ego from the wellknown

parade of women requires no further comment. Bill Clinton’s philandering clearly resulted

from a lack of ego strength: no matter how much he achieved in life, he always needed to be

assured of his personal worth by a parade of women, one of whom turned out to be Miss Lewinsky.

However, there is already evidence that before all is said and done, it will become evident that Bill

Clinton has done a much better job of controlling his own compulsive urges than Obama has, since

there is evidence that the Illinois Senator has veered recklessly into the world of bisexuality.

As the columnist Spengler of the Asia Times points out, Michelle Obama – who often sounds

like a feminist when she is talking about her own immediate concerns – shows no indignation about

the tragic spousal abuse which Ann was willing to undergo: ‘Michelle Obama speaks with greater

warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. “She was kind of a dreamer, his mother,”

Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. “She wanted the world to be open to

her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because

sometimes dreams don’t pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like

most of us don’t in this country.” How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to

raise her children on thin fare in pursuit of a political agenda. “Naivete” is a euphemism for Ann

Dunham’s motivation… Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them,

twice.’ (Asia Times, February 26, 2008) Indeed: what kind of left liberal feminist is going to accept

abandonment by a man whom she knew to be at least a bigamist?

ANN DUNHAM, FORD FOUNDATION OPERATIVE:

THE MICROLOAN RACKET

Ann Dunham became famous posthumously when Time Magazine placed a picture of her with

Barry (Obama) as a toddler – complete with halo – on the cover of its April 21, 2008 issue – in a

forlorn attempt to humanize the recently bittergated Obama just before the Pennsylvania primary.

The overall intent here is to whitewash this quasi-Marxist, Rousseauvian leftist anthropologist into a

sort of middle American humanitarian – an attempt so transparent that Time began receiving letters

impugning its journalistic integrity. Nevertheless, we do learn more about Ann’s later career as Ford

Foundation operative. Her specialty was the cynical financier racket known as microloans or

microcredits – tiny sums of money lent at substantial interest rates to tiny third world entrepreneurs,

with the classic case being the purchase of a cell phone to provide phone service to some rural

village – all in lieu of real communications and transportation infrastructure which the finance

oligarchs at the World Bank and the regional lending agencies had no intention of financing.

Microloans represented the World Bank’s notion of small is beautiful “appropriate technology” –

meaning that if you are a backward country, then backward, third-rate technology is all you will get,

so you had better take it with gratitude. Microloans also served to tether the third world masses to

the mentality of finance capital, familiarizing them with notions of interest rates, the deadlines for

installment payments, and all the dreary apparatus of usury. This entire cynical enterprise reached a

paroxysm a decade after Ann Dunham’s death, when Muhammad Yunus of the Bangladeshi

Grameen Bank won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in pioneering micro-credits. By this

time, the micro-credit was widespread, with a 2004 report showing that some 3,200 micro-credit

institutions were reaching more than 92 million clients, mainly in the poorest countries of the

underdeveloped world. It was an exercise in loan sharking and predatory lending to the most

desperate people in the world, the most defenseless victims of economic globalization. When Yunus

won his Nobel, he was widely praised: “Muhammad Yunus is a revolutionary in the best sense of

the word,” said Sam Daley-Harris, director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign in Washington,

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 29

D.C. He was in fact a counter-revolutionary in the service of rapacious finance capital, and this was

a good description of the mature Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother. As for Ann, she no doubt

kept telling herself that she was doing something very radical.

The adulatory Time account tells us that after her divorce from her Indonesian second husband

Lolo Sotero or Soetero, Ann ‘took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at

the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she

had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on

women’s work. “She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace,” [her

acquaintance] Zurbuchen says, “where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs

who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce.” Ann thought the Ford

Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.’ In

other words, her programs would subvert the existing government by pretending to take the side of

the oppressed masses – just what Soros and the other Wall Street jackals would have desired. Ann’s

‘home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers,

musicians and labor organizers. “She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more

eclectic circle,” Zurbuchen says. “She brought unlikely conversation partners together.”’ These

eclectic and bohemian tastes live on in Barry. Time goes on: ‘Ann’s most lasting professional

legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to ‘92—

before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success

story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by

the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. “I would say her work had

a lot to do with the success of the program,” he says. Today Indonesia’s microfinance program is

No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance

Information Exchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit. […] Every so often, Ann would leave

Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance

job.’ (Amanda Ripley, “Raising Obama,” Time, April 21, 2008) As for Barack Obama, his thoughts

were elsewhere; he writes that in these years of living in the ethnically diverse atmosphere of

Hawaii, “I was too young to know that I needed a race.” (Dreams 27) A strange attitude for a

candidate who now poses as being virtually trans-racial and even post-racial.

LOLO SOETERO AND INDONESIA:

COSMOPOLITANISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM

Obama’s mother Ann then remarried; her second husband was Lolo Soetero Mangunharjo, a

student from Indonesia who was also studying at the University of Hawaii. Lolo Soetero later

became an official of the Director General’s office in the TNI Topography division of the

Indonesian Army, and still later worked as an oil company executive in Indonesia. Soetero was

studying in Hawaii under a program sponsored by the Indonesian government. At first the

Indonesian government was that of Sukarno, who had led the independence struggle against Dutch

colonialism in the 1940s. Sukarno, along with Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, Tito of

Yugoslavia, and Nehru of India had founded the non-aligned movement at the Bandung conference

of 1955. This movement was made up of Third World developing countries who refused to

subordinate themselves permanently to the United States or the Soviet Union, but who tried to

constitute a third way in world affairs during the Cold War era.

In 1965, the CIA supported the Indonesian coup d’état of General Suharto, who overthrew the

Sukarno regime and initiated a bloody reign of terror which lasted for several years and which

30 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

included the massacre of several hundred thousand Indonesian communists, leftists, and supporters

of Sukarno. In 1967, when Soetero’s Indonesian passport was revoked because of political unrest in

Indonesia, Ann Dunham and Barack, who was then in first grade, accompanied him back to Jakarta.

It appears that Lolo Soetero was called back to Indonesia because as a student he was automatically

considered a politically unreliable supporter of the now ousted Sukarno regime. As soon as he

returned to Indonesia, Soetero was interrogated by the authorities and then was drafted into the

Indonesian army, spending at least a year in military service in New Guinea. Obama lived with his

mother and stepfather in Jakarta between 1968 and 1973. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta

from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in Indonesian. When he was in third grade he wrote an

essay saying that he wanted to become president, although he was not sure of what country.

ANN DUNHAM: RAGE AGAINST THE UGLY AMERICAN

During the time that Lolo was employed in the government relations office of an American oil

company, Ann was massively exposed to The Ugly American. Obama tells us: “sometimes I would

overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his

company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s

back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while

their wives would complain to my mother about the quality of the Indonesian help. He would ask

her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my

mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. They are not my people.” Obama describes his mother

during this phase: “in a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where

ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular

humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” (Dreams 47, 50)

SENIOR AND LOLO: FAITHFUL TO JOHNNY WALKER, NOT THE KORAN

The two third-world men Ann Dunham had chosen to marry had a few things in common: both

were nominal Moslems whose devotion to Johnny Walter Black Label scotch whiskey was greater

than their devotion to the Koran. Her marriage to Lolo Soetero also ended in divorce, but she

remained in Indonesia until her life was almost over; she died in 1995. One witness to Ann

Dunham’s life during these years was one of her later professors; this was “Alice Dewey, a

granddaughter of the philosopher John Dewey and an emeritus professor of anthropology at the

University of Hawaii, who was the chairman of Ann Dunham’s Ph.D. thesis committee and became

a close friend over many years.” Alice Dewey told a reporter that ‘Dunham “divorced happily”

from Soetero—who died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment—in part because “he

gradually became more and more like a Westerner and she became more and more like a Javanese.”

Obama told me he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetero as some kind of

radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. “I mean, you know, his big thing was

Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama said. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d

be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their

expectations diverged fairly rapidly.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Ann Dunham, we see,

had gone native in Indonesia. The commonality between the two men she married was Islam

according to some, but the deeper commonality would appear to have been Johnny Walker, in

which they both indulged heavily.

After Ann Dunham’s divorce from Lolo Soetero, she went back to live in Hawaii, where she

began the graduate study of anthropology. But she then returned to Indonesia to carry out her

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 31

anthropological field work. At this point, Barack Obama, aged about 9, was left with his

grandparents. Abandonment by his father was now thus followed by prolonged separation from his

mother, leading to unpredictable psychological consequences. If Larry Sinclair’s allegations are

accurate, Barack Obama is a closet bisexual, and the resulting potential for the blackmailing of a

possible future president is an issue which voters will obviously need to consider very carefully

before putting such a person into the White House.7

Alice Dewey further described Obama’s mother as ‘the most hardworking person I maybe ever

have met. And did it without seeming to. She was cheerful, down to earth. She absolutely was the

kind of person you wanted on your side in any situation, from a barroom brawl to an academic

argument, and she was always there for the little guy, particularly the little woman.” For most of the

1970s, 80s, and 90s, she shuttled between Hawaii and Indonesia, doing academic research and

paying the bills by teaching English or working for nonprofit organizations such as the Ford

Foundation.’ (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) The Ford Foundation looms large over Obama’s

life: it was his mother’s employer, and later the decisive influence over his church in Chicago.

ANN DUNHAM’S LATER YEARS: FORD FOUNDATION,

US AID, WORLD BANK OPERATIVE

Some journalistic accounts have correctly stressed that Ann Dunham in the latter part of her

career became a much more important person than is commonly recognized. One reason that she

has been underestimated is undoubtedly the attempt by the Obama campaign to make the

candidate’s mother appear as bland and conventional as possible. But she was in fact an

international civil servant who played a key role in developing the notion of microloans, one of the

main tokenist World Bank strategies for parrying the demand for real Third World economic and

infrastructural development under the reign of globalization. As Kim Chipman of Bloomberg

writes, ‘Barack Obama’s mother was most at home a world away from her Midwest roots, trekking

the old Silk Road or arranging small loans for weavers in Indonesia. “I’m so tired of seeing her

described as just a white woman from Kansas,” says Bronwen Solyom, 63, who first met Ann

Dunham in the 1970s when they were graduate students in anthropology at the University of Hawaii

in Honolulu. “She was much more than that.”’

Ann Dunham was also known for her later work as an anthropologist and social activist for Ford

Foundation counter-insurgency projects in Indonesia under the reactionary Suharto regime.

Chipman notes, ‘Terance Bigalke, who worked with Dunham at the Ford Foundation in Jakarta,

says she also fostered social activism in her children through her work on behalf of the world’s

poor. “She had such a strong concern for people who were in difficult circumstances economically,”

says Bigalke, 59. That concern led her to study the underground economy of Jakarta street vendors.’

Ann Dunham’s interest in anthropology had begun in Indonesia, Chipman found. Her first months

in Indonesia “sparked a lifelong passion that later led Dunham to return to Hawaii for graduate

studies in anthropology and an 800-page Ph.D. thesis on Indonesian blacksmithing. Her interest in

the local culture was aroused almost immediately, when she started teaching English to

Indonesians.” In effect, whatever her subjective intentions, Ann Dunham profiled the Indonesian

population for the United States Agency for International Development (US AID), the Ford

Foundation, the World Bank, all key institutions for dollar imperialism.

Chipman shows that Ann Dunham’s interest in anthropology was closely linked to her

contributions to imperialist strategy: ‘Friends say Dunham found her calling through her work,

which evolved from studying batik and ironwork to obtaining microfinancing for craftspeople,

32 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

especially women, in rural areas of developing countries. “She was a scholar who was one of the

first to see about microbanking,” Abercrombie says. In 1986, Dunham did a one-year development

project in Pakistan. That year, mother and daughter took a two-week journey along the old Silk

Route to China. Dunham’s work for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan was followed

by stints at People’s Bank of Indonesia and Women’s World Banking in New York. She also did

consulting work for the World Bank and US AID. “She was getting to pretty high-powered

positions, working in world organizations as an expert, but she always liked the people at the

bottom.”’ Naturally, any anthropologist doing field work needs to feel or feign a sympathetic

interest in people being interviewed, the ethnographic material of the study. This does not mean that

the sentiments are always genuine, but the anthropologist will be more effective if they are.

According to the Time magazine cover-up cover story in April 2008, Dunham became an

important official of the Ford Foundation with special responsibility for women’s and gender issues.

Her own track record in serving as a doormat for her first husband, the imperious Obama Senior,

would hardly qualify her as a feminist. Dunham’s subjective devotion to third world people was by

all indications sincere. ‘In her 40s, Dunham talked about adopting a baby. “She loved kids, and we

were taking too long making her a grandmother,” says Maya, noting that her mother never got to

meet any of her grandchildren. After seeing a news report about the offspring of children in Korea

born to African-American soldiers, she decided that would be the perfect addition to her multiethnic

family, Dewey says. Dunham was “very specific about what she wanted,”’ Maya says. Instead,

Dunham found herself battling both ovarian and uterine cancer. Until her death, she displayed the

unflappable temperament that she passed on to Obama, Dewey says. “She took it in stride,” she

says. “She didn’t fuss about it.”’ (Kim Chipman, “Obama Drive Gets Inspiration From His White

Mom Born in Kansas,” Bloomberg, February 11, 2008) Obama’s mother thus evokes a stoic or

quietist quality which we have seen in her passivity when she was abandoned by her first husband.

If, as candidate Obama categorically states in his own book, Ann Dunham represented the

decisive influence on his formative years, what can we conclude to be the content of that influence?

We have followed Ann Dunham from her youth as a provincial atheist and radical left liberal,

through her subsequent phases as a communist sympathizer, Third World enthusiast, anti-racist,

anthropologist, and to her final stage as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, US AID, and the

World Bank. Is there an invariant to this process? Ann Dunham was certainly concerned about the

problems of global poverty and economic underdevelopment, but she appears to have been

incapable of understanding which institutions were responsible for holding back mankind’s

economic progress. Worse, she ended up by going to work for precisely those institutions. Who

then, in her mind, was responsible for underdevelopment?

The acerbic but perceptive commentator Spengler of the Asia Times believes that he has

discovered the ruling passion of both Ann Dunham and her son Barack Obama, and that this ruling

passion is radical anti-Americanism. Spengler’s perspective is doubtless tinged with the cultural and

historical pessimism of Mitteleuropa, but his findings nevertheless compel careful attention.

Spengler starts by noting that

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World

governments…. When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she

brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediately

following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history. Dunham’s experience

in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 33

cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, “Peasant blacksmithing in

Indonesia: surviving against all odds.

In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke

into popular awareness with Margaret Mead’s long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928),

which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the

supposedly repressive West. Mead’s work was one of the founding documents of the sexual

revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American

universities.’ (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008) It might be more accurate to call this left-wing

fringe the postmodern fringe.

The specific brand of leftism in play here is once again Rousseau’s doctrine of the noble savage,

which unquestionably provides the foundation for the anthropology of the entire 20th century.

Rousseau’s argument was that the original sin of human civilization had been to develop beyond the

most primitive stage of Paleolithic hunting, gathering, and foraging. The fall from grace occurred

with the introduction of village life, metallurgy, and most of all the state, with accompanying

notions of property. Rousseau, who had lived in Venice as a secretary to the French ambassador,

asserted that it was civilization itself which made human individuals evil and corrupt. The healing

of civilization therefore required a return to the reign of the noble savage — meaning in practice the

retrogression of civilization back to the old stone age. Margaret Mead’s fake scholarship about the

sexual mores of the South Sea Islanders represented a part of this effort to put civilization into

reverse gear. Various modern day thinkers, from radical environmentalists to neocon theoreticians

like Leo Strauss have also endorsed this notion of turning back the clock of civilized progress: it is a

very, very reactionary notion, and would of course imply genocide on an unimaginable scale if ever

attempted.

Spengler goes on to note: “Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith

of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly

overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical

anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the

Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among

the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a

Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.” It might be more accurate to state that radical Islam was

one of several ideological counteroffensives launched by Anglo-American imperialism during the

1950s in order to undercut the vast appeal of Nasser, Sukarno, and the other militant nonaligned

leaders.

OBAMA: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST PROFILING

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL

Spengler comes to the following chilling conclusion: “Barack Obama is a clever fellow who

imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of

education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American

culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives

with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at

emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is

practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.” (Spengler, Asia

Times, Feb. 26, 2008)

34 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

It is in this context that we should interpret the following comment from Ann Dunham’s former

anthropology professor, Alice Dewey. ‘“It’s too bad she’s not here,” Alice Dewey says. “She’d be

saying, with a little chuckle, ‘Here’s one of our own’ and ‘He’s going to show them.’” (Kim

Chipman, “Obama Drive Gets Inspiration From His White Mom Born in Kansas,” Bloomberg,

February 11, 2008) This raises the question of a possible future president who would be animated

by a resentment of or even hatred towards the American people, or at least towards the blue-collar

or white lower middle-class sectors of the American people, the ones most frequently accused by

wealthy elitists of harboring racial prejudice. Obama may indeed harbor such feelings of hatred or

resentment. It does no good to object that Obama does not propose an explicit program of using

austerity and sacrifice (as demanded by the Trilateral financier oligarchy) as a means for punishing

blue-collar American and the white working poor for their alleged racist crimes; Obama is much too

slick an operator to make any such admissions. If anything, it is Jeremiah Wright who has already

made the admissions for him. Obama approaches his task of campaigning with the cynical and

manipulative detachment of an anthropologist carrying out field work among some old stone age

people, like the Yanomami Indians: he is treating the American people as ethnographic material in

the great Trilateral experiment of depression crisis management, and the results will be horrifying.

“HE’S GOING TO SHOW THEM”

Precisely what is it, we must ask, that Obama is going to show the American people if he should

succeed in taking power? Will he proceed to act out the deeply felt resentments of his mother

against American society? Will he exact revenge for the racial slights and humiliations which he

believes he has undergone?

It was during his time in Indonesia that young Barack Obama underwent a dramatic experience

which helped to establish the primacy of race and racial identity in his thinking. (Dreams 51 ff.) He

was at the time nine years old, and his mother was working at the US Embassy in Jakarta. While

sitting in an office waiting for his mother, young Obama was looking through some issues of Life

magazine. Here he found an article which he says he experienced as an “ambush attack.” The article

described the plight of a black man who had decided to use a harsh chemical treatment in order to

lighten the color of his skin. Obama says he was horrified to see a picture of the man, whose skin

had been flayed off by the chemicals, leaving him scarred and disfigured. ‘“I imagine other black

children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama later wrote. According

to a recent magazine article, Obama’s account cannot be taken at face value because ‘no such photo

exists, according to historians at [Life] magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked

about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been in Ebony or it might

have been ... who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Chicago Tribune, archivists at Ebony

searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.) In fact, it is

surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his

nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious

of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.’

(Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Perhaps Obama is bending the facts in order to document what

he considers to be his own growth in personal awareness from a relative indifference to racial

matters to race and racial identity as a central concern, which he obviously believed by 1995 —

perhaps under the influence of such race theoreticians as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright — to

represent a superior level of awareness. Obama’s mother Ann Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian

cancer, a few months after the publication of Dreams from My Father.

I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 35

OBAMA AND ISLAM

Because Obama’s biological father and stepfather were both at least nominally Moslems, and

because Obama attended Moslem schools for at least part of the time that he lived in Indonesia, a

controversy has arisen due to the accusation by right-wing commentators that Obama remains a

crypto-Moslem. In an attempt to answer this drumbeat, on January 24, 2007, the Obama campaign

released the following statement: “To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not

raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in

Chicago.” But this seemed to dodge the issue of Obama’s attendance at the Moslem schools in

Indonesia. On March 14th, 2007, the Obama campaign offered this statement to correct their

previous statement: “Obama has never been a practicing Muslim.” The statement added that as a

child, Obama had spent time in the neighborhood Islamic center during his stay in Jakarta. In his

book Dreams from My Father, Obama talks of studying the Quran and describes the public school

as “a Muslim school.” (See Dreams) The testimony of Obama’s half-sister is also relevant: “My

whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng,

Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim

public school….” (New York Times, April 30, 2007)

Tine Hahiyary was one of Obama’s teachers and the principal of the school he attended in

Indonesia from 1971 through 1989, and has testified that Obama attended Islamic religious training

during his time at the school. His teacher was named Maimunah and she resided in the Puncak area,

the Cianjur Regency. “I remembered that he had studied mengaji” (or mengagi, meaning rote

recitation of the Quran), Tine reported.8 Obama himself writes that “In the Muslim school, the

teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies.” (See Dreams)

A blogger from Jakarta has written more recently that ‘The actual usage of the word ‘mengaji’ in

Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic

language rather than the native tongue. ‘Mengagi’ is a word and a term that is accorded the highest

value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite

simply, ‘mengaji classes’ are not something that a non-practicing or so-called moderate Muslim

family would ever send their child to. To put this in a Christian context, this is something above and

beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes. The fact that Obama had attended

mengaji classes is well-known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is

going to come out of the closet.” In another internet report posted in 2007, Obama’s classmate Rony

Amiris, now a manager of the Bank Mandiri in Jakarta, describes him as being a devout Muslim.

“Barry was previously quite religious in Islam,” Amiris recalled. “We previously often asked him to

the prayer room close to the house. If he was wearing a sarong he looked funny,” added Rony. In

2007, Emirsyah Satar, CEO of Garuda Indonesia, stated in an internet interview: “He [Obama] was

often in the prayer room wearing a sarong, at that time.”9 A blogger calling himself American Expat

in Southeast Asia, who says he has lived in Indonesia for some 20 years, has written on

laotze.blogspot.com that “Barack Hussein Obama might have convinced some Americans that he is

no longer a Muslim, but so far he has not convinced many in the world’s most populous Muslim

country who still see him as a Muslim and a crusader for Islam and world peace. Barack Hussein

Obama’s race, his staunch opposition to the war in Iraq, his sympathy to Islam and Muslims

worldwide and his Muslim heritage receive Indonesian media coverage. There is no mention of his

apostasy.”10

Mussolini, as part of his propaganda towards the Moslems of North Africa and the Middle East,

described himself once as holding a Bible in one hand and a Koran in the other. Napoleon did the

36 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

same. Hitler appealed to Moslems living under British rule from Egypt to Afghanistan by dropping

hints that he was either sympathetic to Islam or else actually a Moslem, and many Moslems were

either flattered by these references or actually believed them. Mussolini and Hitler were in reality

atheists.

OBAMA’S SIBLINGS: NINE CHANCES FOR A NEW BILLY CARTER OR NEIL BUSH

The siblings of sitting presidents have often been a source of corruption and scandal. Dwight

Eisenhower was lucky in that his brother Milton was eminently respectable and served as the

president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But Richard Nixon had much trouble with his

brother Donald. Bill Clinton was embarrassed by his brother Roger, and this has also been the lot of

Hillary Clinton in regard to her brother Hugh. George Bush the elder harvested negative publicity

from the cooperation of his brother Prescott Bush Jr. with Japanese organized crime figures. A

famous presidential brother implicated in criminal or unethical activity was Billy Carter, who

accepted large bribes from the government of Libya. Most damaging of all to the taxpayers has been

Neil Bush, the younger brother of the current tenant of the White House, whose role in the

bankruptcy of Silverado Savings and Loan cost the Resolution Trust Corporation upwards of $3

billion. Neil Bush was also scheduled to meet with Scott Hinckley, the elder brother of purported

lone assassin John Hinckley Jr., on the day after John Hinckley opened fire on President Reagan.

(See Tarpley, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 1992)

But all of this pales in comparison with the nepotism, graft and corruption we are likely to

witness in an Obama presidency. Obama has an estimated total of 9 siblings, all half brothers and

half sisters. One who has appeared in his campaign is Maya Sotero-Ng, a daughter of Ann Dunham

and Lolo Soetero. The offspring of Barack Hussein Obama Senior are thought to number eight in

all, by three mothers in addition to Ann Dunham.

CHAPTER II: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND

RECRUITMENT BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

… the intelligence community has deposited provocateurs in at least some of our schools so that

the conditions necessary for learning have been, through the ensuing turmoil, destroyed. –

Vincent J. Salandria, 1971.

Obama was fortunate enough to enjoy some very special educational opportunities. These

opportunities were not due to any special intellectual ability or capacity for hard work on the part of

our future candidate. They were rather due to the fact that his mother by now had become an

important operative for the Ford Foundation, and the foundation community takes care of its own

because of the obvious advantages of recruiting from households in which the oligarchical,

multicultural, and postmodern values of the foundation world are assumed as axiomatic. Obama’s

mother and grandparents clearly did everything they could to advance his upward mobility through

schooling, and this paid off when he was accepted into the most exclusive prep school in Hawaii.

Because of Obama’s much-advertised racial identity, there can also be no doubt that preferential

admissions for minorities based on affirmative action must also have played a significant role.

Obama is therefore not the product of a meritocracy or a career open to talents; he is rather the fruit

of special treatment meted out under the aegis of minority quotas favored by the foundation world

as the keystone of their strategy for keeping the American people so fragmented as to perpetuate

oligarchical financier rule. If we need to generalize about Obama, we can say that his hardware was

provided by the Ford Foundation and its various lesser foundation satellites, while his software was

added later through his association with the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group in

the person of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the evil genius of the Jimmy Carter administration of 1977-

1981. To these phases of Obama’s story we now turn.

ELITIST PREPPY AT THE PUNAHOU SCHOOL OF HAWAII

When Obama was ten years old, his mother Ann sent him back to Honolulu to live with his

maternal grandparents so he could attend the prestigious Punahou School, an elite and exclusive

prep school whose alumni also include America Online founder Steve Case: ‘“Ann saw first of all

that he was so bright that he needed to come and really be challenged by a good school,” says Benji

Bennington, 73, the retired curator of the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Dunham

also hoped that “maybe he’d meet a few blacks while here, because he was not meeting them in

Jakarta.” The family was reunited about a year later when Dunham separated from Soetero and

returned to Honolulu for graduate school.’ “He was very much the patriarch as a young person,”

says sister Maya. “Our mother was incredibly strong but also incredibly sensitive. She would cry

easily. He was always protective of her.” When Dunham moved back to Jakarta for her

anthropology field work, Barack saw his mother and half-sister only for Christmas and summer

break.’ (Kim Chipman, Bloomberg, op. cit.)

Obama entered the fifth grade at Punahou and stayed there until he graduated from high school

with honors in 1979. He reports that he was one of three black students at the school, although there

were many Asians and Pacific islanders. Obama’s Dreams from My Father provides incidents of

Obama’s feeling of racial humiliation while attending this school and chronicles his embrace of a

specific black or African-American racial identity as a matter of his own deliberate and conscious

choice. This path of development may be compared with Hitler’s discovery of his own Germanic

38 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

racial identity which forms an important part of Mein Kampf. There is, however, some question as

to whether Obama’s account of his repeated racial mortification by racist or thoughtless whites is

accurate, or whether it represents a fictitious construct designed to bolster his credibility for his later

career in Chicago as a black identity politician. Obama was on the basketball team at Punahou and

seems to have enjoyed some prestige. Some accounts report that, while he was a student in the late

1970s, he carved his name in the pavement outside the cafeteria of Punahou School. These graffiti

reportedly read: “King Obama.”

Here begins Obama’s intense, consuming preoccupation with race, the great central issue of his

subsequent life, in spite of what he now says. He learns about the imperative of race from a black

friend named Ray: “Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no

independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.” (Dreams 81) Obama

experiences this assumption of a racial identity as a narrowing and constriction of the spirit of his

own personality which he is nonetheless driven to accept: “following this maddening logic, the only

thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until

being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the

final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for

that too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. N****r.” (Dreams

85)

During one phase, Obama became intensely preoccupied with the literary expression of his own

situation as found in the works of such writers as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes,

Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. All but the last of this number, he judged, had

been consumed by anguish, doubt, and self-contempt. Almost all of them had “eventually

succumbed to its corrosive force,” and these had ended up as “exhausted, bitter men, the devil at

their heels.” (Dreams 86) Malcolm X, Obama found, was better and stronger: “even as I imagined

myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d

once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might

somehow be expunged. I know that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental.” (Dreams

86)

The Daily Mail stresses Obama’s later account of racial humiliation at Punahou: ‘…while there,

says Mr Obama, he was tortured by fellow pupils – who let out monkey hoots – and turned into a

disenchanted teenage rebel, experimenting with cocaine and marijuana. Even his grandparents were

troubled by dark skin, he says in his book, recalling how once his grandmother complained about

being pestered by a beggar. “You know why she’s so scared?” he recalls his grandfather saying.

“She told me the fella was black.” Mr Obama says his soaring ‘dream’ of a better America grew out

of his ‘hurt and pain.’ This is the incident Obama referred to later in his Philadelphia speech on

racism of March 2008, after the first phase of the Jeremiah Wright scandal had exploded. The

British reporters doubt that this was the real story: ‘“Friends, however, remember his time at school

rather differently. He was a spoiled high-achiever, they recall, who seemed as fond of his

grandparents as they were of him. He affectionately signed a school photo of himself to them, using

their pet names, Tut and Gramps. The caption says: “Thanks... for all the good times.” He worked

on the school’s literary magazine and wore a white suit, of the style popular with New York writers

like Tom Wolf at the time. One of his former classmates, Alan Lum, said: “Hawaii is such a melting

pot that it didn’t occur to me when we were growing up that he might have problems about being

one of the few African-Americans at the school. Us kids didn’t see colour. He was easy-going and

well-liked.” Lon Wysard, who also attended the academy, said the budding politician was in fact

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 39

idolised for his keen sportsmanship. “He was the star basketball player and always had a ball in his

hand wherever he was,” Wysard recalled.’ (London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)

OBAMA AS EXISTENTIALIST POET

One of Obama’s classmates and friends during this time was Keith “Ray” Kakugawa, who later

observed that “Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were

his feelings of abandonment.” Ray later went deeply into the drug culture and served three years in

prison because of illegal narcotics, emerging as homeless in the spring of 2007. A window into the

mentality of the youthful Obama is available in the form of a short poem he wrote during these

years, and which is quoted by Purdum in Vanity Fair. Purdum reports that Obama ‘immersed

himself in the writings of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X, only to

find the same anguish, the same self-doubt, a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed

able to deflect,” as he did in this poem for the school literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola:

I saw an old, forgotten man

On an old, forgotten road.

Staggering and numb under the glare of the

Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,

Slide from right to left, to right,

Looking for his life, misplaced in a

Shallow, muddy gutter long ago.

I am found, instead.

Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.

A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,

He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,

And walks a straight line along the crooked world.

When I mentioned the poem to Obama, he at first had no memory of it. After I read it to him, he

said, “That’s not bad. I wrote that in high school? You know, it sounds in spirit that it’s talking a

little bit about my grandfather.”’ (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Based on this evidence,

Obama was most likely a typical teenage existentialist, preoccupied above all with his own feeling

states, self-doubt, and pessimism. It is curious that he cannot remember a statement as personal as

this, even when shown it years later. Is Obama’s memory still intact? And if not, why not? A whole

range of possibilities, from drug abuse to early onset Alzheimer’s to simple prevarication need to be

considered.

HAWAII CPUSA CELL: FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS

During Obama’s high school years in Hawaii, he came into close contact with an older black

man whom he described in his memoir as Frank. This turns out to be one Frank Marshall Davis, a

devoted long-term member of the Communist Party of the United States. Marshall had moved to

Honolulu from Kansas in 1948; according to the pro-communist history Professor Gerald Horne of

the University of Houston, Davis made the move “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul

Robeson,” the well-known black singer and actor who was also a CPUSA member. Both Davis and

Robeson were from Chicago, and this may have something to do with Obama’s later decision to

move there. ‘As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had

“migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child

with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who

40 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.” (Cliff Kincaid, “Obama’s

Communist Mentor,” Accuracy in Media, February 18, 2008) Obama’s association with a

prominent Communist furnished the basis for the charge made against Obama by Allen Keyes

during the Senate campaign of 2004 that he was a “hard-core academic Marxist.” Frank Marshall

Davis was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Obama was

almost like a son to Davis, listening to his poetry and hanging on each word of his advice. Davis,

along with some other older black men, appear to have constituted a sort of CPUSA cell or sleeper

cell in Hawaii. Obama was taken to visit them in his early teens by his grandfather, Stanley

Dunham. Davis was a part of this now-informal group.

Frank Marshall Davis was mentioned in the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive

Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii as a CPUSA member. The House Un-

American Activities Committee (HUAC) accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front

organizations. The identification of Obama’s “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis is confirmed by

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand libertarian activist, researcher and blogger in a posting of March

2007. Obama writes that he knew “a poet named Frank” who was a purveyor of “hard-earned

knowledge,” and advice. Frank had had “some modest notoriety once,” and was “a contemporary of

Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago...,” Frank was now “pushing

eighty.” Obama was impressed that “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” gave him advice

before he left Hawaii for Occidental College in 1979, when Obama was 18.

Davis has been seen by some critics as a precursor to Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. There is

at least one book-length study of Davis entitled Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall

Davis by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas. In his review of Tidwell’s

study published in the summer/fall 2003 issue of African-American Review, James A. Miller of

George Washington University comments: “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to

join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II – even though he never

publicly admitted his Party membership.” Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

The decrepit intellectual periphery of the CPUSA has been notably stirred up by Obama’s

candidacy, doubtless in part because of Davis. Professor Horne, who is a contributing editor of the

Communist Party journal Political Affairs, mentioned the Obama-David connection in March 2007

at the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University; Horne’s

talk was entitled “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.” Davis also figures

prominently in The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946 by

James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of

Massachusetts-Amherst. Here Davis appears as a black writer who remained loyal to the CPUSA

even after Stalin’s infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Hitler, at a time when other black

intellectuals like Richard Wright broke with the CPUSA line. For Frank Marshall Davis,

communism was the god that did not fail. But what was Frank’s understanding of communism?

Obama writes in Dreams from My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left

Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “an advanced

degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing

what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s**t.” Davis also

complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,”

Obama wrote. Horne gloated that the Obama-Davis connection will emerge as a theme of wide

study in the near future. Horne says that Obama’s giving credit to Davis will be important in

history. “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 41

instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, Living the

Blues and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the

Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will

also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has

befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside,” he said.

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at

Manoa agrees that Davis is the “Frank” in Obama’s book. Takara wrote her dissertation on Davis

and interviewed him frequently between 1972 and 1987, before Davis died. Takara concludes that

Davis demonstrated “an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the

world.” For her, Davis was a “socialist realist.” Davis had been urged by Paul Robeson and Harry

Bridges, the pro-CPUSA head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), to

become a columnist for the Honolulu Record where he could work to advance the communist cause.

Takara sums up Davis’s program at that time as “freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due

process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight

imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics.”

COMMUNIST PARTY USA: OBAMA IS MARX’S OLD MOLE OF REVOLUTION

To advance this ideological Walpurgisnacht to an even more monstrous level, the CPUSA

organ, People’s World Weekly, recently published a letter from CPUSA supporter Frank Chapman

gloating over Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses. Chapman commented: “Obama’s victory was

more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of

struggle. … Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes

burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is

the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”

(Cliff Kincaid, “Obama’s Communist Mentor,” Accuracy in Media, February 18, 2008) The

CPUSA has formally endorsed Obama for the presidency.

Obama may well have learned a lot more from Davis than dialectical materialism. There are

indications scattered across the internet that Davis was bisexual. Officially he was married to Helen

Canfield David of Chicago, reportedly a woman of some social standing.11 If Obama’s mentor of

those years in fact had homosexual proclivities, this would be significant in explaining the later

bisexual features of Obama’s life.

Shortly before leaving Hawaii to go to Occidental College, Obama experiences one of his many

racial epiphanies when he learns that his grandmother Toot has been frightened in the street by a

black man whom she suspects of being a mugger. Obama recounts that when he heard of this

incident, “the words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure. In my

steadiest voice, I told [Gramps] that such an attitude bothered me, too, but assured him that Toot’s

fears would pass and that we should give her a ride in the meantime. […] after they left, I sat on the

edge of my bed and thought about my grandparents. They had sacrificed again and again for me.

They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to

doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have

been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.” (Dreams 89) When it comes to matters of

race, we have already learned that Obama is jumpy as an eyeball, and here his racial

hypersensitivity is displayed once again. In recent years, we have had many illustrious

representatives of the American black community come forward to acknowledge that they, too, are

sometimes uneasy when they are approached by aggressive black panhandlers in the streets.

42 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Obama, by contrast, continues to be so obsessed with this trifling incident that he included it in his

notorious Philadelphia speech on race of March 18, 2008, where he compared the fears of a woman

in late middle age with the violent invectives of the foundation-funded racist provocateur Jeremiah

Wright. When it comes to matters of race, Obama clearly loses all sense of reality and proportions,

and there is no reason to assume that anything whatsoever has changed in this regard.

“FRANK” – MARXIST OR GAY EXISTENTIALIST?

If Frank Marshall David had been a thorough Marxist, that would already have been bad enough.

Karl Marx, as I have shown in Surviving the Cataclysm, was in most respects a kept ideologue of

British intelligence, sponsored by David Urquhardt of the British Foreign Office, with a mission of

fomenting destabilization by pitting workers against industrialists in continental Europe, and with a

secondary task of whipping up sentiment against Russia. Like Mazzini the ultra-nationalist and

Bakunin the hyper-anarchist, Marx the apostle of plebeian revolution was a prong of an ideological

deployment by British intelligence to divide and conquer the main rivals of the British Empire. In

an age when the oppressive dominion of the British Empire, then at the apogee of its power, was the

leading reactionary political fact in the world, Marx chose to ignore that fact almost completely, and

focus almost entirely on the opportunities for conflict that were emerging during the process of

industrialization in the countries the British did not yet completely control. Marx, in other words,

had a permanent blind spot when it came to the mixture of Whig Venetian party aristocrats and

financiers who populated the City of London, and this blind spot lives on in his followers today.

Still, Marx as a serious charlatan does reject Malthus, and does admit that economic science must

face the problem of social reproduction, something that cruder charlatans like Malthus and Adam

Smith are not willing to address. There is every reason to believe that Frank Marshal Davis imbibed

the major negative aspects of Marx without absorbing the minor positive ones.

“Frank” was almost certainly a member of the Communist Party USA. But the quality of his

assimilation of Marxism is quite another matter. The level of Marxist theoretical development in the

CPUSA was notoriously very low. The lack of theory in the old CPUSA was one of the factors that

made it so easy for the FBI to infiltrate it to the point of becoming a majority. Especially when it

came to recruiting in the black community, the CPUSA was infamously opportunistic, always ready

to jettison dialectical materialism when it appeared possible to recruit some new members on the

basis of resistance to white racism. Based on what he says, Frank is not interested in proletarian

internationalism in the struggle against world imperialism. He thinks that white people cannot

understand his experiences as an oppressed black man. He rejects the unity of world history. Frank

has nothing to do with Marxism. He is already a black cultural nationalist, with hardly a veneer of

Marxist phraseology. Frank is more of an existentialist than a Marxist himself.

Immediately after the incident just reported, Obama narrates that he went to visit Frank Marshall

Davis. From Davis, Obama received quantities of whiskey accompanied by a lecture on the

incommunicability of race-based experience to persons on the other side of the color line, namely

Obama’s grandparents, the “white folk.” Frank tells Obama that his grandfather is basically a good

man but that the black experience for Gramps is a book sealed with seven seals: “He can’t know

me,” says the communist Frank, “not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or

the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated.

But your grandfather will never know what that feels like.” (Dreams 90) Frank concludes: “what

I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She

understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it

were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.” (Dreams 91)

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 43

OBAMA AS RACE-BASED EXISTENTIALIST: “UTTERLY ALONE”

By all indications, this is the experience which made Obama not only a confirmed racialist

ideologue, but also a thoroughgoing existentialist in the tradition of Heidegger and Jaspers. Obama

recounts the moment thus: “The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I

stopped, trying to steady myself and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.” (Dreams 91)

This experience is of vital importance for understanding the mentality of the adult Obama. If

Obama had been taught Marxism by Frank Marshall Davis, he would at this point say that he had

decided to submerge his own existence in the greater reality of the march of class struggle through

history. But he does not say that he is part of the vanguard of millions of workers. He says rather

that he is absolutely, metaphysically alone. The finding here is that Obama was by this point a

convinced existentialist, and that Obama’s embrace of existentialism, the point of view which

pervades so much of Dreams, gave him the prerequisites for becoming a full-fledged disciple of

Frantz Fanon, an implacable enemy of Western civilization, proto-fascist, an apostle of purgative

violence in the Sorel-Mussolini tradition. Obama spent years wallowing in existentialist self-pity.

Obama’s eager embrace of the existentialist world outlook provided some of the indispensable

preconditions for his current career as a mob orator. It has equipped him to write his speeches out

of a bag of alienation, despair, and absolute metaphysical loneliness, appealing with some

semblance of pathos to the desire of his target audiences for community, hope, and change. At the

same time, however, Obama’s existentialism has provided him with his own personal path to

fascism.

Many American readers may be surprised at the idea that existentialism is somehow connected

to fascism, or can serve as an immediate prelude to fascism. This is probably because of the

popular identification in this country of existentialism with such French writers as Jean-Paul Sartre

and Albert Camus, both of whom were at pains to make a show of having supported the resistance

against the Nazi occupation of their country. Later research has raised doubts about how much

Sartre ever did to oppose the Nazis. Sartre was a disciple of Heidegger who took part for a while in

a literary group with anti-occupation overtones, but this group, called Socialisme et liberté, “soon

dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote

Being and Nothingness, The Flies and No Exit, none of which was censored by the Germans, and

also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines….the French philosopher and resistant

Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre’s lack of political commitment during the German

occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself.”

(Wikipedia) (Obama clearly knows the French existentialists.)

We must remember that Sartre and Camus represent lesser gods in the international existentialist

pantheon which is actually presided over by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a full throated, cardcarrying

member of the National Socialist party who delivered a public paean to Hitler in the form

of his inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiburg. It is in this speech that Heidegger

made the comment that the decision in favor of National Socialism had already been made by the

youngest part of the German nation, thereby validating the fascist myth that it is youth and youth

alone who are the arbiters of the political destinies of great nations — an absurd fiction which

echoes through the empty vessels of the Obama lemming legions. In Obama, we see the intimate

epistemological and ethical proximity of existentialism and fascism which is exemplified by

Heidegger, the world’s leading existentialist thinker and a Nazi at the same time.

44 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

EXISTENTIALISM AS ANTECHAMBER TO FASCISM

The Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs has provided the most detailed study of the

ideological precursors of fascism and National Socialism in his 1952 book Die Zerstörung der

Vernunft (The Destruction of Reason). Lukacs’ summary of the existentialists Heidegger and

Jaspers, both much touted by US and British philosophy departments, may give us some insights

into Obama’s mentality today. Lukacs sums up: “The philosophy of Jaspers as well as that of

Heidegger concludes without any achievements but nevertheless with extremely important social

consequences. Heidegger and Jaspers take extremely individualistic, petty bourgeois-aristocratic

relativism and irrationalism to their most extreme consequences. They end up in the ice age, at the

North Pole, in a world which has become empty, a senseless chaos, nothingness as the surroundings

of humanity; and their despair about themselves, about their incorrigible loneliness is the inner

content of their philosophy. […] Through this, the general mood of despair in broad layers of the

German bourgeoisie and above all of the intelligentsia was exacerbated, while possible tendencies

towards protest were discouraged, and the aggressive reactionaries received through this a

significant assistance.” (Lukacs 457) If fascism was able to educate wide sectors of the German

intelligentsia into a more than benevolent neutrality, no small amount of the credit was due to the

philosophy of Heidegger and Jaspers.” In the same way that existentialism helped to open the door

for fascism in central Europe, we can see that existentialism served as a kind of prelude to further

fascist developments in Obama’s own mental life.

Lukacs is especially interested in the role of despair in fascist ideology, both before and after

1945. Lukacs writes: “The mere word ‘despair’ as content of this ideology is not enough to explain

it, because we have seen that Heidegger’s despair was actually a direct preparation for Hitlerism.

[…] We are dealing here with something different with something greater and something more

concrete. It is not just general despair about all human activity; just despair has led thinkers from

Schopenhauer to Heidegger into the reactionary camp or at least into collaboration with the

reactionaries. [Post-1945 existentialists] are not only in despair about things in general; their doubts

and their despair are directed above all against those glad tidings which they are supposed to be

proclaiming, namely the defense of the ‘free world,’” understood as the Anglo-American sphere of

world power.” (Lukacs 704) For Lukacs, the pre-1945 fascists displayed cynical nihilism, while the

post-1945 fascists have been characterized by cynical hypocrisy. This is a shoe that may well fit

Obama.

We are arguing, in other words, that Obama’s embrace of the philosophy of academic

postmodernism has constituted an important stage in his development towards fascism. The

postmodernism of which we speak has of course been the dominant intellectual outlook among

most college and university faculties since about the 1970s. Intellectually speaking, it is a thin and

unappetizing gruel, suitable for crabbed little people operating in a phase of imperialist decline.

The starting point of postmodernism is the despair, disorientation, demoralization, and defeatism

which emerged from the collapse of the positive social movements of the 1960s. From its very

beginning, postmodernism has been much more interested in race and gender than in class.

Postmodernism is an unsavory stew of existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism,

anthropological relativism, and Malthusianism, all thrown together in the cauldron of historical

pessimism and cultural pessimism. The aspect of relativism has been especially important for the

rejection and destruction of classical culture with its indispensable notions of human reason, human

freedom, human greatness, and the heroic sense of the world historical individual. Instead, the

drawings of patients in mental institutions are placed on the same plane as the works of Leonardo

and Rafael, and Athens and Florence are compared unfavorably to hunting and gathering societies

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 45

where cannibalism and infanticide proliferate. Postmodernism is the creed of the morally insane. A

thoroughgoing postmodernist (or “postie”) must axiomatically reject any notion of objective reality;

postmodernism when challenged beats a hasty retreat into a dream world of myth, metaphor, and

archetype. Postmodernism gets its philosophical underpinnings most of all from Nietzsche and the

other exponents of what the academics like to call “Continental philosophy,” so as to avoid talking

about the strong fascist overtones of many of these thinkers. The latent fascist potentialities of

present day academic postmodernism are immense, and have only been waiting behind masks of

cynicism and apathy for the appearance of an appropriate demagogue to mobilize them into the

obvious forms of frenetic sociopathic activism.

FRANK WARNS OBAMA HE IS ABOUT TO BE RECRUITED

Before leaving for Occidental College, Obama visits Frank one last time to get his advice,

somewhat on the model of Laertes going to Polonius in Hamlet. Frank tells Obama that college

represents “an advanced degree in compromise.” Frank explains that Obama has to understand the

“real price of admission.” The real price is “leaving your race at the door. Leaving your people

behind. Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going

there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate

words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already

know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity

and the American way and all that s**t. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy

dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things and

then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well paid n****r,

but you’re a n****r just the same.” (Dreams 97)

This is one of the most illuminating passages in Obama’s personal memoir. He is in effect

confessing to the reader what is about to happen to him at Occidental College and above all with his

encounter with Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia University: to become a wholly-owned asset and

career sponsored by the networks of the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger group, and the

Council on Foreign Relations. Obama describes a process of training and indoctrination so

thorough that it needs to be described as brainwashing. The personal identity of the individual is

largely erased, resulting in a kind of automaton or zombie. Obama has now passed beyond the

stage of brainwashing into the phase of spouting slogans to get ahead. He knows that what awaits

him is a phase of nominal authority masking the reality of his role of abject puppet and stooge of his

masters. This chapter might be subtitled “The Confessions of St. Barack,” since he gives us a

thumbnail sketch of his life, past, present, and future. This extraordinary revelation of the real

nature and basis of Obama’s career is of course a potential source of immense embarrassment, so it

must have taken a compulsive urge to impel Obama to include it in the published text. This

elementary lack of prudence illustrates another aspect of Obama’s existentialism and fatalism:

powerful, sincere emotions acquire for the existentialist a validity and justification which cannot be

questioned, no matter how irrational and sociopathic those sincere emotions may be.

OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: BONG HITS FOR FANON

Obama has conceded that he had made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and

drinking; this admission was made in a talk to high school students in New Hampshire in November

2007. The adulatory Vanity Fair profile attempts to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by

congratulating Obama on his frankness in admitting his systematic drug use. Here we read: “Mr.

46 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, Dreams from My Father, was written before

he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs

would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee. Mr. Obama, of

Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or provided many details. He wrote about his two

years at Occidental, a predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound awakening

from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his activism there and his fears that drugs could lead

him to addiction or apathy, as they had for many other black men.” It was doubtful that the GOP’s

Karl Rove attack machine would be so charitable with Obama.

Occidental black students self-segregated themselves; Obama writes that they were “like a

tribe.” (Dreams 98) They attempted to enforce conformity on students they considered non-white.

Obama recounts the story of Joyce, a smart young multiracial woman. Joyce complains that it is

black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose.

They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am.” (Dreams 99) Obama comments that

“Only white culture had individuals.” (Dreams 100) His obsession with race and identity remains

constant throughout.

OBAMA’S “I DIDN’T INJECT’ MOMENT

At Occidental College near Los Angeles, Obama began to experiment intensively with illegal

narcotics. He claims that he dabbled with marijuana and cocaine, but stopped short of shooting up

heroin. Obama himself writes: “I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped,

and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though – Mickey, my potential

initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that.” (Dreams 93) Obama says

he was confronted with “the needle and the tubing” and then got cold feet (while standing in a meat

freezer in a deli) and backed out. He had been on his way to the life of an addict, like his friend

Ray: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be

black man.” (Dreams 93) So Obama was on the verge of heroin but did not inject, a familiar refrain.

As a freshman at Occidental, Obama had an international circle of friends — “a real eclectic sort

of group,” recalled Vinai Thummalapally from Hyderabad, India. Obama became especially

friendly with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis.

Thummalapally also recalls a French student, plus black and white Americans. One of these was

Jon K. Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel. Mitchell says

he remembers that Obama wore puka shell necklaces all the time, even though they were not in

style, and that “we let it slide because he spent a lot of time growing up in Hawaii.”) (Adam

Goldman and Robert Tanner, “Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA, NY,” AP via Newsday, May

15, 2008) Later, these friendships would make it possible for Obama to visit Pakistan in 1981. At

that time Obama traveled to Pakistan and spent “about three weeks” with Hamid, and staying in

Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary. “He was clearly

shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural

peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” commented Margot

Mifflin, who has a bit part in Obama’s memoir. Obama often claims that the fact he has traveled

abroad makes him better able to understand international relations; his trip to Pakistan appears to

have prepared him above all to make his outrageous demand for the unilateral US bombing of

Pakistan, with all the inevitable slaughter, in search of “al Qaeda.” There is also some suggestion

that Obama may have been visiting gay friends on this trip.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 47

Obama tells us that it was at Occidental College that he came under the influence of Frantz

Fanon. Obama writes: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The

more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors

and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather

jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and

patriarchy.” (Dreams 100) Here is the aspiring president wandering through the post-modernist

proto-fascist rubble field. He is overwhelmingly other-directed, obsessed with his image in the eyes

of others. The name that stands out is that of Frantz Fanon, probably the biggest intellectual

influence on the young Obama.

BEFORE POL POT AND KHOMEINI, THERE WAS FANON

Fanon (1925-1961) was a French-speaking psychiatrist born on the island of Martinique in the

Caribbean. Like Rousseau before him, Fanon was promoted and made famous by Venetian cultural

operatives, notably by Umberto Campagnolo of the enormously influential Société Européenne de

Culture, one of the most important international think tanks of the time between 1945 and 1975. It

was the Venetian foundation operative Campagnolo who first brought Fanon to Europe and made

him a celebrity. The preface to the first edition of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in Paris in 1961

was written by the French existentialist pope, Jean-Paul Sartre. Fanon attempted to identify himself

with the merging anti-colonial revolutions of the third world and joined the Algerian FLN, but he

always remained a European existentialist decadent in methodological terms, and not a denizen of a

third world rice paddy or favela. Fanon, a disciple of Merleau-Ponty, was always a hater of science,

technology, and human progress, since he always thought of technology as something imposed by

the European colonial masters which had to be rejected as part of liberation from the colonial yoke.

This made Fanon a direct precursor of the New Dark Ages faction which emerged during the 1970s

in the form of such figures as Pol Pot of Cambodia, the “Islamo-marxists” Ali Shariati and Bani-

Sadr of Iran, and other declared enemies of western civilization. The problem was the aspirations of

the third world peoples to a better life could never be fulfilled without the large scale realization of

science and technology. Fanon was accordingly a thinker who appealed to degenerate third world

oligarchies, anxious to get independence but equally determined to prevent the masses from gaining

upward mobility through the social effects of industrialization, which this school tried to define as

ethnocide because it wiped out the backward and primitive dead-end cultures festering in the

backwaters of the planet.

The other leading idea of Fanon was the necessity of violence, which he exalted in direct

contradiction to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Fanon was evidently under the spell of Georges

Sorel, the theoretician of purgative violence who was so important for the young Mussolini. The

combination of anti-science demagogy couched in hyper-revolutionary third world terms, plus a

demand for violence which easily shaded over into terrorism, made Fanon’s writings a key tool for

the left wings of US, British and French intelligence during the phase of decolonization in the 1960s

and 1970s. Fanon was also important for the European terrorists of the Italian Red Brigades and the

German Baader-Meinhof group. Fanon, much more than Marx, must be seen as one of the

permanent keys to Obama’s thinking. Obama turns out to be an ultra-left existentialist, with

Fanonist-Sorelian fascist overtones.

Fanon expresses the utopian desire to eliminate all the problems inherited from European

colonialism by bringing an entirely new world, a utopia, into being. As so often happens, the chosen

tool to abolish the historical past is “absolute violence.” (Fanon citations are from The Wretched of

the Earth, chapter VI, conclusion, transl. Dominic Tweedie) Violence purifies, and it is only

48 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

through violence that the dichotomy of white and black can be transcended. “Violence,” says

Fanon, “is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair

and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” Fanon also posed as an ideologue

of world revolution, opining: “In guerrilla war the struggle no longer concerns the place where you

are, but the places where you are going. Each fighter carries his warring country between his toes.”

And again: “The national bourgeoisie will be greatly helped on its way toward decadence by the

Western bourgeoisies, who come to it as tourists avid for the exotic, for big game hunting, and for

casinos. The national bourgeoisie organizes centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to

meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the

occasion will be built up as a national industry.”

At the center of the belief structure of the mature Fanon is the total rejection of European

civilization on racial grounds: “We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and

friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating

mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere

they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For

centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual

experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. And yet it

may be said that Europe has been successful in as much as everything that she has attempted has

succeeded. Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence. Look

at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever farther! Every one of her movements has burst

the bounds of space and thought. Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also

set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness. She has only shown herself parsimonious and

niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my

brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that

same Europe? Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find

something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as

we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let

us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom

Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.”

FANON: THE UNITED STATES IS A MONSTER

In Fanon’s world picture, the only thing worse than Europe is the United States. Fanon’s

condemnation of the United States should be carefully read, since it is here that we find the roots of

Obama’s hatred of the country he chose to be his own: “Two centuries ago, a former European

colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America

became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to

appalling dimensions. Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? The

West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of

Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized

the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity.”

Fanon also makes clear that European workers have become integrated into European capitalist

society; contrary to Marxist theory, they have sold out. Nothing positive can be expected from these

workers, since they are just as corrupt as the other Europeans. Fanon thinks that race is everything,

that class is nothing, and that race war, the more violent the better, will be the answer. Here we see

the germ of the anti-working class hatred which was common to Fanon, to the Ayers-Dohrn

Weatherman terrorist faction of SDS, and which lives on in the statements of the Obama campaign

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 49

today: “Yes, the European spirit has strange roots. All European thought has unfolded in places

which were increasingly more deserted and more encircled by precipices; and thus it was that the

custom grew up in those places of very seldom meeting man. A permanent dialogue with oneself

and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state,

where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working

and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing

from the meanings contained in words. Yet some Europeans were found to urge the European

workers to shatter this narcissism and to break with this un-reality. But in general the workers of

Europe have not replied to these calls; for the workers believe, too, that they are part of the

prodigious adventure of the European spirit.” Working class voters are right to identify in Obama a

class enemy, since that is exactly what he is.

The utopian theme of the New Man, the radical reform of human nature itself, and the

overcoming of alienation are all utopian themes which play a central role in fascist movements, as

we will show in more detail in the final chapter of this book. Fanon argues strongly for a utopian

approach of this type, which depends on rejecting western civilization: “The Third World today

faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which

Europe has not been able to find the answers. If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we

must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe. Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations

of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of

their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. For

Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out

new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”12

Just to make sure that the point about violence was thoroughly understood by Fanon’s gullible

young readers, the premier French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961 contributed the following

preface to the edition of Fanon which Obama is likely to have read: “… read Fanon; for he shows

clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage

instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this

truth at one time, but we have forgotten it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence;

only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out

the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he

comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we consider it

as a triumph of barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of

the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a

war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the

disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a

gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s

weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down

a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at

the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a

national soil under his foot.” The decadent French intellectual embraces Fanon most of all because

of his call for violence, thus unerringly singling out the sickest part of Fanon’s work.

OBAMA’S NICOTINE ADDICTION BEGINS

Obama apparently started smoking when he was at Occidental College. In his fawning cult

biography of Obama, author David Mendell writes about Obama’s life as a “secret smoker” and

how he “went to great lengths to conceal the habit.” Jeff Stier has analyzed the degree to which

50 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Obama’s quarter century of smoking may have impacted his health: the conclusion is that Obama

may well have more health problems than John McCain. Stier writes: “So how long and how much

did Sen. Obama smoke? The information has not been officially released, and the campaign has not

returned calls or emails posing this question. But he smoked a lot over his life. He admits to having

smoked up to ten cigarettes a day, but usually closer to five or six. Most people underestimate how

much they smoke, but let’s take him at his word. Let’s also assume he really did quit when he said

he did, in February 2007 (although he admits to having fallen off the wagon). That’s about twentysix

years, given that we know he was smoking by the time he was a freshman at Occidental College.

That’s more than 55,000 — maybe 70,000 cigarettes! Has this aspect of Sen. Obama’s ability to

serve really been explored? Just because he’s young, looks great, and exercises doesn’t mean he’s

healthy. Recall Jim Fixx. An overweight smoker when he turned his life around at thirty-five, Fixx

became the icon of fitness. He quit smoking and started running. Then he died in 1984 at age fiftythree

— while running. Sen. Obama, while not overweight, smoked a lot longer than Jim Fixx did.

And while the stresses of running may have contributed to Fixx’s death, it was his years of

smoking, not his running, that caused the plaque to build up in his arteries. Doctors say the stress of

being president may in fact exceed the stress of running. And it’s an unhealthier kind of stress. The

public deserves to know how long and how much Sen. Obama really smoked. Does he have other

risk factors for heart disease? Compared to whites, for instance, African-Americans are more likely

to die of a stroke, according to the American Heart Association. This, in fact, is probably the only

time race is a legitimate question to raise this campaign season — and just one of several health

question on voters’ minds.” (Jeff Stier, Obama’s Health, April 19, 2008) McCain, we see, may be

in better health than Obama, despite appearances.

Smoking is subject to an ineffable taboo in the rich elitist, affluent suburbanite, academic, and

global warming circles which provide Obama’s base of support, so he has striven to hide his

horrible dirty vice from public view. Pictures showing Obama smoking have been greeted with

unalloyed horror by Obama’s backers. However, the candidate has confessed that he has gone back

to puffing his coffin nails as a result of the stress of the campaign trail. One reporter who penetrated

Obama’s terrible secret, despite his evasive action, was the perceptive Jake Tapper, who exposed

the issue in April 2008: ‘As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen

sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of

cigarettes. Obama ran off before I could ask him if he’d just snuck a smoke, so I called his

campaign. They denied it. He’d quit months before, in February [2007], they insisted. He chewed

nicorette. But I knew what I’d smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if

he’d had a cigarette. They reported back that he had told them he hadn’t had a cigarette since he

quit. And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve

somehow misfired. Except….last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to

wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful. “I fell off the wagon a

couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on,” he said. “But it is a struggle

like everything else.”’ (Jake Tapper, “Obama is Smokin’,” abcnews.com, April 3, 2008) Because of

the importance of the presidency, it is imperative that all candidates release their medical records,

including the results of any mental health treatments and of any and all HIV testing.

THE LOST YEARS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY:

OBAMA’S WALL OF SECRECY

Obama’s years at Columbia University between 1981 and 1983 constitute the greatest single

mystery of his life. From the point of view of all available biographical material published and in

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 51

the public domain, these are quite simply Obama’s lost years. Dreams from My Father, as we have

seen, is a book prodigal with details about Obama’s drug use — a question that may have a serious

potential to damage his political career. By contrast Obama’s attendance at Columbia University, a

member of the prestigious Ivy League, ought to be a selling point and indeed a point of honor for

our candidate. Instead, any attempts to establish the relevant facts about Obama’s years at Columbia

runs up against a brick wall of silence, evasion, and prevarication. The result is a gaping hole in

Obama’s autobiographical narrative, a serious lacuna precisely where this inveterate showboater

would normally be showcasing his academic achievements. It is in part one, chapter 6 of Dreams

that Obama covers up these years at Columbia. There is almost nothing about his activity as a

student, or about his mental life. The Associated Press ran up against the same wall: “The Obama

campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for

example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama

lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn — one

in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s

Upper East Side.” (Adam Goldman and Robert Tanner, “Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA,

NY,” AP via Newsday, May 15, 2008)

The biographical surveys of Obama published by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune

are equally incapable of providing any details about Obama’s time on the Columbia campus. As

Janny Scott of the New York Times reported, ‘Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking

the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three

miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing

in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his

Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from

those years. “He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a

campaign spokesman. Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir,

Dreams from My Father, weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s

prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at

his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was

like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.’ Why so secretive when he could be

showboating, according to his preferred custom? Or, are we dealing with some form of mental

impairment?

In an article by the insufferable British snob and Obama partisan Richard Wolffe (know to the

few viewers of the Olberman propaganda show, Newsweek magazine attempted to convinced its

readers that Obama is some kind of Christian. This required grotesque contortions, which need not

concern us here. Wolffe reflects the same cone of silence encountered by other researchers into

Obama’s lost years at Columbia, about which he reports virtually no facts and few lies: Obama,

alleges Wolffe, ‘enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school

in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in

Los Angeles. In New York City, "I lived an ascetic existence," Obama told Newsweek in an

interview on his campaign plane last week. "I did a lot of spiritual exploration. I withdrew from the

world in a fairly deliberate way." He fasted. Often, he'd go days without speaking to another person.

For company, he had books. There was Saint Augustine, the fourth-century North African bishop

who wrote the West's first spiritual memoir and built the theological foundations of the Christian

Church. There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher and father of

existentialism. There was Graham Greene, the Roman Catholic Englishman whose short novels are

full of compromise, ambivalence and pain. Obama meditated on these men and argued with them in

52 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

his mind.’ Notice that the racist-terrorist-Luddite Fanon, the writer who influenced Obama the most,

has disappeared. He is now replaced by Nietzsche, the classic protofascist philodoxer of the

nineteenth century. The top Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg rightly claimed Nietzsche along with

Richard Wagner, the antisemite Lagarde and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain as a precursor

of the Nazi movement. As we argue elsewhere, it is most likely through existentialism, of which

Nietzsche was a precursor, that Obama developed as a social fascist. (“Finding His Faith,”

Newsweek, July 12, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/145971)

Obama’s acolytes at the reactionary Chicago Tribune found even less about Obama’s Columbia

years than the swooning liberals at the New York Times.

Obama spent just two years at Occidental. He said in a recent interview that he had begun to

weary of the parties and fretted about a lackadaisical approach to his studies. He grew more

introspective and serious. His mother’s warnings were beginning to take hold. Seeking a fresh

start, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City. Classmates and teachers from

those days remember him as studious and serious, someone who hit the library in his off hours

instead of the bars. “If I had to give one adjective to describe him, it is mature,” said William

Araiza, who took an international politics class with Obama. “He was our age, but seemed older

because of his poise.” (Maurice Possley, “Activism Blossomed in College,” Chicago Tribune,

March 30, 2007)

That’s it. Nothing more. No Dink Stover at Yale, no This Side of Paradise. Before you know it,

Obama has left Columbia and is out in the big world: “After his graduation from Columbia

University in 1983, he worked briefly for a New York financial consultant and then a consumer

organization.” Bob Secter and John McCormick, “Portrait of a Pragmatist,” Chicago Tribune,

March 30, 2007) Some postings on the Internet have alleged that Obama is seeking to hide a phase

of flamboyant homosexuality during his years at Morningside Heights. This may be so. However,

the principal thesis argued here, based on very strong circumstantial evidence, is that Obama is

seeking to conceal the central event of his entire personal story: his recruitment by Zbigniew

Brzezinski as a long-term controlled political asset and sponsored career of the Rockefellercontrolled

Trilateral Commission.

OBAMA AND ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AT COLUMBIA, 1981-1983

Brzezinski during these years was fresh from having directed the National Security Council

during Jimmy Carter’s sole term in office. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, it was in

precisely this period of the early 1980s that Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and other long-term

Trilateral planners were reflecting on the results of the Carter regime, while looking forward to

wrecking and frustrating a general political upsurge in the United States (known in Huntington’s

parlance as a creedal passion period) which they could already see on the horizon, and which they

located at that time in the years between 2010 and 2030. It is safe to assume that Brzezinski and

Huntington were also concerned with recruiting young political talent which they could develop,

groom, indoctrinate, and brainwash for various purposes, including that of political candidate, over

the coming decades. Brzezinski and Huntington, in short, were looking for political assets which

they might employ during a quarter century perspective which was the framework for their future

activity. Because of the strong Ford Foundation pedigree of Obama’s mother, young Barack would

have been an obvious choice as a subject to be interviewed and vetted. The contention here is that

Obama was recruited in the context of this effort, and that since then, his career has been fostered

and sponsored by the circles of the Trilateral Commission.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 53

Zbigniew Brzezinski during these years was working as the boss of the Institute for Communist

Affairs at Columbia — a notorious anti-Soviet think tank and propaganda center. What little we

know about Obama includes that he was a politics major with a specialty in international relations

who wrote his senior thesis on the topic of Soviet nuclear disarmament. This, needless to say, is a

topic which has Zbigniew Brzezinski written all over it. If Senator Obama wishes to refute the

contention that he has been a member of the Brzezinski Trilateral stable of politicians and other

operatives since approximately 1981-1983, he is invited to offer documentation to that end. For his

part, Zbigniew Brzezinski understood quite soon in his career that his Dr. Strangelove television

persona was a decided political liability in this country. It has been forgotten today, but at the time

he left office at the end of the Carter administration, Brzezinski was by all odds the most hated

member of a very unpopular administration. In fact, it would seem that Brzezinski ranks down to

this day as the most hated government official serving in Democratic administrations since the

departure from the White House of Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1969. Any doubts about this

profound unpopularity had been clarified when Brzezinski was loudly booed by the delegates to the

1980 Democratic National Convention. Since those times, Brzezinski has been extraordinarily gun

shy when it comes to publicity or to stating in public what he actually thinks and intends.

Brzezinski, in other words, has learned that he must conceal his own political operations, lest they

be disrupted by hostile scrutiny. Obama has represented one of these long-term, concealed

Brzezinski operations.

Obama’s presence at Columbia remains shrouded in mystery. According to published reports,

many of his classmates don’t remember Obama. According to one account, he does not appear in

the yearbook of his graduating class. In response to inquiries made by journalists during 2007,

Columbia University was unwilling or unable to find a picture of him during his years at that

university. Obama has attempted to conceal his years at Columbia with the usual cloak of

complaints about the alleged racism of the place: ‘Mr Obama was later admitted to read politics and

international relations at New York’s prestigious Columbia University where, his book claims, “no

matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched

with blunt correspondence (about) n****rs.” But one of his classmates, Joe Zwicker, 45, now a

lawyer in Boston, said yesterday: “That surprises me. Columbia was a pretty tolerant place. There

were African-American students in my classes and I never saw any evidence of racism at all.”’

(London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007) Nevertheless, Obama does reveal in veiled terms that

coming to Columbia was a great watershed in his life: ‘“There was a fundamental rupture in my life

between Occidental and Columbia, where I just became more serious,” Obama said.’ (Purdum,

Vanity Fair, March 2008) It was Brzezinski’s intervention that made the difference, we believe.

And: is Obama suggesting that this was when he turned away from illegal drugs? He never says so

specifically, leaving a plethora of questions.

In a September 5, 2008 interview with Matt Welch, the Libertarian Party candidate for vice

president Wayne Allyn Root, a member of Obama’s Columbia class of 1983, reports that he never

met or heard of anybody called Obama, and has not been able to find anyone who can among his

fellow alumni. Root majored in the same department where Obama claims to have majored. Here is

an excerpt from this revealing exchange:

“Wayne Allyn Root: I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is

I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don’t have a

classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!

Matt Welch: So tell us what we should know about Barack

54 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Welch: Yeah, but you were like selling, you know, Amway in college or something, weren’t

you?

Root: Is that what you think of me! And the best damned Amway salesman ever!

Welch: No, I’m sure that you were an outgoing young man, I’m just guessing.

Root: I am! That’s my point. Where was Obama? He wasn’t an outgoing young man, no one

ever heard of him.

Tim Cavanaugh: Maybe he was a late bloomer.

Root: Maybe. Or maybe he was involved in some sort of black radical politics.

Welch: Ooooooooooh.

Root: Maybe he was too busy smoking pot in his dorm room to ever show up for class. I don’t

know what he was doing!

Welch: Wait, you weren’t smoking pot in your dorm room?

Root: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t. But I don’t hold that against anybody, but I wasn’t.... Nobody

recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.

Welch: Were you the exact same class?

Root: Class of ‘83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don’t get more exact

than that. Never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion,

our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class?

Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he

was.

Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?

Root: I don’t know! I didn’t know him. I don’t think anybody knew him. But I know that the

guy who writes the class notes, who’s kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who

knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It’s

very strange.

Welch: That’s peculiar! Do you have any theories?”13

In spite of his intent to deceive and dissemble, Obama has lavished praise on Zbigniew, as for

example in his first foreign policy speech in Iowa in 2007, when he called in Zbiggy to introduce

him. On this occasion, Obama paid homage to the Polish revanchist in effusive terms: “Brzezinski

is someone I have learned an immense amount from,” and “one of our most outstanding scholars

and thinkers.” The New York Times account of this critical and decisive phase in Obama’s life

stresses the obsessive secrecy with which the Obamakins attempt to shroud this entire phase.

Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an

undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces

only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the

metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.” He tells of

underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire

escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods”

bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to

multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself

with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior

year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 55

nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work

he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star

performer.” […] In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in

which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period

of study.” “I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,”

he was quoted as saying. He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student

Organization and anti-apartheid activities, although in recent interviews, several prominent

student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role. (Janny Scott, “Obama’s Account

of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” New York Times, October 30, 2007)

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar

on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics

company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr.

Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A

in the course. Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The

faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay

Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in

the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

One of Obama’s friends at Columbia was his roommate Sadik or Siddiqi, who is described as “a

short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party. Obama’s

campaign adamantly refused to identify “Sadik,” but the Associated Press located him in Seattle,

where he raises money for a community theater. When Obama arrived in New York, he already

knew Siddiqi — a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles.

Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock

Obama’s idealism — he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to

help the poor. “At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too

seriously,” Siddiqi said. “I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with

the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me

very irritating.” Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man. “We were

both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled

and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a

boutique…. The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with

gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture

they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps. …’

Obama commented: ‘“For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not

focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.” In his memoir, Obama recalls fasting on

Sunday; Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory’s vegetarian diet. “I

think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that.” But it

wasn’t exactly an ascetic life. There was plenty of time for reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S.

Naipaul) and listening to music (Van Morrison, the Ohio Players, Bob Dylan). The two, along with

others, went out for nights on the town. “He wasn’t entirely a hermit,” Siddiqi said. Siddiqi said his

female friends thought Obama was “a hunk.” “We were always competing,” he said. “You know

how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t outcompete

him in picking up girls, that’s for sure.” Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother,

who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but

polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate — he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but “he was really

patient. I’m surprised he suffered me.” Finally, their relationship started to fray. “I was partying all

56 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

the time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.’ (Adam Goldman and

Robert Tanner, “Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA, NY,” AP via Newsday, May 15, 2008)

TRILATERAL COMMISSION POST-CARTER PERSPECTIVE, 1981-1983

During these years, Trilateral leaders Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington were pondering the

future transformation of the United States into a bureaucratic-authoritarian or totalitarian state. In

his book American Politics, Huntington developed a perspective for the future based on conflict

between increasingly authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian state control, on the one hand, and an

underlying American value system and world-outlook – which he calls the “American Creed” – on

the other. In Huntington’s view, there was no doubt that the regime would become more oppressive:

“An increasingly sophisticated economy and active involvement in world affairs seem likely to

create stronger needs for hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization of power, expertise, big government

specifically, and big organizations generally.” (p. 228) This is a kind of shorthand for what most

experts could identify as the fascist corporate state.

The problem Huntington saw was the American Creed, based on liberty, equality, individualism,

and democracy and rooted in “seventeenth-century Protestant moralism and eighteenth-century

liberal rationalism.” (p. 229) Huntington predicted in 1981 that the conflict between individualistic

values and the centralized regime may explode early in the coming century, specifically between

2010 and 2030, in a period of ferment and dislocation like the late 1960s: “If the periodicity of the

past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of

the twenty-first century.” At this time, he argued, “the oscillations among the responses could

intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions.” (p. 232) Such a

process would be acted out as follows:

“Lacking any concept of the state, lacking for most of its history both the centralized authority

and the bureaucratic apparatus of the European state, the American polity has historically been

a weak polity. It was designed to be so, and the traditional inheritance and social environment

combined for years to support the framers’ intentions. In the twentieth century, foreign threats

and domestic economic and social needs have generated pressures to develop stronger, more

authoritative decision-making and decision-implementing institutions. Yet the continued

presence of deeply felt moralistic sentiments among major groups in American society could

continue to ensure weak and divided government, devoid of authority and unable to deal

satisfactorily with the economic, social and foreign challenges confronting the nation.

Intensification of this conflict between history and progress could give rise to increasing

frustration and increasingly violent oscillations between moralism and cynicism. American

moralism ensures that government will never be truly efficacious; the realities of power ensure

that government will never be truly democratic. This situation could lead to a two-phase

dialectic involving intensified efforts to reform government, followed by intensified frustration

when those efforts produce not progress in a liberal-democratic direction, but obstacles to

meeting perceived functional needs. The weakening of government in an effort to reform it

could lead eventually to strong demands for the replacement of the weakened and ineffective

institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs.

Given the perversity of reform, moralistic extremism in the pursuit of liberal democracy could

generate a strong tide toward authoritarian efficiency.” (p. 232)

Huntington then quotes Plato’s celebrated passage on the way that the “culmination of liberty in

democracy is precisely what prepares the way for the cruelest extreme of servitude under a despot.”

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 57

The message is clear: sooner or later, all roads lead to Behemoth. (Tarpley, Project Democracy,

[Washington: EIR, 1987])

Trilateral fascination with a totalitarian transformation in this country did not start after Carter,

but began well before he came on the scene. A good example is Brzezinski’s own book, Between

Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), where the Polish revanchist conjured up

the glittering image of a “technetronic era,” whereby a more controlled society would gradually

emerge, dominated by an oligarchical elite unrestrained by traditional values.

Brzezinski predicted that “Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information”

(Brzezinski 1), adding that surveillance and data mining will foster “tendencies through the next

several decades toward a technocratic era, a dictatorship leaving even less room for political

procedures as we know them” (Brzezinski 12). Information Technology would become the key to

mass social control: “Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not

hesitate to achieve its political ends by the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior

and keeping society under close surveillance and control.” (Brzezinski 252) These are remarks

which ought to remind fatuous left liberals, who have been deluded by Zbig’s re-invention of

himself in an anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war mode, that they are dealing here with one very sinister

totalitarian elitist.

HYPOTHESIS: A QUARTER CENTURY OF TRILATERAL INDOCTRINATION

The inevitable corollary of the Brzezinski-Huntington analysis as developed in the post-Carter

era is the need to prepare political operatives to intervene in the creedal passion period or general

political upsurge which was expected to emerge around 2010. This would suggest that Brzezinski,

Huntington, and other Trilateral operatives were keeping their eyes open for suitable political talent

which they could identify, recruit, and begin grooming for use a quarter-century in the future. To

those for whom such a protracted process might seem to be fantastic and conspiratorial, let it be

pointed out that the career timescale involved hardly differs from the typical career of a military

officer, a bank executive, or a top-flight academic. To those who are accustomed to living from one

paycheck to the next, a 25-year perspective may seem like extraordinary foresight. To those

accustomed to viewing the world from the apex of huge organizations, it looks like something

rather routine and prosaic.

The hypothesis advocated here is therefore that Obama has been a protected and controlled asset

of the Trilateral Commission since his time at Columbia University between 1981 and 1983. Since

the moment of his recruitment, Obama’s career has been promoted, fostered, preferred, and

otherwise protected by the Trilateral financier network.

DEVAL PATRICK: BRZEZINSKI’S SPARE OBAMA

The interchangeability of Obama and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is important

because the two of them remind us of the procedures used by the Trilateral managers the last time

they installed a puppet president – Jimmy Carter. As Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us with startling

brutality in his memoir entitled Power and Principle, the Trilaterals did not put all their eggs in one

basket when it came to grooming a puppet for the 1976 election. Their favored choice was that

messianic peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia who in fact won the presidency. But they always

retained a fallback option as well. As Brzezinski relates, this was another southern Democratic

Governor, Reubin Askew of Florida. If Carter had overdosed, suffered a nervous breakdown, or

58 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

been indicted, Askew would have been rushed into the breach to take his place. Since the spare

candidate or fallback option needed had to be a relatively prominent public figure, it is virtually

impossible to conceal the fact that an understudy is waiting in the wings. The existence of Patrick

as Obama’s virtual twin is therefore of critical importance for the argument that Obama is in fact a

Manchurian candidate created and controlled by the Trilateral commission and its allies.

The parallels are indeed striking, starting with the fact that both Obama and Patrick are fatherless

boys who are therefore susceptible to seeing a powerful institution or authority figure as an ersatz

father. Patrick was born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, into an African-American family

living on welfare in a two-bedroom slum apartment. In 1959, his father Laurdine “Pat” Patrick, a

member of jazz musician Sun Ra’s band, deserted Deval, his mother, and his sister in order to

pursue his music career in New York City, where he had fathered a daughter by another woman.

Deval’s relationship with his father, like Obama’s, was a lamentable one. Deval was in middle

school when he was picked up by a foundation called A Better Chance, a national non-profit

organization for identifying, recruiting, co-opting, and developing leaders among smart black

students. Thanks to this foundation backing, Deval was able to attend the exclusive, costly, and elite

Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts – a local prep school equivalent to Obama’s Punahou

School in Hawaii. Patrick graduated from Milton Academy in 1974, and from Harvard College in

1978. At Harvard, Patrick was co-opted into the ultra-elitist Fly Club, Harvard’s answer to Yale’s

Skull and Bones secret society. He then spent a year working for the United Nations in Africa. In

1979, Patrick enrolled in Harvard Law School. While in law school, Patrick was elected president

of the Legal Aid Bureau; Obama would top that by becoming the editor of the law review. Patrick

got his first job defending poor families in Middlesex County, Massachusetts – similar to Obama’s

apprenticeship as a community organizing counter-insurgency operative. Patrick’s wife, like

Obama’s, is an upwardly mobile member of the black affirmative-action overclass.

OBAMA DISCREDITED IN MASSACHUSETTS,

NEW HAMPSHIRE, RHODE ISLAND

Patrick spoiled Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island (where the television comes

from Boston) for Obama’s future chances by his blatant nepotism and greedy rapacity in office. He

spent $11,000 on drapery for the governor’s state house suite, changed the governor’s car from a

Crown Victoria to a Cadillac, and hired a chief of staff for his wife at an annual salary of almost

$75,000. He commandeered a state helicopter for his private use. Patrick lavished all this on himself

while demanding austerity and service cuts for the people, as Obama is also sure to do. Patrick was

also remarkably corrupt: he placed a call to Citigroup Executive Committee chair Robert Rubin on

behalf of the financially beleaguered mortgage company Ameriquest, a subsidiary of ACC Capital

Holdings, of which Patrick is a former board member. Patrick later attempted to lie his way out of

this predicament with the absurd claim that he was calling not as governor but as a private citizen.

When this ploy failed, the skewered Patrick plaintively confessed: “I appreciate that I should not

have made the call. I regret the mistake.”

Patrick, like Jeremiah Wright, was a devotee of the blowback theory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,

a hallmark of left CIA sponsorship. On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 events on September 11,

2007, Patrick declaimed: “It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was

also about the failure of human beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other. It

seems to me that lesson of that morning is something that we must carry with us every day.” In

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 59

another telling incident, one of Patrick’s aides (a certain Carl Stanley McGee) was arrested in

Florida in December 2007 for the sexual assault of a 15-year old boy in a Florida hotel.

Early in Patrick’s term, only 48 percent of Massachusetts voters approved of the way he was

handling the job, while 33 percent disapproved — a relatively high number for a governor’s

honeymoon period, said Andrew E. Smith, director of The Survey Center at the University of New

Hampshire. 44 percent said Massachusetts is headed in the right direction, while 56 percent said the

state is off course. (Boston Globe, April 8, 2007)

BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION

Obama’s first job after leaving Columbia was with Business International Corporation (BIC), a

private intelligence company which provided information and know-how to US companies seeking

to do business overseas. Obama worked as a consultant and financial journalist. So far as is known,

Business International Corporation was never identified as a CIA front company, but it had the telltale

earmarks of one. Its business of journalism and reporting, ferreting out information about

conditions in foreign countries was a perfect cover story for spying of all sorts. Business

International went out of existence when it was acquired the London Economist Intelligence Unit,

an operation that notoriously moved in the orbit of British intelligence.

Once again, Obama covers up whatever may have happened in reality by throwing up a

smokescreen of racial conflict. This time it was the first temptation of St. Barack by the devil

(“white” society, as always). Dan Armstrong, who knew Obama when he was working at BIC, has

stressed that Obama’s account of the firm and his job there is far from accurate: ‘Mr. Armstrong’s

description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr.

Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees

worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals)

understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was

informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with

ashtrays.” Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign

Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report. […] “It was not

working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at

the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a

consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone

from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”’ (Janny

Scott, “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” New York

Times, October 30, 2007) Armstrong’s view is that Obama has distorted what went on at BIC to

make himself look good, specifically by concocting a moment in which he turns away from the

corrupt fleshpots of whitey’s world.

THE TEMPTATIONS OF ST. BARACK

Obama writes the following about his career at BIC in Dreams: “Eventually a consulting house

to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy

lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking

the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could

tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable

pride for the company’s secretarial pool.” Armstrong refutes most of these points, noting that there

were other black people working there at the time, and noting:

60 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

… after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious

exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down

the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was

particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I

was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a

loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book. First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a

small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter

publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced

consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans

to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low

salaries and heavy workload. Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications.

Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country,

punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country

correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some

research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for,

and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting. It’s also not

true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional

man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I

used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s

not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.

Out of these mundane facts, Obama (or more likely his ghostwriters) construct a modern

morality play to burnish the credentials of an ambitious young proto-pol: “…as the months passed, I

felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the

position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes,

coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my

reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split

second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before

I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of

resolve.” (Dreams)

Armstrong notes ironically: “If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of

the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the

idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never

left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese

financiers or German bond traders.” Obama wants the reader to believe that he was saved from a

life of corporate ambition by a telephone call from his African, Kenyan sister, who wanted to tell

him that their brother (or half-brother) David had been killed in a motorcycle accident: “Then one

day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected

happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently …a few

months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in

earnest for an organizing job.” (Dreams) Armstrong points out that what Obama “means here is that

he got copy from a correspondent who didn’t understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to

make sense out of it.”

PORTRAIT OF THE CANDIDATE AS A YOUNG MEGALOMANIAC

In Armstrong’s view, the entire story of this turning point in the life of the selfless young

community organizer was a tissue of lies: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 61

purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community

organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and

barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens

his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people. I’m disappointed. Barack’s

story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to

embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how

dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the

facts to his purpose.” Dan Armstrong, “Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume,”

http://analyzethis.net/blog/index.php

Here appears an aspect of Obama’s life which has since become notorious – the identification of

his undistinguished self with Jesus Christ, the Messiah and Son of God. If Armstrong is right about

this parable of the temptations, Obama really does believe that he is the Savior, and has thought this

for almost fifteen years at minimum. Some choose to mimic Christ, some choose to mimic

Napoleon, but the common denominator is megalomania, the most succinct summary of Obama’s

mentality – and, ironically, one that puts him in the same psychopathological class with his apparent

polar opposite, George W. Bush, who is also a megalomaniac, as Dr. Justin Frank has pointed out.

There was another dangerous temptation lurking in Obama’s life. Obama had expressed his

scorn for those he called “half-breeds” who preferred white people to blacks. After college, he lived

with a white woman, but then decided to push her away when he realized that he would have to

assimilate into her (“white”) world, and not vice versa. He later married Michelle, the upwardly

mobile black woman lawyer. Obama’s choices were based on very solid political reasoning: if he

had come forward to run for the presidency with a white woman for his consort, he would have

been politically doomed by the resentment of black women, many of whom would have interpreted

this choice as a confirmation of racial stereotypes held by black males against them, stereotypes

concretely expressed in preference for white women. A white wife would have been political

suicide. When the Greenwich Village poetaster LeRoi Jones wanted to become the black nationalist

organizer Amiri Baraka, it was imperative that he jettison his white wife, who would have been a

fatal impediment for his planned activity in the service of the Prudential Insurance Company –

provoking clashes with poor Italians in the streets of Newark, New Jersey as part of a

counterinsurgency scheme.

NADERITE PUBLIC INTEREST RESEARCH GROUP, NEW YORK CITY

After BIC, Obama moved on for a stint at Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group in New

York City, a nonprofit group which billed itself as promoting “consumer, environmental and

government reform.” According to Janny Scott, Obama “became a full-time organizer at City

College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.” Nader’s

groups attempt to carry out feasible reforms in the areas of health, safety, and consumer issues, all

under the banner of “good government” – the eternal slogan of reform Democrats and upscale

suburbanites who are horrified by the venality of politics among poor people and the underclass.

Obama’s specific assignment was the one he has tried and failed to carry out in 2008: to take

projects that were designed to appeal to affluent suburbanites and sell them to people much lower

on the socioeconomic scale. His job was an exercise in condescending Malthusian elitism: ‘Mr.

Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the

importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that

more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were

62 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

more likely the emphasis at City College. “You needed somebody — and here was where Barack

was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen

Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on

the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently

radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.”’ (Janny Scott,

“Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” New York Times,

October 30, 2007) Obama failed then, and he is failing again this time in his quest to market elitist

issues among those with urgent economic needs.

GAMALIEL FOUNDATION, CHICAGO: ALINSKYITE COUNTERINSURGENCY

Obama embarked on what he says, even now, was the hardest work of his life: the three and a

half years of community organizing in the impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago’s far South

Side. His job: to work with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based effort that aimed

to organize low-income residents to improve local conditions. … his friend Valerie Jarrett, former

chairman of the Chicago Stock Exchange, told me. Obama himself described the years in Chicago

to me as the time when he “finally and fully grew up.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)

Obama loves to boast that he served for some years as a community organizer. The problem for

most people is that they have very little concrete notion what this might mean. This needs a few

words of explanation. The Developing Communities Project was an operation of the Gamaliel

Foundation, the temple of the organizing methods associated with Saul Alinsky, who had been

preaching community organizing since the World War II era. The Gamaliel Foundation was also a

satellite of the Ford Foundation, the flagship US foundation devoted to preventing the emergence of

any social-political challenge to the dominance of Wall Street financiers over the crumbling US

society. Money for Obama also came from the Woods Fund, a foundation created by the reactionary

Woods family, who owned coal mines that provided the coal for Commonwealth Edison, where the

dominant figure was Thomas Ayers, the father of Obama’s terrorist friend, foundation operative Bill

Ayers.

The best term for Saul Alinsky was that he was a counter-insurgent, quite independent of his

personal understanding of the matter. Alinsky’s community organizing specified that people ought

to be organized locally and on the basis of the lowest common denominator, generally some petty

local grievance, although sometimes based on poverty, but only if it were understood as a purely

local issue. Alinsky was obsessed with everything that was fragmented, parochial, localistic,

balkanized, sub-divided neighborhood by neighborhood, precinct by precinct, block by block. In his

dream world, one local group of Hungarian steelworkers would fight to get a sewer fixed. A few

hundred yards away, a black community group would fight the city government to get a public

library. Nearby a group of women would be demanding a daycare facility. A men’s club would

struggle to clean up the public park. None of these groups would be in any contact with any others.

They would not act politically, would not support candidates; they would only exert pressure on

corporations, governments, and so forth.

Each of these tiny groups would be fragmented and impotent and helpless in a real emergency,

like a depression, a war, or a police state. Above all, they would never be able to advance an

alternative to Wall Street domination, which was so far beyond the local purview that it never came

up – and yet, this was always the heart of the matter. It was more likely that a black local group

would fight a white one, with unemployed or parents fighting the teachers’ union, or some other

futile clash. Sometimes Alinsky’s methods won some trifling local concession, but often the yield

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 63

was nil. The more common outcome was that the local organizers became demoralized by a long

series of defeats, and drifted off into boredom, despair, and de-politicization. This is in fact the

outcome that appears to have crowned the career of Barack Obama as a community organizer in

Chicago in the 1990s; after three years of futility, Obama was canny enough to depart the scene in

favor of the Harvard Law School, another stepping stone in his glittering political career.

Obama went to Chicago in 1985. He worked as a community organizer among low-income

residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development

on the city’s South Side. The Developing Communities Project (DCP) counter-insurgency effort

was funded by the Gamaliel Foundation, which was heavily funded by the flagship Ford

Foundation. DCP purported to offer job training and college prep on Chicago’s South Side. The real

problems of blacks on the South Side of Chicago were the soaring unemployment and

imprisonment among the area’s mostly black workers – issues that Obama never addressed.

The Gamaliel Foundation’s own website informs the public that “the Gamaliel Foundation

receives grants from the Bauman Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Carnegie

Corporation of New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open

Society Institute, and others.” (www.gamaliel.org) Obama has thus been a Ford Foundation-Soros

asset going back more than twenty years. The Developing Communities Project (DCP) was

associated with the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Both the

CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid

organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” as Alinsky put it. The element of

manipulation is clear enough, even in the abstract theory. One of Obama’s early mentors in the

Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, presumably the Marty Kaufman (or part of that composite

character) that Obama writes about in Dreams. Kruglik later told the New Republic that Obama

“was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting

targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their

own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing,

sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their

egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”

Alinsky had told his agitators to bring people to the “realization” that they are indeed miserable,

that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations. (This is already

absurd, since it is the economic breakdown crisis itself that radicalizes those who experience it. The

task of an organizer is to develop strategy and programs to allow a popular movement to challenge

the financier elite at the highest level – state power, not petty community control or local control,

where defeat is always guaranteed.) The task of the agitator is then to help them to bond together to

demand what they deserve, and to agitate so energetically that governments and corporations will

see “self-interest” in granting the demands of the local agitators. Obama had a four-year education

in these crude Alinsky methods, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere –

in profiling and manipulation, since these are the essence of the Alinsky divide-and-conquer method

of counterinsurgency.

PREVARICATION IN THE HOOD

Obama paints a moderately flattering picture of himself as a community organizer in Dreams.

But even here, he has faced charges of embroidering and embellishing his record to make himself

look good. The criticism comes from the long-time local activist Hazel Johnson, who has disputed

the account of events at Altgeld Gardens that Obama put into his book, and which he has repeated at

64 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

innumerable political appearances over the years. The local CBS affiliate in Chicago went to the

Altgeld neighborhood and found that ‘some say Illinois Senator Barack Obama gave himself a little

too much credit for his work as a community organizer. Obama’s past work in the troubled Altgeld

Gardens housing project is a staple of his presidential stump speeches, and a significant part of his

first book. …at least one resident who worked with Obama back then is unhappy with the senator’s

recollection. Hazel Johnson and her daughter Cheryl are disputing some parts of the version of

events Obama tells. They do not, however, dispute that he worked hard at Altgeld Gardens and say

they are supporting his presidential campaign. But, Johnson says in his book, Dreams from My

Father, and in campaign stump speeches, Obama gets some things wrong about the months he spent

working in Altgeld Gardens in the 1980s. She and her daughter Cheryl produced a document, for

example, showing Obama’s 1987 salary as an organizer in the development to be $25,000 – not the

$13,000 he often talks about. There is a very simple explanation for that, Obama’s aides say. He did

indeed make $25, 000 in 1987, but he was initially hired in 1985 at a salary of $13,000. And, they

claim, Obama didn’t work cleaning up asbestos at Altgeld, but fiberglass, another environmental

hazard. They also dispute his version of an incident in which Obama claimed Altgeld Gardens

residents beat on the car of a government official they were unhappy with. “I think he portrayed us

as barbaric that we ran behind CHA officials beating on the car, and that didn’t take place, because I

was in that particular meeting” Cheryl Johnson said.’ Perhaps Obama thinks that the masses are

after all a great beast.

Interestingly, the one community source who came forward to endorse Obama’s version of

events is a person who was currently on the payroll of the Gamaliel Foundation, and who can thus

be located in the larger orbit of the Ford Foundation. This was the Jesuit priest Greg Golluzzo. ‘“I

discussed every item of this,” said Greg Golluzzo of the Gamaliel Foundation. … Johnson says that

since all of this has come up, she thinks Obama should go talk to her.’(Mike Flannery, “Altgeld

Gardens Resident Who Worked With Senator in 1980s Says He Is Exaggerating His Role,”

Cbsnews.com, 2007) Obama has not returned to Altgeld to answer the criticisms of Hazel Johnson.

When Obama’s fellow foundation operative Gerald Kellman summed up Obama’s years of work,

he recognized that it had all been a big failure: “It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr.

Obama dwarfs what he accomplished. Mr. Kellman said that Mr. Obama had built the

organization’s following among needy residents and black ministers, but “on issues, we made very

little progress, nothing that would change poverty on the South Side of Chicago.”14 So Obama was a

failure as a community organizer. His other big project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was also

a failure in improving education in Chicago, as we will see.

HILLARY REJECTED ALINSKY; OBAMA EMBRACED HIM

Other commentators have tried to show that Obama is still using Alinsky methods in the running

of his presidential campaign. One right-wing observer writes: “Obama also appears to have

mastered the playbook used by…the legendary amoral guru of left wing activism, Saul Alinsky….”

(Kyle-Anne Shiver, Obama’s Alinsky Jujitsu, American Thinker, February 25, 2008) In fact, rightwing

writers on the Clinton-Obama contest have attempted to equate the outlooks of these two

candidates based on the bare fact that they both came into contact with the Alinskyite counterinsurgency

doctrine. The big difference is that Obama looked at the Alinskyite school of organizing,

and decided to join it. Hillary looked at Alinsky in considerable depth, found it totally inadequate,

and turned away.

Hillary’s views are found in her senior thesis from Wellesley College which, contrary to popular

belief, is readily available to the public. Hillary saw an Alinsky who tried to escape ideological

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 65

categories: ‘“Alinsky, cringing at the use of labels, ruefully admitted that he might be called an

existentialist,” she found. [We already know what that can mean.] Rodham tried to probe his moral

relativism — particular ends, Alinsky maintained, often justify the means — but Alinsky would

only concede that “idealism can parallel self-interest.” Hillary tentatively accepted Alinsky’s

contention that the problem of the poor isn’t so much a lack of money as a lack of power, as well as

his skeptical view of federal anti-poverty programs as ineffective. (Alinsky took the facile view,

shared by the GOP, that Johnson’s War on Poverty was a “prize piece of political pornography,”

even though he collected funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity.) It is clear that Alinsky

wanted everything to come out of the do-it-yourself bag of the local community organizer, a kind of

nomadic left-wing anarchist who viewed the state as an adversary. Organizing in the Democratic

Party was too broad, and might develop into an actual challenge to the ruling class, the very thing

that Alinsky’s owners were using him to head off. Hillary conceded what was obvious: “A cycle of

dependency has been created,” she wrote, “which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy.”

Hillary advanced a “perspective” or critique of Alinsky’s methods, citing especially scholars who

claimed that Alinsky’s small gains actually delayed attainment of bigger goals for the poor and

minorities.

Hillary noted the “few material gains” that Alinsky’s methods were capable of obtaining, such as

forcing Kodak to hire blacks in Rochester, New York, or delaying the University of Chicago’s

expansion into the Woodlawn neighborhood, the very Hyde Park community later represented by

Barack and policed by Michelle. Hillary attributed part of Alinsky’s failure to shifting demography

and the diminishing role of neighborhoods in American life. She also showed that many projects

depended completely on the presence of Alinsky personally – hardly a recipe for empowering

others: “One of the primary problems of the Alinsky model is that the removal of Alinsky

dramatically alters its composition,” she wrote; “Alinsky is a born organizer who is not easily

duplicated, but, in addition to his skill, he is a man of exceptional charm.”

Hillary’s final verdict was that the Alinsky school of micro-organizing could never work in a

mass society; the Alinsky “power/conflict model is rendered inapplicable by existing social

conflicts” — over-arching national issues such as racial tension and segregation, prosperity and

economic depression. Alinsky never had any success in forming an effective national movement,

she said, suggesting the futility of “the anachronistic nature of small autonomous conflict.” Alinsky

sometimes threatened small-scale disruptions to extort temporary, local concessions. Hillary

concluded that the mini-conflict approach to large-scale power is limited. “Alinsky’s conclusion

that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board

‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote.

Hillary brought Alinsky to Wellesley in January 1969 to speak at a private dinner for a dozen

students; he expressed dissatisfaction with New Left protesters such as the Students for a

Democratic Society. Rodham closed her thesis with the obligatory flourish by saying that she

reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social justice activists next to Martin Luther King,

Walt Whitman, and perennial socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. She also ironically

suggested that Alinsky was a part of the establishment: “In spite of his being featured in the Sunday

New York Times,” she wrote, “and living a comfortable, expenses-paid life, he considers himself a

revolutionary. In a very important way he is. If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the

result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the

tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is

regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been

feared — because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy.”’ (Bill Dedman,

66 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

“Reading Hillary Clinton’s Hidden Thesis,” MSNBC, May. 9, 2007) Alinsky offered Hillary a job

as a community organizer, which she had the good sense to refuse. Obama later accepted just such a

job from the Gamaliel Foundation after Alinsky’s death.15

OBAMA’S ROOTS TRIP TO KENYA

After quitting his job as a community organizer, Obama decided to make his obligatory

pilgrimage to Kenya, where he had never been. By this time his father was deceased. He traveled by

way of London. A conversation about political and economic conditions in Africa with a young

Englishman in the airplane gives Obama another chance to reflect on his favorite obsession, race.

Here he found yet another opportunity to reflect on his “own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely

at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.” (Dreams 310) He has an

opportunity to travel around Europe for three weeks in a grand tour that most American middle

class families of whatever race were already unable to provide for their children, or for themselves

in retirement. Obama tells us that he visited London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and then concluded

that it was all a terrible mistake:

…by the end of the first week I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t

beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out

someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites

I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more

means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of

language, stripped of work and routine – stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d

become accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation – I had

been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there. (Dreams 301-

302)

Obama, we see, was a convinced existentialist.

OBAMA AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Here Obama’s racist psychopathology is displayed in the sharpest relief. Had he already been

imbibing Wright’s hate-mongering theories about the Italian garlic noses and the inferiority of the

Irish? Europe represents a huge chunk of the historical experience of humanity as a whole, but

Obama’s racist obsession leads him to conclude that it does not belong to him – despite the obvious

facts that the language, institutions, science, technology, and all the related components of his life

derive from European models. Obama rejects what he sees, and clings to the empty abstraction of

Afrocentrism, albeit tinged with a heavy dose of existentialism. If he had gone to China, Obama

would not have pondered that the majority of the man-days lived by humanity have probably been

Chinese; he would have rejected China too, on the same explicitly racist grounds. Obama explicitly

rejects the unity and wholeness of human history. He imagines that history is made up of a series of

self-contained and hermetically sealed races, and that no race exercises any influence over the

internal life of another race. With this, historical reality goes out the window, and is sure to be

replaced by racist myths.

Obama turns out to be close to the pre-fascist pessimist Oswald Spengler, the 1920s theoretician

of the Decline of the West, who also thought of each Kultur as being axiomatically independent of

and untouched by all the others, with each one living out its own appointed life span. Obama’s

contemptuous dismissal of Europe obliges us to label him as a fanatic and an incurable racist.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 67

Obama’s maître à penser Jeremiah Wright has mocked and derided European classical music in

general and Georg Friedrich Handel in particular. The common ground between Obama and Wright,

which some have suspected even as others indignantly denied it, turns out to be quite substantial.

Turning away from Europe, Obama was confronted with the pervasive polygamy of his own

father, his own tribe, and his own Kenyan ancestors. Obama’s 40-year-old cousin Said Hussein

Obama later recalled, “My cousin found it difficult when he came here to learn his six half-brothers

and sisters were born to four different mothers.” In reality, the number of Obama Senior’s offspring

may be even greater, as we have already seen. “The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama

added in his memoir, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years

ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and

tobacco and alcohol.” (Dreams 441) This Abongo “Roy” Obama is a Luo activist and a militant

Muslim who now contends that the black man must “liberate himself from the poisoning influences

of European culture.” In other words, Roy has also embraced Fanon. Roy has called on his younger

half-brother to embrace his African heritage. (Dreams 441) Roy’s role, if any, in the violent tribal

conflict which has been convulsing Kenya in 2007-2008 is not known.

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: ANOTHER WALL OF SECRECY, 1988-1991

Obama then entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990, he was elected the first

African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, and received a first wave of positive publicity

in the New York Times. Obama graduated from Harvard Law magna cum laude in 1991. Obama’s

professors were aware that he was slippery: “He then and now is very hard to pin down,” said

Kenneth Mack, then a classmate and now a professor at the law school. Becoming the first black

president of the law review was a highly political process, and not only an academic or technical

one. Winning the position was a matter of political finesse, and clearly of some successful

manipulation. “He was able to work with conservatives as well as liberals,” says Obama’s friend

Michael Froman, who is currently an executive at Citigroup.

Obama’s greatest fan appears to have been Professor Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb

Professor at Harvard University. Tribe taught Obama and employed him as a research assistant. He

remembers him as a “brilliant, personable, and obviously unique” person. Tribe said that Obama’s

theoretical perspective on applying modern physics to law was “very impressive.” Obama never

talks about this theory, but it reeks of the unbridled relativism that can make of the Constitution

whatever one wants. Tribe is of course a darling of the liberal media who later argued Al Gore’s

Florida case before the Supreme Court in December 2000. Tribe says that Obama was one of his

two best students ever, and adds: “He had a very powerful ability to synthesize diverse sources of

information.” (Wallace Wood, Rolling Stone)

Obama is alleged to have contributed to Tribe’s bizarre 1989 article in the Harvard Law Review

entitled “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics.”

This is a 39-page treatise which argues that constitutional jurisprudence should be revised in a way

which recalls the process by which Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics.

On the surface, Tribe and Obama were arguing against the absurd and suffocating “original intent”

method of the right-wing reactionary Federalist Society. But their arguments would also open the

door to boundless arbitrary caprice and abuse by removing any notion of natural law from the

method of construing the Constitution. Obama is thus capable of rejecting the manacles of original

intent for a Cole Porter doctrine of “anything goes” in legal positivism, which would open the door

68 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

to fascist innovation in a way that even “original intent” has not been able to do. Once again, we are

looking here at the transition from reaction to fascism.

OGLETREE AND REPARATIONS

Another significant mentor for Obama was the black Professor Charles Ogletree, who is one of

the leading proponents of reparations for slavery. Reparations are a favorite tactic of the foundations

and the counter-insurgency community in general, since this ploy holds out the promise of a whole

new cycle of futile and self-defeating racial conflict in the United States, thus safeguarding financier

rule for another historical epoch. It is especially absurd in the light of the growing numbers of

Latinos, Asians, and other more recent immigrants who have no connection whatsoever to slavery

and Jim Crow. The serious approach would be a class-based approach, with working people of all

ethnic and racial groups forming a united front to extract from Wall Street the necessary means for

social and economic renewal in housing, health care, jobs, education, mass transit, and related areas.

This is exactly what the reparations issue is designed to prevent.

When Wright went to the National Press Club, the only specific demand he made was for an

apology for slavery. It is widely assumed that such an apology, while fully justified in itself, would

be seized on by the foundation-funded affirmative action black overclass to demand reparations, of

which the black overclass would receive the lion’s share, while the inner-city ghetto would sink

ever deeper into despair and poverty. “This matter is growing in significance rather than declining,”

Ogletree recently commented. “It has more vigor and vitality in the 21st century than it’s had in the

history of the reparations movement.” Professor Ogletree was an advisor to Obama during his 2004

Senate candidacy and serves as an advisor to him now. (AP, July 9, 2006) It is therefore quite

possible that, in addition to a global warming tax and a third world solidarity tax, a future Obama

regime might try to impose a slavery reparations tax. Under the likely conditions of economic

breakdown in this country such an attempt, whatever the abstract balance of equities, might well

lead to the worst of all possible outcomes, civil war. We will have more to say about Obama’s

secret agenda for reparations later in this study.

Evelyn Pringle, who has delved into the labyrinth of Chicago corruption in which Obama

wallowed for so many years, has found that the mafioso and underworld figure Antoin Rezko,

Obama’s prime moneybags for much of his earlier career, came into contact with Obama while he

was still in law school and tried to hire him immediately as a mouth-piece for Rezko’s underworld

empire: in the arguments at the spring 2008 Rezko trial, it was revealed that he ‘“met Barack

Obama when he was in Harvard Law School and tried to hire him” to be the lawyer for his

development company.’

A well-informed expert on Chicago political corruption, Pringle shows that Rezko and Obama

go way back together: ‘Obama says he met Rezko, when he got a call right out of the blue from

David Brint, after he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, wanting to know if he

would be interested in being a developer for Rezko’s real estate company, Rezmar. Because they

read that he was interested in community development work, Obama says, Rezko and his two

partners, Mahru and Brint, met with him to discuss the job. “I said no, but I remained friendly with

all three of them,” Obama said in the Chicago Tribune on November 1, 2006. In fact, Obama told

the Tribune that Rezko “might have raised $50,000 to $75,000” for one campaign alone in his failed

run for Congress in 2000.’ (Evelyn Pringle, op-ed news) In Obama’s life, there are too many of

these coincidences; we can feel the mysterious action of the Trilateral invisible hand. As for Obama

and Rezko, they go back to 1991 or earlier.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 69

OBAMA’S WORLD: THE FOUNDATIONS

We have already seen Obama in his role as a community organizer for the Gamaliel foundation.

We must stress that Obama’s role as a foundation operative begins here, but certainly does not end

when he goes off to law school. No indeed: the vocation of being a foundation operative constitutes

Obama’s family business. His mother was a Ford Foundation operative, and most of the jobs

Obama has ever held were with foundations. When it came time for Obama to start going to

church, he unfailingly chose a congregation where Ford Foundation race theory is projected onto

the plane of heaven and eternity in the form of the provocateur religion of Black liberation theology.

Before we go any further with Obama’s own story, it will be useful to offer an overview of the

strategic orientation of US foundation operations during this timeframe. Foundations represent an

extremely important part of the social control mechanisms which prevail today in the United States.

The foundations are all the more effective in their chosen work of social control, engineering and

political manipulation because many people are simply unaware of the immense scale of their

operations, even though every broadcast on public television or National Public Radio is always

accompanied by a litany of the foundations which have financed that program. One way to

understand the pervasive influence of foundations is to say that they are as omnipresent in this

country today as the CIA and the FBI were during the Cold War. This is partly because many

intelligence community operations of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s have morphed into foundations under

the auspices of President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, which privatized many of the existing

spook activities. Many naïve people still think of foundations as being humanitarian or charitable

institutions concerned with education, health, and the improvement of the human condition.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Like Henry Ford himself, the Pew family and many other

oligarchical plans whose family fortunes have been transformed into foundations harbored fascist

sympathies during the 1920s and 1930s. Today, they are overwhelmingly multicultural, politically

correct, Malthusian, and neo-Luddite in their ideology. They hate science and technology because

these are seen as avenues of upward social mobility for the lower orders, and as a threat to

continued financier domination. Perhaps more than any other agency, the foundations have

engaged in the strangulation and perversion of the American spirit over these past four decades in

particular.

The late Christopher Lasch, in his classic study The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of

Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995), notes the important role of class prejudice in forming elite

attitudes in this country today. He describes how well-to-do liberals, when confronted with

resistance to their ideas of social engineering, “betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath

the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence,” and turn on those who “just don’t get it.”

(Lasch, 28) The result is an academic culture which appears to be contemptuous of the human

potential of vast strata of the American population. This is the kind of mentality which we can see

in Obama’s infamous San Francisco “Bittergate” rant. This is a condensed version of the elitist and

left authoritarian mental world of the pro-oligarchical foundation bureaucrats. In order to

understand Obama’s mentality and the decisions he might make as the head of the future regime, we

are therefore obliged to review some critical points about the recent historical record of the Ford

Foundation and its satellites.

Most discussions of Obama’s career as what he calls a “community organizer” are crippled by a

total lack of historical background on the Ford Foundation and its satellites, and further by any

comprehension of the goals of foundation-funded social engineering. Because Obama is so totally a

product of the Ford Foundation and the foundation world of which it is the center, we will have to

70 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

repeat several times in this volume that the main purpose of these foundations by the latter half of

the 20th century was to exercise social control, so as to perpetuate the uncontested political

domination of Wall Street financial interests over the legitimate aspirations of the various ethnic

groups, economic strata, and other components of the American population.

The watchword of the Ford Foundation is Divide and Conquer. The goal of its projects is

always to play one group in the population against some other group so as to create conflict, strife,

and division, so that the Wall Street interests can emerge unscathed and triumph. The

individual foundation grant officers involved in this process may well be motivated by some

hallucination of Marxism, multiculturalism, or political correctness, but it is not these values which

the foundations finally serve: their goal is to disrupt and abort the emergence of anything

approaching a politically conscious united front of the American people capable of demanding

radical economic reforms, and especially to ward off a revival of the New Deal, new political

formations based on economic populism, a Marshall Plan for the cities, including the urban ethnic

minority populations, and so forth.

POVERTY PIMPS FOR THE FOUNDATIONS

When Obama says that he was a community organizer, it would be far more accurate to say that

he was a poverty pimp for the Ford Foundation network, a paid race-monger whose job it was to

organize politically naïve and desperate groups on the south side of Chicago into corporatist, deadend,

fragmented, parochial projects from which they would derive little or no benefit, and the goal

of which was simply to use up enough of their lives in futility until they dropped out altogether in

despair. The only exception to this was the use of these community control or local control or

community action advocacy projects as political pawns against certain state and local political

factions, or as battering rams against other groups of working people, above all trade unions made

up of municipal employees, especially teachers. This is where Obama learned to support “merit

pay” as a weapon against teachers’ unions.

In order to understand the foundation world, it is necessary to recall that these foundations

generally represent the family fortunes of industrialists and businessmen of the 19th and early 20th

centuries – the robber barons – which have been placed into tax-free status as charitable trusts, all

the while perpetuating the urge for power of their founders. The foundations represent family

fortunes or fondi which have attained a kind of oligarchical immortality by transcending the mere

biological existence of the individuals and families who created them, and becoming permanent

institutions destined to endure indefinitely.

These foundations once upon a time had to maintain some credibility by funding hospitals,

universities, libraries, scientific research, and other projects which often had genuine social utility.

Shortly after the Second World War, there began a trend towards social engineering and social

action on the part of the foundations. The leader in this was the Ford Foundation, which, because it

was the largest and wealthiest of the US foundations quickly became the flagship and opinion leader

for the other foundations. Foundation officers represent the very essence of the financier oligarch

mentality, and one result of this is that they generally all do the same thing at the same time in their

respective fields of specialization. Because of this, control over the Ford Foundation represents a

social control mechanism of great strength, which has been a decisive force in shaping the decline

of US society and national life, especially over the last 40 years.

Dean Rusk had served Averill Harriman and Dean Acheson during the Truman administration,

and then became president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the late 1950s; he ‘once described

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 71

Ford’s influence on other foundations: What the “fat boy in the canoe does,” he said, “makes a

difference to everybody else.” And Ford’s influence was never stronger than after it adopted the

cause of social change. Waldemar Nielsen’s monumental studies of foundations, published in 1972

and 1985, only strengthened the Ford effect, for Nielsen celebrated activist philanthropy and berated

those foundations that had not yet converted to the cause. “As a result,” recalls Richard Larry,

president of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, “a number of foundations said: ‘If this is what the

foundation world is doing and what the experts say is important, we should move in that direction,

too.’” The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for example, funded the National Welfare Rights

Organization—at the same time that the organization was demonstrating against Governor Nelson

Rockefeller of New York. The Carnegie Corporation pumped nearly $20 million into various leftwing

advocacy groups during the 1970s.’ (Heather Mac Donald, “The Billions of Dollars That

Made Things Worse,” City Journal, Autumn 1996)

AGGRESSIVE FOUNDATION ACTIVISM OF THE LATE 1960S

In the second half of the 1960s, the social ferment generated by defeat in Vietnam, the student

movement, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the gathering economic decline

of the country spurred the foundations into action. With unerring oligarchical class instinct, they

could see the grave danger that might be represented for financier domination by the possible fusion

in a united front of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, and the

student movement. Their answer to this was to promote and fund organizational forms that were so

narrow, so fragmented, and so parochial, that they prevented the necessary cooperation among these

movements, thus blocking them from attaining most of their principal goals. Alan Pifer was the

head of the Carnegie Foundation in 1968; in his annual report for that year, Pifer

exhorts his comrades [sic] in the foundation world to help shake up “sterile institutional forms

and procedures left over from the past” by supporting “aggressive new community

organizations which . . . the comfortable stratum of American life would consider disturbing

and perhaps even dangerous.” No longer content to provide mainstream knowledge

dispassionately, America’s most prestigious philanthropies now aspired to revolutionize what

they believed to be a deeply flawed American society. […] Foundation-funded minority

advocates fought for racial separatism and a vast system of quotas—and American society

remains perpetually riven by the issue of race. On most campuses today, a foundation-endowed

multicultural circus has driven out the very idea of a common culture, deriding it as a relic of

American imperialism. Foundation-backed advocates for various “victim” groups use the courts

to bend government policy to their will, thwarting the democratic process. […] The net effect is

not a more just but a more divided and contentious American society. (Heather Mac Donald,

“The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse,” City Journal, Autumn 1996)

Right-wing commentators like the one just cited are generally incapable of analyzing the real

motivations for what the foundations do; they usually attribute the catastrophic results of foundation

social engineering to some misguided instincts to do good. Nothing could be further from the truth:

the goal of the foundations is to maintain the brutal regime of finance capital, and this presupposes

that there be no national coalition capable of expressing a national interest in contradiction to the

dictates of the Wall Street financiers. The rightwingers are therefore forced to make up fantastic

stories of how Marxists have crept in to the temples of finance capital by the dark of the moon, so as

to advance their work of revolution. In reality incendiary race baiting and pseudo-revolutionary and

hyper-revolutionary rhetoric are most often the stock in trade of the foundation-funded political

operative, who gets paid good money to inflame the mutual animosities and resentments of groups

72 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

that ought to be uniting against Wall Street, rather than squabbling with each other for some petty

and futile local concession. Barack Hussein Obama is precisely one of these foundation-funded

political operatives or poverty pimps.

The Ford Foundation became more aggressive in its social engineering and more radical in its

methods in order to ward off the threat which was latently present in the political upsurge of the late

1960s: ‘From its start, Ford aimed to be different, eschewing medical research and public health in

favor of social issues such as First Amendment restrictions and undemocratic concentrations of

power, economic problems, world peace, and social science. […] But by the early 1960s, the

trustees started clamoring for a more radical vision; according to Richard Magat, a Ford employee,

they demanded “action-oriented rather than research-oriented” programs that would “test the outer

edges of advocacy and citizen participation.”’ (Heather Mac Donald)

FORD FOUNDATION COMMUNITY ACTION AND THE 1960s GHETTO RIOTS

The beginnings of the local control-community control-poverty pimp apparatus of domestic

social engineering and counterinsurgency goes back to the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Project of

the 1960s, which was spearheaded by an obscure and highly influential Ford Foundation operative

named Paul Ylvisaker. ‘The first such “action-oriented” program, the Gray Areas Project, was a

turning point in foundation history and—because it was a prime mover of the ill-starred War on

Poverty—a turning point in American history as well. Its creator, Paul Ylvisaker, an energetic social

theorist from Harvard and subsequent icon for the liberal foundation community, had concluded

that the problems of newly migrated urban blacks and Puerto Ricans could not be solved by the “old

and fixed ways of doing things.” Because existing private and public institutions were unresponsive,

he argued, the new poverty populations needed a totally new institution—the “community action

agency”—to coordinate legal, health, and welfare services and to give voice to the poor. According

to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan… Ford “proposed nothing less than institutional change in the

operation and control of American cities . . . . [Ford] invented a new level of American government:

the inner-city community action agency.” Ylvisaker proceeded to establish such agencies in Boston,

New Haven, Philadelphia, and Oakland.’ (Heather Mac Donald)

The initial phase of Ford Foundation intervention into the black inner-city ghetto under the

rubric of the Gray Areas strategy helped to fuel the Watts, Detroit, and Newark riots of 1965-67.

The community action projects that were begun in these years did not deliver what they promised,

but did set the stage for the futile and self-defeating violence of “Burn, baby, burn,” which was

considered fashionable in the radical chic salons of the day. “Unfortunately, because it was so

intent on persuading the federal government to adopt the program, Ford ignored reports that the

community action agencies were failures,” according to historian Alice O’Connor.

Reincarnated as federal Community Action Programs (CAPs), Ford’s urban cadres soon began

tearing up cities. Militancy became the mark of merit for federal funders, according to Senator

Moynihan. In Newark, the director of the local CAP urged blacks to arm themselves before the

1967 riots; leaflets calling for a demonstration were run off on the CAP’s mimeograph machine.

The federal government funneled community action money to Chicago gangs—posing as

neighborhood organizers—who then continued to terrorize their neighbors. The Syracuse, New

York CAP published a remedial reading manual that declared: “No ends are accomplished without

the use of force. . . . Squeamishness about force is the mark not of idealistic, but moonstruck

morals.” Syracuse CAP employees applied $7 million of their $8 million federal grant to their own

salaries.’ (Heather Mac Donald) McGeorge Bundy should have been arrested for inciting to riot,

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 73

since that is exactly what he was doing. The political benefits of the resulting backlash would of

course be harvested by demagogues like Nixon and Agnew.

THE 1968 NEW YORK CITY TEACHERS’ STRIKE AS A TURNING POINT

A much-neglected turning point of recent American history was unquestionably the disastrous

events associated with the New York City teachers’ strike of 1968. These events have almost been

forgotten, one suspects, because no foundation is eager to dredge them up. Contemporary

observers, however, were clear that they had lived through a deliberately provoked catastrophe:

‘One of the most polarizing events in our recent history was the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute

over decentralization and community control which led to the New York teachers’ strike of 1968.

Martin Mayer said of this strike: “The New York teachers’ strike of 1968 seems to me the worst

disaster my native city has experienced in my lifetime.” McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation’s

experiment caused New York City to shut down its educational system. That city became polarized:

new - black militant radicals against old - left radicals, black trade unionists against anti-union

black-power advocates, black against Jew, black against white, striker against non-striker, and

ACLU civil libertarians against seekers of due process.’ (“The Promotion of Domestic Discord,”

Vincent J. Salandria, October 23, 1971)16

MCGEORGE BUNDY:

FROM VIETNAM STRATEGIC HAMLETS TO COMMUNITY CONTROL

In order to fragment, divide, and frustrate the ongoing political upsurge, the organizational forms

which the Ford Foundation was using its fabulous wealth to create had to be as narrow,

fragmented,apolitical, exclusive, and petty as possible. “Community Action Programs were a

calculated means of keeping control. To deliver a particular point of view, foot soldiers got busy.

Militants and Black Power were a joke! The Ford Foundation, through its president, McGeorge

McBundy, was one step ahead and positioned to penetrate the movement. In promising to help

achieve full domestic equality, they played a vanguard role and become the most important

organization manipulating the militant black movement.” (Pulling No Punches, October 28, 2007)

McGeorge Bundy was a Skull and Bones graduate of Yale, a protégé of Dean Acheson, and the

director of the National Security Council under President Kennedy who bears one of the heaviest

individual burdens of responsibility for unleashing the genocidal Vietnam War. Bundy had left

government in 1966, and would stay on as boss of the Ford Foundation until 1979. For much of

this time, Bundy was considered to be the informal spokesman for the US Eastern Anglophile

banking establishment, otherwise known as the financier oligarchy or ruling class. Accurate

accounts of Bundy’s activities are very hard to come by, because no foundation has been willing to

pay for an in-depth analysis of how foundation-funded social engineering is destroying this country.

Bundy was, in short, a butcher, but he was also a sophisticated ruling-class political operative.

Bundy was a slightly younger colleague of the generation of self-styled “wise men” who had

reorganized the Anglo-American world empire in the wake of World War II. Bundy was a dyed-inthe-

wool, hereditary, silver-spoon oligarch, who was conscious of representing one of the most

powerful and aggressive centers of imperialist social engineering. ‘David Halberstam was correct to

quote one of McGeorge Bundy’s colleagues as stating that Bundy “... is a very special type, an

elitist, part of a certain breed of men whose continuity is to themselves, a line to each other and not

the country.”’ (Vincent J. Salandria, “The Promotion of Domestic Discord,” an address at the

74 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

conference of the New England Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and

Freedom, October 23, 1971)

Bundy was determined to ram through the Ford Foundation counterinsurgency strategy,

whatever the cost to New York City and its people: as one student of these events observes,

‘McGeorge Bundy was not a man given to self-doubt. (He once cut off discussion at a foundation

meeting by announcing to a group of program officers: “Look, I’m settled about this. Let’s not talk

about it any more. I may be wrong, but I’m not in doubt.”) And if he had second thoughts about the

path down which he was taking the foundation, he did not express them at the time. Indeed, his

speeches and writings in that period showed a confident determination to continue working with

black militants.’ (“McGeorge Bundy: How the Establishment’s Man Tackled America’s Problem

with Race,” Tamar Jacoby) 17

GONZALEZ: FORD FOUNDATION “REVERSE RACISM” AMONG LATINOS

Bundy started by revamping the grant priorities inside the Ford Foundation to focus on black

oppression, as well as the parallel problems of other ethnic minorities. It is important to note that

racial oppression was never defined by the Ford Foundation in broad-based economic terms, such as

the need for modern housing, new urban mass transit, top-flight medical care, high-tech jobs with

union wages, a quality college education for all ghetto youth, and other reforms which would have

necessitated a domestic Marshall Plan costing hundreds of billions of dollars. This was something

which the oligarchs had no intention of paying for. Rather, the Ford Foundation claimed that the

oppression of the black community was a matter of white racist attitudes, as reflected in institutional

arrangements which prevented black self-determination, community control, and self-esteem. In

this case, the oligarchs could claim that white blue-collar workers were the real culprits, since they

were the ones who came into the most intensive daily contact with oppressed blacks. “Bundy

reallocated Ford’s resources from education to minority rights, which in 1960 had accounted for 2.5

percent of Ford’s giving but by 1970 would soar to 40 percent.” The same methods were also

applied to Hispanics and Latinos in programs that were the precursors of the lunatic provocateur

propaganda of groups like Atzlan, which makes the absurd demand that many American states be

restored to Mexico. The only purpose of such raving delirium is to provide grist for the right-wing

xenophobic radio talk show hosts and other ideologues, who can use this transparent posturing as

“proof” in the minds of their gullible listeners of a nefarious Mexican plot to subvert the United

States.

Under Bundy’s leadership, Ford created a host of new advocacy groups, such as the Mexican-

American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (a prime mover behind bilingual education) and

the Native American Rights Fund, that still wreak havoc on public policy today. Ford’s support

for a radical Hispanic youth group in San Antonio led even liberal congressman Henry B.

Gonzalez to charge that Ford had fostered the “emergence of reverse racism in Texas.” (Heather

Mac Donald)

Congressman Gonzalez, a real fighter who later pioneered in the effort to impeach George Bush

the elder,

complained that the Ford Foundation had promoted racism among his people, Mexican-

Americans. He related how the Ford Foundation made a grant of $630,000 to the Southwest

Council for LaRaza. He said: The Ford Foundation wanted to create new leadership, and in fact

the new leaders it has created daily proclaim that existing leadership is no good ... ... the

president of MAYO, ... likes to threaten to ‘kill’ what he terms ‘gringos’ if all else fails ... ... I

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 75

must come to the sad conclusion that, rather than fostering brotherhood, the foundation has

supported the spewings of hate, and rather than creating a new political unit, it has destroyed

what little there was ...’ (Salandria)

We will see later on that the methods of the Ford Foundation in regard to the subversion and

manipulation of the American Indian movement for financier and provocation purposes are virtually

identical to the approach employed towards black and Hispanic target populations.

THE FORD FOUNDATION VS. MARTIN LUTHER KING

Martin Luther King was perceived by the Ford Foundation as a very serious threat, because of

the inclusive united-front methods by which he proposed to merge the struggles of the black

community with those of labor and the antiwar movement. The oligarchical class instinct of the

Ford Foundation therefore dictated that ultra-radical racist provocateurs be thrown into the fray who

would condemn Dr. King as a collaborationist Uncle Tom who was out of touch with younger

firebrand radicals. The general heading for these Ford Foundation provocateurs was the Black

Power movement or the pork chop cultural nationalists, who were always notoriously eager for their

foundation checks.

In a sense, in this, Ford was only following up on its own early initiative: the foundation’s Gray

Areas program, working in six inner cities in the early 1960s, had pioneered the idea of helping

the ghetto help itself. But in 1964 the War on Poverty had taken the notion one step further,

urging “maximum feasible participation” by the poor as a virtue in itself - calling on ghetto

people not just to help run local services but teaching them to organize politically so that they

could bargain with the government. As the idea gained credence, the emphasis of many antipoverty

programs shifted away from health care and education and job-training to teaching

“leadership” and in effect telling “Whitey” off. Some people at the foundation were troubled by

this new development. But they were largely unable to resist the growing pressure for any and

all kinds of participatory programs. And it wasn’t long before Ford found itself paying for street

gangs and avowed Black Power leaders. (Tamar Jacoby)

And again, the decision to fund the most incendiary lunatic agitators was a very conscious one,

since their outrageous statements could be used to fuel the backlash of the white middle class

against the militants and their demands.

FORD’S MCKISSICK, ANTI-MARTIN LUTHER KING

Thanks to the sheer power of its multi-billion-dollar endowment, the Ford Foundation was able

to create a new fad for shameless, race-baiting provocateurs on the national scene. H. Rap Brown

became infamous for his favorite slogan that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” Rap also

issued ominous threats, including his classic “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna’ burn it

down.” This was the age of “burn, baby, burn,” while reactionary Republican strategists around

Nixon and others thanked heaven for their extraordinary good fortune.

A good example of the Ford Foundation sponsorship for the most extreme black power militants

as a countergang to Martin Luther King was the grant allocation in Cleveland, Ohio:

Among the most controversial of these grants went to the Cleveland chapter of CORE

[Congress of Racial Equality]. Like even the most moderate civil-rights organizations, CORE

had been drifting leftward through the 1960s. Its integrationist national director James Farmer

76 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

had been replaced in 1966 by the younger and angrier Floyd McKissick, who along with

Carmichael was among the first proponents of Black Power. Outflanked on the left by SNCC

[Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] and even tougher ghetto leaders advocating

violence and a separate black nation, McKissick felt under strong pressure to prove his

militancy. He began to talk of “revolution” and to forge links with black Muslims; he explicitly

repudiated the phrase “civil rights,” replacing its appeal to morality with bristling talk of racebased

“power.” Before long, his escalating racial rhetoric had driven most white members out

of CORE. By 1967, SNCC had actually expelled whites, and in July CORE deleted the word

“multiracial” from its constitution. With this, it dropped all pretense that it was pursuing

integration or the hope of progress based on racial harmony.

None of this apparently bothered the Ford Foundation, which announced two weeks later - even

as the Newark ghetto erupted in riots - that it was giving $175,000 to CORE’s Cleveland

chapter. Bundy explained at a press conference that his board had considered the grant “with

particular care.” (In fact among some 16 trustees, only Henry Ford himself had expressed any

doubts.) What’s more, said Bundy, “neither Mr. McKissick nor I suppose that this grant

requires the two of us - or our organizations - to agree on all public questions.” The foundation

had chosen Cleveland because it had been particularly hard hit by riots the past summer; Ford’s

theory was that CORE might channel the ghetto’s grievances in a more constructive way,

averting further violence in the streets. The money was earmarked for voter registration and the

training of community workers who were then to help other blacks articulate their needs.’

(Tamar Jacoby, “McGeorge Bundy: How the Establishment’s Man Tackled America’s Problem

with Race,” http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1303/ Jacoby/Jacoby.html)

Bundy the patrician had made McKissick the minority plebeian into his mercenary as part of an

incipient war on the part of the financiers against the majority of the American people in the form of

the white middle class and lower middle class.

Rational spokesmen for the black community were horrified by the kinds of reckless and

irresponsible agitation which the Ford Foundation was creating: ‘In Cleveland, ‘A black city

councilman who opposed the program said the youths were being taught “race hatred” and that they

had been heard telling younger children that “we are going to get guns and take over.” Yet Ford

continued to defend the grant: “I see it,” said a foundation consultant, “as a flowering of what Black

Power could be.” In August 1968, the program was renewed, with explicit instructions to include

local gang leaders.’ (Tamar Jacoby) The Ford Foundation was not making mistakes; it was rather

acting with diabolical effectiveness to pursue its oligarchical class agenda.

BUNDY AND MAYOR LINDSAY ATTACK THE NEW YORK SCHOOLS, 1968

At this time, the mayor of New York City was a liberal Republican bankers’ boy named John V.

Lindsay. Lindsay was expected by Wall Street to maintain full payment on the municipal bonds of

the city, no matter what the consequences might be for schools, hospitals, transportation

infrastructure and so forth. The bankruptcy of New York City which would explode in 1974-75

was now on the horizon, so it was time for the finance oligarchs to take preemptive action to divide,

disrupt, and abort any potential for a united front of New Yorkers against their outrageous and

exorbitant demands, which would later be carried out by the infamous Municipal Assistance

Corporation or Big Mac, directed by the austerity fanatic and future Obama backer Felix Rohatyn.

Bundy was able to convince Lindsay that a counterinsurgency project based on black community

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 77

control of the public schools would offer vast potential for mobilizing the black ghetto against the

largely Jewish teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers or UFT.

The result was a sinister triumph of foundation-funded social engineering and political

manipulation. The idea was to give the newly created community control apparatus the right to hire

and fire teachers, in flagrant violation of the legally binding contract the UFT had fought so hard to

obtain from the city only a few years before. Bundy was no doubt gleeful as he contemplated the

potential for busting a union in the short run, using duped black parents, egged on by foundationfunded

poverty pimps:

The most notorious Bundy endeavor, the school decentralization experiment in the Ocean Hill-

Brownsville section of Brooklyn, changed the course of liberalism by fracturing the black-

Jewish civil rights coalition and souring race relations in New York for years afterward. Bundy

had led a mayoral panel under John Lindsay that recommended giving “community control”

over local public school districts to parents. The panel’s report, written by a Ford staffer,

claimed that New York’s huge centralized school system was not sufficiently accountable to

minority populations. Black and Puerto Rican children could not learn or even behave, the

report maintained, unless their parents were granted “meaningful participation” in their

education. Translation: parents should hire and fire local teachers and school administrators.

(Heather Mac Donald)

Bundy launched the program with characteristic energy and dispatch. The very month he

arrived in New York, he secured the board’s formal blessing to make race the top priority. Then

he got down to studying the issue in earnest. He read everything he could get his hands on and

spared no effort to get to know “Negro leaders.” He reached out to individuals and heads of

organizations, meeting them individually and in small groups. There were Sunday lunches at his

home and dinner meetings at the elite, all-male Century Club. The Century round-tables became

a kind of an institution in themselves: a dozen or more black and white men, from government,

social work and academia, would gather on the club’s musty top floor and take turns around the

table, each speaking his piece, then removing their jackets and arguing late into the night.’

(Tamar Jacoby)

‘The Bundy Report on decentralization contains one inexcusable folly – inexcusable because ...

Bundy ... recognized it as folly ... that communities can ‘unite’ around the issue of education. In

fact, communities inevitably divide about the issue of education.’ (Salandria)

If this was folly on the part of Bundy, it was very willful folly. Later Obama would repeat the

same divisive tactics as head of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

RACIST RHODY MCCOY, FORD OPERATIVE AND ROLE MODEL FOR OBAMA

The success of the community control gambit for purposes of counterinsurgency and political

manipulation depended in large part on the personal qualities of the boss of the new experimental

community control school district. As could be expected, the Ford Foundation selected for this post

the most incendiary and outrageous racist provocateur in sight:

Ford chose as the head of its $1.4 million decentralization experiment in three Brooklyn school

districts a longtime white-hater, Rhody McCoy, who dreamed of creating an all-black school

system, right up through college, within the public schools. McCoy was a moderate, however,

compared to the people he tapped as deputies. Although the school board blocked his

appointment of a militant under indictment for conspiracy to murder, he did manage to hire Les

78 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Campbell, the radical head of the Afro-American Teachers Association, who organized his

school’s most violent students into an anti-Semitic combat force. According to education

scholar Diane Ravitch, McCoy had an understanding with racist thug Sonny Carson that

Carson’s “bodyguards” would intimidate white teachers until McCoy would diplomatically call

them off.’ (Heather Mac Donald)

Since the majority of the New York City teachers were Jewish leftists with radical New Deal

backgrounds, the most scurrilous anti-Semitic baiting was prescribed for all the Ford Foundation

operatives who wished to advance their careers:

Ford’s experimental school districts soon exploded with anti-Semitic black rage, as militants

argued that black and Puerto Rican children failed because Jewish teachers were waging

“mental genocide” on them. The day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, students at a

junior high school rampaged through the halls beating up white teachers, having been urged by

Les Campbell to “[s]end [whitey] to the graveyard” if he “taps you on the shoulder.”

…white teachers at one school found an anti-Semitic screed in their mailboxes, calling Jews

“Blood-sucking Exploiters and Murderers” and alleging that “the So-Called Liberal Jewish

Friend . . . is Really Our Enemy and He is Responsible For the Serious Educational Retardation

of Our Black Children.” McCoy refused to denounce the pamphlet or the anti-Semitism behind

it. Nor did Ford publicly denounce such tactics—or take responsibility after the fact. McGeorge

Bundy later sniffed self-righteously: “If private foundations cannot assist experiments, their

unique role will be impaired, to the detriment of American society.” But if the experiment goes

awry, the foundation can saunter off, leaving the community to pick up the pieces. (Heather

Mac Donald)

Another commentator noted, “Not the least of the political questions left dangling at the end of

the tragedy of the teachers’ strikes is the best way to make tax-exempt foundations responsible for

the consequences of their actions.” (Salandria) In reality, American society would be best served by

a policy of taxing these oligarchical parasites out of existence, and returning their ill-gotten loot to

the public treasury.

FORD OPERATIVES PROVOKE THE TEACHERS TO STRIKE

With the start of the new school year in September 1968, the great Ford Foundation experiment

in community control and social engineering exploded into chaos, a chaos which engulfed New

York City as a whole.

Everything the skeptics predicted – and more – came to pass in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, one of

the three experimental districts funded by Ford. Within weeks of the foundation’s $59,000

grant, the militant activists who made up the board in this forsaken Brooklyn ghetto found

themselves at odds with some dozen allegedly “incompetent” teachers charged by the board

with being disloyal to the decentralization experiment. (The board was largely black, the

teachers were white – and even a black judge who later investigated the dispute could find little

cause, apart from race, for the board’s dissatisfaction.) In May 1968, the offending teachers

were asked to leave their posts, and when the union rallied to their defense, the local board went

to war against the union. The union struck; the board resisted — by hiring several hundred

irregular teachers and organizing people from the ghetto to demonstrate at the schools. Then,

throughout the fall of 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools were the scene of daily

violence. (Tamar Jacoby)

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 79

Every institution in the city quickly chose sides between the teachers union and the black

community control apparatus, splitting New York into two opposed camps. It is this kind of

ominous precedent which allows us to predict that an Obama presidency carried on with these same

foundation methods of social engineering will bring civil war in the United States as a whole much

nearer. In the fall of 1968,

a typical day brought out pickets and counter-pickets, shouting at each other across wooden

police horses, threatening each other and inciting schoolchildren. Both sides organized rallies at

City Hall; both spread hateful and largely racial innuendo. Black anti-Semitism (many of the

teachers were Jewish) vied in fury with whites’ race-charged fear and anger, and the cumulative

venom spiraled out of control. The eight schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district were at

the center of the storm – and many white teachers there reported they feared for their lives. But

the striking union gave as good as it got, spreading bitterness throughout the city by shutting

down the entire school system and causing more than 1 million students to miss nearly 40 days

of the fall term. By November, when the strike was settled, integration – and race relations in

general – had been set back 20 years or more. (Tamar Jacoby)

Naomi Levine described how the Ford Foundation under McGeorge Bundy used Ocean Hill-

Brownsville to deliberately provoke a confrontation:

Why did the Ocean Hill governing board order the “termination of employment” of the nineteen

teachers and administrators in Ocean Hill in such a peremptory manner and at a time when the

State Legislature was considering various proposals that would have enacted into law many of

the Bundy report recommendations? Why did the union react so strongly? […] The conclusion

is inescapable that the Ocean Hill governing board wanted a confrontation with the Board of

Education in order to fix its powers and responsibilities once and for all, and that it created the

situation to provoke such confrontation. (Salandria, “The Promotion of Public Discord,”

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t7653.html )

Significant parts of the community control experiment were rolled back, but by then the vast

damage had already been done. There was even a backlash against the high-handed and elitist

approach of the Ford Foundation, but this fell far short of wiping out this poisonous and malignant

institution:

In the end, state education authorities approved a much watered-down version of the Bundy

panel proposals. But Ford was made to pay dearly for its activist involvement. Conservative

journalists and congressmen riding the backlash of the late 1960s seized on the foundation’s

involvement in both Ocean Hill and Cleveland. These were only two small grants, a few

hundred thousand dollars of the many millions Ford had spent on race relations – for education,

voter registration, housing integration and poverty research. But that did not stop critics like

Texas congressman Wright Patman, who suggested apocalyptically on the House floor that “the

Ford Foundation [had] a grandiose design to bring vast political, economic and social changes

to the nation in the 1970s.” Thanks largely to his efforts, in 1969 Congress passed legislation

that significantly restricted all foundation giving (not just Ford’s) with excise taxes and federal

oversight. (Tamar Jacoby)

Wright Patman was that rarity, a genuine populist fighter against the Federal Reserve and the

financier elite in general.

The events around the New York City teachers’ strike of 1968 partially destroyed the

government of the City of New York in a manner from which it has never really recovered. It also

80 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

set the stage for the personal ruin of Mayor Lindsay, who had in effect turned over large parts of the

city to unelected and unaccountable Ford Foundation mindbenders. Here is an account of these

events from the point of view of City Hall which appeared in the New York Times obituary for

Mayor Lindsay in 2000:

Lindsay initiatives… were widely viewed as special concessions to black New Yorkers…

In 1968, Mr. Lindsay responded to black parents’ demands for more control and more black

teachers in their neighborhood schools by putting into effect, on an experimental basis, a school

decentralization plan in several black areas of the city, including Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in

Brooklyn.

Studies were cited that said integration was sputtering in New York, that schools had a poor

record educating black children, that it was psychologically harmful for blacks to attend schools

with mostly white teachers and administrators. The Ford Foundation, among others, had urged

the city to pursue decentralization, and the Legislature had agreed to finance the plan.

Challenging a white, largely Jewish school bureaucracy, whose authority was to be pared by

decentralization, Rhody McCoy, the administrator of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, transferred 13

teachers and 6 administrators, most of them Jewish, out of his district. In effect, he dismissed

them without pedagogic reasons, and it was said that their real offense was to oppose

decentralization.

The action was denounced as illegal by the United Federation of Teachers, which called a strike

that closed 85 percent of the city’s 900 schools for 55 days, putting a million children out of

classrooms and disrupting thousands of families. The strike’s bitterness was horrendous, with

threats of violence and diatribes laced with racism and anti-Semitism; Mr. Lindsay denounced

the slurs and ugly conduct as intolerable.

The strike ended when the state suspended Mr. McCoy and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board

on grounds that it had violated valid union contracts by transferring the teachers and

administrators without cause. Later, the Legislature fashioned a compromise, decentralizing city

schools into 32 districts and giving locally elected boards power to run their elementary and

junior high schools, but adopting strong protections for teachers’ jobs. But the episode left a

legacy of tensions between blacks and Jews that went on for years, and Mr. Lindsay called it his

greatest regret.

The last six months of 1968 were “the worst of my public life,” Mr. Lindsay later said. The

schools were shut down, the police were engaged in a slowdown, firefighters were threatening

job actions, sanitation workers had struck for two weeks and the city was awash in garbage, and

racial and religious tensions were breaking to the surface.

The depth of feeling against Mr. Lindsay in the boroughs outside Manhattan was not widely

understood beyond New York. But it became apparent to the nation after a Feb. 9, 1969,

blizzard buried the city in 15 inches of snow. While major arteries were plowed quickly, side

streets in Queens were buried for days, and homeowners greeted the visiting mayor with boos,

jeers and curses. The scenes, captured on national television, conveyed a message that the

mayor of New York was indifferent to the middle class. (New York Times, Dec. 21, 2000)

In other words, Lindsay was widely seen as an arrogant elitist full of contempt for blue-collar

and middle-class New Yorkers; these harbingers of a possible Obama regime in Washington are too

obvious to require any further commentary.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 81

A CLASSIC PATRICIAN-PLEBEIAN ALLIANCE

TO CRUSH THE MIDDLE CLASS

In Machiavelli’s Discourses, the perspicacious Florentine secretary points out that one of the

most dangerous political alliances that can come to dominate a state is one between the wealthy

patricians and the poorest inhabitants of the city. This seems to have been exactly what McGeorge

Bundy was aiming at, and the results were and continue to be catastrophic based on any rational

conception of American national interest. As Vincent Salandria, an intelligent lawyer, observed

several years after the dust began to settle,

A new political alliance is being forged in this country between the super-rich and the superpoor

– especially the alienated and activist members of minority groups.

The Ford Foundation, under the aggressive leadership of McGeorge Bundy, is providing the

major thrust for this power bloc ... This is a dangerous game but it doesn’t seem to worry those

members of the “Eastern Establishment” who are involved. They’re sure that no matter what

happens they’ll still be on top.

Salandria saw that the scope of the social manipulation being attempted by the Ford Foundation

was so vast that it implied nothing less than a foundation coup to impose a new oligarchical political

order in the United States:

The Ford Foundation’s support of provocateurs and revolutionaries throughout the nation is

raising numerous eyebrows. Many believe Bundy, former coordinator of intelligence for

President Kennedy, is fostering a new political alliance. Its effect, at the moment, appears to be

the destruction of the American constitutional system. The Foundation seems to be bypassing

the legally constituted federal bureaucracy, Congress and state and local governments in order

to build a movement of revolutionary proletarians.’ (Salandria, “The Promotion of Public

Discord.”)

It was clear that the teachers and the black parents were essentially fighting each other for a

share of a pie of economic concessions that was rapidly shrinking because of the incipient economic

decline and deindustrialization of the United States. These two groups would have had everything to

gain by forming an alliance to extract urgently needed concessions from the Wall Street banks. As

Salandria puts it,

I feel that McGeorge Bundy’s social engineering experiments with ethnics are designed to

cause this country to unravel under a systematic program of polarization. Where the foundations

leave off, the government agencies directly involve themselves in provocateur attempts to

splinter this nation. […] Coleman McCarthy has very wisely shown the evil and cynicism

behind the approach used by McGeorge Bundy. He points out the only legitimate function that

the intellectual should play in dealing with ethnics and racism is to: ... explain that the blacks

and white working class are actually in the same urban fix together. Instead of letting them fight

each other for useless inner-city leftovers, the intellectuals could act as a referee, creating a

black-white coalition based on hard, mutual needs, not any sentimental notions of integration.

(Salandria)

It was also very clear that the Ford Foundation continues to regard the black community as

second-class citizens who had to be maintained as wards and clients of the foundation community.

Edith Kermit Roosevelt describes this process: The operations in New York City of the Ford

Foundation typically illustrate the ruthless tactics used by the foundation’s self-described ‘elite’

82 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

in their drive for political power. One of the Ford Foundation’s goals has been to fundamentally

change the direction and control of New York City’s public-school system. City educational

institutions provide the Ford Foundation with a vehicle in their drive to control minority and

ethnic groups in urban areas through dollars distributed to key personnel who will be beholden

to them. (Salandria)

A DISASTROUS WATERSHED IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Salandria, who was a leftist, typifies the rage of Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish, and other New

Yorkers who had witnessed the rape of the city by a group of leftist elitists in the pay of the Ford

Foundation. He reflects:

But let us not be so outraged as to lose our bearings. Yes, admittedly I have difficulty at times

in maintaining my poise. This is especially true when I hear that McGeorge Bundy, the greatnephew

of A. Lawrence Lowell, one of the murderers of my Italian brothers, Nicola Sacco and

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, through Ford Foundation grants will provide aid aimed at increasing

minority opportunities in higher education. How ironic that the Ford Foundation which has

polluted the urban school systems with its provocateur activities and thereby foreclosed

educational opportunities for so many ethnic children, seeks to parade as the ethnics’ friend by

buying off scholars of ethnic backgrounds! (Vincent J. Salandria, “The Promotion of Domestic

Discord,” an address at the conference of the New England Branch of the Women’s

International League for Peace and Freedom, October 23, 1971)

The aftermath of the strike was marked by a rapid rightward shift by many of the white ethnic

groups. In fact, the emergence of the neoconservative or neocon movement is unthinkable without

the backlash generated by the foundation operatives through these events. There were of course

many other causes, but this strike was the one which more than any other turned the nation’s largest

city into a raging political and social battlefield, where reason and reconciliation were inevitably the

first casualties. Every left-wing organization in New York City had to take a position on one side or

the other of the teachers’ strike. The Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic

Society split into two factions over this issue. The anarchist, proto-fascist “action faction” of

spoiled suburbanite youth under Weatherman co-founder Mark Rudd enthusiastically supported the

Ford Foundation racist provocateurs, and were eager to bust the union. Rudd was reportedly already

on the foundation payroll as a provocateur. This group quickly joined forces with the SDS national

office clique around Bernardine Dohrn, and became the terrorist-fascist Weatherman tendency.

Obama’s affinity for the Weather Underground bombers Ayers and Dohrn accordingly has deep

roots, since these figures represent the most militant and aggressive anti-working class figures from

that degraded sector of the self-styled left who chose to support and uphold the fiendish strategy of

the Ford Foundation and the US intelligence community to divide and conquer on racial lines. The

Weathermen gave precious left cover to McGeorge Bundy, and it is no accident that they find

themselves today at the side of Obama, a second-generation racist provocateur for the foundations.

The Weathermen were the most violent of those who wanted radical politics to follow the line

dictated by the oligarchical foundations. So it is not surprising to find Ayers and Dohrn as darlings

and grant recipients of the foundations today, even as they act as the core of Obama’s support

network. The pro-labor part of the Columbia SDS chapter was the part already known as the Labor

Committee, and soon expanded to other cities as the New York-Philadelphia Labor Committees,

and then as the National Caucus of Labor Committees; the present author was a member of the

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 83

Cornell University branch in Ithaca, New York, starting in September 1968. The issues of those

days are still central today, despite Obama’s attempt to push them out of public view.

The methods used by McGeorge Bundy in New York City in 1968 to exacerbate racial conflict

are essentially identical to the underlying approach of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge of the

1990s, which was organized through a consortium of foundations by the Weatherman terrorist

bomber Bill Ayers, who had suddenly become respectable as a professor of education and

foundation operative. Ayers recruited Obama to be the chairman of the board of this Annenberg

Chicago challenge, and this was unquestionably one of the biggest steps up the career ladder for our

young Messiah.

The centerpiece of the Annenberg Chicago challenge was the decentralization of the school

system through the creation of local school councils (LSCs), with the same kind of community

control and local control illusions which had been peddled by Bundy. In this case, the effect was

less explosive than in New York City, because during the 1990s a much larger percentage of the

Chicago teachers’ union was black. Nevertheless, the existence of the local school councils allowed

the Chicago banking community through its political operatives like Ayers and Obama to play

desperate black parents against the teachers union, against municipal agencies, and against the

mayor, if that were required. This is why the New York example of 1968 is so indispensable in

understanding what the goals of Obama’s operations actually were.

BUNDY DICTATES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TO THE SUPREME COURT

The crowning achievement of McGeorge Bundy’s career was doubtless his success in

engineering a majority on the United States Supreme Court in favor of affirmative action programs

by which token numbers of organic black intellectuals and community leaders would be co-opted

into the elite career tracks of the prevailing finance oligarch institutions, while leaving the vast

majority of the black ghetto in a situation of worsening poverty and despair. Bundy thus scored his

last, and perhaps most significant, achievement in the realm of race relations – his role in the

Supreme Court’s Bakke decision endorsing the use of racial criteria in university admissions.

Bundy’s contribution was an article in The Atlantic making the case for affirmative action. It

was, even for Bundy, an unusually subtle and brilliant argument – but if that was all it was, it

would hardly matter today. What made it important was its impact on one particular reader:

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who provided a crucial fifth vote in favor of the use of

racial criteria. His short opinion on the case was so close to Bundy’s piece that it all but quoted

him. “Precisely because it is not yet ‘racially neutral’ to be black in America,” Bundy wrote, “a

racially neutral standard will not lead to equal opportunity.” Thus, he concluded. “To get past

racism, we must here take account of race.” Blackmun borrowed the phrase almost verbatim,

and it has stood for [many] years as the nation’s primary rationale for affirmative action. For

better of worse, it encoded the key idea of the late 60s - that racial progress can come only

through racial consciousness - at the center of American law. The distilled essence of Bundy’s

thinking on “the Negro question,” it remains a telling emblem of all that he did to encourage

black consciousness and race-based strategies. (Tamar Jacoby)

With the Bakke decision, which was argued under the Carter regime, we come to the world of

racial quotas, set-asides, and preferential treatment in such areas as college admissions. Far from

favoring a relaxation of racial tensions and an improved climate of national unity, these methods

have kept racial issues and racial stereotypes alive, as part of a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy.

Clinton sponsored an extensive debate about race, and today we have Obama announcing that yet

84 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

another racial conversation is needed. Instead, the view here is that what is needed is political

education based on class, poverty, exclusion, and economic decline. How can the government

determine race? Will we use light meters? Will we measure skulls, as in phrenology? Will we

demand family trees? These ideas must be rejected. What we can determine is if someone is in

poverty, and those are the people we must urgently assist into modern, productive employment.

Today, 30 years later we are in a position to see the real shape of the river as we observe the

characteristic human types which this system has created. Notable among these are Barack Hussein

Obama and Michelle Obama, who both assume the hypocritical stance of victims of racial

discrimination, when in fact the only discrimination they have known has all been in their favor,

and against the competition. Even as they amass luxury automobiles, significant wealth, mink

coats, and their legendary mansion, they must parade themselves as people who repeatedly rejected

the materialistic allure of the corporate world for a life of ascetic dedication and personal sacrifice

in the service of high principle. They also know that at least two-thirds of the black community for

which they claim to speak does not benefit, but demonstrably suffers, from this system.

Because of the obvious psychological stress between their rapacious greed, and their public pose

of altruism in the service of the black community, their troubled consciences require special care,

and it is this care which Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Otis Moss, and Dwight Hopkins have been

funded by the foundations to provide. Today Obama is running as the affirmative action candidate

for president, demanding and getting unprecedented and unheard of special treatment from the

hacks of the Democratic National Committee in the form of delegates from the state of Michigan,

where he deliberately took his own name off the ballot to avoid humiliating defeat while saving

resources. Obama demands the Democratic nomination despite the fact that Senator Clinton won

the popular vote or raw vote. All this will provide yet another lesson that affirmative action

perpetuates racial conflict, condemns the poor to a life of despair, and promotes a parasitic overclass

of race-mongers notable for their personal mediocrity and incompetence.

THE RACIST WORLD VIEW OF THE FOUNDATIONS

Let there be no confusion that racial problems in the United States have proven to be so

intractable precisely because they have been continuously exacerbated by never-ending campaigns

of foundation-funded social engineering.

Today, the full-blown liberal foundation worldview looks like this: First, white racism is the

cause of black and Hispanic social problems. In 1982, for example, Carnegie’s Alan Pifer

absurdly accused the country of tolerating a return to “legalized segregation of the races.” The

same note still sounds in Rockefeller president Peter C. Goldmark Jr.’s assertion, in his 1995

annual report, that we “urgently need . . . a national conversation about race . . . to talk with

candor about the implications of personal and institutional racism.” Second, Americans

discriminate widely on the basis not just of race but also of gender, “sexual orientation,” class,

and ethnicity. As a consequence, victim groups need financial support to fight the pettymindedness

of the majority. Third, Americans are a selfish lot. Without the creation of courtenforced

entitlement, the poor will be abused and ignored. Without continuous litigation,

government will be unresponsive to social needs. Students in foundation-funded ethnic studies

courses learn that Western culture (whose transmission is any university’s principal reason for

existence) is the source of untold evil rather than of the “rights” they so vociferously claim. […]

Liberal foundations are straining to block popular efforts to change the country’s discriminatory

racial quota system.’ (Heather Mac Donald)

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 85

The dead hand of foundation grant officers has also helped to throttle the creative arts in this

country by imposing their bankrupt and artificial notions of diversity and multiculturalism. These

can be seen for example in the world of drama, where

The large foundations now practice what Robert Brustein, director of the American Repertory

Theater, calls “coercive philanthropy,” forcing arts institutions to conform to the foundations’

vision of a multicultural paradise—one that, above all else, builds minority self-esteem.’

(Heather Mac Donald)

During the 1990s, it sometimes seemed that the counterinsurgency and social manipulation

efforts of the foundations have been so successful as to turn the United States into a political

graveyard. As Heather Mac Donald of the neocon Manhattan Institute comments,

the impulse toward the activism that over the past 30 years has led the great liberal foundations

to do much more harm than good remains overwhelming. In a pathetic statement of

aimlessness, the president of a once great foundation recently called up a former Ford poverty

fighter to ask plaintively where all the social movements had gone.’ (Heather Mac Donald)

1980s COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS AND

COLLABORATIVES: OBAMA’S BACKGROUND

By the time Barack Hussein Obama arrived on the foundations scene in the mid-1980s, the

original community action/community control/local control counterinsurgency strategy of the

foundation community had somewhat evolved into community development corporations. These

CDCs were first of all a reflection of the fact that economic conditions had become much more

desperate as a result of rampant economic misrule under the Reagan regime. The trade union

movement in its traditional form had now been largely broken. The CDCs were basically apolitical,

in that they presuppose that any attempt to change the policies of the government in Washington

was hopeless, and that the most that could be attempted was to make the slide into deindustrialization

and poverty a little more comfortable. The CDCs were also corporatist in the strict

sense borrowed from the Mussolini fascist corporate state: as an organizational form, they brought

together workers, bankers, foundation bureaucrats, and government officials in an attempt to cajole

corporate interests into creating a few jobs in poverty-stricken and blighted neighborhoods.

Alternatively, they sought some minor reform such as measures to reduce asbestos or lead

poisoning in schools and public buildings.

This is precisely the strategy which Barack Hussein Obama was implementing for the Gamaliel

foundation, a satellite of the Ford Foundation, in the Altgeld neighborhood on the south side of

Chicago. Obama was therefore a second-generation poverty pimp carrying out an overtly

corporatist political plan designed to maintain the control of bankers and financiers over the city of

Chicago in just the same way that McGeorge Bundy had done this in New York.

Ford never exactly repudiated community control – or Black Power. Nor did it give up entirely

on Bundy’s paradoxical idea that the best way to spur integration was to bolster separate black

institutions and strengthen black identities. Yet Bundy and his officers quietly retreated to a far

safer form of black institution-building – investment and grants for ghetto-based enterprises

known as “community development corporations.” […] The theory is simple: Ford - and the

government and private lenders - funnel money to a local nonprofit “board” that builds up the

neighborhood and tries to attract business. These businesses create jobs, while the “corporation”

– acting as a kind of local government – provides an array of social services. In the past 20

86 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

years, Ford has spent some $200 million on what it now estimates to be 2000 CDCs. The

difference between today’s CDC and the community activism of the 1960s is small but critical:

participation is still the key word, but the emphasis is on substantive participation – community

involvement in a particular activity like rehabilitating local housing – rather than on

participation for participation’s sake. Success is hard to measure. Few of these “corporations”

could exist without outside support: yet to Ford and to the communities that host them, they

represent an important kind of “self-help.” And that, for the moment, is still the most urgent

priority – with the goal of integration still deferred indefinitely. (Tamar Jacoby)

This is the kind of thing Obama is talking about when he claims that he was trying to organize a

community to bring back jobs that had been lost when a steel mill shut down. The way to create

jobs is to organize politically and expand the New Deal policies which have been proven effective

in creating high technology jobs at union wages. Instead, Obama offered an exercise in futility

leading to no tangible gains and the burnout of most of his main cadre, which was the plan.

These community development corporations were also termed “collaboratives.” Once again, the

scale of organization is always minuscule, the dominant ideology localist in the extreme, and the

chances of any success asymptotically approaching zero. The collaboratives also include an attempt

to wipe out prevailing moral values in the target population, which reminds us of Obama’s

infamous San Francisco “Bittergate” tirade, in which he criticized rural populations facing high

unemployment for their devotion to religion, gun ownership, ethnic pride, and the resistance to

economic globalization. This is the mental world of the foundation-funded social engineer and

political manipulator in unalloyed form. One analyst notes that

The so-called “collaboratives” movement in community development is emblematic of the 30-

year-long foundation assault on the bourgeois virtues that once kept communities and families

intact. The idea behind this movement, which grows out of the failed community action programs of

the 1960s, is that a group of “community stakeholders,” assembled and funded by a foundation,

becomes a “collaborative” to develop and implement a plan for community revitalization. That plan

should be “comprehensive” and should “integrate” separate government services, favorite

foundation mantras. To the extent this means anything, it sounds innocuous enough, and sometimes

is. But as with the foundations’ choice of community groups in the 1960s, the rhetoric of

“community” and local empowerment is often profoundly hypocritical. (Heather Mac Donald)

This is the world of local, small-scale corporatism, with communitarian overtones – this is truly

Obama’s world.

“PATRONAGE TROUGHS FOR POLITICAL OPPORTUNISTS”

Here is another example of the same foundation social control strategy based on community

development corporations as it has been implemented over the past decades in Miami, Florida, in

the wake of a serious urban riot a quarter of a century ago. We quote it at length because it is

important for the reader to understand as clearly as possible what cynical manipulation lurks behind

the benevolent-sounding job description of “community organizer” in Obama’s constantly touted

resume:

If you haven’t had a couple of bloody, terrifying urban riots down the street from your

corporate headquarters, the experiences of Knight-Ridder’s CEO, James K. Batten, 53, can help

you capture the feeling, and lead you to one of our first “heroes.” After Miami’s lacerating

Liberty City riot of 1980, Batten helped mobilize the business community. Says he: “Suddenly

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 87

there was a surge of conscience among businessmen — some of it sparked by idealism and

concern for humankind, and some of it by pragmatism and self-interest. Nineteen-eighty left a

sense of foreboding about what Miami really was and where it was headed. Even the most

cynical recognized that no one wants to vacation in a war zone.” In the aftermath, officials from

a newly formed Ford Foundation-backed outfit called LISC, for Local Initiatives Support Corp.,

came to Liberty City in search of struggling community development organizations to help.

They found none, but they did discover Otis Pitts, an educated native of Liberty City with a

varied background as a military policeman, railroad cook, and Miami city cop. After his police

partner was killed by his side on a call in Liberty City, he took up youth counseling work and

was running a successful agency in Liberty City when LISC found him. LISC and Pitts set up

something called the Tacolcy Economic Development Corp., to which LISC provided money

for plans and such, plus a small loan and expertise to get additional financing for rebuilding a

looted supermarket on a pivotal corner. LISC acted as a facilitator, but the project was

essentially on Pitts’s shoulders, and it had to make commercial sense. It took off when he

persuaded Winn-Dixie Stores to come in as anchor tenant, after the original tenant refused to

return. “I learned quickly that a deal is finite,” he recalls now. “You can’t put too many risks on

one deal. As soon as something like this gets started, all the aspirations and demands of the

community come together. We were under pressure to hire minority employees, to build with

minority contractors, even to help start a minority grocery chain. Well, if you just keep piling

up the risks like that with unrealistic expectations, the deal will collapse.”

So, says Pitts, he became single-minded. “The major objective,” he says, “was to build a damn

shopping center to provide quality goods and services at competitive prices in a safe and decent

environment” — basically the economic cornerstone of any community. At that, he did bring in

mostly black subcontractors and workers. Today, Pitts’s crisply appointed offices are located in

Edison Plaza, which is just what he describes. Its success has attracted a McDonald’s to an

opposite corner, and Pitts has gone on to other victories. His most recent accomplishment is the

121-unit, eight-story Edison Towers apartment house for low-income tenants, a beautifully

appointed, exquisitely maintained private residence with excellent security smack in the middle

of Liberty City. Financed with LISC help and mostly private funds, Edison Towers is a model

of how community development corporations get the job done. The financing included a

$100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, plus loans from the foundation, LISC, Dade County,

Southeast Bank, and Equitable, as well as a $1.6 million grant from a developer called Swire

Properties. […] LISC — basically a creation of the Ford Foundation — is far in front of the

curve on business involvement with poverty. With tax credits as a partial inducement, it has

assembled more than $200 million from some 500 corporations and foundations and leveraged

over $1 billion of direct investment in more than 500 community development corporations

across the country. In the South Bronx alone, LISC has invested upwards of $5 million in some

36 development projects. “We make it an attractive proposition for a corporation or foundation

to work through us,” says LISC President Paul S. Grogan. “They may want to attack these

problems, but they don’t have the capacity themselves to evaluate the opportunities, or to make

judgments about these community organizations. They don’t know the landscape. There’s still

sort of a stereotype of unscrupulous neighborhood organizations that don’t do anything but take

the money.” LISC officials admit that many community development corporations aren’t as

successful as Pitts’s or Rivero’s, but all of them counter the “poverty pimp” images from the

1970s. “We’re able to provide the opportunity recognition and the screening, and that’s been

crucial to us,” says Grogan. The lesson we can learn from LISC: “There’s an appetite and an

interest on everybody’s part if you can make something happen in a businesslike way, and that

88 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

says something about the directions for the future.” (John Huey, “How We Can Win the War on

Poverty,” Fortune, April 10, 1989)

“POVERTY PIMPS, POVERTY-CRATS, POVERTICIANS,

BUREAUCRAT-POLITICIANS”

The same patterns can be observed in the history of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, a group

which billed itself as having been established in 1977 to advance the interests of the Puerto Rican

community. In 1981, the NPRC received about 90% of its funding in the form of a grant from the

US Department of Housing and Urban Development. By 1991, 50% of the funding came from

corporate grants, while 30% came from foundations, with the Ford Foundation leading the pack.

The Puerto Rican community generated numbers of militant leaders, but these were so extreme that

they had little or no impact on elections. Leaders who were moderate enough to be able to run for

office posed other crippling problems: these moderate leaders

were more concerned with good government goals than with poverty issues. These leaders,

variously referred to as “bureaucrat-politicians,” “poverty-crats,” “poverticians,” and “poverty

pimps,” were intensely focused on the acquisition of power. But instead of using it to improve

the economic condition of Puerto Ricans, they invested it in shoring up their organizations. At

times they did this under the guise that the quality of life for Puerto Ricans depended on the

resources they controlled, while in effect securing “nothing more than patronage troughs for

political opportunists.”’ (José E. Cruz, “Unfulfilled Promise: Puerto Rican Politics and

Poverty,” Centro Journal XV:1 2003)

Back during the Cold War, retired spies wrote books with titles like I Led Three Lives. An

honest autobiography by a foundation operative like Obama might thus have a title along these

lines:

“I WAS A POVERTY PIMP FOR THE FOUNDATIONS”

The role of poverty pimp within the framework of foundation-funded strategies for mass

political and social manipulation, with a view to keeping the American people in a state of apathy,

fragmentation, passivity, and oppression, is a very exact characterization of what Obama did during

his years as a “community organizer.” To talk about poverty pimps is of course politically incorrect

in the extreme, but it is the only way to convey the social reality of what we are dealing with in the

case of Obama. For further background, we read in Wikipedia:

Poverty pimp or “professional poverty pimp” is a sarcastic label used to convey the opinion that

an individual or group is benefiting unduly by acting as an intermediary on behalf of the poor,

the disadvantaged or other some other “victimized” groups. Those who use this appellation

suggest that those so labeled profit unduly from the misfortune of others, and therefore do not

really wish the societal problems that they appear to work on so assiduously be eliminated

permanently, as it is not in their own interest for this to happen. The most frequent targets of

this accusation are those receiving government funding or that solicit private charity to work on

issues on behalf of various disadvantaged individuals or groups, but who never seem to be able

to show any amelioration of the problems experienced by their target population.

This self-serving cynicism, in feeding off the plight of a group of desperate dupes who are

turned into a salable political commodity, is the essence of Obama’s career.

II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 89

SOCIAL ENGINEERING THROUGH ENDLESS LITIGATION

There is one further aspect of foundation activity which should be mentioned, since it bears on

the activities of Barack Hussein Obama, Michelle Obama, and their close friend Bernardine Dohrn

in their professional careers as lawyers. Bernardine Dohrn in particular received a large grant from

the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to undertake the institutional reform of the

juvenile justice and Family Court systems in Chicago. The veteran terrorist bombthrower Dohrn

was supposed to do this through a special institute she controlled at Northwestern University. This

MacArthur grant to the aging terrorist pasionaria is coherent with another dimension of foundation

strategy, which is to pervert the courts into tools of social engineering and political manipulation.

Heather MacDonald writes:

Public interest litigation and advocacy embodies the foundations’ longstanding goal of

producing “social change” by controlling government policy. Foundations bankroll public

interest law groups that seek to establish in court rights that democratically elected legislatures

have rejected. Foundations thus help sustain judicial activism by supporting one side of the

symbiotic relationship between activist judges and social-change-seeking lawyers. Foundations

have used litigation to create and expand the iron trap of bilingual education; they have funded

the perversion of the Voting Rights Act into a costly instrument of apartheid; and they lie

behind the transformation of due-process rights into an impediment to, rather than a guarantor

of, justice. Foundation support for such socially disruptive litigation makes a mockery of the

statutory prohibition on lobbying, since foundations can effect policy changes in the courts,

under the officially approved banner of “public interest litigation,” that are every bit as dramatic

as those that could be achieved in the legislature.

ANN DUNHAM’S LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS

In the world of the foundations, the only ones who really know what they are doing are the

finance oligarchs and elitists at the top. The McGeorge Bundy types are the only ones who are

getting their money’s worth. The local people, the black parents, are dupes who are being used by

the financiers as a battering ram to maintain Wall Street’s control of society. Many of the

community control operatives and many of the middle and lower level foundation personnel are

dupes. They are often dupes who think they are fooling the foundation bosses. Obama’s mother,

Stanley Ann Dunham, the disillusioned late Marxist who went to work for the Ford Foundation, was

in all probability a person who thought that she was tricking the McGeorge Bundy types by carrying

out programs and projects which she imagined were very radical and very anti-capitalist, according

to her somewhat diluted Marxist criteria. She might have thought that she was burrowing from

within the institutions to help advance the revolution. By about 1970, there were many radicals who

embarked on this same type of long march through the institutions, as the popular phrase of the time

described it. What these radicals could not see was that their smattering of Marxism had in reality

done little more than make them into useful idiots for the aristocratic financier types, just as Marx

himself had ultimately served the British Empire.

McGeorge Bundy doubtless understood all this when he gave all that money to the raving

firebrand Floyd McKissick so as to create an artificial opposition to Dr. King. Bundy doubtless

knew that Rhody McCoy probably saw himself as a black revolutionary. It was precisely this

dimension of self-delusion that made people like this into such useful idiots. Henry Ford II

obviously lacked this level of sophistication, and was genuinely shocked at what the Ford

Foundation staff had become: a nest of failed radicals and subversives marching through the

90 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

institutions. Henry Ford II did not understand that these were exactly the people needed for

effective counter-insurgency and divide-and-conquer operations: credible left cover operatives. As

Heather MacDonald relates,

Many foundations had turned against the system that had made them possible, as Henry Ford II

recognized when he quit the Ford Foundation board in disgust in 1977. “In effect,” he wrote in

his resignation letter, “the foundation is a creature of capitalism, a statement that, I’m sure,

would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to

discern recognition of this fact in anything the foundation does. It is even more difficult to find

an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the

beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.” Did Ford exaggerate? Not according to

Robert Schrank, a Ford program officer during the 1970s and early 1980s. Schrank, a former

Communist, recalls the “secret anti-capitalist orientation” of his fellow program officers.

“People were influenced by the horror stories we Marxists had put out about the capitalist

system,” he says; “it became their guidance.”

This is the world of Obama’s mother, a weak, disillusioned late Marxist working for the Ford

Foundation. In the case of her son, the magnetic power of Marxism had declined precipitously, and

his outlook was based on race in Fanon’s sense, not class. This combination suffices to make

Obama the most radical subversive ever to seriously contend for the US presidency.

CHAPTER III: FOUNDATION-FUNDED RACISM IN

CHICAGO: JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND MICHELLE

White folks’ greed runs a world in need. – Jeremiah Wright, “The Audacity of Hope” sermon

“What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the

world.” – James Cone.

Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for. I have a

number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in

the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely. –

Obama to Cathleen Falsani, 2004.18

The Obama campaign is very fond of pointing to the great personal sacrifice made by their

candidate after leaving Harvard Law School. They stress that with his prestigious law degree,

Obama could have written his own ticket to any number of lucrative positions in Wall Street, the

corporate world, or the top law firms. But this type of propaganda ignores the fact that Obama’s

career was now being guided, fostered, assisted, and directed by the networks of the Trilateral

Commission and its banking allies. Obama was now a young man who was destined for great

things thanks to these super-rich and powerful backers. Again and again we will see the marvelous

process by which obstacles are removed from Obama’s path, and adversaries are eliminated, even

as wonderful and unprecedented opportunities open up for him as if by magic. It was clear to

Obama’s Trilateral case officers that a career solely played out in the elitist world of board rooms

and country clubs would not be sufficient to provide him with a left cover required should

candidacy for political office be part of his future, as they fully intended that it would. Therefore,

Obama had to be sheep-dipped in the world of community organizing during the 1980s to develop

his ability to manipulate and con the people he met in the streets. Now, he needed an entrée into the

left-leaning Chicago Democratic political machine, where radical black nationalists and veterans of

the Weatherman terrorist group were well represented. Obama needed to burnish his resume with

activities that would reinforce his image and credentials as a true progressive, while banishing any

suggestion that he was in fact an agent of finance capital.

‘Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work

as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself

is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer.

The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to

work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you. So, why

or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law

Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley? Sidley had been longtime

outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed’s key

outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern

alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out that Bernardine Dohrn

worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her fatherin-

law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar. Dohrn was not

admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the

murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the

“Revolutionary Armed Task Force”) “comrades,” including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of

Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after

serving 22 years of a plea-bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a

92 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. … Trienens recently explained his

unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practiced law and had graduated from law school

(before going on her bombing spree 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago Tribune saying, “[W]e

sometimes hire friends.” I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama

to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior

to attending law school when Obama’s DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988.

Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn’s CV indicates that she

left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to starting a position at Northwestern

(again, hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel

Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been at the firm at the same time,

although if Obama and Dohrn met before Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have

discussed the firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there. My best guess, though, is that it

would have been Tom Ayers who introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get

the attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in very handy later in

Obama’s career as Kaufman suggests. (Recently I heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton

Minow, who tells me her sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS

and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell contends on the basis of this

anecdote that her family met and supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to

provide me any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.) In any case the

summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a

lawyer and working as a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama’s first supervisor or mentor there.

Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law

review in the spring of 1990. After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter

registration campaign (which would turn out to be an important step in his career).’ (Steve

Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

AFTER LAW SCHOOL: BUILDING A RESUME FOR A POLITICAL CAREER

After law school, Obama returned to Chicago to work as a civil rights lawyer, joining the firm of

Miner, Barnhill & Galland, an unsavory enterprise to which we will return later… He became a

modest adjunct lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, while helping to organize a voter

registration drive during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Abner Mikva, a five-term

congressman from Illinois who was at that time Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals

for the D.C. circuit, tried to recruit Obama as his law clerk, a position that might have been a

stepping stone to clerking on the Supreme Court, but Obama declined the offer. David B. Wilkins,

the Kirkland and Ellis professor of law, said he advised Obama in 1991 to become a Supreme Court

Clerk. “Obama knew there was honor in pursuing that post,” Wilkins said, but Obama quickly

added that it was not for him. “He said that he wanted to write a book about his life and his father,

go back to Chicago, get back into the community, and run for office there. He knew exactly what he

wanted and went about getting it done,” Wilkins said. More accurately, Obama’s Trilateral case

officers knew what the next steps for their young protégé and asset needed to be.

“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” said David Axelrod, the Chicago

machine hack who is now Obama’s campaign boss gushed. “After Harvard, Obama could have

done anything he wanted.” Axelrod’s specialty has long been to help black candidates get white

votes with a utopian litany of messianic platitudes; he also got Deval Patrick elected as Governor of

Massachusetts. Obama served as an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 to

1996. During this time, he says he represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 93

voting rights cases. His part-time adjunct work in constitutional law at the University of Chicago

Law School lasted from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

THE MACHINE PICKS OBAMA TO LEAD PROJECT VOTE, 1992

Obama was now on his way to becoming a Chicago machine pol, but his drooling acolytes seek

to portray his choices as reflecting a self-denial worthy of a holy ascetic. One writes: “When Obama

returned to Chicago, he turned down big-money firms to take a job with a small civil rights practice,

filing housing discrimination suits on behalf of low-income residents and teaching constitutional

law on the side. He had thought he might enter politics since before he left for law school, and

eventually he did, winning a seat in the state Senate at the age of thirty-seven.”(Wallace Wood,

Rolling Stone)

Obama, clearly not acting alone, but rather helped along by his Trilateral mother ship and by the

corrupt Chicago Democratic machine, now became a leader of Illinois Project Vote, which claimed

to have registered 150,000 new voters for the 1992 election. Estimates of those registered vary;

another acolyte relates: “In 1992, he served as executive director of Illinois Project Vote! a voterregistration

drive that added an estimated 125,000 black voters to the rolls and was credited with

helping elect Carol Moseley Braun to the U.S. Senate.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) The

real goal of all this may have been the modernization of the traditional Cook County vote fraud

machine, which has helped so many cadavers send in absentee ballots over recent years. This

activity would become one of Obama’s main talking points in his advertisements for himself when

he was running for state senate a few years later. Obama, with characteristic megalomania, seems to

think that Project Vote was the reason Bill Clinton won the 1992 election. Therefore, when Clinton

endorsed Obama’s opponent Bobby Rush in the Perfect Master’s losing 2000 congressional race,

Obama felt betrayed, and his grudge against the Clintons came to the fore in the venom of the 2008

primaries.

OBAMA: A “VACUOUS OPPORTUNIST”

The political scientist Adolph Green of the University of Pennsylvania came into contact with

Obama around this time, and later wrote:

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political

career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me

then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like

him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty

rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal. (“Obama No,” The Progressive,

May 17, 2008) And there were other layers beneath that.

Obama published his autobiography in 1995; this was Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race

and Inheritance. During his presidential bid, he would get another wave of adoring publicity when

he won a Grammy for the audio version of this book. What kind of a person writes an

autobiography before he is 40? Surely one that is self-centered or self-absorbed, or possibly selfobsessed.

Such an autobiographer might well be a megalomaniac, with delusions of grandeur on the

scale of Nero.

94 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND THE THEOLOGY OF HATE

But if Obama was a megalomaniac, we was not the only megalomaniac on the south side of

Chicago. There was also the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the central figure of an affluent

congregation that called itself the Trinity United Church of Christ. Even before going to Kenya,

Obama had come into contact with Jeremiah Wright. Obama had often been questioned about his

religious faith during his years as a community organizer. During this time Obama, who said he

“was not raised in a religious household,” was asked by pastors and church ladies, “Where do you

go to Church, young man?” (Dreams) The guess here is that he was not a Moslem during those

years, but rather an existentialist like his idol Frantz Fanon, and therefore most likely an atheist on

the model of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Obama now realized that membership in a church was a

political necessity. He chose Wright’s church not merely because it was very large, very influential,

and very wealthy, but also because it professed black liberation theology, which Obama certainly

would have known by that time to be the brand preferred by his backers in the foundation world, of

which the Ford Foundation was the flagship. Another name for Wright’s church might have been

the Foundation Church of the Counter-insurgency, since those were the doctrines that were taught

there. It was a church based on Afrocentrism, on black nationalism, and on the rejection of western

civilization. Ironically, it was also a church frequented by some of the most successful practitioners

of affirmative action, meaning the small minority of the black community who had benefited

immensely from quotas, set-asides, and racial preferences, while the majority of the black inner-city

ghetto sank deeper and deeper into poverty and despair. Indeed, Wright’s doctrines were designed

to soothe the consciences of the upwardly mobile black overclass even as they were co-opted into

the financier power structure of the city.

Obama experienced some friction with Wright at their first meeting: ‘“Some people say that the

church is too upwardly mobile.” It was in fact the richest black congregation in Chicago. Wright

shot back: “That’s a lot of bull. People who talk that mess reflect their own confusion. They’ve

bought into the whole business of class that keeps us from working together.”’ (Dreams 283)

Wright means that racial unity is everything, and socioeconomic class is nothing. With this, the

essence of Wright’s method is exposed: he is a follower of the proto-fascist German sociologist

Ludwig Gumplowicz, whose main work was Der Rassenkampf (The Racial Struggle, 1909).

Gumplowicz was a product of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose nationalities policy is

one of the models for the Ford Foundation’s current doctrines of multi-culturalism. Gumplowicz

taught that the main clash in human society was the racial one, and not class struggle – not Plato’s

authentic class struggle, and not Marx’s fake version either. It is a tune repeated by many a

reactionary, irrationalist, and obscurantist.

Here are some impressions of Trinity United and of Wright personally: ‘The Trinity United

Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and

unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a

ghetto on the city’s far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black

nationalist future might look like. There’s the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric

Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane

bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest

preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday…. This is as openly

radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much

Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his

politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a “sounding

board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.” Both the title of Obama’s

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 95

second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic

National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. “If you want to understand where

Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,” says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left,

“just look at Jeremiah Wright.”’ (Wallace Wood, Rolling Stone) Indeed.

JEREMIAH WRIGHT’S GREATEST HITS

Wright was a racist provocateur operating in the orbit of the Ford Foundation and other counterinsurgency

institutions. He was a guardian of a social order dominated by financiers and bankers.

But he did this with radical black nationalist or Afrocentric cover, which guaranteed support from

guilt-ridden white liberals. Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. became the Pastor of Trinity United

Church of Christ (TUCC) on March 1, 1972. The church motto is “Unashamedly Black and

Unapologetically Christian,” which was a phrase coined by his predecessor, the Reverend Dr.

Reuben Sheares, and was officially adopted by Wright. Trinity goes on to say: “Our roots in the

Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people,

and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization…. “Trinity has

a non-negotiable commitment to Africa, is committed to the historical education of African people

in diaspora and committed to liberation, restoration, and economic parity.” Some have seen here a

claim to Afrocentric racial superiority, which could only be grounded in irrationalist mysticism.

Trinity United Church of Christ claims to be founded upon the “Black Value System,” written

by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. Trinity supports

the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics, Trinity says, must be

taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered.

They must reflect on the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God

2. Commitment to the Black Community

3. Commitment to the Black Family

4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education

5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence

6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic

7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect

8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”

9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black

Community

10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and

Supporting Black Institutions

11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System

12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.

Wright was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He did not attend the largely black high school

in his neighborhood, but instead took an exam which he passed to be able to attend an elite citywide

high school which was largely white. This is an instance of Wright’s failure to practice the

racial solidarity which he preaches when his own advantage is concretely at stake. Morton A. Klein,

the president of the Zionist Organization of America, happened to have attended the same public

96 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

high school from which Wright graduated. Klein noted that Wright had chosen a highly competitive

college prep program in a school which was largely white:

It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school

Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated

neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the

second-oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic

students in the city. The school then was about 80 percent Jewish and 95 percent white. The

African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we

came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal

education, and we tended to live in row houses.” (Morton A. Klein, “Obama’s pastor: Product

of privilege, not poverty,” World Net Daily, March 25, 2008)

Wright’s choice of an affluent white neighborhood for his retirement was a clear violation of the

ban on middle class values contained in his church program. But it did represent a return to

Wright’s origins.

After high school, Wright entered Virginia Union University. After three and a half years at

Virginia Union, Pastor Wright left and entered the United States Marine Corps. He transferred from

the USMC into the United States Navy where he served as a cardiopulmonary technician, assisting

President Lyndon B. Johnson during the heart attack he suffered in office. After six years in the

service, Pastor Wright transferred to Howard University where he completed his undergraduate

studies and received his first Master’s Degree. His second Master’s Degree was from the University

of Chicago Divinity School. His Doctorate was received from the United Theological Seminary, the

noted smithy of synthetic religions near Columbia on Morningside Heights, under Dr. Samuel

DeWitt Proctor. In addition to Pastor Wright’s four earned degrees, he has been the recipient of

eight honorary doctorates.

Some vintage Wright: “Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in

college,” he intones. “Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this

country is still run! We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the

training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and

believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people.

. . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means! We are selfish, self-centered

egotists who are arrogant and ignorant and betray our church and do not try to make the kingdom

that Jesus talked about a reality. And — and — and in light of these 10 facts, God has got to be sick

of this s**t” Some reports include an additional peroration, in the classical style recommended by

Cicero and Quintilian: “And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S**T!”

(Wallace Wood, Rolling Stone, Kyle-Anne Shiver)

When some authentic representatives of the historical black church were allowed on television to

respond to Wright’s claims that he represented them, at least one of them offered the criticism that

many black families would not want to stay in a church where “the pastor was cussing.” Wright did

more: in one scene from his tapes, he began ranting that “Some argue that blacks should vote for

Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued. “That’s not true,” he thundered. “He

did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.” He turned around and humped his own

altar to emphasize that Bill Clinton had been “riding dirty” with Miss Lewinsky.

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 97

OBAMA HELPED FUND WRIGHT’S MICROPHONE

Obama did not just listen to this tripe; he financed it and made it possible financially. In 2006,

the Obamas gave $22,500 to Wright’s church, and this represented the vast majority of their

charitable contributions. Wright’s church was foundation-funded: for example, in 2001 the Woods

Fund, where Obama was a board member, awarded a $6,000 grant to Trinity United. They were

paying for an agitational machine disguised as a church. Wright, for his part, needed the money to

buy his new Porsche. Worldly asceticism was not a part of the Protestant ethic as interpreted by

Wright. He rejected middleclassness in favor of upperclassness, or, more simply, elitism.

Obama has described Wright as his spiritual mentor and his sounding board. A key phrase from

one of Wright’s sermons is the “audacity of hope,” which Obama has affixed as the title of his

compendium of observations on his own presidential campaign. Wright is a great admirer of Louis

Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, and traveled with Farrakhan to visit with Libyan leader Muammar

Qaddafi. Farrakhan has gotten his picture on the cover of Wright’s parish magazine several times,

sometimes in the company of Obama. Wright’s church gave Farrakhan the “Dr. Jeremiah A.

Wright, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer” Award at the 2007 Trumpet Gala at the United

Church of Christ. According to some reports, Wright himself was for a time a member of

Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen noted that the Trinity United house organ had once

named Louis Farrakhan as its person of the year, praising the Nation of Islam leader. Cohen called

on Obama to denounce such praise of Farrakhan, known for statements deemed anti-Semitic. In his

January 15, 2008 Washington Post column, Richard Cohen wrote: “Every year, [Trumpet] makes

awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to

a man it said ‘truly epitomized greatness.’ That man is Louis Farrakhan.”

Farrakhan was a hero to some, but for others who looked at him from the left, he fell far short of

what was needed. There was for example Farrakhan’s address to the Million Man March of 1995,

when titanic efforts had been marshaled by ordinary black men to demonstrate for the survival of

the black family. Farrakhan was the main speaker. He had no legislative program to outline to

mobilize and sustain the efforts of the black men who had come so far at such expense to hear him.

Instead, he launched into a raving tirade about numerology, babbling about the number of steps

leading to various buildings in Washington, or their height as measured in feet. It was an appalling

performance. He finished up with a kind of pledge by those present, but there was no mention of a

political party or something concrete to express so much need and so much energy. Not

surprisingly, the momentum generated by the Million Man March quickly dissipated. Farrakhan had

proven once and for all that he was no political leader. He had not been able to point to the next

step, to the next link in the chain of meaningful political action.

Many wondered what Farrakhan was about after all, with his idiotic and self-destructive anti-

Semitic outbursts. There had been a time after that fabled trip to Libya when he had seemed to

suggest that he had become a kind of paymaster for Qaddafi. Some claimed that he had had a role in

the assassination of Malcolm X, who had been a rival of sorts to him for the NOI succession. Did

Farrakhan have connections to the US intelligence community? If he did, then everything would

begin to fall into place, including his indirect association to Obama. Farrakhan has endorsed Obama

for the presidency, saying that the Illinois senator “is the hope of the entire world, that America will

change and be made better.” It was Farrakhan who had been quoted saying, “White people are

potential humans — they haven’t evolved yet.” Was Farrakhan a provocateur for the FBI? When

the spotlight was trained on this matter, Obama has run away in the other direction.

98 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

In the week ending March 14, 2008, the American public came to know the intemperate

rhetorical outbursts of this Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the Trinity United Church of

Christ which Obama and his family had by then been attending for some 20 years. It turned out that

videotapes and audiotapes of Reverend Wright’s incendiary sermons had long been available for

public sale, but that the controlled corporate media, had pooh-poohed any attempt to dig beneath

their favorite candidate’s messianic-utopian veneer, had not paid any attention to this mass of

damning material until the Obama candidacy had begun to falter after his loss of the Ohio and

Texas primaries. Until this time, only a limited number of taped sermons had been presented on

television, although some had been widely available on the Internet. During the critical week in

question, Brian Ross of ABC news was one of the first to present extensive excerpts from Reverend

Wright’s ranting performances. He was quickly followed by Hannity, O’Reilly, and Greta Van

Susteren, and then by CNN, followed by the diehard Obama hysterics at MSNBC. On March 14

2008, a media firestorm swirled around the increasingly daemonic figure of Reverend Jeremiah

Wright, prompting Obama to drop the ranting Reverend from a committee of spiritual advisers to

his campaign.

WRIGHT: “GOD DAMN AMERICA”

The culmination of Wright’s doctrine was this: “The government gives them the drugs, builds

bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no,

God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.” “God damn America for

treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God

and she is supreme.” (2003) “God damn Wall Street” would have been above reproach. “God damn

Bush” would have gotten applause on any street. “God damn the CIA” would have been warmly

received in many quarters. But “God damn America,” is the subjunctive form of a wish that God

visit evil upon the American people, and that is quite another matter. “God damn” is considered a

form of blasphemy since it amounts to giving orders to God, telling God to hate. It shows that

Wright was not a Christian at all, but a purveyor of hate. If Obama says he got to Christ through

Wright, then he never got there, since Wright’s religion was a satanic cover story for Mammon and

Pluto. In this case, Obama never got to Christianity at all, and may well be a Satanist himself.

WRIGHT’S LEFT CIA BLOWBACK THEORY OF 9/11

Wright raved on and on: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more

than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported

state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because

the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s

chickens are coming home to roost.” (Sept. 16, 2001)19

This is the CIA’s favorite blowback theory, most famously embraced by the ex-Weatherman

bomb expert and sometime professor at the University of Colorado Ward Churchill. Churchill

called the 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns,” and argued that those who did not embrace the official

myth of 9/11 complete with the 19 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed, and Ramzi Binalshib were in fact racists who were seeking to deny that the Arabs

were after all capable of great things. Ward Churchill taught the pseudo-revolutionary provocateur

group the Weathermen how to make bombs and fire weapons, according to a Fox News report

citing the Jan. 18, 1987 issue of the Denver Post. The revelation is among many reported since

Churchill prompted a national furor with publicity over an essay he wrote entitled “Some People

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 99

Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” (“9-11 professor trained terrorists: Radical group

Weathermen assisted by Ward Churchill, World Net Daily, February 11, 2005) The parallels to

Wright are evident. An entire left CIA, foundation-funded domestic intelligence and

counterinsurgency network was primed to spout the “chickens coming home to roost” line right

after 9/11.

This blowback theory had broad appeal to morally insane leftists who wanted to see 9/11 as the

just punishment and retribution for US imperialist crimes. The problem was that 9/11 had been a

cynical provocation staged and manufactured by the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence

community to start a unilateral version of the war of civilizations.20 Blowback was the most

insidious defense of the official 9/11 story. In honor of his role, blowback advocate Ward Churchill

had been awarded the Arlen Spector Award for 2005. Named in honor of the originator of the

“magic bullet” theory of the Kennedy assassination, the Arlen Spector Award goes yearly to the

person who offers the most imaginative and demagogic defense of an official big lie. This jest had

been mine, but the point was no jest.

The newspaper of record, as usual, attempts to obfuscate this issue: ‘On that Sunday after the

terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright also said the attacks were a consequence of violent American

policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone

away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry

way of ignoring Black concerns.” “The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,”

Obama said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks

shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative. …

Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern

with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through,” Mr.

Obama said. “He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the

context of social justice and inequality.”’ (“A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith,”

New York Times, April 30, 2007)

Like Wright, Deval Patrick, and Weatherman veteran Ward Churchill, Obama embraced the

blowback theory of 9/11. Here are Obama’s remarks right after 9/11, which are worth citing

because they show his complete alignment with the left wing of the US intelligence establishment:

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also

hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate

lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at

our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must

be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their

organizations of destruction. We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of

understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives

from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or

connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness

to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it

unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand

of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though,

it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair. We will have

to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of

innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination

directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to

100 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of

embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa,

Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.21

This is terrorism as a purely spontaneous sociological phenomenon, the direct reaction to

economic issues, without the intervention of intelligence agencies. I have provided an exhaustive

refutation of this point of view in my 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005 ff.)

WRIGHT: “I’M A BAD MAMMA JAMMA!”

Even the left liberals at the New Yorker were uneasy with some of Wright’s more incendiary

positions, no doubt because they represented a threat that the Perfect Master might be unmasked:

Wright, who drives a Porsche and references Bernie Mac and Terry McMillan in his unorthodox

sermons (“Take what God gave you and say, ‘In your face, mediocrity, I’m a bad mamma

jamma!’”)…. Wright preached. Wright espouses a theology that seeks to reconcile African-

American Christianity with, as he has written, “the raw data of our racist existence in this strange

land.” The historical accuracy of that claim is incontestable. But his message is more

confrontational than may be palatable to some white voters. In his book Africans Who Shaped Our

Faith —an extended refutation of the Western Christianity that gave rise to “the European Jesus . . .

the blesser of the slave trade, the defender of racism and apartheid”—he says, “In this country,

racism is as natural as motherhood, apple pie, and the fourth of July. Many black people have been

deluded into thinking that our BMWs, Lexuses, Porsches, Benzes, titles, heavily mortgaged condos

and living environments can influence people who are fundamentally immoral.” In portraying

America as “a Eurocentric wasteland of lily-white lies and outright distortions,” Wright

promulgates a theory of congenital separatism that is deeply at odds with Obama’s professed belief

in the possibilities of unity and change. (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

Obama had warned Wright to stay away from his pseudo-Lincolnesque announcement of his

campaign in early 2007, but that had not been enough for the egomaniac Wright, it seemed. Asked

about the incident almost a year before the Wright scandal blew up in grand style, the Obama

campaign stated: ‘“Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.” In March 2007, Wright

commented in an interview that his own family and some close associates were angry about the

canceled address, for which they blamed Obama’s campaign advisers, but that the situation was

“not irreparable.” The haughty and vindictive Wright added menacingly: “Several things need to

happen to fix it.” When asked if he and Mr. Wright had settled this quarrel, Obama said: “Those are

conversations between me and my pastor.” “If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to

publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally,

and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”’ (“A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for

Faith,” New York Times, April 30, 2007)

Wright, in his moments of lucidity, was aware of himself as a violently controversial figure.

Wright told The New York Times in a March 6, 2007 interview: “When his [Obama’s] enemies find

out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli,” with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to visit Libyan

leader Muammar Qaddafi, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

Note that for Wright, all political categories are racial and racist categories. Nevertheless, in a

March 2008 campaign appearance, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually

particularly controversial.” This argued for very poor judgment indeed, since Wright was about to

become a huge obstacle to Obama’s presidential power grab.

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 101

The ranting sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright established beyond doubt that he is a

purveyor of racial hatred, and that this hatemongering was a constant, habitual, and structural

feature of his pulpit oratory. If Obama were as conciliatory and irenic as he claims to be, why does

he associate with such a person? Why not quit this church and find another one more consonant

with traditional Christianity? Instead, we find that Reverend Jeremiah Wright officiated at Obama’s

wedding, at the christenings of his two daughters, and that the title of Obama’s second book, The

Audacity of Hope, the book we have referred to as the postmodern Mein Kampf, is a direct citation

from one of Reverend Wright’s incendiary sermons.

BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY: THE CONE-HEADS

In a spring 2007 television interview with Hannity, Reverend Wright stated that he is an

exponent of Black liberation theology, with special reference to the works of theologians like James

Cone and Dwight Hopkins. These writers, Reverend Wright argued, are the sources of the black

and Afrocentric Christianity which is taught in his church. James Cone is a professor at the Union

Theological Seminary, located near Columbia University in New York City. Union Theological

Seminary is for all practical purposes a factory for new and improved synthetic religions, structured

according to the needs of the oligarchical financier elite to manipulate, dominate, and control

various target populations.

Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, concocted a synthetic religion combining porkchop

black nationalism, third-world pseudo-Marxism, and primitive Christianity. He describes his

own handiwork as “a theology which confronts white society as the racist anti-Christ.” In a war

against “white values,” black pastors, like Wright, must reject “white seminaries with their middleclass

white ideas about God, Christ and the church.” (Rich Lowry, “The Real Rev. Wright,”

realclearpolitics.com, April 29, 2008) “What I write is urged out of my blood,” writes Cone. A

religion of blood means a religion of blood consciousness and race, taking us back to National

Socialism. We are close to Fichte’s Volksgeist and Mazzini’s idea that the races are the real actors

of history. We are also close to Michelle Obama’s advice to her husband to be visceral, to feel and

not to think, which will be discussed below.

Cone gives up any notion of supernatural religion and makes religion derive from a contingent

historical experience when he writes: “To put it simply, Black Theology knows no authority more

binding than the experience of oppression itself. This alone must be the ultimate authority in

religious matters.” Whites are presented as “madmen sick with their own self-concept.” Cone lays

particular stress on his contention that Jesus Christ was black: “The ‘raceless’ American Christ has

a light skin, wavy brown hair, and sometimes - wonder of wonders - blue eyes. For whites to find

him with big lips and kinky hair is as offensive as it was for the Pharisees to find him partying with

tax-collectors. But whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is black, baby, with all of the

features which are so detestable to white society.” (In Christianity, by contrast, God is a spirit, and

the issue of skin color does not arise.) In Cone’s theology, eternal salvation is equated with black

people rising up against their white oppressors. As a coherent gnostic, Cone re-interprets the notions

of eternity and paradise as rewards that can and should be obtained in this world.

CONE: “IF GOD IS NOT FOR US AND AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE,

THEN HE IS A MURDERER”

Cone went much further, attempting to transform Christ from the universal living God to a kind

of totemic or animistic tribal god suitable to lead a raiding party in a race war:

102 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black

community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had

better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black

community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the

destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power,

which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at

their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.” And

again: “In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted

of society, and against oppressors ... Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation

and against the white oppressors, or he is not.” (See William R. Jones, “Divine Racism: The

Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology,” in African-American Religious

Thought: An Anthology, ed. Cornel West and Eddie Glaube [Westminster John Knox Press];

cited by Spengler, “The peculiar theology of black liberation,” Asia Times).

Christianity allows and indeed requires class distinctions, with a preferential bias in favor of the

poor and the destitute, as expressed in the imperative to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the

homeless, visit the sick and prisoners, and bury the dead. It is easier for a camel to pass through the

eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But the apostles are commanded

to preach the gospel to all nations, without exception, and St. Paul is adamant that there can be no

difference between Jew and Greek, Jew and Gentile, Syrian, or Samaritan. What Cone is preaching

here is a new synthetic religion which can only be described as satanic, since it is most explicitly

based on hatred. If Obama claims that he reached Christianity thanks to Reverend Wright, we can

only conclude that he never became a Christian, since as a disciple of Cone, Wright himself could

never be classified as a Christian. What Cone has elaborated is a religion of hatred which is the

opposite of Christianity.

DISTURBING PRECEDENTS FOR ETHNIC RELIGION

Cone’s work calls to mind the outlook of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the racist and antisemitic

friend of the German Emperor William II and later a supporter of Hitler. Chamberlain was

an Englishman who chose to become a German; he was a relative of Sir Neville Chamberlain, who

appeased Hitler at Munich in an attempt to turn him east against Russia. Chamberlain was one of

only four persons whom the National Socialists acknowledged as their ideological forebears: the

three others were the composer Richard Wagner, the anti-semite Lagarde, and the philodoxer

Nietzsche; Chamberlain was the only one who did not come from the German-speaking area of

central Europe. Chamberlain’s argument was that the Germanic master race was the bearer and

originator of all civilization and culture and admirable in all things save one: it did not have its own

ethnic religion, and was saddled with an alien Christianity, a religion which Chamberlain rejected

for racist reasons since so many of the main figures were Jews, and also because of doctrines like

charity, which were incompatible with the way of the Germanic warrior. Chamberlain called for the

creation of a specifically and exclusively Germanic ethnic religion, he called this “eine arteignene

Religion” or “eine artmäßige Religion.”

Cone’s work can be most clearly understood if we view him as a new Houston Stewart

Chamberlain, attempting to create a new and synthetic ethnic religion in the service of the

oligarchical foundation community, with the same kind of reactionary and anti-human intent which

animated Chamberlain. Cone’s talk of killing God also puts him in a class with another proto-Nazi,

Nietzsche. In modern America, the intent of all this is a transparent strategy of divide and conquer,

splitting the population into more or less fictitious subject nationalities, each with its own ethnic

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 103

idol, thus guaranteeing that no united front against the preponderance of the financiers can ever

emerge.

What is the extent of Cone’s influence? Apologists for Obama have argued that two-thirds of

black preachers in America sound like Wright, but empirical studies suggest that the real figure is

far less, perhaps one-third at the very most. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya carried out a

ten-year statistical study of the black church in America, published as The Black Church in the

African-American Experience (1990). One of the questions asked in this study dealt with black

liberation theology: “In our urban questionnaire we asked the pastors of 1,531 urban churches,

‘Have you been influenced by any of the authors and thinkers of black liberation theology?’“ It

turned out that only 34.9 percent of urban black clergy said they had been influenced by black

liberation theologians, as opposed to 65.1 percent who said they had not. Lincoln and Mamiya

found a class divide in this regard, with more affluent and educated congregations more likely to be

influenced by black liberation theology. Pastors with a high school and lower educational

background said that they were minimally influenced by liberation theology, while those with a

college education had the most positive views of the movement. The majority of the less educated

pastors had neither heard of the movement nor of the names of theologians associated with it.

Among clergy familiar with the movement, James Cone had the highest name recognition. (Ron

Rhodes, “Black Theology, Black Power, and the Black Experience”) The implication is clear: black

liberation theology is in fact an ideology of the black overclass.

FORD OPERATIVES AT TRINITY UNITED

Dwight N. Hopkins, the other named mentioned by Wright, is a professor of theology at the

University of Chicago and an ordained American Baptist minister. He teaches at the Rockefellerfunded,

right-wing elitist University of Chicago, and also teaches at Obama’s Trinity United Church

of Christ, where his students expect to be treated as his university students. During the Reverend

Wright crisis of the Obama campaign, Hopkins acted more and more as a spokesman for Wright’s

church in numerous cable television interviews. Hopkins is the “Communications Coordinator for

the International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities, a Ford Foundation sponsored

global project,” as we learn from the Trinity United web site. Hopkins is thus an operative of the

notorious Ford Foundation, a flagship institution of the US financier oligarchy. He is also an official

of Obama’s church, and the dominant figure of Wright’s Center for African Biblical Studies.

Wright says of Hopkins: “His work covers what has transpired over the past 30 years in the area of

black theology. The developments he covers are a ‘must’ for Generation X-ers” – including,

therefore, Obama. Hopkins’ standpoint is that of a “theological interpretation of black power.” It is

the attempt to project the privileges and psychological defenses of the black overclass into the

heaven of theology, and must thus be classed as a blasphemous abuse of religion for venal and

demagogic goals.

In his notorious performance at the National Press Club in April 2008, Wright attempted to

camouflage the fact of a new synthetic religion entirely separate from Christianity behind a smoke

screen of relativism. Wright’s relativism means that all alternatives are axiomatically equal, no

matter what their quality or what their consequences for human survival might be. Wright’s

universe recalls Hegel’s description of Schelling in the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind — a

night in which everything looks the same: “The prophetic theology of the black church in our day is

preached to set African-Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that

different means deficient. Being different does not mean one is deficient. It simply means one is

different, like snowflakes, like the diversity that God loves. Black music is different from European

104 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

and European music. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black worship is different from European

and European-American worship. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black preaching is different

from European and European-American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not

bombastic. It is not controversial. It’s different.”

Using this boundless relativism, Wright can level good and evil, charity and hatred. He can and

did mock the “garlic-nosed” Italians, the Irish, and the music of Georg Friedrich Handel. Wright

was a great hater of Europe. As well as being the purveyor of a wholly fantastic and utopian vision

of Africa and its history, Wright was an obscurantist of the first magnitude. Obama alleged that he

had come to Christianity through Wright, but it was clear that Wright was light years distant from

Christianity. Wright was a worshipper of Ford Foundation grants, a racist provocateur and merchant

of hatred working to preserve Wall Street’s domination over American society. The only religion

that Obama could have learned at Wright’s knee was hate-based Satanism, concocted in the service

of Mammon, Pluto, and all the other gods of wealth. To make matters worse, there is no proof that

Obama was ever baptized. Chicago-based journalist, broadcaster and critic Andy Martin, when

asked about Obama’s baptism, wrote, “I have never been able to obtain any evidence that he was

baptized, although I asked for those records.”

A body of doctrine which claims to be a religion, as distinct from a political ideology, must deal

with an eternal truth growing out of the ontological situation of God and humanity in the world.

Religion is not the distillation of anybody’s specific predicament or historical experience. Cone

wants to celebrate the triumph of postmodern “cultures” over any notions of what is universal and

eternal. God is either an eternal spirit with no color at all, or is nothing. There cannot be a white god

nor a black god nor a Russian god nor a Chinese god – there can be only one universal God, unless

we wish to regress to polytheism or totemism. As soon as we have a separate god for every skin

color, religion is out the window, replaced by a kind of deus ex machina useful mainly for

propaganda purposes. If we have a black god who wants to rise up against whites, we should not be

surprised if another god appears who recommends white supremacy, soon followed by another god

who supports Serbia against Albania, still another one who is mainly concerned with global

warming, and yet another one who wants more tax cuts for the rich. God is not a figment of a

political perspective nor of a strategy for health and wealth. But Cone’s god appears to be precisely

something of this order – the embodiment of an ideology of accumulation of wealth under

conditions of affirmative action, in late US-UK imperialism.

FORD FOUNDATION THEOLOGY

Where does this pseudo-theology come from? Since the 1960s, the Ford Foundation has been a

leading agency for funding black cultural nationalism and separatism (sometimes referred to as

“pork chop cultural nationalism”) as a strategy for divide-and-conquer counterinsurgency in the

black ghetto and among economically disadvantaged inner-city populations more generally. In

these efforts, the watchwords of the Ford Foundation have been community control, local control,

and self-management. The goal is always to fragment, divide, and Balkanize the oppressed subject

populations according to every conceivable fault line of ethnicity, color, religion, national origin,

sexual preference, age, gender, and any other splinter factor that the social engineers can devise. In

this way, a general political challenge to the rule of the financiers will never emerge.

Martin Luther King, by contrast, was opposed to racial quotas during his entire career, and this

view was shared by both Robert Kennedy and by the black civil rights advocate Bayard Rustin.

Rustin wrote that “any preferential approach postulated on racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual lines

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 105

will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to backlash. However, special treatment can be

provided to those who have been exploited or denied opportunities if solutions are predicated on

class lines, precisely because all religious, ethnic, and religious groups have a depressed class who

would benefit.” The class-based strategy is one that would tend to unite all of the present

squabbling and contending oppressed groupings of American society in a united front against their

common oppressor, as in the Wall Street financier class and their minions. The Ford Foundation,

the left CIA, and the domestic counterinsurgency apparatus have always been mobilized to head off

precisely this possibility. Racial quotas were introduced by President Richard Nixon and his

secretary of labor George Schultz, who used a quota system called the Philadelphia plan to pit black

unemployed against white construction workers, to the detriment of both and to the greater glory of

the bosses. Support for racial quotas came from such black activists as Ford Foundation operative

Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality, CIA provocateur Stokely Carmichael of the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the famous FBI provocateur H. Rap Brown, and

James Forman. All of these figures performed the precious service of giving black nationalist

radical and left cover to what was inherently a divide-and-conquer strategy invented by the ruling

class for the purpose of playing one group in the population off against another. Racial preferences

and quotas boiled down to a system of somewhat enhanced tokenism, having as an additional

purpose the recruitment of the most active and intelligent elements of the oppressed groups as

privileged tools of the ruling class, whose characteristic outlook and methods they assimilate and

internalize to a large degree as their own.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IMPOSED BY NIXON AND SHULTZ

Most left liberals naively assume that affirmative action is the only conceivable approach to the

race problem, despite the fact that it has failed over 40 years to improve the poverty of the black

inner city. Most people do not know that affirmative action was born as a counterinsurgency

strategy devised by none other than Richard Milhous Nixon and his retainers, most notably the

current boss of the neocon establishment, George Shultz. Here are some considerations which I

advanced a decade ago in my Surviving the Cataclysm.

Michael Lind correctly notes that post-1968 multiculturalism represents a demagogic and

successful form of tokenism applied as a counterinsurgency strategy; for Lind, “identity politics

is merely America’s version of the oldest oligarchic trick in the book: divide and rule.” (Lind,

The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, 141)

The atrophy of class analysis in modern America is partly the fault of the 1960s New Left, which

was much more interested in race and gender than in class. The New Left was interested in

community control for the black community, which happened to be the main domestic

counterinsurgency tactic of the Sargent Shriver Office of Economic Opportunity and the Ford

Foundation. This is the classic divide-and-conquer approach to ethnic groups which has been

assumed by imperial ruling classes from time immemorial, from the Ottoman milliyet-bachi (or

ethnark) system to the British Raj in India to the Soviet autonomous republics set up by Stalin.

MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE CITIES, OR RACIAL QUOTAS?

The basic problems of black ghetto victims by 1970 (or 1997) were in reality largely economic —

jobs, wages, health care, education, mass transit, housing, and related issues. The same was true of

the black rural poor. To even begin to address these problems would have required a domestic

Marshall Plan, a second New Deal on a vast scale. The post-1957 stagnation of productive

106 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

employment and industrial investment would have had to be reversed. Such an approach would

necessarily have treated the disadvantaged layers of all ethnic groups, and would have required

very substantial investments and other expenditures. The US financial elite, fixated on its new

runaway shop opportunities in the globaloney economy, was not interested in such a domestic

Marshall Plan. The finance oligarchs also had reason to fear a multiracial coalition from below,

which had been attempted during the Detroit mass strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, as documented

in the section “Black and White, Unite” of Maurice Zeitlin’s Talking Union. These mass strikes

had forced the finance oligarchs to accept the existence of unions. A program of domestic

counterinsurgency based on racial tokenism and “shucks” for the oppressed ethnic groups now

seemed far more attractive to them. The basic mentality involved is subtly hinted at by Albert

Blumrosen, who as a 1970 functionary of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission helped

to lay the groundwork for the current system. Blumrosen wrote in his book on Black Employment

and the Law: “If discrimination is narrowly defined, for example, by requiring an evil intent to

injure minorities, then it will be difficult to prove that it exists. If it does not exist, then the plight of

racial and ethnic minorities must be attributable to some more generalized failures in society, in the

fields of basic education, housing, family relations, and the like. The search for efforts to improve

the condition of minorities must then focus in these general and difficult areas, and the answers can

come only gradually as basic institutions, attitudes, customs and practices are changed.”

This same outlook had been expressed a little earlier by George Shultz. Over the years Shultz has

been Secretary of Labor, of the Treasury, and of State, and is said to have a Princeton tiger tattooed

on his posterior. During Nixon’s first term, Shultz revived the so-called Philadelphia Plan, a system

of racial quotas for hiring in the then largely white construction trades which had been developed

by Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz of the Johnson administration. John Ehrlichman of Nixon’s

palace guard later commented in his memoirs that Tricky Dick “thought that Secretary of Labor

George Shultz had shown great style constructing a political dilemma for the labor union leaders

and civil rights groups....Before long, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP were locked in combat over

the passionate issues of the day.” (Ehrlichman, 228-229) Later, the McGovern group in the

Democratic Party would inscribe racial and gender quotas on their own banner so prominently that

Nixon in 1972 could get away with attacking McGovern as “the quota candidate.” The Democratic

Party and the unions should at this point have adopted a plank calling for expanded production and

productive jobs for all Americans, rather than accept the logic of quotas, which amount to

quarreling over the distribution of the shrinking pie. The decline of the Democratic Party and of the

labor movement over the reactionary quarter century after 1970 is the result of the failure to

advocate economic expansion, and not quotas, during Nixon’s first term. Quotas and associated

practices like school busing have become lightning rods for white backlash and resentment, which

in turn made possible the successful Republican southern strategy in the Electoral College and the

long night of Reagan, Bush, and Gingrich. 22

NIXON- SHULTZ PHILADELPHIA PLAN PLAYS BLACKS AGAINST UNIONS

According to one account, in a meeting with Republican Congressional leaders “Nixon emphasized

the importance of exploiting the Philadelphia Plan to split the Democratic constituency and drive a

wedge between the civil rights groups and organized labor.” [Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil

Rights Era (New York: Oxford, 1990)] Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin told a 1969 AFL-CIO

gathering that Nixon’s successful playing off of black groups against the unions was “a source of

tremendous satisfaction to powerful enemies of the labor movement.” To underline the consensus

in the ruling elite, the blue-ribbon commission chaired by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 107

which studied the causes of the ghetto riots of the mid-1960s concluded that “white racism” was

the cause of black discontent and of the race problem in America — white racism alone, and not

slums, low wages, wretched schools, nonexistent health care, and unemployment. The Kerner

Commission report was the voice of the white and inept US ruling elite scapegoating white

workers and the white middle class for its own sorry record.

Originally, racial quotas and affirmative action were supposed to represent redress for past

discrimination. After a decade or two, that was transformed into the need to enhance diversity among a

series of artificial, bureaucratically defined “cultures,” including African-Americans, Asians and

Pacific islanders, Hispanics, Native Americans, and whites as the five official variants. Race quotas,

preferences, set-asides, offsets and the rest of the dismal apparatus of multiculturalism amount to a

sophisticated and insidious counterinsurgency strategy which fosters the co-opting of talented black,

Hispanic and other organic leaders into an artificial stratum of clients of the ruling elite.

Multiculturalism, it must be stressed again, has not led to economic development or to broad-front

improvement in the condition of any ethnic group. Multiculturalism is tokenism. Black and Hispanic

ghetto victims have not been helped by this approach. Multiculturalism has delivered material

advantages for the few, and has betrayed the hopes of the many. In the world of education, the

irrationalist attempt to justify quotas and discrimination has debased the quality of intellectual and

cultural life, which cannot escape the fact that the hopes of the majority of all ethnic origins have been

betrayed. Barack and Michelle Obama are examples of the greedy opportunists who have been the

winners under affirmative action.

SALVING THE BAD CONSCIENCE OF THE BLACK OVERCLASS

Forty years later, these policies have resulted in the creation of a black overclass made up to

some degree of the beneficiaries of affirmative action, racial quotas, set-asides, preferential

treatment in government contracts at all levels for minority-owned businesses, and the like. This

black overclass likes to portray itself as the authentic representatives of the black community as a

whole, but in reality it looks down on the black underclass caught in the cycle of ghetto inner-city

poverty as if it were a completely separate group. More accurately, the affirmative-action portion of

the black overclass regards the oppressed black underclass as a useful political commodity which

can be exploited for the purposes of obtaining more concessions from the white establishment —

concessions which should flow into the pockets of the black overclass, and never reach the

sidewalks of the inner-city ghetto. The black overclass thus combines a militant black nationalist or

black empowerment ideology with extreme forms of economic individualism, rent-seeking, and

personal aggrandizement of all kinds. It is a cynical exercise in duplicity, and is at least one of the

contributing factors for a situation in which the inner-city black ghetto is getting poorer, while the

income gap between the black overclass and the black underclass is also rapidly expanding.

What then is the psychological consequence of such a situation for the individual member of the

black overclass? The black overclass is rapidly accumulating mansions, BMWs, mink coats,

diamond jewelry, and the other apparatus of conspicuous consumption. The black ghetto victim, by

contrast, is sinking deeper and deeper into abject poverty. In the face of the situation, however, the

black overclass continues to demand additional privileges for itself, while continuing to neglect the

urgent material needs of the vast majority of the black community. The kind of black liberation

theology purveyed by Dwight Hopkins, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and the Trinity United

Church of Christ provides a kind of answer to the resulting psychological tensions. The more

BMWs you have in your garage and the more mink coats you have in your closet, the more

vehemently you must complain about the Atlantic slave trade, apartheid and the Sharpeville

108 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

massacre, the Tuskegee experiment, and similar atrocities, often quite real but all far from your own

privileged existence. The more Ivy League degrees you have on your wall, the louder you must

chant, “God damn America!” The more government contracts you have obtained, the more you

must profess the blowback theory of 9/11, citing the 3,000 deaths of innocent people as God’s

punishment for the racist crimes of US imperialism. All these points represent nothing but the

characteristic outlook of the foundations. The religion preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright

and the theologian Dwight Hopkins at the Trinity United Church of Christ is demonstrably not

Christianity, but rather a gnostic-synthetic ersatz belief structure which has been whipped up and

concocted for the special emotional needs of a narrow segment of the black overclass under

conditions of affirmative action in the late Anglo-American imperialist development. To be more

concise, Reverend Wright’s church is a foundation-funded cult. It teaches an ethnocentric, synthetic

religion.

Some in the black community offered criticisms of Wright; here is one from Jonetta Rose

Barras, a well-known radio commentator in the Washington DC area, who was confused about

Obama, but not about that fact that Wright was at least obsolete:

I’ve known preachers like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor to Sen. Barack Obama.

Like many of them, he no doubt sees his congregation as full of victims, and thinks that his words

will inspire them to rise out of their victimhood. I understand that. Once upon a time, I saw myself

as a victim, too, destined to march in place. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as a clenched-fist-pumping black

nationalist with my head wrapped in an elaborate gele, I reflected that self-concept in my speech.

My words were as fiery as the Rev. Wright’s. And more than a few times, I, too, damned America,

loudly, for its treatment of blacks. But I turned away from such rhetoric. Is it time that Wright and

other ministers do, too? But just as spirituals eventually lost their relevance and potency as an

organizing tool against discrimination — even as they retained their historical importance in the

African-American cultural narrative — so, I believe, has Wright-speak lost its place. It’s harmful

and ultimately can’t provide healing. And it’s outdated in the 21st century. I came to this realization

gradually. As I expanded my associations and experiences — organizing in places such as San

Francisco, Providence, R.I., Patterson, N.J. and Northeast Washington, meeting caring Hispanics,

Asians and whites — I came to know that we are all more alike than different. I saw that our dreams

sat inside each other. All of us wanted a better America, not so much for ourselves as for our

children, and their children. Achieving this meant that we had to get beyond our past segregated

lives and work together, inspiring the best in ourselves — not the bitterness and the biases. […]And

today, there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one

another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I

once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer’s leash. This is the

coalition pushing for a new America. (Jonetta Rose Barras, “He’s Preaching to a Choir I’ve Left,”

Washington Post, March 23, 2008)

DOROTHY TILLMAN, OBAMA ALLY: “AMERICA OWES US” GRAFT

Another of Obama’s Chicago political cronies is Dorothy Tillman, an alderwoman of the city.

Tillman’s specialty is to try to extort payments from banks and corporations which reportedly go to

herself and her clients, based on the accusation that the bank or company in question participated in

slavery. Tillman has been quoted as saying her goal is to “repair the damage of 400 years” of

slavery. “America owes us,” she says. (Chicago Sun-Times, March 26, 2007) Again, this is not the

demand for broad-based economic development programs for the black underclass. It is often an

attempt to extort cash payments to specific individuals to make a public relations problem go away,

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 109

leaving the black ghetto in its current predicament. Alderman Tillman’s record must be read in

connection with her track record for corruption: ‘Obama had endorsed …Dorothy Tillman, calling

her “a very early supporter of my campaign.” Tillman was then under fire for her stewardship of the

scandal-plagued Harold Washington Cultural Center, where contracts benefited members of her

family. Obama rejected the notion that such endorsements conflict with his promotion of ethics

reform in government.’ (Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2007)

Reverend Wright argued in his sermon on Christmas Day 2007 that resistance against the Obama

presidential candidacy was predicated on the fact that Obama did not “fit the mold.” “He ain’t

white!” exclaimed the Reverend. A half truth at best, since Obama is half white. “He ain’t rich!”

Manifestly false, since the Obamas reported a 2005 income of about $1.6 million, with Michelle

pulling down $325,000 as gatekeeper to push black ghetto victims out of the University of Chicago

Hospital, plus $101,083 in 2006 for serving on the board of the wage-gouging, union-busting Tree

House (a Walmart supplier). Obama got almost $70,000 per year as a mere lecturer at the

University of Chicago Law School, a very good deal for a mere adjunct. They live in a mansion

with a wine cellar containing a thousand bottles of the finest vintage wine – as many bottles of wine

as Imelda Marcos had pairs of shoes. By mid-2008, it was estimated that the Obamas were worth

about $7 million overall. They were rich by anybody’s measure. “He ain’t privileged!” Another lie,

as Michelle’s Princeton and Harvard degrees, made possible by affirmative action, sufficiently

document.

In a cynical attempt at deceiving voters, Obama has tried to pretend that sermons with incendiary

contents were the exception rather than the rule at Trinity United. This is obviously disingenuous.

Obama was not just listening to Reverend Wright, he was also subsidizing the oratory of hatred with

his generous financial contributions to the church. Obama was helping to pay for Reverend

Wright’s microphone! Hatred was obviously Reverend Wright’s weekly stock in trade. Did Obama

ever walk out of a sermon? Did he ever tell Reverend Wright to tone it down — before he began

running for president at the end of 2006? Did he ever threaten to quit the congregation? Evidently,

he did not.

By mid-March 2008, the Reverend Wright affair had placed Obama in a bind. Would he remain

a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ under Reverend Wright’s hand-picked successor,

reportedly a worthy disciple in his apostolate of hatred? If he did, you could be sure that Reverend

Wright’s taped outbursts would continue to knock him off message. If he tried to cut his losses by

exiting from the congregation, he could be sure that an entire phalanx of Reverend Wright’s coreligionists

of the black theology school would condemn him as a sellout who was capitulating

under the pressure of the white man. All Obama could do was to attempt to paper over the entire

question with his mellifluous and ambiguous rhetoric of reconciliation, which was sounding

increasingly hollow in this new context. Even when he later pretended to repudiate Wright, it was

done with qualifiers – he said that his relationship with Wright had changed, not that it was over. He

also remained an active member of Trinity United, which now passed under the leadership of Ford

Foundation grantee Otis Moss III. Obama left Trinity United only when the primaries were over and

he was beginning his hard right turn.

THE CASE OF FATHER PFLEGER, RENEGADE THEOLIB PRIEST

The new Otis Moss regime brought new problems for Obama. On Easter Sunday, Moss preached

that Wright had been subjected to a crucifixion, thus returning to the rhetorical tropes of

victimization and persecution so favored by affirmative-action race-mongers when they get into

110 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

trouble. Moss also had a policy of inviting incendiary racist provocateurs to join him during divine

services at Trinity United. One of these firebrands was a certain Father Michael Pfleger, a fiery

liberal social activist of the liberation theology school and a white reverend at an African-American

church, St. Sabina’s Catholic Church on the South Side of Chicago. Pfleger, an expert in racial

pandering, is a longtime friend and associate of Obama, having known him since the Perfect Master

was a community activist poverty pimp. In September, the Obama campaign had brought Pfleger to

Iowa to host one of several interfaith forums for the campaign. So here we have yet another close

personal friend of Obama over more than two decades who turns out to be a race-baiting

provocateur.

Pfleger’s appearance at the post-Wright Trinity United was introduced by Rev. Otis Moss

personally with much praise for the visiting priest. Pfleger then launched into a tirade about the

importance of taking on “white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head.” This goes

back directly to the classic Weatherman line of “white skin privilege” still embraced by Dohrn and

Ayers. Pfleger then turned his attention to those who have the temerity to oppose the ascendancy of

the Perfect Master: “Rev. Moss, when Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really

don’t believe it was put on,” Pfleger raved from the pulpit. “I really believe that she just always

thought, ‘This is mine! I’m Bill’s wife, I’m white, and this is mine! I just gotta get up and step into

the plate.’ And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama,’ and she said, ‘Oh, damn!

Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’

Pfleger then mocks Hillary weeping, much to delight of the crowd, many of whom stand up and

applaud. “She wasn’t the only one crying, there was a whole lot of white people crying!” Pfleger

says to laughter. The tape, which shows only this one controversial part of Pfleger’s “sermon,” then

cuts to Moss thanking Pfleger: “We thank God for the message, we thank God for the messenger,

we thank God for Father Michael Pfleger,” Moss says.’ (Aaron Klein, World Net Daily, June 1,

2008)

PFLEGER: “AMERICA IS THE GREATEST SIN AGAINST GOD”

“Racism is still America’s greatest addiction,” Pfleger says. “I also believe that America is the

greatest sin against God.” There seems to be a mixed reaction to that from the pews. But Pfleger

explains: “If the greatest command is to love, than the sin against love must be the greatest sin

against God who IS love and who calls us to love one another. So that this greatest sin against God,

racism, it’s as natural as the air we breathe.” (Taylor Marsh, June 1, 2008) The New York Times

recently reported that Father Pfleger had “long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce

crime and improve the community” — so being a racist provocateur is only a sideline. “But he has

drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and

inviting him to speak at his church.” (Jake Tapper, “Priest and Obama Ally Mocks Clinton’s Tears

from Obama’s Church’s Pulpit,” ABC New, May 29, 2008)

There could now be absolutely no doubt that Obama’s church represents an incendiary beacon

and clearing house of racist provocation, is the atmosphere of race-baiting and scurrilous insults

which Obama chose and embraced, not just for himself but for his entire family. Obama long

remained a member of this cesspool of hatred, thus guaranteeing that the entire issue will live on all

the way to the November election. ‘Sen. Barack Obama’s chief political strategist sits on the finance

committee of the Chicago church led by controversial pastor Michael Pfleger, who claimed in a

sermon last weekend Sen. Hillary Clinton cried in public because she thought being white entitled

her to the Democratic presidential nomination.’ (Aaron Klein, World Net Daily, June 1, 2008)

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 111

WRIGHT’S $1.6 MILLION MANSION IN A RICH WHITE GATED COMMUNITY

Wright himself was apparently taken underground by the Obama campaign, who did not want

this racist provocateur doing any media interviews. Speculation was rife on right-wing talk radio

that the racist reverend had been sequestered by Axelrod, and that he now slept with the fishes. In

reality, he was ensconced at a luxury resort hotel in the Caribbean. Then it became known that

Wright was about to move into a newly constructed $1.6 million mansion in the Chicago suburbs in

a gated community where the black population was less than 2%. He was reported to enjoy a $10

million line of credit provided by Trinity United. His Porsche was in the garage. Wright was not an

ascetic.

Wright is also a highly political reverend, who gets around to the Gamaliel Foundation’s

schedule of conferences. On June 21-22, 2007, for example, Gamaliel held its “African-American

Leadership Conference” in Pittsburgh under the theme of “Uniting for Power.” The keynote speaker

was none other than Jeremiah Wright. At this conference, Reverend John C. Welch of Pittsburgh

made a thinly veiled call to mobilize politically for Obama: “I hope that when you leave you will

also have a plan for your cities so that collectively we can make sure that this country will undergo

an unprecedented cosmetic surgery in the 2008 presidential election,” said Welch. Welch was right:

an Obama presidency, as is argued in this book, would constitute nothing more than a cosmetic

makeover or facelift for a moribund empire. The goal needs to be to turn away from the path of

empire and return to the ways of the constitutional republic. But Obama is too much of a puppet to

be able to contemplate that route.

When Otis Moss III, who replaced Wright at Trinity United, took advantage of the national

attention focused on Trinity United to devote his Easter Sunday sermon to defending Wright from

what he termed a “crucifixion.” The point was that the affirmative action beneficiary needed above

all things to cultivate the metaphysical pose of the eternal victim – in order to get more grants. One

was reminded of a right-wing reactionary who had benefited from affirmative action (even if he

proposed to remove it for others). This was Clarence Thomas, who told his 1992 Senate

confirmation hearings that he had been the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” Otis Moss III had gone

to college at Morehouse College thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM: THE CYNICAL USES OF IDENTITY POLITICS

The activities of the Ford Foundation and the other foundations for which it serves as a flagship

do not represent the first time that racial issues have been cynically used for the pursuit of political

ends. The leader of the National Socialist movement will always be associated with the most

virulent exploitation of crackpot race doctrines which furnished the staples of his demagogy. But it

is also interesting to note that even this greatest racist of the 20th century was fully aware that the

concept of race was a fraud and a sham. Here is Hitler in an unguarded moment speaking to

Hermann Rauschning, the leader of the Nazi movement in Gdansk or Danzig, sometime in the

autumn 1934:

The conception of the nation has become meaningless. The conditions of the time compelled

me to begin on the basis of that conception. But I realized from the first that it could have only

transient validity. The ‘nation’ is a political expedient of democracy and liberalism. We have

to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race, which has not yet

been politically used up. The new order cannot be conceived in terms of national boundaries of

the peoples with an historic past, but in terms of race which transcends those boundaries. All

112 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

the adjustments and corrections of frontiers, and in regions of colonization, are a plowing of the

sands… I know perfectly well, just as well as all these tremendously clever intellectuals, that in

the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer and cattle breeder,

cannot get your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as a

politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic

bases to be abolished and an entirely new anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual

basis. Understand what I mean… I have to liberate the world from dependence on its historic

past. Nations are the outward and visible forms of our history. So I have to fuse these nations

into a higher order if I want to get rid of the chaos of an historic past which has become an

absurdity. And for this purpose the conception of race serves me well. It disposes of the old

order and makes possible new associations. France carried her great revolution beyond her

borders with the conception of the nation. With the conception of race, National Socialism will

carry its revolution abroad and remake the world. (Hermann Rauschning, Voice of Destruction

[New York: Putnam, 1940], 231-232)

It is worth underlining that a racist outlook and the outlook of the modern state are antithetical.

The US financier elites may have found that playing the race card has functioned as an effective

form of counterinsurgency over the last four decades, but they also need to recognize that the

politically correct and multicultural cult of racial diversity is a highly corrosive factor weakening

the American state and polity.

OBAMA’S RACE SPEECH: A HYPOCRITE WITH A TELEPROMPTER

Obama’s speech on race, delivered with much fanfare in Philadelphia on March 18 in response

to the initial explosion of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, was a microcosm of the moral and

intellectual bankruptcy of his presidential campaign. Prior to any content, the setting and method

deserve attention. Obama as a candidate is as controlled and scripted as, say, Elizabeth Dole most of

the time. He avoids answering questions and does not like unstructured repartee or give and take.

His typical formats often offer no opportunity for questions and answers, only soaring rhetoric and

platitudes. He is no debater; he is a pontificator. His favorite approach is the Nuremberg rally, with

the speech read off the glass panes of a teleprompter to his left and right, an apparatus not noticed

by so many of his fawning disciples and dupes. This was the method used in his Iowa victory

speech, and this was the method in Philadelphia. Obama appeared with his head thrown back,

literally looking down his nose at the audience: he was literally talking down to them. The tone was

self-righteous, lecturing, even hectoring. His approach was condescending, patronizing, belittling

his audience. Voters have complained that Obama simply lacks any credible credentials for talking

down to them in this way.

Obama had been caught consorting with the racist provocateur, Jeremiah Wright. But he did not

apologize. He turned the actual moral situation on its head by portraying Wright as a reflection of

American racism, and blaming the American people and their inveterate racism. This method of

blaming the public for one’s own blunders and incompetence has been a staple of the Trilateral

political faction going back to Carter’s infamous malaise speech of July 1979. Obama has never

sincerely apologized for anything. Those who were shocked in 2004 when Bush was unable to think

of any error or mistake that he had made should be more concerned about Obama, who also lacks

the moral courage to admit a mistake or a failing. The sole exceptions are his attempt to get off the

hook for shady and unethical transactions that may have crossed the line into actual felonies: thus,

his stock line for responding to questions about his smelly house-flipping deal with underworld

kingpin Tony Rezko is to say that this was a “boneheaded” mistake. In the case of Wright, Obama

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 113

had been imbibing racist hatred in the pews for 20 years, and exposing his wife and children to the

foul-mouthed tirades of the raving reverend. But he never apologized, never uttered a self-critical

word. Obama is like Bush: structurally incapable of self-criticism. This may in turn be rooted in the

mental defect we find in both of them: megalomania.

A plausible defense for Obama would have gone like this: “I ask the American people to forgive

me for my terrible political opportunism. I came to Chicago and needed to build a political base.

Wright was a popular preacher, and he had a following among the upwardly mobile black opinion

leaders I wanted to meet and to cultivate. He also had a program of church social work which gave

him a veneer of credibility among poorer blacks. I joined the church and brought my wife and

children there. We sat through the “God damn America” two-minute hate tirades and gave Wright

as much as we could afford, over twenty-five grand last year, to get his support and endorsement.

He was mobilizing his national network of black liberation theology ministers for me, and nobody

else could do that for me. Wright drives a Porsche and is about to move into a $1.6 million house,

so he always wanted money. But now Wright has become a colossal political liability, so I am

dumping him. I condemn him and repudiate him, I am quitting his church, and I will never speak to

him again as long as I live. I will never give him another penny as long as I live, and neither will

anyone in my family. I will not allow him anywhere near the White House, and I will not steer

government patronage money his way. This is a clean break, irrevocable and unalterable. No more

Jeremiah Wright. I sincerely apologize to the American people and ask for their forgiveness. I am

guilty of political opportunism, and I will work to win redemption. God bless America.”

This would have been the best possible damage control in regard to Wright, but Obama was

structurally incapable of giving a speech like this, even if he had not meant it and fully intended to

keep Wright in a secret priest hole in the White House to serve as his confessor and spiritual

director for all four years and beyond. This would have involved the three steps of penitence – the

contrition of the heart, the confession of the mouth, and the restitution and satisfaction of works.

Obama could never be a penitent. Instead, Obama reached back to the Carter malaise speech of July

1979.23

From this speech Obama abstracted the characteristic method of a Trilateral-Ford puppet who is

caught in malfeasance: blame the American people, especially the working class. Backed by a row

of American flags, with his head thrown back (partly in arrogance and partly to facilitate reading off

the glass plates of the teleprompter) Obama attempted to turn reality on its head, and especially to

turn the tables on the critics of Wright. He tried to contort himself from a sleazy Chicago wardheeling

pol who had been caught in the company of a widely hated extremist, to a moralistic social

critic sagaciously diagnosing the pathologies of the American body politic. The words flickered

across the glass plates of the teleprompter and out of Obama’s yap, rife with Harvardian

modulations. Obama morphed from the defendant that he was into the divine state prosecutor of the

judgment day, reading the American people the list of their sins, original, mortal, and venal: racism,

racism, racism.

It turned out that Reverend Wright was not a satanic huckster projecting the Ford Foundation’s

divide-and-conquer strategy of financier oligarch domination into the realm of pseudo-Christian

theology, oh no. Reverend Wright was a microcosm who reflected the conflicts of American

society, and the chief of these was once again racism. Wright’s specific comments could always be

rejected, but Wright could not be rejected, because he had become part and parcel of Obama’s hardwon

race identity, his völkische Identität. And Wright was not the only one to be tainted by racism:

there was also Obama’s grandmother Toot, who had once been frightened by a potential mugger

114 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

who had happened to be black. Obama droned on mercilessly, reading the words off his trusty glass

plates.

At the end, it turned out that the country needed a new dialogue about race. Not about

foreclosures that were hitting the black community harder than any other sector of the population.

Not about mass layoffs, that were hitting blacks hardest, since they were the last hired and the first

fired in such industries as remained. Not about food price inflation, which was undermining the

living standards of blacks along with everyone else. Not about the black high school dropout rate,

nor the incarceration rate of young black men. Not about banking panic. Not even about soaring

college tuition costs. Just about race, understood as an attitude, as an autonomous force in history,

divorced from its material basis, and divorced from any class analysis that might account for social

tensions in some other way.

OBAMA: NO SPECIFIC PROPOSALS TO HELP THE BLACK UNDERCLASS

It was worth noting that Obama labored very hard to create the appearance of a campaign that

studiously avoided all racial issues, at least as far as the candidate himself was concerned. He had

not proposed anything to help Harlem, Anacostia, Watts-South Central, or the Cabrini Greens. Up

to this point, Obama had made zero proposals specifically designed to help poor inner city blacks,

nor did he make any such proposals now. The Obama campaign ethos was on the surface postracial,

trans-racial, globalized. But beneath the surface, the Obama campaign was a brutal racist

slander machine, capable of generating the absurd myth that Bill Clinton was a racist (a myth which

Sean Wilentz has dismantled and exposed). This was a trick which the political thug David Axelrod

had learned in Chicago, where he had sometimes managed the campaigns of black candidates who

wanted to attract the votes of upper-middle class white voters. The trick was to project an image of

trans-racial and post-racial beatitude on the part of the candidate, but to have surrogates and

campaign spokespersons ruthlessly slime the opponent as a racist any time he dared to raise the

most minute criticism. The classic stance of the Obama campaign was, in a nutshell, that if you dare

criticize our man, you are revealing yourself as a racist. It was a masterpiece of self-righteous

duplicity.

Needless to say, the controlled corporate media and their media whores swooned in ecstasy.

Obama’s speech joined the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address among the

foundational documents of the United States, raved quite a few. It should be printed by the million

and made required reading in every school, raved others. For the left liberals, the speech had the

unique merit of expressing their own class-based race-dominated world view through the mouth of

someone who claimed to be black, but using the jargon of the academic oligarch. The left liberals

crowed that Obama had turned the tables on his critics and opponents, and that the Reverend Wright

issue had now been successfully neutralized; no longer would the South Side Savonarola be a millstone

around the neck of the Perfect Master as he strove towards the seizure of power.

Ordinary working people, American voters, had other ideas. The racist provocations of Wright

were a permanent guarantee that Obama could not be elected president in the normal way, that is,

without the destruction of his competition by Gestapo methods through the FBI and Department of

Justice, in the way that Governor Spitzer had been taken down. The danger was that Obama had so

many ogres and monsters in his left CIA-Ford Foundation base of support and in his past in general

that, if he were at the top of the Democratic ticket, he would drag the entire party down to defeat

with him. Obama had no coat-tails. He had reverse coat-tails; he was a burden for Democratic

candidates down the ticket. The burden was composed of Jeremiah Wright the racist provocateur,

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 115

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn the Weatherman terrorist bombers and butchers, Tony Rezko and

Auchi the gangsters, Michelle Obama the fascist ideologue, and most of all of Obama’s own secret

persona as the Marx-Fanon-Rousseau anthropologist and theoretician of bitterness. This was a

crushing, intolerable, unsustainable burden for any Democratic candidate who wanted to win an

election anywhere other than Berkeley, Big Sur, Jackson Hole, Hyde Park, the Upper West Side, or

Takoma Park.

MICHELLE ROBINSON, QUOTA QUEEN AND ETERNAL VICTIM

Obama’s future wife Michelle now enters our narrative as Michelle Robinson. She was born into

what she always claims was a working-class family of modest means from the South Side of

Chicago in 1964. She graduated from Whitney Young High School in Chicago in 1981 and majored

in sociology at Princeton University, graduating cum laude with the Class of 1985. She received her

Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.

Michelle needs very much for the public to believe that she came from a very humble

background. Why should this be so? It is because Michelle’s stance is metaphysically that of the

eternal victim. Part of this pose must be related to bad conscience, assuming that she has a

conscience. She has been the recipient of privileged treatment. She constantly repeats that her

Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were not good enough to get into Princeton. But she was admitted,

with a scholarship. The only explanation is that she benefited from a preferential racial quota.

Michelle is thus in reality what Lani Guinier was called in the press 15 years ago: she is a Quota

Queen. She then went to Harvard Law School. In the meantime, the black underclass has been left

to its own devices in festering inner-city ghettos. How does this brutal class reality impact the

mentality of someone like Michelle? She needs to reject class, and embrace race with a vengeance.

Above all, she must assume the pose of a victim, of a person with an overwhelming grievance. This

sense of victimhood is an indispensable component in the mentality of fascism. The Italians and

Germans of the 1920s and 1930s felt that they had been treated very badly, humiliated, betrayed,

stabbed in the back, and the fruits of their sacrifices mutilated. Michelle Obama has this basic

prerequisite to be a fascist ideologue; as we will see, she has realized that potential.

Michelle Obama’s illusory account of a grim and disadvantaged youth on the edge of poverty

has not withstood examination. The distinguished University of Pennsylvania political scientist

Adolph Reed has pointed out the essential inaccuracy of what has been alleged about Michelle by

her backers. Reed observes:

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as

having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and

her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those

embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin

narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more

complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this

campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance. (Adolph Reed, “Obama No,” The

Progressive, May 17, 2008)

NEWTON MINOW OF SIDLEY, AUSTIN, FRIEND OF BARKY

Barry encountered Michelle for the first time thanks to the efforts a top establishment fixer, the

venerable Newton Minow, who still wraps himself in the banner of Camelot. Minow has been one

116 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

of Obama’s key backers. Minow is still widely known today for belaboring the obvious: it was

Minow who popularized the phrase “vast wasteland” for American broadcast television in 1961,

when he was the head of the Federal Communications Commission under Kennedy. Minow spoke

as an elitist, perhaps preparing the way for the foundation-funded PBS system, a Rockefeller idea

which expresses the view of the foundation oligarchy. Now in advanced age, Minow can be seen as

a patriarch of the Chicago oligarchy, a leading grandee of the Chicago establishment. Minow may

be one of the case officers working Obama on behalf of the Trilaterals, Bilderbergers, and the

banking establishment in general. Minow’s political judgment is very much open to question: he

was a prominent backer of Adlai E. Stevenson, the liberal Illinois governor and supercilious elitist

who lost the presidency to Eisenhower not once but twice, in 1952 and 1956 as well. Minow’s

fortunes improved when he battened on to the Kennedy bandwagon. We read in a recent account:

At 81, sitting in his law office at Sidley Austin, in the Loop, above a stretch of street christened

Honorary Newton N. Minow Way, Minow is talking about the young man his daughter Martha,

a professor at Harvard Law School, recommended for a summer associate’s job two decades

ago. At Minow’s firm Obama fell in love with a young lawyer, Michelle Robinson, who would

become his wife. “I adored Jack Kennedy,” Minow explains, “and I saw the 21st-century

version of Jack Kennedy in my mind. He is astonishing. I think the fundamental point is the

country wants a different kind of politics.” He adds, “I also believe the race issue and the

gender issue are yesterday, particularly with young people.” One-upping Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes’s famous summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gifts, Minow, a former Supreme Court

clerk, says, “I believe as the country sees Barack, gets to know him, they will see the same thing

I see: really a combination of a first-class mind and a first-class temperament, all in the same

person.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)

For our present purposes, the point is that Barry met Michelle thanks to the mediation of old

Newt Minow in the Sidley Austin law firm one summer.

MICHELLE OBAMA REVEALED

Sharon Churcher, writing for the right-wing London paper The Daily Mail, provides a

penetrating look at Michelle Obama as she really is as a person and as a life story. The emphasis is

on Michelle’s attempt to deceive the public, always for the purpose of painting herself as a victim.

Churcher observes that

Michelle’s pitch is far from sophisticated, playing heavily on her humble beginnings and

traditional values: “I was raised in a working-class family on the south Side of Chicago. That’s

how I identify myself, a working-class girl,” she has told the voters, time after time. It helps that

she cuts a fine figure on the stump, tall and slender with a hair ‘flip’ reminiscent of Jackie

Kennedy. And it does no harm that, while Barack, 46, comes from mixed Kenyan and white

parentage, Michelle, 44, is authentically African-American, giving the Obamas an unmatched

breadth of appeal. Last week it seemed the mask had slipped when, speaking unscripted for

once, a sharper, less emollient Michelle emerged. “For the first time in my adult life I feel really

proud of my country,” she said, an apparent lack of patriotism immediately seized on by her

Republican opponents. When The Mail on Sunday went back to the gritty district of Chicago

where Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised, we found a rather different picture from the

one so single-mindedly promoted by Camp Obama. Instead of the one-room tenement that now

appears in most accounts of her upbringing, we found a well-kept neighbourhood of red-brick

Arts and Craft-style houses which have long been home to respectable black families.’ (Sharon

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 117

Churcher, “Mrs O.: The truth about Michelle Obama’s ‘working class’ credentials, London

Daily Mail, February 23, 2008)

So Michelle was from a very comfortable family, after all. In fact, some of Michelle’s early

advantages came from her father’s status as a ward heeler for the Chicago Democratic machine,

long associated with the Daley family:

“Michelle was from a middle-class family,” confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela

Acree. “She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn’t a mansion, but it was

just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood.”

The Robinsons grew up on the upper floor of a house built in the Twenties. Number 7436 South

Euclid Avenue - a classical reference to the Greek mathematician which found an appropriate

echo in Michelle’s subsequent respect for traditional learning - even has a small garden, shaded

by a large elm tree, and an ornate stone bench.

The South Side of Chicago has long had its share of gang-infested housing ‘projects’ but with

the University of Chicago hospital close by, there were plenty of white professionals in the area

as well as hard-working families in the Robinsons’ own image.

No one could pretend they were rich and it is true that her father, Frasier Robinson, spent some

time as a maintenance worker for Chicago’s Department of Water Management.

However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.

Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle’s father was a volunteer organiser for the city’s

Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded

with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago’s water plant. Even before overtime, he earned

$42,686 – 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.

Michelle’s mother stayed at home and devoted her energies to her and her older brother Craig.

Marian Robinson nurtured great ambitions for both her children, along with the traditional

values which are now serving Michelle so well.

Television was all but banned in favour of homework, debates about the issues of the day and

improving games of chess.

Bright and determined, Michelle was awarded a place at one of Chicago’s first ‘magnet’

schools, which offered special programmes for gifted children. By the time she was 13, she was

taking a college-level biology course.

Even as a child, she was not to be underestimated, says Craig, now 45, who works as the head

basketball coach at high-flying Brown University. There was no doubt who was in charge.

“We had this game where we set up two rooms and played ‘Office’,” he recalled. “She was the

secretary, and I was the boss. But she did everything. It was her game, and I kind of had nothing

to do. My sister is a poor sport. She didn’t like to lose.”

She rarely did. Michelle beat huge competition to win a place studying sociology at Princeton,

one of America’s most venerable and expensive universities.

Once she had arrived amid the fauxgothic precincts, however, she found herself surrounded by

spoilt white students from wealthy families. She, in contrast, was obliged to take out loans to

pay her way and this rankled, as she revealed in a 1985 thesis. (Sharon Churcher, “Mrs O.: The

truth about Michelle Obama’s ‘working class’ credentials, London Daily Mail, February 23,

2008)

118 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

This is the domineering Michelle Obama we have come to know; a supermarket tabloid story

claims that she controls everything that husband Barack does.

MICHELLE OBAMA AND CHERIE BLAIR: VULGAR, GRASPING ARRIVISTES

The British author compares Michelle to Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister

Tony Blair. The suggestion is that Michelle is the same kind of grasping, greedy, striving, socialclimbing,

vulgar arriviste or nouveau riche which the British public had learned to hold in

contempt. Turning to Michelle’s thesis, she writes:

The document …betrays an angry, campaigning brand of politics which in no way fits with the

mild-mannered advocate of common sense now winning hearts and minds from coast to coast…

There are those who, in any case, suggest that her ideological roots have always remained rather

shallow and that, for the most part of her life, politics have been overshadowed by the

straightforward business of ‘getting on’.

Even at university, Michelle was well aware that there was more to life than politics, admitting

in that same thesis that a ‘high-paying position’ could prove more attractive than a life of placards

and late-night meetings.

It was little surprise to those who knew her at the time that it was commerce not campaigning

that claimed her when she graduated with a law degree from Harvard, taking a post with Sidley

Austin, an eminent Chicago law firm. Her specialist area was not human rights or family law, but

the lucrative detail of copyright and trademark cases.

An acquaintance of Obama’s family compares her with another political wife, another lawyer as

it happens, with a keen interest in making money.

“Michelle is very much like Cherie Blair. She is a middle-class girl who has discovered that

money is nice and doesn’t see that as a contradiction with having radical beliefs,” he said.

Chicago’s veteran political consultant and pundit Joe Novak agrees, saying: “She [Michelle] is now

motivated more by personal gain than by social consciousness. She saw her opportunities, and she

took them.” (Sharon Churcher, “Mrs O.: The truth about Michelle Obama’s ‘working class’

credentials, London Daily Mail, February 23, 2008)

Sharon Churcher focuses on the affluent, opulent life style now affected by the arriviste

Michelle, who is now thoroughly addicted to the finer things in life:

The rewards have been significant. Despite the image she projects on the Newsweek cover,

Michelle owns an impressive collection of diamond jewelry, designer outfits and £400-a-pair

Jimmy Choo shoes.

When she is wooing working-class voters, however, she favours austere black skirts and white

blouses. “Our lives are so close to normal, if there is such a thing when you’re running for

president,” she declared during a campaign stop in Delaware, shortly before her husband’s

latest victories were announced.

“When I’m off the road, I’m going to Target to get the toilet paper.”

She did not bother to mention, however, that the paper, like the rest of the family shopping, is

taken to an £825,000 three-storey [c. $1.6 million] red-brick Georgian revival mansion, set

amid beautifully manicured lawns in one of Chicago’s most affluent districts.

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 119

Even the house became a source of controversy when it emerged that the wife of a Chicago

slum landlord, Tony Rezko, helped them buy land to enlarge its grounds.

More contentious still was Michelle’s appointment as the £150,000-a-year vice-president of

external affairs at the University of Chicago hospital in 2005.

It came only two months after Barack was sworn in as a U.S. senator, and was attacked by

critics as a blatant attempt by the hospital’s hierarchy to curry favour with her husband, in an

era when some politicians want to rein in the vast profits of America’s medical system.

They questioned why the wife of a committed Democrat would work for a hospital that has

been accused of ruthless greed.

Michelle’s image was further tarnished in May 2006, when it was revealed that the centre -

despite earning some £50 million a year – had refused to treat a man who could not afford to

pay his bill. He died.

All of which has led some political veterans to accuse Michelle of the very lack of compassion

and moral scruples that her husband has lambasted in his Republican rivals for the White

House. (Sharon Churcher, “Mrs O.: The truth about Michelle Obama’s ‘working class’

credentials, London Daily Mail, February 23, 2008)

Michelle is thus a gatekeeper against the black community, and her activity has already claimed

victims.24

Some sources reached by Sharon Churcher have been able to draw the necessary conclusions

about Michelle Obama’s substandard moral and political qualities. Unlike Hillary Clinton, they

point out, neither Obama has endorsed far-reaching healthcare reforms.

Michelle also is under attack for joining the board of a food company where she allegedly took

part in a 2005 decision to close a pickle and relish plant in La Junta, Colorado, putting 150 mostly

Hispanic labourers out of work. The small town was devastated. “It totally amazed me when they

closed it,” said La Junta mayor Don Rizzuto, who had believed that Michelle and her husband were

“the champions of the little guy.”

In their most recently publicised tax returns, for 2005, the Obamas earned £800,000. This

included royalties from the senator’s autobiography Dreams from My Father, and his £82,600

Senate salary. Under a three-book deal which he subsequently signed, he stands to earn at least £1

million.

To Joe Novak, this only goes to prove that Michelle is distorting reality when she attempts to

depict herself as a champion of the masses. “For the past year (she and Barack) have jetted around

the country with Oprah Winfrey and Robert De Niro, enjoying penthouse parties and living the high

life,” he said.

Perhaps, when she contrasts her current red-carpet lifestyle with the unassuming world of South

Euclid Avenue, she genuinely may think that her childhood was impoverished. And the one thing

that is certain about the incredible Mrs O. is that she never intends to have to live that way again.’

(Sharon Churcher, “Mrs O.: The truth about Michelle Obama’s ‘working class’ credentials, London

Daily Mail, February 23, 2008)

Barack Obama has the mental structures of a fatherless boy, and he knows it. “The truth is that

none of the men in my life were that successful or that stable,” [Michelle] Obama told me. “They

made an awful lot of mistakes.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Later, when it came time to

marry Michelle, he hesitated; Barack had a more bohemian attitude toward romance. “We would

120 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

have this running debate throughout our relationship about whether marriage was necessary,”

Obama told me. “It was sort of a bone of contention, because I was, like, ‘Look, buddy, I’m not one

of these who’ll just hang out forever.’ You know, that’s just not who I am. He was, like”—she

broke into a wishy-washy voice — ‘Marriage, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s really how you feel.’

And I was, like, ‘Yeah, right.’” (Jim Geraghty, “The Campaign Spot,” March 5, 2008)

At Obama’s wedding, his new brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, who had been an athlete at

Princeton, pulled him aside and inquired about his plans. Obama ‘“…said, ‘I think I’d like to teach

at some point in time, and maybe run for public office,” recalls Robinson, who assumed Obama

meant he’d like to run for city alderman. “He said no — at some point he’d like to run for the U.S.

Senate. And then he said, ‘Possibly even run for President at some point.’ And I was like, ‘Okay,

but don’t say that to my Aunt Gracie.’ I was protecting him from saying something that might

embarrass him.”’25 Obama did not tell his brother in law that his self and his career were controlled

assets of the Trilateral Commission, his sponsors.

MICHELLE OBAMA AS A CREATURE OF THE CORRUPT DALEY MACHINE

Michelle had made her way in the world as an asset of the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine,

the Daley family machine. She was in her own way a ward heeler and wheel horse for Daley’s city

hall apparatus, with one key contact being Valerie Jarrett, a political fixer on the make. ‘Obama

went straight from Princeton to Harvard Law School. After graduating, she became a junior

associate, specializing in intellectual property law, at the Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin. She

worked there for three years, eventually becoming, as she says in her stump speech, disenchanted

with “corporate America.” Valerie Jarrett hired her as an assistant to the mayor, Richard Daley. “In

the planning department, part of her job was to help businesses solve problems,” Jarrett told me.

Sort of like a one-woman 311? “No, a 911,” Jarrett responded. “She made problems go away just

that fast.”

In 1993, she was appointed the founding director of the Chicago office of a public-service

program called Public Allies, which places young adults from diverse backgrounds in paid

internships with nonprofit organizations. An early appearance in the Chicago Tribune was in an

article about Gen X-ers. Obama told the reporter, “I wear jeans, and I’m the director.” Michelle and

Barack met at Sidley & Austin, when she was assigned to advise him during a summer job.

Michelle’s co-workers warned her that the summer associate was cute. “I figured that they were just

impressed with any black man with a suit and a job,” she later told Barack.’ (New Yorker, March

11, 2008) We see that Michelle, too, has a record of serving the foundations. Among other things,

Michelle embodies the fascist potential of generation X, which is an echo of the Lost Generation

born between 1885 and 1905 – the generation that gave the world Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin even

as it founded fascism.

THE BLACK OVERCLASS RAGE OF MICHELLE OBAMA

Reporters, even the drooling acolyte types, have observed that inordinate rage of the wealthy

elitist lawyer Michelle Obama. Early in 2008, she said that she wanted to assault and maim former

President Clinton: ‘In Wisconsin, I asked her if she was offended by Bill Clinton’s use of the phrase

“fairy tale” to describe her husband’s characterization of his position on the Iraq War. At first,

Obama responded with a curt “No.” But, after a few seconds, she affected a funny voice. “I want to

rip his eyes out!” she said, clawing at the air with her fingernails. One of her advisers gave her a

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 121

nervous look. “Kidding!” Obama said. “See, this is what gets me into trouble.”’ (New Yorker,

March 11, 2008) For Michelle, Bill was obviously a monster.

Michelle is famous for her diagnosis that America is a mean country, which appeared for the

first time in the New Yorker: ‘Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008,

and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are

“guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of

struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks

are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Fortyfour!”’

(New Yorker, March 11, 2008) It is of course true that the US standard of living has been cut

by about two thirds over the last four decades, so Michelle is doubtless correct in that abstract sense.

It is the part about “cynics, sloths, and complacents” that needs examination. If you want to attack

the causes for the immiseration of America, then you should get busy attacking Wall Street, the

Federal Reserve, and their political puppets. But Michelle does not do this at all. She attacks the

supposed moral inferiority of the American people, while letting Wall Street off the hook along

with all the other power centers. The decline of the country becomes a matter of purely individual

responsibility, setting the stage, one senses, for a demand of austerity and sacrifice so as to make

expiation.

Spengler of the Asia Times argues that the real nature of Obama’s emotional makeup can be seen

most readily by looking at Michelle. Obama has learned to dissemble, but could not hide the criteria

that he used when choosing a wife. Michelle is a bubbling cauldron of racial hatred, and this pot has

boiled over from time to time during the campaign. This is the most important evidence that Obama

himself is also a compulsive hater. Obama, says Spengler, tries to hide this,

but Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her

country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it,

and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because

Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been

desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my

frustration and disappointment.”

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama’s face are not new

to the candidate’s wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they

were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of “blackness” at Princeton

University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a

well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote,

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever

before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my

White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus;

as if I really don’t belong.” (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008)

OBAMA BITCH-SLAPPED IN PUBLIC BY MICHELLE

Michelle has also been prodigal in her public abuse of Obama – a jarring note which was

extremely incongruous during the earlier, more seraphic phase of Obama’s campaign, before the

scandals and dossiers began to emerge. For the cynical central European Spengler, an experienced

man of the world, this is an index of Michelle’s vast power. Spengler observes:

122 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in

Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator.

“I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack

Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law

professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the

Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a

fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure

the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than

he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV

version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.”

Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite

her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships…. Obama’s choice of wife is a

failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they

must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk.’

(Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008)

MICHELLE OBAMA: THE THESIS OF SELF-ABSORPTION

In 1985, in order to graduate from Princeton with her AB in sociology, Michelle had to submit a

senior thesis, which was entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” It is filed

under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. It is 96 pages long, and reposes in the Mudd

Library on campus. This thesis attracted much attention when it was “temporarily withdrawn” from

Princeton’s library until after the November 2008 election. Some extracts had appeared previously

in the Newark Star Ledger. Because of Obama’s standard vapid rhetoric about hope, change, and

the new politics, the attempt to suppress Michelle’s thesis appeared at once as a cynical act of

stonewalling. Michelle looked very much like the super-secretive George Bush. Jonah Goldberg

reported on National Review Online, “A reader in the know informs me that Michelle Obama’s

thesis ... is unavailable until Nov. 5, 2008, at the Princeton library. I wonder why.” “Why a

restricted thesis?” chimed in Louis Lapides on his site, Thinking Outside the Blog. “Is the concern

based on what’s in the thesis? Will Michelle Obama appear to be too black for white America or not

black enough for black America?” Princeton librarians were so pestered by those wanting to see the

infamous thesis that they started reading their refusal from a script. Princeton media officers joined

in the stonewall claiming it is “not unusual” for a thesis to be restricted and refusing to discuss “the

academic work of alumni.” The embarrassment for Obama became so great that he decided to

release the thesis to the Politico, which is controlled by the reactionary Allbritton interests.26

The thesis deals mainly with Michelle’s own cahier de doléances of racist slights and her racebased

world outlook. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my

‘blackness’ than ever before,” she states in the introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no

matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward

me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the

circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will

always be black first and a student second.” “I feel” is her pole star and compass as she goes

through life. She is an extreme example of the radical subjectivist world view of late AngloIII:

Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 123

American imperialism. She offers no analysis of conditions in the ghetto, or ideas for recovery,

reconstruction, and reform. Her axiomatic standpoint is her own greedy and infantile ego.

At that point in her life, Michelle thought that her future career after Princeton would bring her

towards “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will

only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” “In

defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community,” Michelle

elaborates, “I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very

different from white culture.” This is of course the central tenet of the pork-chop nationalist

position. It is not a scientific analysis of culture. It is rather a rhetorical strategy and political pose

for extracting more and better concessions from the affirmative action system, which has left two

thirds to three quarters of the black community in poverty for the last 40 years, since the system was

put in place by Nixon and George Shultz, his Secretary of Labor.

MICHELLE SHOCKED TO FIND WEALTHY SNOBS AT PRINCETON!

For this affirmative action method to work, it is indispensable that grievances be kept alive and

at the center of attention; if one is to be a beneficiary, one must always be a victim. Michelle writes,

with dubious orthography: “Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and

academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their

enrollments.” Warming to the victimhood that this analysis offers, she goes on to complain that

Princeton in 1985 had only five black tenured professors on its faculty. The Afro-American studies

program “is one of the smallest and most understaffed departments in the university.” There was

only one campus group “designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of blacks and

other third world students.” Today her pose is that she is a typical home girl of the south side

Chicago ‘hood; before that, she was from the third world, as we see here. The stance is determined

by the object she is seeking at that moment. She strove mightily to get into Princeton, but she now

finds the place “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.” If

she had wanted to avoid wealthy snobs, why then did she choose Princeton in the first place? Was

she a complete fool? If she wanted third-world students, she could have headed for a dozen ultraleft

campuses. What Michelle is evidently seeking here is the pose of going to Princeton and

scorning the place at the same time, the better to enhance her status as a person who has secured the

invidious best, but rejected it as not good enough.

At this time Michelle was interested in the work of sociologists James Conyers and Walter

Wallace, who delved into white-black community relations. These two discussed the “integration of

black official(s) into various aspects of politics” and notes “problems which face these black

officials who must persuade the white community that they are above issues of race and that they

are representing all people and not just black people,” instead of seeking to build up “two separate

social structures.” This is the delicate question of how to make the transition from the affirmative

action black nationalist stance necessary to secure grants and set-asides, to the more inclusive

posture that would be necessary to run for office in any constituency not dominated by blacks.

Michelle had no solution for this problem then; the solution has been supplied by Axelrod, who

discovered that messianic platitudes and vapid utopian sloganeering about non-partisanship, hope,

and change would allow this shift to be carried out while duping the gullible and guilt-ridden white

liberals, who, after all, were eager to be fooled.

Michelle mailed out an 18-question survey to a sample of 400 black Princeton graduates, asking

them to estimate the amount of time and “comfort” level spent interacting with blacks and whites

124 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

before they went to Princeton, while they were on campus, and after graduation. Michelle also

asked about their religious beliefs, living arrangements, careers, role models, economic status, and

attitudes towards the black underclass. She asked the respondents to specify whether they agreed

more with a “separationist and/or pluralist” viewpoint or an “integrationist and/or assimilationist”

ideology. About 90 alumni sent back the questionnaires, yielding a response rate of about 22

percent. Michelle wrote that she was disappointed with the answers, since they indicated a

weakening of the race-based or Völkische Identität of the black Princetonians surveyed. Michelle

complained: “I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of

identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton

alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black

community. However, these findings do not support this possibility...” (Politico.com, February 23,

2008)27

With this, Michelle had discovered that social reality was not in conformity with the race-based

view of life she had assumed as part of her quest for upward mobility under conditions of

affirmative action. Even her small sample suggested that race was an empty construct, that racial

solidarity could not function as the organizing principle of life, and that racialist or racist thinking

was above all alien to lived social reality. She was not pleased. Concerning the abysmal quality of

her work in the strict academic sense, the less said the better.

Michelle Obama is thus revealed to have been a self-absorbed, self-centered, self-obsessed, selfserving,

and self-righteous undergraduate. We can perhaps detect here an egomania or megalomania

which is evidently the psychological basis of her marriage with Obama: they both imagine

themselves as the centers of the world. The questionnaire was of course a mere formality, serving to

mask Michelle’s intense preoccupation with her own radically subjective feeling states. She was

interesting in delving into herself, and the forms she sent out and compiled were but a fig leaf in

that obsessively introspective process. She lacks any sense of reality, since she forgets that she is in

a position where she is envied by the vast majority of college youth; she needs to portray herself as

a victim of something, be it slights real or imagined. She also has no gratitude for the special

privileges that have been given her through no merit of her own.

Michelle Obama’s odious personality may well emerge as a telling argument in any future

debate about the viability of affirmative action as against color-blind, class-based programs that

recognize class, poverty, and exclusion, and no longer racial discrimination, as the critical problem

of US society. Michelle will become the poster child for abolishing quotas, preferences, set asides,

and the entire affirmative action apparatus. The argument will be that no system which has

produced such a person deserves to be perpetuated, while 60% or 70% of black America remains in

the despair of the inner city ghetto. Michelle can thus safely be said to constitute a huge

vulnerability among the many huge vulnerabilities of the Obama campaign. If we look back to

Jimmy Carter, we can perhaps see how dangerous a person like Michelle can become when she is

unleashed on the national stage, as she necessarily will be.

MICHELLE OBAMA: HATING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on February 18, 2008 Michelle delivered the lines which have

made her infamous: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and

not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” This was

an element in her standard stump tirade on several subsequent occasions, leaving no doubt that she

really meant it and meant to say it. If nothing else, it was a catastrophic failure of deception and

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 125

concealment: Michelle cannot contain her own assiduously cultivated rage, even when the

expression of that rage becomes destructive to her and a threat to her consuming ambition.

National pride and national honor are not a bad thing. Honor, in fact, is the one ything that

humans cannot live without. Like everything else, much depends on how it is used. The American

New Deal state created by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the help of the sit-down strikers and the trade

union organizers represented the most advanced form of human organization ever seen. The New

Deal state battled the Great Depression, defeated Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and fascism, kept the UK

and USSR on their feet through Lend-Lease, contained and frustrated Stalin and Mao, unlocked the

secrets of the atom, and put humans on the moon. Abraham Lincoln was the greatest man of the

nineteenth century, and, together with Russia and Prussia, saved the world from the uncontested

universal despotism of the British Empire under Lord Palmerston. There was a dark side – generally

the handiwork of the finance oligarchs, north and south, yet there was much to be proud of. But not

for the racist Michelle Obama, partly because Michelle is also a postmodernist and multiculturalist.

Postmodernism holds that any conception of human greatness is an illusion, an obscene distortion of

human pettiness, fecklessness, and mediocrity. Nobody is a hero to a postmodernist – not because

there are no heroes and heroines, but because the postmodernist is too crabbed, deformed, and

envious to admit the category of human greatness in any form. Michelle has a perfect right to her

wretched opinions, but she has no right to take them to the White House and make it into the

bordello of world history.

Why does the super-privileged wealthy elitist Michelle hate the United States and the American

people? Partly, one thinks, because she forgets the largesse and holds fast to the memory of the

adversities. On February 29, 2008 Michelle visited Zanesville, Ohio, where she greeted some local

women at a local day care center. Michelle launched into sententious nostrums sharply contradicted

by her own greedy, rapacious, and social-climbing lifestyle: “We left corporate America, which is a

lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women, not mentioning that she works

for the ultra-reactionary, Rockefeller-founded University of Chicago, and sits on the boards of jobdestroying

corporations. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for

the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re

encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the

money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

During this same appearance, Michelle demonstrated how out-of-touch she is, by bemoaning the

amount of money she has to spend on piano, dance, and other lessons for her two daughters. The

sum she cited came to nearly one-third of the median household income in Zanesville, which was

$37,192 in 2004, which is below both the Ohio and national averages. Just 12.2 percent of adults in

that county have a bachelor’s degree or higher, also well below the state and national averages.

About 20 percent don’t have a high school degree. Michelle was a multi-millionairess; she was

indeed out of touch. And she wanted to stay that way. She expects the group of women, whom she

could buy many times over, to sympathize with her. ‘“Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women

in the audience, their first question for me is, ‘How on earth are you managing it, how are you

keeping it all together?’” she pontificated to the women of modest means in Zanesville.28

One of Michelle’s favorite themes is that she had had to take out student loans to get through

Princeton and Harvard. She complains about how long it has taken her and Barry to pay off these

loans. She talks about how it has taken them years and years, well into middle age, to pay off their

debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still

paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” Michelle laments. “Barack and

126 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

I were in that position. The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two bestselling

books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were

struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” “We left corporate America, which is a

lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” Michelle typically says, adding that “many of our

bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Michelle talks a good rap about hard times in America, but she makes it all turn on what has to

be done for her personally, not for the voters; For Michelle, the axiomatic point of view is always

but always herself: ‘Her frame of reference can seem narrow. When she talks about wanting “my

girls to travel the world with pride” and the decline of America “over my lifetime,” you wonder

why her default pronoun is singular if the message is meant to be concern for others and

inclusiveness.’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008) For obvious demagogic reasons, Michelle also fails

to distinguish between the relative stabilization of falling real wages under Clinton, and the

precipitous decline that resumed under Bush the younger: ‘In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that

the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most

people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to

pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want

to meet you!”’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

MICHELLE OBAMA: BOUNCER FOR

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO HOSPITAL

Michelle’s job is that of a bouncer or gatekeeper for the University of Chicago Hospital, which

is located close to the edge of the black ghetto. The problem faced by the University of Chicago

managers is that too many sick and dying indigent black people come to their emergency room in a

desperate attempt to get some kind of treatment. Michelle’s job is to push these poverty-stricken

black people back into the ghetto to die in nondescript waiting rooms in poorly-equipped doctors’

offices or dingy substandard clinics there. Her qualifications of this job were that she had to be

black, and she had to be cruel, with no hint of the racial solidarity that she has hypocritically

paraded in public for most of her life. Michelle has made out like a bandit in this cruel and inhuman

line of work. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the

University of Chicago Hospital, where her title is vice president for community affairs, jumped

from $121,910 in 2004 (just before Barry was installed in the Senate), to $316,962 in 2005, just

after he took office. This does not include the honoraria Michelle takes in from serving on corporate

boards. 29

Michelle’s rapidly expanding personal income has raised more than eyebrows: ‘“Mrs. Obama is

extremely overpaid,” one citizen wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tribune, after the paper

published a story questioning the timing of the award. “Now, what is the real reason behind such an

inflated salary?” Her bosses at the University of Chicago Hospitals vigorously defended the raise,

pointing out that it put her salary on a par with that of other vice-presidents at the hospital. (As it

happens, Obama has spent most of her life working within the two institutions for which she most

frequently claims a populist disdain: government and the health-care system.)’ (New Yorker, March

11, 2008)

Michelle’s role in excluding indigent patients from the University of Chicago Hospital where she works

has also drawn attention from congressional investigators. One such instance: ‘The ranking minority member

on the Senate Finance Committee is seeking information from the non-profit University of Chicago Medical

Center about jobs held by Sen. Barack Obama's wife and one of his best friends,’ reported Joe Stephens of the

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 127

Washington Post. ‘Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on Friday sent the center a letter saying he was "troubled"

by recent news reports about the hospital's efforts to steer patients with non-urgent complaints away from the

center' emergency room to local clinics. Michelle Obama was a key figure behind the initiative. The letter,

which Grassley released to the public September 2, 2008, does not directly mention the Democratic

presidential nominee, his wife or his campaign. Grassley also asked for financial data, board minutes and

other documents related to hiring, job promotion, business contracting and care for the poor.’ ‘For years,

Grassley has argued that non-profit hospitals should spend more resources on the poor and be more

financially accountable, in return for the millions of dollars they keep each year as a result of their tax-exempt

status. Grassley has periodically demanded financial data from selected hospitals and issued reports detailing

perceived shortcomings. He has also chaired a Senate hearing on the topic.’ Grassley also wanted information

on the hospital’s conflict of interest policy, and also wanted to probe hiring practices, evidently including the

public relations contract which went to Obama spinmeister David Axelrod, and a computer contract that was

awarded to Obama moneybags Robert Blackwell.

(http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/sen_grassley_seeks_university.html

) Here is how the hospital itself advertised a fall 2005 community forum, complete with free dinner, chaired

by Michelle Obama: ‘Michelle Obama, vice president for community affairs at the University of Chicago

Hospitals, will serve as moderator. The South Side Health Collaborative is a partnership, supported by the

federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which is devoted to improving access to quality

healthcare for the uninsured, underserved, and special needs populations. The Collaborative pulls together 13

Federally Qualified Health Clinics, two social service organizations, private physicians, and the University of

Chicago Hospitals. Its goal is to help patients find a medical home, enabling them to build a lasting

relationship with a primary care physician in their neighborhoods. Since the program began in January 2005,

members of the Collaborative have interviewed more than 12,000 patients who came to the emergency room

at the University of Chicago Hospitals for care because they did not have a regular physician. They have

helped more than 1,000 patients connect with a primary care provider, often making an appointment for

follow-up care before the patient leaves the ER.’ (http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2005/20051108-

collaborative.html) The big question was of course whether Barky’s political clout as a newly minted US

Senator had been used to procure the federal grant for Michelle’s exclusion operation, raising Obama’s

signature problems of dirty politics, influence peddling, and graft.

The dividing line between the elite and the mass in modern America comes down to one

question: do you have servants? Bush did, and the Obamas emphatically do. As the New Yorker

reported, “The Obamas employ a full-time housekeeper, and Michelle tries to see a personal trainer

four times a week,” but they claim that they do not also have a nanny. In 2005, “the Obamas moved

to a $1.65-million Georgian Revival mansion in Hyde Park, which features a thousand-bottle wine

cellar and bookcases made of Honduran mahogany.”

TYPICAL PARVENU STYLE

The Obamas, in short, are typical parvenu arrivistes, and they revel in it: ‘The Obamas are

fixtures of Chicago’s philanthro-social scene: there they are, waving from a silver Mustang at the

annual Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic; there’s Michelle delivering remarks at the Alpha Kappa

Alpha Sorority’s Seventy-second Central Regional Conference; there she is arriving at the Black

Creativity Gala with a shopping bag full of “Obama for Senator” buttons. Cindy Moelis recalls

being shocked, after agreeing to host Obama’s baby shower, that the guest list included fifty people.

“Hmmm,” Michael Sneed, the Sun-Times columnist, reported in 2006. “Sneed hears rumbles a mink

coat reportedly belonging to Michelle Obama, wife of Sen. Barack Obama, may have gone missing

following the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s birthday bash at the South Shore Cultural Center.”’(New Yorker,

March 11, 2008)

128 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Is Michelle being criticized unfairly? ‘Some observers have detected in Obama an air of

entitlement. Her defenders attribute these charges of arrogance to racist fears about uppity black

women. While it’s a stretch to call the suggestion that Obama projects an air of self-satisfaction

bigoted, it may at least reflect a culture gap: last April, after Maureen Dowd wrote a column

criticizing Obama for undermining her husband’s mystique, a blog riposte, circulated widely on the

Internet, was titled “The White Lady Just Doesn’t Get It.” The sentiment—that America was in a

mess, and Mrs. Obama was not happy about it—was not a new one, but her unfortunate formulation

instantly drew charges that she was unpatriotic. Bill O’Reilly spawned his own scandalette,

remarking, “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence,

hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.” Victor Maltsev, of Rego Park, wrote to the

Post, “Obama wants to be our next first lady? Watch out, America!” Cindy McCain seized the

opportunity to draw a sniffy contrast between the Obamas and her and her war-hero husband, telling

a cheering crowd, “I don’t know about you—if you heard those words earlier—I’m very proud of

my country.”’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

Michelle embodies the condescending, patronizing attitude of the entire Obama operation: it is a

mission to the benighted denizens of Middle America, viewed as ethnographic material. Michelle

has to ask for votes, and she finds that this is beneath her new-found opulence and social prestige:

‘Perhaps Obama’s high-handedness is preëmptive, her way of “claiming a seat at the table”—as she

is fond of calling enfranchisement in the power-brokering structure—rather than waiting to be

offered one. It’s as though she figures she might as well say that she and her husband are all that

before someone can say that they aren’t. And there’s a sort of strategic genius to her presentation of

campaigning as grinding work that takes her away from her family, rather than a glorious tour of the

world’s greatest country that she would be thrilled to be undertaking even if she didn’t have to. She

frequently tells her audiences, “I don’t care where I am, the first question is ‘How are you managing

it all? How are you holding up?’ “The effect, of course, is to set up an expectation of tribute, like

those hairdressers who display all their gifts in the days leading up to Christmas. By loudly voicing

her distaste for retail politicking, Obama makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were

doing them a favor.” (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

Michelle may well be more devoted to Jeremiah Wright than Barry is. At a recent campaign

stop, her exordium went as follows: “You all got up bright and early just for me?” she asked the

mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd. “Yes!” they roared. Obama continued, “On behalf of my

church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings.” After warming up the crowd,

Obama launched into her stump speech, a forty-five-minute monologue that she composed herself

and delivers without notes. (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

The New Yorker, a bastion of pro-Obama devotion, provides some clues to the ultimate sources

of Michelle’s rage, hatred, and hauteur. She is tormented by feelings of inferiority, low self-worth

and self-esteem, and the sense of impending doom. One is reminded of Napoleon’s mother, who

kept repeating “longo mai,” meaning, in her Corsican dialect: Let’s hope all this lasts. People like

this generally try to sock away a stash of money in case it doesn’t last, and Michelle will likely be

no exception.

When the New Yorker began asking about this obvious internal stress, Michelle replied:

“What minority communities go through still represents the challenges, the legacies, of

oppression and racism. You know, when you have cultures who feel like second-class citizens

at some level . . . there’s this natural feeling within the community that we’re not good enough .

. . we can’t be as smart as or as prepared—and it’s that internal struggle that is always the

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 129

battle.” She talked about her first trip to Africa—Barack took her to Kenya to meet his father’s

family—and the realization that, as much as white society fails to account for the African-

American experience, so does any conception of pan-blackness. In The Audacity of Hope,

Barack Obama perceives a vulnerability in his wife, one so closely guarded that even her

brother professed to me never to have noticed it. There was “a glimmer that danced across her

round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her,” he writes, “the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if,

deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a

moment, all her plans might quickly unravel.” (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)

Napoleon’s mother again. Could Michelle be a candidate for a nervous breakdown, or else for

uncontrollable transports of rage – likely to be couched in racist terms – out on the campaign trail?

We may be close to finding out.

OBAMA JOINS MINER, BARNHILL, AND GALLAND, REZKO’S LAWYERS

Obama went to work for the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill, and Galland. The firm

presents itself on its current web site in these terms: “Miner, Barnhill, & Galland was founded in

1971 and today consists of fourteen lawyers in two offices. Ten lawyers are resident in the Chicago

Office and four lawyers office [sic] in Madison, Wisconsin. The firm has acquired a national

reputation in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development work. In addition to its

practice in these areas, the firm represents a broad range of individual and corporate clients,

providing a wide variety of legal services.” On the surface it was a mix of socially conscious left-ofcenter

causes, therefore, with a good dose of lucrative corporate work, meshing well with Obama’s

neoliberal camouflage profile. But note the “economic development work,” since here lies the rub.

According to at least one account, Obama already knew that he wanted to get elected in the

Hyde Park neighborhood, a region of great sensitivity to the University of Chicago, and thus to the

Rockefeller family and to the US intelligence community in general:

When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama

to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr. Miner thought he was

recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr. Obama

recruited him.

Mr. Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of

the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city’s first black mayor, Harold

Washington. Mr. Miner, who had helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr. Washington and

served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.

The confident younger man “cross-examined” Mr. Miner about how Mr. Washington had

managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he

“got along with all these different types of folks,” Mr. Miner recalled.

“During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with

me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared this with

me — he was amused,” Mr. Miner said, laughing. “This isn’t where you land if you want to

curry favor with the Democratic power structure.”

It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run

for office from Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded

politicians independent of the city’s legendary Democratic machine. Mr. Obama chose to put

130 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

down roots in the neighborhood after graduating law school and marrying Michelle Robinson, a

Chicago native and fellow lawyer. […]

Mr. Miner was “enormously helpful” in introducing Mr. Obama to the liberal coalition of

blacks and whites that had helped elect Mr. Washington, said Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend

and close adviser. “It brought in a whole new circle of people.” (Jo Becker and Christopher

Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side,” New York Times, May 11, 2008.)

At this critical point in his career, Obama once again seemed to have a guardian angel or familiar

spirit hovering overhead, this time in the form of Thomas Ayers, the august father of Barky’s

terrorist friend Bill Ayers, the aging Weatherman of whom we will have much to recount. The

solicitude of Thomas Ayers and his family, including Bernardine Dohrn, for Obama’s upward

mobility, we stress again, is part of a pattern of foundation and intelligence community intervention

in favor of Obama which started when his mother joined the Ford Foundation, and which became

intense during the years when Obama and Zbigniew Brzezinski were at Columbia in 1981-1983.

Steve Diamond suggested how Obama was hired:

The partner who hired him was Judson Miner. Miner was a well-known left wing lawyer in

Chicago who had been counsel to the progressive black mayor in the 80s, Harold Washington.

But Miner possibly also had ties to the Ayers family. He was law school classmates with

Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago (both Class of 1967). He formed a lawyers

group against the war after graduation and organized a left wing alternative to the local Chicago

bar association.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22,

2008)

Obama also taught in an adjunct teaching position at the University of Chicago, and he has

consistently tried to upgrade this into the claim that he was a law “professor,” a title to which he

never had any right. If he were to go to Germany, he could be prosecuted for Titelmißbrauch, the

abusive faking of academic titles. On March 27, 2007 Obama told a fundraiser, “I was a

constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the

Constitution.” But Obama is an imposter. He has never been a professor, except in the most generic

sense. Obama has been a “Senior Lecturer (on leave of absence)” at the University of Chicago Law

School, which is controlled by his backers and controllers. He has taught courses in Constitutional

Law III: Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process, Current Issues in Racism and the Law, and

Voting Rights and the Democratic Process.

THE CHICAGO CESSPOOL OF CORRUPTION:

OBAMA’S HEART OF DARKNESS

But there was much more than meets the eye at the modest Chicago left-wing law firm now

called Davis, Miner, and Barnhill law firm. Evelyn Pringle has gone back to the time after Obama’s

graduation from Harvard Law School, when he was hired by what then was Miner, Barnhill, and

Galland. Even at that time, Allison Davis was the dominant personality at the firm. And the secret

of Miner, Barnhill, and Galland was that it was Tony Rezko’s law firm:

After turning down the surprise job offer from Rezko, Obama expects voters to believe that he

just happened to get hired at the small 12-attorney Davis law firm, which just happened to

represent Rezmar in development deals. And then a couple years later, Rezko’s companies just

happened to appear on the very first contributions made to the “Friends of Obama” committee

to launch his political career as a state senator.’ (Evelyn Pringle, op-ed news)30

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 131

Another Chicago analyst reminds us that it was Rezko who made Allison Davis a big man

through his patronage:

Rezko got Allison S. Davis appointed to the Illinois State Board of Investment, in control of

billions in state retirement funds. Although Davis has not been charged with wrongdoing, the

feds are reportedly pressing a probe of that agency. Davis is currently the president of that State

Board. Barack Obama was a Harvard Law student in 1990 when he interviewed for a job with

Tony Rezko’s slum-redevelopment firm. He didn’t go directly into the Rezko company. But in

1993 Obama was hired by Allison S. Davis, whose law firm (Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland)

represented Rezko’s operations over the years, while Rezko raised cash for Obama’s electoral

campaigns. Davis became Rezko’s personal financial partner in slum-redevelopment deals,

which were then backed by State Senator Obama. (John Desiderio, Working Life, January 27,

2008)

“Operation Board Games” is the code name for the prosecution of Rezko, joined potentially by

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and other Democratic and

Republican pols, ward-heelers, and fixers. One of the central points of this probe is the Davis,

Miner, and Barnhill law firm, where Obama was employed. Pringle outlines the case as follows:

The investigation dubbed “Operation Board Games,” into the influence peddling within the

cesspool of corruption that encompasses Illinois politicians from both major parties, has

developed into multiple subplots, many of which feature Barack Obama. They also give the

details of Obama’s involvement in a slumlord business largely operating out of the Chicagobased

Davis, Miner & Barnhill law firm, which hired Obama in 1993, with his boss, Allison

Davis, reaping in the profits with Rezko’s development company, Rezmar. [Pringle’s] “Board

Games for Slumlord” article gives in-depth details of the federal investigation along with the

names of people who are listed as “Co-Schemers” and “Individuals” in the indictments issued

thus far. Therefore for the most part, this article will refer to all the scams collectively as what

prosecutors refer to as “pay-to-play” schemes. The Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland law firm,

where Obama worked for nearly a decade, served as a hub for a slew of slumlord deals, many

that benefited the firm’s founder, Allison Davis, and Obama’s claims that he knew nothing

about the inner workings of this small firm, represent an insult to the intelligence of the

American public…. Allison Davis, Obama’s boss at the law firm, is also listed in legal

documents as playing a part in setting up a major extortion attempt in the Board Games case.

(Pringle, oped news)

A recent expose published in the Boston Globe also points directly to Obama’s choice of law

firms to work for not as a selfless gesture of idealistic commitment, but rather as an entrée into the

sleazy world of Chicago graft:

Allison Davis, Obama’s former law firm boss, dabbled in development for years while he

worked primarily as a lawyer. He participated in the development of Grove Parc Plaza. And in

1996, Davis left his law firm to pursue a full-time career as an affordable housing developer,

fueled by the subsidies from the Daley administration and aided, on occasion, by Obama

himself. Over roughly the past decade, Davis’s companies have received more than $100

million in subsidies to renovate and build more than 1,500 apartments in Chicago, according to

a Chicago Sun-Times tally. In several cases, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 the two

men created a limited partnership to build an apartment building for seniors on Chicago’s South

Side. Obama wrote letters on state Senate stationery supporting city and state loans for the

project. In 2000 Davis asked the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago for a $1 million investment

132 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

in a new development partnership, Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners. Obama, a member of

the board, voted in favor, helping Davis secure the investment. (Binyamin Appelbaum, “Grim

proving ground for Obama’s housing policy,” Boston Globe, June 27, 2008)

OBAMA: THE MOST CORRUPT SINCE HARDING? OR SINCE GRANT?

It was a form of corruption which siphoned off immense quantities of public resources in order

to slake the greed of a very small group of insiders, wheel horses, and fixers. In Pringle’s

evaluation, Barack Obama has a long history of working with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and

governors of Illinois, including the current Governor Rod Blagojevich, in doling out government

funding for housing development in Chicago. His history is hardly a model of success, except for

the hundreds of millions in profits made by the chosen few slumlords. Less than a year ago, in the

April 26, 2007, Chicago Sun-Times, Fran Spielman reported that Chicago aldermen were accusing

the Daley administration “of being asleep at the switch while low-income housing projects

developed by the now-indicted Tony Rezko collapsed into disrepair…The spigot of loans, grants

and tax credits should have been cut off when the first of 30 taxpayer-supported Rezko buildings in

Chicago fell into disrepair, the aldermen said,” according to the report.’ Obama’s resume is

notoriously thin, but it already contains an ample dossier of graft, corruption, and malfeasance in

office.

Obama’s corruption, starting with the beginning of his law practice in Chicago, also has

implications for the future of US housing policy for lower income groups, sure to be a key item in

the wake of the mortgage crisis, and the collapse of the housing industry as it had existed since the

Carter years. According to Pringle, there are already signs that Obama wants to bring the

discredited, scandalous, and failed Chicago model to Washington, where he can launch a new phase

of gangsters and racketeers of the Rezko-Auchi stripe feeding at the public trough. Pringle foresees

that

Obama now wants to bring this dog and pony show to Washington. I can see it now. His former

boss, Allison Davis, at the Davis, Miner & Barnhill law firm, that served as a hub for Rezko’s

thriving slumlord business for a decade before Davis quit and became partners with Rezko, will

be appointed to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Davis and his

partners, which include his sons Jared and Cullen, have received more than $100 million in

taxpayer subsidies to build and rehab apartments and homes over the past 10 years and have

made at least $4 million in development fees, according to the Times. “Davis has gotten deal

after deal from the mayor, helping to make Davis one of the city’s top developers,” Tim Novak

noted in the November 7, 2007 Sun-Times. There’s already a plan in place to guarantee that the

Chicago model of “community development” is carried out in the White House. In his “Plan to

Fight Poverty in America,” Obama says, “we should create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund

to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.” The Plan will create a “White

House Office of Urban Policy” to develop a strategy for metropolitan America, and Obama will

appoint a Director of Urban Policy who will report directly to him, as president, to “coordinate

all federal urban programs,” the Plan states. Mayor Daley will probably be hired for this gig.

The Plan explains that Obama will task his new Director “to work across federal agencies and

with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development

barriers of every major metropolitan area in the country.” (Pringle, oped news)

The last big scandal at HUD goes back to the tenure of “Silent Sam” Pierce, an African-

American who was appointed by Reagan. In this case, HUD official Deborah Gore Dean, a cousin

III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 133

of later Vice President Al Gore, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government,

plus perjury, and did some jail time. Sam Pierce was manifestly involved in mismanagement, abuse

and political favoritism, but an independent counsel was unable to get the goods on him. This gives

us the merest inkling of what an Obama administration may have in store. It may prove to be the

most corrupt administration since Warren Gamaliel Harding, almost a century ago.

Obama will doubtless seek to portray any abuses as the inevitable by-products of his valiant

attempt to redress the balance of minority oppression. Indeed, his legal colleagues appear to be

consummate masters in the gaming of the system of quotas, set-asides, preferences, and other

mechanisms of discrimination which have grown up under the aeges of the post-Nixon affirmative

action policies. As Pringle points out,

An example of the Chicago version of a minority-owned business is DV Urban Realty Partners,

where Allison Davis, who is amillionaire many times over, owns 51%, and Robert Vanecko,

Mayor Daley’s nephew, owns 49%. First of all, “Barack Obama you are no Robert Kennedy,”

and we’re still asking the question because the careers of politicians like Obama are funded by a

political mafia which has turned helping the poor into a cottage industry. Cursory review of

Illinois campaign records shows Allison Davis and his family members giving close to $16,000

to Obama’s presidential campaign. The Sun-Times reports that Davis has donated more than

$400,000 to dozens of political campaigns, and the top beneficiaries include Mayor Daley,

Blagojevich and Obama.” (Pringle, op-ed news)

It was also thanks to the Davis, Miner & Barnhill law firm that Obama was able to forge an

additional set of links with the Chicago foundation community, starting with the Woods Fund.

Pringle shows that Obama began serving on the board of Woods Fund, a Chicago charity

foundation, in 1993, the same year he was hired by Davis’ law firm. In 2000, Davis went to the

foundation to help fund his plans to build low income housing. Obama voted to invest $1 million

with Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners, a $17 million partnership that Davis still operates,

according to a report by Novak in the November 29, 2007 Sun-Times. [Daley hack Martin] Nesbitt

is also vice president of the Pritzker Realty Group, where he procures new real estate investment

opportunities, retail investments and developments for the Pritzker Group….’ This is Martin

Nesbitt, a top official of the Chicago Housing Authority, where the slogan on the logo reads

“Change” – no doubt to comfort Rezko’s victims.31 A quick trip to the Huffington Post site showed

tens of thousands of dollars donated to Obama from people with the last name Pritzker in the

Chicago area,’ with many from the Pritzker clan. Penny Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt

Hotels, is the National Finance Chair for the Obama campaign, and presides over Obama’s

equivalents of the Bush Pioneers or Rangers. The party label may change, but the plutocracy

remains. As for Nesbitt, he has been showing up in television profiles of Obama as a distinguished

commentator on issues like Barky’s anguish when he was forced to part company with Jeremiah

Wright, and so forth; Nesbitt is never asked about shady dealings in Chicago.

CHAPTER IV: APPRENTICESHIP WITH FOUNDATIONFUNDED

TERRORISTS: AYERS AND DOHRN

“We must be alert to the CIA agents who would promote the polarization of our society. We

must examine the evidence which indicates that fake revolutionaries, who are inciting

insurrection in our cities, have had their pockets and minds stuffed by the CIA.” – Vincent

Salandria, 1971.

“How could we have done the FBI’s work better for them?” –Mark Rudd, Weatherman leader.

“You don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work.” – Ward Churchill, ex-Weatherman

“God, what a great country. It makes me want to puke.” – Bill Ayers, Weather Underground

Public opinion is now broadly aware of the close personal relationship and friendly affinity

which has existed for two decades between the candidate Obama and the rehabilitated but

unrepentant and defiant Weatherman terrorist bombers, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. As

David Axelrod told the Politico, “Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same

school … They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school

together.”32 Ayers has written about his involvement with the group’s bombings of the New York

City Police headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. Obama’s

quest for elective office started in 1995 with a fund-raising meeting held at the home of Ayers and

Dohrn. A $200 campaign contribution from Ayers is listed on April 2, 2001 by the “Friends of

Barack Obama” campaign fund. The two appeared speaking together at several public events,

including a 1997 University of Chicago panel entitled, “Should a child ever be called a ‘super

predator?’” and another panel for the University of Illinois in April 2002, entitled, “Intellectuals:

Who Needs Them?” Ayers and Obama are friends. Ayers was the key man in giving Obama his

first big visible and public break in the foundation world, his job as the chairman of the board of the

Annenberg Chicago Challenge.

The basic facts of the meeting at the Ayers-Dohrn abode are these: ‘In 1995, State Senator Alice

Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals

at the home of two well-known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known

nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the

1960s anti-war movement. Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an

unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he

has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for

president. “I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to

learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr.

Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the

informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her

successor.” Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said. Obama’s connections to Ayers and

Dohrn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their

home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been

previously reported.’33

The period between 1991 and 1995 is the time when Obama assembles his network with its

various components – the politically connected lawyer Allison Davis, the mafioso slumlord Tony

Rezko, and the terrorists turned education operatives in the service of the foundations, Bill Ayers

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 135

and Bernardine Dohrn. It is a group redolent of the foundations and thus of the left wing of the

intelligence community, and it will remain in place around Obama until the present day. Obama

was now preparing for his first run at elective political office. To do this, he needed a base of

activists, supporters, and donors. Obama’s pedigree will be clearly exhibited by the method by

which he chose to go about addressing this task. As we have already seen, Obama can be

considered as a product of the Ford Foundation and its associated satellite foundations. Obama’s

mother worked directly for the Ford Foundation. Obama himself worked for the Gamaliel

Foundation, a satellite of the Ford mother ship. This is his time as a “community organizer.”

Obama’s church was fully stocked with theologians whose careers had been promoted by the Ford

Foundation. Thus, we may say that Obama’s hardware configuration was largely due to the efforts

of the Ford Foundation and its satellites.

The software, as we have stressed, came largely from Zbigniew Brzezinski and his associates in

the Trilateral Commission-Bilderberger-New York Council on Foreign Relations orbit, who had

been training and indoctrinating Obama for almost one and a half decades at this point. Since many

traditional functions of the US intelligence community had been privatized into the world of front

companies and especially the foundations and nongovernmental organizations, we can for purposes

of brevity and clarity label the matrix of Obama’s software as the left wing of the intelligence

community, or the left CIA. This is the network to which Obama quite naturally and indeed

inevitably turned when the time came for him to run for the Illinois State Senate. Over time,

intelligence networks cannot be hidden, since the same persons often appear in radically different

roles. This means that their momentarily announced loyalties and purposes were spurious and

fictitious: what counted all along was their loyalty to the intelligence network to which they belong.

Obama wanted to represent that part of Southside Chicago which is called Hyde Park, a

neighborhood which is split between the comfortable homes of professors at the University of

Chicago on the one hand, and a brutal and impoverished black inner-city ghetto on the other. Hyde

Park is a neighborhood split by fault lines of racial tension. The political importance of the

University of Chicago for the US intelligence community can hardly be overestimated. The

University of Chicago’s troubled frontier with the black ghetto has been something of a concern to

the US ruling financier oligarchy for some time, since relations there have been so bad that the

university might have to move away, a colossally expensive project. A whole cottage industry of

academic-grade poverty pimps and foundation operatives has grown up to provide border guards for

the line of demarcation between the university and the ghetto. Those who succeed as border guards

and gatekeepers along this line are marked for preferment; the striving Obama power couple are one

example.

Another is Danielle Allen, who (like Bernardine Dohrn) has been the recipient of the largesse of

the MacArthur Foundation – in Allen’s case via a coveted genius grant, which is a program used to

promote philistine mediocrities to help dumb down the academic world, according to the general

program of the foundations. Allen has just become UPS Foundation Professor in the School of

Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey – she is the first black

fellow of that elite think tank, where the arch-oligarchical operative Bernard Lewis (a key apostle of

the Iraq war) also resides. Lately, Allen has been going on the radio, voicing shrill indignation over

internet attacks on the Redeemer. A recent puff piece on the postmodern Allen stresses her role as a

gatekeeper active in ‘the University of Chicago’s surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood, where

town and gown have a long history of … “interracial distrust.”’ Allen, the article goes on to say,

learned in Hyde Park that ‘it was impossible to ignore the poor and often violent world not far from

campus. Hyde Park today is a racially mixed, mostly middle-class neighborhood, but you don’t

136 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

have to walk far to find real urban blight. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, as the South Side of Chicago was

getting poorer and blacker, the university administration grew increasingly concerned that parents

would refuse to send their children to such a place. There were rumors that the university was

considering moving its campus out of Hyde Park. Instead, it launched an aggressive policy of urban

renewal, relying heavily on draconian eminent domain laws that said that if a private developer

owned 60 percent of a block, it could claim the remaining 40 percent through eminent domain.

Those losing their houses were mostly black, while the university was mostly white. One

consequence of this was a feeling of bitterness and suspicion toward the university that has lingered

for decades. All of this was troubling….’ (Merrell Noden, “At home in two worlds,” Princeton

Alumni Weekly, March 5, 2008) So this is the area where Obama decided to pursue his political

career, obviously as a black-faced gatekeeper and protector of the University of Chicago’s interest

against the black poor.

As the veteran public servant Larry Johnson showed on his noquarterusa.net blog, the truth was

that Obama WAS an employee of a Bill Ayers enterprise for about eight years. In reality, the

terrorist Ayers had been Obama’s boss: “Barack also was essentially an employee of Bill Ayers for

eight years. In 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform

the Chicago public schools. One of the architects of the Challenge was none other than Professor

Bill Ayers. Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal and proudly lists himself on his own website as

the co-founder of the Challenge. And who did William Ayers, co-creator of the Challenge, help

select as the new director of the board for this program? Barack Obama. Barack Obama was the

first Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. This appointment came at a

crucial time in Barack’s life. He was on the verge of challenging longtime state Senator Alice

Palmer for her job. When Barack decided to run, it is no surprise that he turned to William Ayers

and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, for help in organizing the campaign and in hosting his first

fundraiser in the district. Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in

2003. Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period.”

(Noquarterusa.net, April 26, 2008) This was in addition to Ayers’ well-documented role in

organizing the fundraiser that kicked off Obama’s first run for elective office in 1995. The old

provocateurs of the left CIA were now serving as a support network for the next generation of

domestic counterinsurgency operatives.

THE WEATHERMEN’S LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS

HAS PRODUCED OBAMA

The University of Chicago is of course the home of the Milton Friedman Chicago boys, the archreactionary

or quasi-fascist economists who dictated the fascist austerity program imposed by the

Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the middle 1970s, and who have helped destroy or impoverish

many other countries around the world from Bolivia to Poland to Russia. One of them is the

infamous Skull and Bones member Austan Goolsbee, a top economic controller of the Obama

campaign. But the intelligence community also has a left wing face. Here we find the Black

liberation theologian and Ford Foundation operative Dwight Hopkins, who shuttles back and forth

to Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Here also we find the residue of many intelligence

community operations of previous decades, and in this context one group stands out above all

others: the veterans of the more extreme factions of Students for a Democratic Society, the most

important left wing organization of the 1960s and indeed the largest left-wing political formation in

all of American history. Here we find, in other words, a group of left-wing radicals who are well

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 137

advanced in the long march through the institutions, working within the system and achieving

remarkable positions of institutional authority in the process:

‘Today one of the approaches used by these types is the “long march” through the (presumably

“bourgeois”) institutions. (See [a] discussion of it by “Progressives for Obama” supporter, Fidelista

and former SDS leader Carl Davidson.) Of course, the “long march” referred to is that taken by

Mao and the People’s Liberation Army in 1934. Now, Davidson et al. apply the concept to the

tactics of the “left” inside various “reform movements” such as the anti-war movement. Davidson

was one of the organizers of the 2002 anti war rally at which Obama first spoke out against the

war.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

Diamond also notes: ‘Bill Ayers appears to be attempting to lead a similar “long march” in the

education world. Ayers is a vigorous advocate of local control along with a related concept called

“small schools,” most likely because he believes it gives him the potential to build a political base

from which to operate. He has discussed these ideas in speeches and writings on his blog. As he

said in a speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in late 2006: “Teaching invites

transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educación es revolución!” (Steve Diamond,

‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

Some of Obama’s friends were openly terrorists and bombers from the incendiary Weatherman

faction, like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Others did not join the Weathermen in their long

years of underground urban guerrilla struggle: here we find such figures as Carl Davidson and

Marilyn Katz. Assorted leaders of various successor organizations to the Black Panthers and/or the

Black Liberation Army will also appear. The common denominator of many of these figures is that

they were seldom the spontaneous radicalized student militants that they pretended to be, but were

generally elements of pollution: police agents, provocateurs, wreckers, sent in to the radical student

left to do a job of sabotage, discrediting, and crippling.

If Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had been the authentic left-wing proto-fascist anarchists and

bombers they have always claimed to be, they might well have faced an appointment with the gas

chamber or the electric chair, given their implication in criminal conspiracies which led to the

deaths of a significant number of persons, including police officers. Instead, Ayers and Dohrn have

been rewarded and taken care of by some mysterious force through their receipt of prestigious

endowed professorships in which they now have tenure. Was the hand that rewarded Ayers and

Dohrn the same hand which has promoted and fostered the career of Obama? All indications are

that it was, and that it was a hand attached to the left side of the US intelligence establishment.

Right-wing commentators will rail that Ayers and Dohrn, Wright and Obama are authentic

communists seeking to carry out the revolutionary program of Karl Marx. The argument here, by

contrast, is that all of these figures are synthetic frauds who have been deployed to carry out the

program of finance capital, as articulated through certain key parts of the US intelligence

community who have never concealed their close relations with Wall Street. The difference is

highly important. It is the difference between an ignorant right-wing hallucination which deserves

to be mocked and laughed at, and an actual historical philosophical analysis of the systematic

deformation and manipulation of social life by the immense power of an intelligence community

that boasts a legal budget in the neighborhood of $100 billion, which is supplemented by hundreds

of billions more coming from drug-running, gun-running, slave trading, and other nefarious

activities, plus what the foundation endowments contribute. Only if they are understood in this way

138 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

can figures like Wright, Ayers, Dohrn, and the rest open a window into the process which has

dished up the Manchurian candidacy of Obama.

OBAMA’S NEST OF RACIST AND TERRORIST PROVOCATEURS

The fact that Obama emerges from such a nest of racist and terrorist provocateurs has begun to

dawn on a number of researchers. Steve Diamond writes: ‘The people linked to Senator Obama

grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They

adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the

emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were

becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization. In fact, at

the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the

Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that

government or right-wing elements helped create them. There is some evidence, in fact, that that

was true (for example, the Cointelpro effort of the federal government.)’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who

“sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008) Correct. The Weathermen were spooks,

provocateurs who knew what they were doing, on some level.

THOMAS AYERS OF THE BOARD OF GENERAL DYNAMICS,

TOP PENTAGON CONTRACTOR AND SPOOK

If we try to identify Obama’s personal patron during the Chicago years, we must conclude that

Obama owed everything to the Ayers family – to ruling class patriarch Thomas Ayers, his son Bill

Ayers the terrorist, to his daughter-in-law Bernardine Dohrn (another terrorist), and to Bill’s brother

John. This is also the finding of Steve Diamond. So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his

ties not to well-connected über lawyer Newton Minow … but more likely to the family of

(in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers.

Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard

Law School. During that time a critical issue in Chicago politics was the ongoing crisis in the public

schools. A movement was underway from two angles: from below in black, Latino and other

communities for more local control of schools, and from above by business interests who wanted to

cut costs. For a fascinating account and analysis see Dorothy Shipps, “The Invisible Hand: Big

Business and Chicago School Reform,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 99, #1, Fall 1997, pp. 73-

116 or her later excellent book on the subject: School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-2000

(Kansas 2006.)

A 1987 teachers’ strike brought those two sides together to push for a reform act passed by the

Illinois legislature in 1988 that created “Local School Councils” (LSC) to be elected by residents in

a particular school area. According to Shipps, the strike “enrag[ed] parents and provid[ed] the

catalyst for a coalition between community groups and Chicago United [the business lobby] that

was forged in the ensuing year.” (The full story of this complicated process is provided by Shipps in

her book; see Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

The central figure, establishment godfather, and spiritus rector of this entire network is Thomas

Ayers, the recently deceased father and protector of Bill Ayers. Thomas Ayers headed

Commonwealth Edison for seven years, ending in 1980. Before reaching the top job, he helped

negotiate the first labor contract between the energy giant and the International Brotherhood of

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 139

Electrical Workers. He served on many boards, including that of G.D. Searle, Chicago Pacific

Corp., Zenith Corp., Northwest Industries, First National Bank of Chicago and Tribune Co., owner

of the Chicago Tribune. He worked with many nonprofits, serving as the chair of the Chicago

Urban League, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and Industry,

Chicago United, Community Renewal Society and the Chicago Community Trust. Extremely

important is Ayers’ status as a member of the board of General Dynamics Corp. of St. Louis, one of

the largest US defense contractors.34 This role by itself is enough to certify that Thomas Ayers was

a high-level member of the US intelligence community. Thomas Ayers can be regarded as a civic

leader and trend setter of the upper crust of Chicago society, a high-level political fixer who was

comfortable hob-nobbing with bankers, top executives, trade union bureaucrats, gangsters, and

finally with terrorists like his son.

One of the remarkable things about the Weatherman faction was that so many of its leaders were

the sons and daughters of the US ruling class, and especially of those with obvious links into the

intelligence community, be it through the OSS, the CIA, or the foundations. One always wondered:

were these protofascist anarchists simply acting out their own personal Oedipal rebellions against

mommy and daddy? There is ample evidence of this in Ayers hyper-Oedipal “kill your parents”

outburst. But, at the same time there was always the suspicion that there might be something more

going on: were these spoiled little elitists being sent into the student movement to do a stage before

they moved on to some cushier form of employment, perhaps in the family business? A few of them

ended up dead or serving life terms in prison, but a military career would be no less risky. So there

is always the lingering suspicion that such an internship might have been what some of their parents

had in mind at the beginning.

Believe it or not, the foundation-funded left CIA (or left FBI, as the case may be) has taken care

of Bill Ayers so well that he is now a tenured professor of education at Northern Illinois University.

He may have gone from throwing bombs to tampering with the minds of defenseless young

students, but his program remains the same: to provoke an all-out race war in the United States. As

Steve Diamond has commented on noquarterusa.net, ‘Since the days of Weather Underground,

Ayers has advocated a viewpoint that argues that the fundamental issue in American life is “white

skin privilege” – that white Americans benefit from being white at the expense of blacks. As Ayers’

wife Bernardine Dohrn wrote in the introduction to a 2002 book she co-authored with Ayers and

their fellow Weather Underground veteran Jeff Jones: “One cannot talk separately about class,

gender, culture, immigration, ethnicity, or biology without being intertwined with race, as Katrina

and the systematic destruction of a major black U.S. city re-informs us. We were waking up [in the

late 1960s]. What to do once we had knowledge of the dimensions of white skin privilege? How to

destroy white supremacy? Well, that is another matter. And as burning today as it was then.”’

Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeff Jones, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry,

Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground 1970 – 1974 (New York: Seven Stories

Press, 2006).

AYERS: “I DON’T REGRET SETTING BOMBS.

I FEEL WE DIDN’T DO ENOUGH”

“‘I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said [to the New York Times]. “I feel we didn’t do

enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in

the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The

long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on

140 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility

for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in

other people that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.” Does Ayers plan

to kill again? “I don’t want to discount the possibility. I don’t think you can understand a single

thing we did without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War,” he said, and the fact that “the

enduring scar of racism was fully in flower.” Ayers admits that he finds “a certain eloquence to

bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance.”’ (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of

Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,”’ New York

Times, September 11, 2001) Ayers later claimed that his threats to go back to terrorism were “a

joke.” Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a “whirlpool of violence’ – and, we might

add, criminal insanity. What Ayers is saying is that, from the point of view of his terrorist

controllers and ruling class case officers, it was well worth a few dead cops to be able to break the

back of the protest movements of the 1960s, which is after all the only thing that Ayers and Dohrn

have ever accomplished, apart from some narcissistic preening.

The Weatherman symbol which Ayers bears, depending on how it is depicted, has something in

common with the semi-circle which stands out from the logo of the Obama campaign. According to

his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers bears on his back the Weatherman logo, a rainbow

with a superimposed lightning bolt. The basic form of this logo was a semi-circle; it can be seen on

the dust jacket of the 2001 hardcover edition of Ayers’ book. It has curiously disappeared from the

later paperback edition. The Obama campaign logo was a blue O, with the lower half filled with red

and white stripes. When seen from certain angles and distances, the Obama logo bore a distinct

resemblance to the older Weatherman coat of arms, especially when it was the all-blue version

rather than the full-color one. In heraldry, one would have said that Obama’s escutcheon contained

a reference to the Weatherman crest. One can imagine Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn meeting in 2005

or 2006 and wickedly chortling about the new design, meant to symbolize the final revenge of the

Weather Underground terrorist killers and butchers in the form of the seizure of power in

Washington by a secret disciple of their left CIA belief structure. It was a risky gesture, since it

risked being recognized, denounced, and exposed. Would Americans ever vote to put a crypto-

Weatherman into the White House? Given the importance of emblems in fascism, this should not be

taken lightly.

At the time he was interviewed, Ayers was 56, and was flogging his self-serving

autobiographical cover story entitled Fugitive Days (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Ayers recounted

how he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol

building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. Is this a confession? No, because Ayers by now has

embraced post-modernism with its categorical denial that any such things as reality and truth exist

or can ever exist: “‘Is this, then, the truth?” he writes. “Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest

to me…. ‘Obviously, the point is it’s a reflection on memory,” he answered. “It’s true as I

remember it.” Ayers remembers much, and then disremembers it: “‘Everything was absolutely ideal

on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: “Even though I didn’t

actually bomb the Pentagon — we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and

claimed it.” He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he

calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was

extensive.’ There is no doubt: Ayers is a post-modernist, a liar. (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a

Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,”’

New York Times, September 11, 2001)

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 141

The terrorist is now a suitably blasé and laid-back professor of education (not a professor of

English, as Obama evasively described him in the Philadelphia debate with Hillary when George

Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers), and a very influential professor at that. According to the

review in the New York Times, ‘Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A

spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal

crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.” Ayers might still be

vulnerable on the murder technicality, some might argue. Ayers’ transitional program to the

Weatherman communist utopia was summed up in classically Oedipal terms as follows: “Kill all the

rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s

where it’s really at.” He is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at

Chicago. When questioned about his exhortation to homicide and terrorism, Ayers again retreats

into the postmodern briar patch: if I say terrorism, it’s just a metaphor, a piece of irony! Ayers

comments: “it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did [say it],’ he sighed. “It was

a joke about the distribution of wealth.” (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a

Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,” New York Times, September

11, 2001) Too bad if you died.

Ayers’ consort is Bernardine Dohrn, the sado-masochistic heroine of new left Weatherman

terrorism who strutted as an elitist dominatrix in a leather mini-skirt on the stage of the SDS split

convention on Wabash in Chicago in June 1969, ready to rumble with the downscale pro-working

class nerds and Maoists of Milton Rosen’s Progressive Labor Party, a split-off from the CPUSA.

Bernardine was the MI-6 leather lady Diana Rigg of The Avengers – with a whip, she could have

started a brilliant career at such establishments as Dominique’s House of Pain. But Bernardine had

come from the left-communist circles around the National Lawyers’ Guild, deployed into SDS to

turn the organization towards lunatic purgative violence, the advocacy of race war in the US, and

speedy doom.

Ayers lived underground as a fugitive from the FBI from 1970 on. He disappeared from view

after his then wealthy elitist/terrorist girlfriend, Diana Oughton, along with Ted Gold from the Mad

Dog faction and the ultra-violent Terry Robbins, all died when their bomb factory, located in a posh

Greenwich Village townhouse, blew up because of their incompetent handling of explosives.35

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, according to Ayers’

count, and also helped spring narcotics guru Timothy Leary from jail where he was serving time.

This last caper was a piece of crude political theater, and showed anybody with a brain that the

Weathermen were in fact police agents and that the CIA wanted Leary freed to further inundate the

world with LSD under the auspices of Project MK Ultra. Dohrn is now the director of the Legal

Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University. Their old friends Kathy

Boudin and David Gilbert, whose child they have raised, are serving prison terms for a 1981

robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, N.Y., in which the Weathermen murdered four

people, including two policemen and two armed guards.36 Gilbert is clearly hoping that a President

Obama would pardon him.

TERRORIST MÉNAGE À TROIS: AYERS, BERNARDINE, WARD CHURCHILL

Ayers, as the New York Times review concedes, was always suspect in SDS because he was the

son of a rich and powerful executive, and was suspected of having intelligence community links.

His father, Thomas Ayers, was, as we have seen, chairman and chief executive officer of

Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University and of the Chicago

Symphony. The little rich boy Bill Ayers attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then

142 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

the University of Michigan, but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society. “In 1967 he

met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was

a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts,” wrote the Times. In 1970,

after the explosion of the Greenwich Village townhouse, Dohrn jumped bail and failed to appear for

her trial in connection with the Weatherman Days of Rage caper, a piece of absurd political

tragicomedy in which a few hundred Weathermen wearing football helmets proposed to start the

revolution by doing battle with the Chicago cops in the middle of the Loop. The Weathermen had

expected a massive turnout that would have allowed them to rule the streets and sweep the forces of

order aside. The whole lunatic exercise was predictably a tactical failure, and an even bigger

strategic political failure, since it marks the end of the student movement and of the Students for a

Democratic Society. Despite all of its problems, SDS had been by some measures the largest leftwing

membership organizations in the history of this country, and with reasonable leadership it

could have acted as a pressure group to the left of the Democratic Party for many years to come.

But that meant nothing to the Weatherman provocateurs, police agents, and wreckers, who seemed

determined to destroy SDS with all the tools at their disposal.

Later in the spring of 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were both indicted along with other Weathermen

in Federal Court under the Rap Brown law for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of

Rage, and then for “conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges

were dropped in 1974, allegedly because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance,

but, some said, because the individuals in question were evidently assets of interest to the US

intelligence community.

FOUNDATIONS ALLEGED TO HAVE FUNDED THE WEATHERMEN

The now obscure but highly detailed survey entitled Carter and the Party of International

Terrorism,37 issued in the summer of 1976 by the long-defunct US Labor Party, alleged the

involvement of a number of foundations in the origins and development of the Weathermen. This

study expresses a heterodox view of the Weathermen which may nevertheless prove heuristic:

… The Weathermen were created as a joint project of the Ford Foundation, IPS, and the

Institute for Social Research (ISR) [at the University of Michigan].38 The group was spawned in

May, 1968 at a “secret meeting” in the midst of the Columbia University student strike.

Weatherman founder Mark Rudd constituted the initial cell around a Ford Foundation grant

under which the group agreed to bust the strike through anarchist provocations. The Ford

Foundation “blank check” was conduited through Tom Neumann, the [step-son] of OSS

ideologue Herbert Marcuse and the head of a New York City IPS anarchist project, “Up Against

the Wall Motherf****r.” Weathermen were constituted as a national faction within the IPSdominated

Students for a Democratic Society by means of the selection process conducted

during 1968-1969 through a series of position papers published in the Radical Education

Project, run by Marcus Raskin and Arthur Waskow. In fact, the position papers (including the

infamous “You Don’t Need a Weatherman…” were synthetic belief structures drafted by

psychological warfare experts at ISR and published under the bylines of SDS leaders like Bill

Ayers and Jim Mellen – both [Ann Arbor] ISR graduate students. SDSers attracted to the

anarcho-syndicalist Weatherman credo were put through a series of well-financed “military

maneuvers” during this period to refine the selection. The Democratic Convention riots in

Chicago: Led by IPS operatives Hayden and Waskow and heavily financed by the Carnegie

Fund ($85,000), the Office of Economic Opportunity ($194,000 conduited through IPS), plus

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 143

similar sums from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the New World Foundation, and the Roger Baldwin

Foundation of the ACLU. […]

The Fall 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago [was] a Weatherman riot financed through a “war

chest” bankrolled by Raskin, Waskow, et al.; also funded through an IPS front called

“American Playground,” through the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and through the IPS

media project, Liberation News Service. By this point, the Weatherman belief structure was

psychotically fascistic, as demonstrated in the Dec. 1969 ‘War Council’ speech by IPS

controller Bernardine Dohrn referring to the recent Manson family murders’ [cited elsewhere in

this book]. (Carter and the PIT, 121)

The USLP authors explicitly accused the Ford Foundation of helping to call forth violent radical

groups:

The entire Ford operation took on an upgraded character in 1966 with the appointment of

McGeorge Bundy as the president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy’s experience as the special

National Security Adviser to President Kennedy provided for an upgraded interface between the

Foundation’s activities and the overall global warfare policies of the Rockefeller family empire.

Ford virtually orchestrated - along with the subsumed Institute for Policy Studies field

operations - the creation of the black nationalist “radical” apartheid operation, the domestic race

war prospectus, the building up of a nationwide network of urban brainwashing centers and the

creation of a nationwide Gestapo in the form of the Law Enforcement Assistance

Administration. By 1968, the Ford Foundation was openly funding domestic terrorism. The

Weatherman organization represents the most open case, although during the 1968 New York

City teachers’ strike, the Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the

Communist Party USA, all by that point under Institute for Policy Studies control, were

bankrolled by Ford.” (Carter and the PIT, 19)

It has proven impossible to corroborate these charges using other sources, and the historical

record remains fragmentary and incomplete. The accuracy of some of these allegations cannot be

determined without access to the relevant government and foundation archives, which will hardly

be forthcoming in time to help vet Obama’s closest associates. If the charges made by the USLP

three decades ago are accurate, then the leading Weathermen, including Obama’s friends Ayers and

Dohrn, started working for the foundations more than forty years ago, and continue to receive grants

from many of these same foundations today.

THE WAR AGAINST MONOGAMY: AYERS GOES BISEXUAL

Ayers also figures as yet another homosexual or bisexual in Obama’s life, beyond Frank, Donald

Young, Larry Sinclair, and others. Ayers in Fugitive Days ‘also writes about the Weathermen’s

sexual experimentation as they tried to “smash monogamy.” The Weathermen were “an army of

lovers,” he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male

friend.”’39 If Ayers became bisexual, he may still be bisexual, and this would place another bisexual

or homosexual partner in Obama’s immediate circle, in addition to Wright (accused of closet

homosexuality by Rev. James David Manning of Harlem), Larry Sinclair, and the late Donald

Young, the gay choirmaster of Wright’s church who was found murdered on Christmas morning

2007. When Dohrn was asked about the revolutionary orthodoxy of settling into marriage after

efforts to smash monogamy, Ms. Dohrn said, “You’re always trying to balance your understanding

of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.” Ayers chimed in

144 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

that he shared the same conflicts about marriage. “We have to learn how to be committed,” he said,

“and hold out the possibility of endless reinventions.”

Indeed, a good agent provocateur should be able to re-invent himself or herself several times in a

career. A champion in this was Arthur Koestler, who went from being a Zionist in Palestine to a

KPD communist to a Cold War hardline anti-communist, to a Jungian dealer in paranormal and

psychic phenomena, ending up as a voluntary euthanasia advocate. He also changed nationalities

several times, from Hungarian to proto-Israeli to German to British. The best guess is that he was a

British agent from the very early stages on. Ayers, by contrast, still has a ways to go if he wants to

get into the Spy Museum.

WARD CHURCHILL, WEATHERMAN AND PARALLEL LIFE

TO AYERS AND DOHRN

Another key Weatherman supporter who figures in the life of Ayers and Dohrn is Ward

Churchill, who was up to the end of 2007 probably the best known former Weatherman still active

in politics, largely because of his statement noted earlier that the office workers who died in the

World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were “little Eichmanns,” servants of imperialism who

deserved what they got. Churchill also became infamous as a supporter of the CIA’s blowback

theory of 9/11, which he saw not as a false flag operation by the Anglo-American intelligence

community, but rather as just retribution for the crimes of US imperialism. This tirade had made

Ward Churchill a favorite target of Fox News Channel personalities like O’Reilly and Hannity.

Churchill stated that anyone who doubted the official US version of 9/11 – the 19 Arab hijackers,

Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, etc.- was really a racist who did not believe that Arabs were capable of

great things – a very imaginative defense of the US government line. Especially in 2005-2007,

Churchill was repeatedly attacked by the reactionary Fox News Channel personalities O’Reilly and

Hannity, and was ousted from his tenured post at the University of Colorado with much fanfare.

Back around 1970, Ward Churchill had been a Weatherman, just like Ayers and Dohrn. Today

he poses as an American Indian activist. A recent critical account of Ward Churchill by Bob Black

alleges that c. 1970,

Ex-Weathermen were even less popular than Vietnam veterans. It took Churchill awhile to find

his way from the warpath to the career path. He became a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune

magazine. Finally he discovered, or invented, his Indian heritage. In 1978 he took on the new

role of professional Indian. By 1983, he was “director of Planning, Research and Development

for Educational Opportunity Programs at the University of Colorado/Boulder.” In plain English,

he was an affirmative-action bureaucrat, a paid race-monger. He made the most of the gig, and

very possibly wrote himself a job description to jump into academia. So he is now, without even

possessing a doctorate, a tenured ethnic-studies professor at the university in the posh resort

town of Boulder. Tom Giago, an enrolled Oglala Sioux born and raised on the Pine Ridge

reservation, the publisher of Indian Country Today, considers Churchill a “white profiteer, a

police agent and a terrorist.”… If Churchill’s indigenism is the radical threat he says it is, why

does the government pay him to propagate it? When Churchill first surfaces, he is killing

indigenous people for the U.S. Government. Next he is a member of the agent-ridden

Weatherman SDS; then a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune; and then a sachem in the agentriddled

American Indian Movement. Next, notwithstanding this unsavory background, he works

as a bureaucrat for a state university, from which gig he is bootstrapped into a tenure-track

faculty position for which he has no qualifications, and soon he is tenured. His noisy presence

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 145

in the Amerindian nationalist movement helps to splinter it. For Churchill, the test of indigenist

orthodoxy is simple: you pass it if – but only for so long as – you promote Churchill’s career. Is

Churchill, as many suspect, a police agent? Nobody’s said it better than Churchill himself:

“You don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work.” Indian identity, in Churchill’s windy words,

“is determined by cultural/intellectual/political attributes,” but he is careful not to identify what

these attributes are, for if he did, it would be obvious that he doesn’t possess them.’40

We have seen the race-based divide-and-conquer policies of the foundations at work against the

black and Hispanic communities; Ward Churchill’s operations remind us that similar policies have

been used against the American Indian or Native American parts of the population as well.

Back in 1969, Ward Churchill worked together with Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn at the

Chicago SDS National Office: ‘“I had my little medals, I went back to my tractor factory” - and

started hanging out in Chicago at the national office of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society,

where he ran into Bernardine Dohrn, an attractive leader of the Weather Underground, a radical

group that favored the bombings of buildings and confrontations with police in their fight against

racism, the Vietnam War and the ruling class. But the Weather Underground knew more about

Marxism than about bombs. Churchill briefly taught the Weathermen and Weatherwomen how to

make bombs and how to fire weapons - “which end does the bullet go, what are the ingredients,

how do you time the damned thing.”’ Ward Churchill’s instruction may have been faulty, however:

‘Thenthree of the radicals accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone, and

Churchill decided that he had had enough. He became involved with Native American and Black

Panther causes - “I was identifying more with people of color than the white left” - and started

working for AIM in 1972, the year before the Wounded Knee, S.D., shootout between activists who

had seized the village and FBI men who joined the violent confrontation.’ (Denver Post, January

18, 1987)41 One of those who perished in the explosion of the Weatherman bomb factory in New

York’s Greenwich Village was, as we have seen, Bill Ayers’ then girlfriend, the wealthy heiress

Diana Oughton.

This was precisely the time when pro-terrorist professor Ward Churchill was teaching bombmaking

to the Weatherman, as he himself boasted in a 1987 Denver Post interview. The old

Weatherman ideology burns brightly in Ward Churchill, a veteran provocateur and wrecker. Ward

Churchill speaks with much greater frankness about the Weatherman world view than do Ayers,

Dohrn, and the rest of their circle, who need to be more careful of what they say in public. Ward

Churchill lets it all hang out – he is the Weatherman who tells you what the others are thinking

today. And this is what Ward Churchill is thinking these days: “One of the things I’ve suggested is

that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary,” Churchill said in a 2004 interview to Satya

magazine.42 Churchill specifies that he does not want a revolution; things are too far gone for that.

He does not want a new regime to take power in the U.S. Instead, he explained, he wants the state

destroyed. Like Wolfowitz after 9/11, he wants to “end states” – specifically this one. “I want the

state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of

existence altogether,” he concluded. This is indeed the hard line of the academic, foundationfunded,

and intelligence-community linked ultra-left provocateurs. These are the sorts of people

who will triumph in an Obama administration.43 Ward Churchill thus wants to annihilate and to

obliterate the United States. This is a proposal for genocide. One of the central ideas of this book is

that the old Weatherman program of destroying the American people in the service of the

intelligence community, the foundations, and the Wall Street finance oligarchy, expressed more or

less openly by Wright and with special violence and cynicism by Ward Churchill, is in fact the only

possible program of a future Obama administration.

146 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

We stress again that there are not many degrees of separation between Ward Churchill and

Obama. When Ward wanted to join SDS, he went straight to Obama’s friend, neighbor, and cothinker,

Bernardine Dohrn. It was also Ward Churchill who, just back from his tour of duty in

Vietnam in what looks like a branch of Army Intelligence (Long-Range Reconnaissance, the

equivalent of a multi-state killing spree. taught bomb-making to the aspiring terrorist

Weatherpeople in that posh Greenwish Village townhouse. When the townhouse blew up, one of

the dead was Diana Oughton, who was the girlfriend of Obama’s sponsor, benefactor, and friend,

Bill Ayers.(One-degree of separation: Obama’s ultra-leftist backers, Rezkowatch, Monday, April

28, 2008)44

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The years have done nothing to diminish the radical subjectivism of the Weatherman clique.

“Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers had a son, Zayd, in 1977. After the birth of Malik, in 1980, they decided

to surface.” These names may reflect the influence of a general turn in spook circles towards

Islamic, rather than communist cover, which became evident at the end of the 1970s. “Ms. Dohrn

pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined

$1,500. The Federal charges against Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had already been dropped.” This

happy ending was doubtless thanks to the efforts of the CIA Office of Security, which interfaces

with most domestic police agencies and courts. When Kathy Boudin was arrested and given a life

sentence for the New York Brinks robbery and the accompanying murders of policemen, Dohrn and

Ayers volunteered to care for Boudin and Dave Gilbert’s son Chesa, then 14 months old, and

became his legal guardians. Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. When she refused to give

a handwriting sample, she was jailed for seven months. Chesa was without a mother during that

time. Ayers told the New York Times that Chesa was “a very damaged kid.” Given the criminal

irresponsibility of both his biological parents and his adoptive parents, this is no surprise. “He had

real serious emotional problems,” Ayers added. But after extensive therapy, “became a brilliant and

wonderful human being.” (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of

Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen,” New York Times, September 11, 2001)

Smith recounts: ‘As Mr. Ayers mellows into middle age, he finds himself thinking about truth

and reconciliation, he said. He would like to see a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about

Vietnam, he said, like South Africa’s. He can imagine Mr. Kerrey and Ms. Boudin taking part.”

Perhaps this is something we will see under a future Obama administration. And if there were

another Vietnam, he is asked, would he participate again in the Weathermen bombings? By way of

an answer, Mr. Ayers quoted from “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney’s retelling of Sophocles’

Philoctetes: “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.”

He continued to recite:

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.’

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 147

Is this Ayers’ dark prophecy of a future America ruled by his protégé Obama? The New York

Times review moves towards its conclusion. Reflecting on his varied life in a mellow epiphany of

self-indulgence, Ayers added: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope

and history rhymed.” (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a

War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen,” New York Times, September 11, 2001) Too bad

for the dead and maimed cops and innocent bystanders whose blood purchased these epiphanies for

the privileged elitist Ayers, a gravedigger of protest politics in the US all his life.

The question of the continuing close friendship among Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama began to

emerge in February, thanks to the efforts of certain blogs such as noquarterusa.net, and to a

campaign on this issue conducted by the right-wing radio talk show host and television personality,

Sean Hannity.45 Gradually, the Ayers question began to seep into the controlled corporate media:

Joe Klein wrote ‘There are other guilt-by-association problems floating out there: the occasional

over-the-top racial statements by Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright; the fact that Obama has been

described as “friendly” with 1960s dilettante-terrorist William Ayers.”’ (Joe Klein, Time, March 6,

2008) The “friendly” was from arch-mindbender David Axelrod. But Bill Burton, Obama’s

spokesman, said Ayers “does not have a role on the campaign.” Ayers said he had no comment on

his relationship with Obama.

A brief look at the final phase of the Weatherman faction before it disappeared into clandestine

safe houses for a decade or more will permit us to understand the ideology of Ayers and Dohrn,

which is important because these ideas live on today most emphatically in the Obama campaign,

and are in danger of being accomplished under a future Obama regime. The atmosphere that

prevailed in the last days of the legal, aboveground existence of the Weatherman faction is

conveyed in an extraordinary article from Liberation News Service written in the final days of 1969.

WEATHERMAN: AN AGENCY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD

WILL RULE THE USA

We can start with an old article from Liberation News Service about one of the last legal public

events the Weathermen ever held, a kind of Christmas and New Years’ party for agents

provocateurs as the student movement entered its death agony: ‘The Weatherman controlling

faction of SDS held a national “war council” here Dec. 27-30. [1969] About 400 young people

showed up at the gathering—nominally SDS’s quarterly national council meeting—to practice

karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the “Weather Bureau” lay

down its political line for revolution in America. The meeting hall was decked with large banners of

revolutionary leaders—Che, Ho, Fidel, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver—hanging from the ceiling.

One entire wall of the ballroom was covered with alternating black and red posters of murdered

Illinois Panther leader Fred Hampton. An enormous cardboard machine gun hung from the ceiling.

Violence was the keynote of the long hours of talk that began Dec. 27. The distinction between

revolutionary armed struggle and violence for its own sake is a major point of contention between

Weatherman and its numerous critics. The strongest debate centered on the question of who is going

to make the American revolution. Weatherman, along with many others in the movement,

recognizes that the American revolution is part of the world struggle against U.S. imperialism, a

struggle for liberation from both colonial and capitalist oppression. Weatherman’s critics maintain,

however, that Weatherman’s internationalism is based on an analysis that ignores capitalist

oppression in America. Weatherman sees revolutionary change in America as happening almost

solely, if at all, as a belated reaction to a successful world revolution including a successful revolt

148 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

by the black colony inside the U.S.’ (“Weatherman Conducts a ‘War Council,’” Liberation News

Service, Flint, Michigan, Dec. 31, 1969)46

WEATHERMAN: ‘IF IT WILL TAKE FASCISM,

WE’LL HAVE TO HAVE FASCISM’

For our purposes today, the most interesting remarks made that day are probably those of

Weatherman extremist leader Ted Gold, who talked about what the US government and economy

would be like if the race war desired by the Weathermen ever came about. We need to pay careful

attention here, since we are learning something about the way a future Obama regime may treat the

US population:

The logic of that view was expressed in a statement by Ted Gold, a top Weatherman, who said

that “an agency of the people of the world” would be set up to run the U.S. economy and

society after the defeat of the U.S. imperialism abroad. A critic spoke up: “In short, if the

people of the world succeed in liberating themselves before American radicals have made the

American revolution, then the Vietnamese and Africans and the Chinese are gonna move in and

run things for white America. It sounds like a John Bircher’s worst dream. There will have to be

more repression than ever against white people, but by refusing to organize people,

Weatherman isn’t even giving them half a chance.” “Well,” replied Gold, “If it will take

fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Weatherman—virtually all white—continues to promote

the notion that white working people in America are inherently counter-revolutionary,

impossible to organize, or just plain evil — “honky -------,” as many Weathermen put it.

Weatherman’s bleak view of the post-revolutionary world comes from an analysis of American

society that says that “class doesn’t count, race does.” White workers are in fact fighting for

their survival, insisted people doing organizing of factory workers in California. They claim

that strikes for wage increases and job security can fairly easily be linked to the anti-imperialist

analysis. But Weatherman denies that survival is an issue for white workers. Weatherman

leader Howie Machtinger derided white workers for desiring better homes, better food and

essentially better lives. Machtinger [argued]: “When you try to defend honky workers who just

want more privilege from imperialism, that shows your race origins.” The Weatherman position

boiled down to inevitable race war in America, with very few “honkies”—except perhaps the

400 people in the room and the few street kids or gang members who might run with them—

surviving the holocaust. That notion is linked to Weatherman’s concept of initiating armed

struggle now and not waiting to build mass white support—that is, a small but courageous white

fighting force will do material damage that will weaken imperialism while the black liberation

movement smashes “the imperialist ___” by itself. Machtinger talked a lot about how the black

liberation movement is so far advanced at this point that the only thing left for white

revolutionaries is to support blacks by fighting cops as a diversionary tactic. Weatherman is

adamant in saying that whites cannot be organized into a mass revolutionary movement. To say

that they can or should, according to Weatherleaders, is “national chauvinism.”… A new

Weatherman catchword was “barbarism.” The Weathermen see themselves as playing a role

similar to that of the barbarian tribes, such as the Vandals and the Visigoths, who invaded and

destroyed the decadent, corrupt Rome.’

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 149

BERNARDINE DOHRN DEMANDS TERRORISM AND ARMED STRUGGLE

A central figure in these monstrous proceedings was Obama’s close friend Bernardine Dohrn,

who found a way to bring the conference to a new low of despicable anti-human barbarism, but

always under left cover:

Bernardine Dohrn, former inter-organizational secretary of SDS for 1968-69, gave the opening

speech.47 She began by admitting that a lot of Weatherman’s actions have been motivated by “a

white guilt trip.” “But we ------ up a lot anyway. We didn’t fight around Bobby Seale when he

was shackled at the Conspiracy Trial. We should have torn the courtroom apart. We didn’t

smash them when Move peace creeps hissed David Hilliard on Moratorium Day in San

Francisco. We didn’t burn Chicago down when Fred was killed.” Dohrn characterized violent,

militant response in the streets as “armed struggle” against imperialism. “Since Oct. 11 [the last

day of the SDS national window-breaking action in Chicago], we’ve been wimpy on armed

struggle... We’re about being a fighting force alongside the blacks, but a lot of us are still

honkies, and we’re still scared of fighting. We have to get into armed struggle.” Part of armed

struggle, as Dohrn and others laid it down, is terrorism. Political assassination—openly joked

about by some Weathermen—and literally any kind of violence that is considered anti-social

were put forward as legitimate forms of armed struggle. “We’re in an airplane,” Dohrn related,

“and we went up and down the aisle ‘borrowing’ food from people’s plates. They didn’t know

we were Weathermen; they just knew we were crazy. That’s what we’re talking about, being

crazy --------- and scaring the ----- out of honky America.”’ (“Weatherman Conducts a ‘War

Council,’” Liberation News Service, Flint, Michigan, Dec. 31, 1969)48

BERNARDINE DOHRN: MANSON MURDERS AS

THE ESSENCE OF THE REVOLUTION SHE WANTED

And what kind of revolution did top Weathergirl Bernardine Dohrn want? It was a revolution in

the spirit of Charles Manson, the demonic protagonist of that year’s grisly Tate-LaBianca murders

in Hollywood:

A 20-foot long poster adorned another wall of the ballroom. It was covered with drawings of

bullets, each with a name. Along with the understandable targets like Chicago’s Mayor Daley,

the Weathermen deemed as legitimate enemies to be offed, among others, the Guardian (which

has criticized Weatherman) and Sharon Tate, one of several victims in the recent mass murder

in California. She was eight months pregnant. “Honkies are going to be afraid of us,” Dohrn

insisted. She went on to tell the war council about Charlie Manson, accused leader of the gang

which allegedly murdered the movie star and several others on their Beverly Hills estate.

Manson has been portrayed in the media as a Satanic, magnetic personality who held nearhypnotic

sway over several women whom he lent out to friends as favors and brought along for

the murder scene. The press also mentioned Manson’s supposed fear of blacks—he reportedly

moved into rural California to escape the violence of a race war. Weatherman, the “Bureau”

says, digs Manson, not only for his understanding of white America—the killer purportedly

wrote “pig” in blood on the wall after the murder—but also a “bad --------.” (At least one press

report explained the “pig” on the wall by saying that Manson wrote that in order to throw

suspicion on black people.) [Dohrn gave a three-fingered “fork salute” to mass murderer

Charles Manson. Calling Manson’s victims the “Tate Eight,” Dohrn gloated over the fact that

actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time, had been stabbed with a fork in her womb.]

150 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

“Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they

even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” said Bernardine Dohrn.

This statement by Bernardine marks the maximum in subhuman degradation and degeneracy, a

level of despicable anti-human animus which can match the decadence of any World War II fascist.

Bernardine has lamely attempted to explain that this was all a metaphor, a joke. The Liberation

News correspondent of 1969 took it quite seriously, and so must we today as we look forward to

Bernardine Dohrn’s possible role in a future Obama administration.

WEATHERMAN: THE ‘WHITE DEVIL’ THEORY OF WORLD HISTORY

Bernardine functioned to all intents and purposes as the keynote speaker who set the exalted

moral tone for the rest of the speeches.

Women members of Weatherman held a panel discussion on women’s liberation. The fighting

women, “the women who can carry bombs under their dresses like in “The Battle of Algiers,”

were put forward as the only valid model for women’s liberation. Women’s liberation comes

not only with taking leadership roles and with asserting yourself politically, they said, but also

with overcoming hang-ups about violence.

In between the women’s raps, the people sang a medley of Weatherman songs, high camp

numbers such as, “I’m Dreaming of a White Riot,” “Communism Is What We Do,” and “We

Need a Red Party.” Spirited chants broke out, too: “Women power!” “Struggling power!” “Red

Army power!” “Sirhan Sirhan power!” “Charlie Manson power!” “Power to the People!” “Off

the pig!” […]

Another speaker referred to the white women’s role as reproduced and characterized white

women who bring up children in white America as “pig mothers.”

The “crazy violent ----------” theme was picked up in a long address by “Weather Bureau”

member John Jacobs, who laid out the “White Devil” theory of all world history and traced the

history of today’s youth from the Beat Generation of the 1950s. [Here Jeremiah Wright, Father

Pfleger, Dwight Hopkins, and Otis Moss III might have felt at home.]

“We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent,’” Jacobs declared. That notion, coupled

with the White Devil theory, formed the basis of what they call “Serve the People --------.”

Serving the people, relating to people’s needs, is a crucial factor in many people’s minds of

organizing white working people in America, so that the revolution will come as class war and

end in socialism, rather than come as race war and end in fascism. (“Weatherman Conducts a

‘War Council,’” Liberation News Service, Flint, Michigan, Dec. 31, 1969)49

But the Weatherman perspective was precisely that there was no hope of revolution against the

financier ruling class, and that in any case race war against white blue collar workers was the thing

that was to be desired and provoked.

OBAMA’S WEATHERMAN CONNECTION: HARBINGER OF SWIFT BOATING

By spring 2008, it has been obvious for months that Obama’s close affinity with and friendship

for some of the most celebrated terrorists and murderers of recent US history was going to cause

him political problems, to say the least. As former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson

commented, Obama was damaged goods from the moment that the average American heard about

his penchant for associating with known criminals:

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 151

There is now undeniable proof of a longstanding relationship between Barack Obama and

William Ayers. We are not talking about two guys who just happened to bump into one another

on the street. We are not talking about a secret admirer (Ayers) who quietly sent $200 to an

aspiring politician. No, we are talking about William Ayers hosting a fundraiser for Barack

Obama and actively working with him to secure Barack’s first electoral victory in Illinois. But

wait, there is more. Barack and Ayers also served on the board of the Woods Fund. And they

worked together to give money to some other folks, including a group with ties to the PLO. […]

Look at the beating that John Kerry took for tossing his medals over the White House fence.

Ayers did not toss medals, he threw bombs. Real ones. Bombs that exploded. Do you think that

Republicans will ignore Obama’s ties to Ayers? The two were serving on the same board in

2002. We are talking less than six years ago and the record will come out showing some

questionable grants by these two characters. William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be

Barack Obama’s Willie Horton.’ (noquarterusa.net, April 16, 2008)

THE SDS MENAGERIE AROUND OBAMA

The problem goes way beyond just Ayers and his fork-saluting spouse. The Obama campaign

presents the aspect of a storm cellar or assisted-living facility for the burned-out wreckage of the

intelligence community operations of yesteryear. Some of these figures were Weatherman terrorists,

some were simply SDS extremists, some flirted with Stalinism. In July 1996, the New York Times

reported that Marilyn Katz, a former aide to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and now a wheel

horse of the Daley machine and a supporter of Obama, “oversaw security for Students for a

Democratic Society, a radical group at the eye of the Chicago protests” during the 1968 Democratic

National Convention. There was no “security” in the SDS contingent on that occasion. Ms. Katz

was presumably occupied with organizing provocations to provide cover for the police riot that

ensued.

On October 2, 2002, when Barack Obama delivered his obscure, unrecorded, and poorly

attended but now famous speech at a Chicago antiwar rally, Katz was one of the key organizers of

the rally. On the event’s fifth anniversary, Marilyn Katz, now a member of Obama’s national

finance committee, posted the following statement on the blog of Chicagoans Against the War and

Injustice (CAWI), which she had “put together,” relying upon “some of her old contacts she met

organizing anti-war demonstrations for Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s.” Katz

described how the rally in Chicago on October 2, 2002, was “not organized by a politician or a

recognized political force. It was organized by a loose group of friends, mostly SDS veterans. Katz

was thus key to providing Obama’s only foreign policy credential and proof of his alleged good

judgment – his lame anti-war speech of October 2002, the horse that he mercilessly rode to death

during the 2008 primaries. What would Barky ever have done without his SDS friends?

MARILYN KATZ, SDS VET AND ORGANIZER

OF OBAMA’S OCTOBER 2002 ANTI-WAR SPEECH

Marilyn Katz later recounted: ‘Meeting in a living room in Chicago just ten days earlier, we

chose to act, agreeing that on October 2, 2002, we would assemble in Chicago’s Federal Plaza to

stand against the war. With a gut feeling that other Americans also thought the invasion of Iraq was

foolhardy, if not immoral and absurd, but with no assurance than anyone would come to a

demonstration we agreed that “If we were five, we would be five.” “If we were without any elected

officials, we would be an involved citizenry. But we would take a stand.” But we were not alone. In

152 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

fact nearly 3,000 people assembled in Federal Plaza on that day responding to the flurry of emails (a

new organizing technology for us) that seemingly liberated people from their sense of isolation and

offered them the opportunity of collective action - of community. Black, Latino, White, veterans of

the peace and women’s movements, the 60s, high school and college youth, community activist—a

mosaic of the City. Long-time leaders like Jesse Jackson, Juan Andrade and Julie Hamos and a new

voice.... not yet known to the crowd, to the media or to the nation.... the voice of State Senator

Barack Obama.”50

Katz was joined in the organizing by former SDS president Carl Davidson, like Klonsky

reputedly once upon a time close to the Communist Party USA line, so that Obama was getting help

from “two perennially engaged ‘60s veterans and ex-SDS members,” Jeff Epton wrote December

15, 2003, for In These Times. Katz and Davidson were “key organizers” of the October 2, 2002,

anti-war demonstration. Originating as Chicagoans Against War with Iraq (CAWI), by December

2003 CAWI had shifted into Chicagoans Against War and Injustice. Davidson later commented, “as

the war transformed from invasion to occupation, CAWI activists managed to avoid splits over

sectarian and strategic differences, and committed to stay together and move from ‘protest to

politics.’” In 2005, Katz and Davidson co-wrote a documented entitled “Stopping War, Seeking

Justice.” Davidson is “now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and

Socialism, an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA,” Cliff Kincaid wrote on February 18,

2008, for Accuracy in Media.

Davidson is also an Obama supporter, now leading Progressives for Obama. On his blog Keep

On Keepin’ On, Davidson recently endorsed Obama’s comments about small town people being

bitter. Katz is attempting to minimize her role in the old SDS. On April 18, 2008, the Chicago Sun-

Times quoted Katz as saying that she “met Ayers when he was 17 and they were members of

Students for a Democratic Society, a peaceful group from which the Weather Underground

splintered.” Katz also demanded that Obama’s relationship with former domestic terrorist William

Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn—with whom Obama launched his political career in 1995 at

the Ayers-Dohrn Hyde Park home— “should not be a campaign issue.” Katz is now the head of MK

Communications and a registered lobbyist with the City of Chicago; she has personally contributed

$1,000 to Obama for America, Obama’s presidential campaign fund. Marilyn Katz and her husband

Allan J. Katz, a shareholder and chairman of the Policy Practice Group at Akerman Senterfitt of

Tallahassee, Florida and a Tallahassee City Commissioner, as well as a Member of the Florida

Democratic Committee and Democratic National Committee, are joint bundlers committed to

raising a minimum of $200,000 for Obama’s campaign.’51

MIKE KLONSKY, FOUNDATION STALINIST

Another Katz and Ayers associate—and Obama supporter—is Mike Klonsky. In 1968, he was

the last pre-Weatherman SDS national chairman and a “demonstration organizer.” Klonsky ‘“would

go on in post-SDS years to form the October League (Marxist-Leninist) and Communist Party

(Marxist-Leninist), part of the new communist movement that emerged [born dead] in the 1970s.”

Klonsky was named by Ayers in the 1990s to head the Small Schools Workshop. In 1996, Klonsky,

like William Ayers, was a consultant for Mayor Richard M. Daley’s “agenda for public schools.”

Until June 25, 2008, when he was jettisoned for purposes of damage control and window dressing

in the course of Obama’s hard right turn after the primaries, Klonsky maintained a community blog

subtitled Freedom Teachers at MyBarackObama.com.

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 153

During the engineered breakup of SDS, Klonsky was a leader of the tendency called

Revolutionary Youth Movement I (RYM-I), a less extreme competitor of the Ayers-Dohrn-Mark

Rudd-Jeff Jones-John Jacobs-Ted Gold Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM-II), which

became the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground, otherwise known as Weatherpeople,

Weather Bureau, etc. Klonsky and Ayers appeared for a time as bitter factional opponents, but at

bottom this was simply role-playing, with Klonsky picking up the radicals who were only halfdemented,

and thus not crazy enough to join the kamikazes of the Ayers-Dohrn clique. If Ayers was

known in SDS as a likely spook and provocateur for the intelligence community, Klonsky was

regarded as a submarine for the Communist Party, USA, whose leaders were then in turn controlled

by the FBI. During the lean years that followed, Klonsky tried Maoism.

The cooperation of Ayers and Klonsky in favor of Obama’s seizure of power reproduces the old

CP-anarchist alliance, which was a common wrecking plan for SDS chapters in 1969-1970. When

Klonsky’s role in the Obama campaign’s internet effort became widely known, the Illinois Messiah

was quick to cut his losses so as to avoid the specter of yet another explosive flare-up of negative

publicity on the models of Rezko, Wright and Ayers. ‘No sooner than Global Labor blogged …

about the role in the Obama campaign of Mike Klonsky, former Weather Underground leader Bill

Ayers’ longtime comrade-in-arms from their days in SDS to the Chicago School Wars they fought

in the 80s and 90s alongside Barack Obama, and presto he’s gone. As of this evening, Klonsky is no

longer blogging on the Barack Obama for President website.’ (Steve Diamond,

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/, June 25, 2008)

Another fanatical Obama backer with SDS connections is Tom Hayden, the SDS co-founder

who helped promote the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago. Hayden, a former

California state senator and ex-husband of radical chic Jane Fonda, has endorsed Sen. Obama. So

has Jane Fonda. Hayden authored the SDS political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement,

which the group’s founding members adopted in 1962. This document condemned the American

political system as the cause of international conflict and a variety of social ills — including racism,

materialism, militarism, and poverty. Instead, it offered the vacuous petty-bourgeois slogan of

“participatory democracy,” while offering no analysis and making no demands for labor rights,

rebuilding the inner cities, third-world economic development, or other urgent economic issues of

the day.

SDS derived from a group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a transparent cold

war anti-Soviet CIA front group made up of right-wing social democrats. LID has a student and

youth branch called Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). SLID was running out of

steam in the early 1960s, so the intelligence community decided to re-invent it in the trendier format

of SDS. The name may have been taken from German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher

Studentenbund), the successful pseudo-radical student group of Willy Brandt’s German Social

Democratic Party (SPD), which many CIA officers had been able to observe first-hand during their

frequent postings in West Germany, the hub of the cold war.

During the course of the 1960s, large parts of the SDS membership would escape ruling-class

ideological control, which is what gave SDS the potential that had to be destroyed. But the SDS

leadership was confined to narrow cliques with strong intelligence community input, who were

easily able to defeat challengers and insurgents in conformity with Roberto Michels’ Iron Law of

Oligarchy.

Todd Gitlin, the SDS president from 1963 to 1964, has also been well taken care of, and now

serves as a tenured professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. Giltin is a regular

154 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

contributor to Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe. He also blogs at ToddGitlin.com. In a new low for

tendentious, pro-Obama pseudo-journalism, Gitlin was contacted April 18, 2008, by The New

Republic to respond to Sen. Obama’s Philadelphia cover-up speech about his hate-spewing pastor,

Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Gitlin had endorsed Obama on February 4, 2008.

Paul Booth is yet another founder and former National Secretary of Students for a Democratic

Society (SDS) and former President of Chicago’s Citizen Action Program (CAP), formed in 1969

by trainees from counterinsurgent Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), according to

Discover the Networks. Booth is a labor skate, acting as assistant to Gerald McEntee, president of

the public employees union AFSCME.

In 1973, “radical activists” Booth and his wife, Heather Booth, founded The Midwest Academy

(MA), a “training organization ... for a variety of leftist causes and organizations,” which

“describes itself as ‘one of the nation’s oldest and best known schools for community

organizations, citizen organizations and individuals committed to progressive social change.’”

This is the usual coded language for local control/ community control counterinsurgency. Not

surprisingly, one of The Midwest Academy’s funders is the Woods Foundation of Chicago, on

whose board Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) served 1999 to December 2002 as a paid director with

domestic terrorist William Ayers. In 1999, The Midwest Academy received a $75,000 grant

from the Woods Fund. In 2002, The Midwest Academy received $23,500 for its Young

Organizers Development Program. Additionally, in February 2004 Paul Booth contributed $500

to Obama’s 2004 senatorial campaign.’ (“One-degree of separation: Obama’s ultra-leftist

backers,” Rezkowatch, Monday, April 28, 2008)

WEATHERMAN HATRED OF WHITE WORKERS FROM 1969 TO OBAMA

Obama’s top handler David Axelrod told NPR that it was a mistake to rely on white working

class voters in the first place. In a statement dripping with elitist class prejudice, Axelrod observed:

“The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even

to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”

This is simply factually wrong, since Bill Clinton won many of these voters. Obama’s campaign

manager David Plouffe was even more categorical that blue collar workers were out of reach. But

these were after all registered Democratic voters that Obama was losing in a Democratic primary.

These very damning statements illustrate the thesis of this book that Obama hates and resents white

working families and blue collar voters. Since white working people represent the absolute majority

of the US population, one must wonder by what system Axelrod hopes to win a general election.

Again, the conclusion must be that Obama really has no plan to win a general election, but will

hope for help from police state forces in the form of scandals which will conveniently destroy his

opponent. This is, after all, the main reason Obama is in the US Senate in the first place – ask the

hapless Trilateral victims Marson Blair Hull and Jack Ryan.

THE WOODS FUND AND THE CIA-CONTROLLED FACTIONS OF THE PLO

The Woods Fund of Chicago, with Ayers and Obama on the board for several years before 2002,

appears to function as a funding conduit for certain US-controlled or US-influenced factions of the

highly factionalized and crisis-ridden Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority.

Whether these US-manipulated factions are violent or moderate is less important than the fact that

they represent CIA tentacles inside the PLO. The fact that various Palestinian or PLO factions are

controlled by foreign states is, or ought to be, well-known. The Soviets had some of these factions.

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 155

The Israelis were known to control a part of the central committee of the Abu Nidal Organization,

run by Sabri al-Banna, the son of the pro-British and later pro-Nazi founder of the Moslem

Brotherhood. Ariel Sharon helped to create Hamas, and so forth. The French and the Vatican are not

far behind. So, Obama is close to the apparatus that funds the pro-US fifth column in the PLO. The

PLO-linked groups funded by the Woods Foundation with the help of Obama’s august presence

also appear to be devices for the social control of the Arab populations of Chicago and the

surrounding areas, which are being managed according to the Hapsburg-style affirmative

action/racial identity counterinsurgency method we have already seen at work against black

Americans, Hispanics, and native Americans.

With Obama helping to get funding for his group, the radical Palestinian professor Rashid

Khalidi helped to set up a fund-raiser for Obama when he ran for congress in 2000.

Khalidi, now the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and head of

that school’s Middle East Institute, in an interview in Tuesday’s Daily News, said he hosted the

fundraiser because he and Obama were friends while the two lived in Chicago. “He never came

to us and said he would do anything in terms of Palestinians,” Khalidi told the paper.

Nevertheless, one Hyde Park source close to Obama, speaking only on condition of anonymity,

recalled, “He often expressed general sympathy for the Palestinians — though I don’t recall him

ever saying anything publicly.” Khalidi helped to arrange the recent appearance of Iran’s

Ahmadinejad last summer at Columbia University. (Rashid Khalidi, “Middle East Professor at

Columbia University and PLO activist,” The Jewish Week, 2007, noquarterusa.net)

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University was marred by the university president’s scurrilous

insults against the foreign leader. In the estimation of this writer at the time, the visit created a

turbulent scene of protests which could have been used as a covering screen to assassinate the

Iranian leader and precipitate a general Middle East war. Thankfully, that had not occurred. But the

question remains about Khalidi’s motives in bringing the Iranian president into the chaotic and

dangerous situation that prevailed at Columbia. Had some case officer told him to do it? Even after

its privatization into foundations and private fronts under Executive Order 12333, US intelligence

still does not pay out its money for nothing. What was it that US intelligence was buying from

Khalidi?

As a pro-Israeli account details,

Ayers and Obama had teamed up for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago

charitable organization. Together, they voted to donate $75,000 of the largesse they controlled

to the Arab American Action Network. The AAAN was co-founded by Rashid Khalidi…

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Khalidi denies having been a PLO operative or

having directed its official press agency for six years (from 1976 to 1982).’ (Aaron Klein,

“Obama worked with terrorist; Senator helped fund organization that rejects ‘racist’ Israel’s

existence,” WorldNetDaily, February 24, 2008)

The details on the grants are very interesting:

In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the

disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for

which Khalidi’s wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the

AAAN for $35,000 in 2002. Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec.

11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website. According to tax filings, Obama received

compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2001. …

156 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

The $40,000 grant from Obama’s Woods Fund to the AAAN constituted about a fifth of the

Arab group’s reported grants for 2001, according to tax filings obtained by WND. The $35,000

Woods Fund grant in 2002 also constituted about one-fifth of AAAN’s reported grants for that

year. The AAAN, headquartered in the heart of Chicago’s Palestinian immigrant community,

describes itself as working to “empower Chicago-area Arab immigrants and Arab Americans

through the combined strategies of community organizing, advocacy, education and social

services, leadership development, and forging productive relationships with other

communities.” It reportedly has worked on projects with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant

and Refugee Rights, which supports open borders and education for illegal aliens. AAAN cofounder

Rashid Khalidi was reportedly a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in

Beirut from 1976 to 1982….

Khalidi’s wife, AAAN President Mona Khalidi, was reportedly WAFA’s English translator

during that period. Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but

Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told WND he indeed directed WAFA. Khalidi also

advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991…

While the Woods Fund’s contribution to Khalidi’s AAAN might be perceived as a one-time run

with Obama, the presidential hopeful and Khalidi evidence a deeper relationship. According to

a professor at the University of Chicago who said he has known Obama for 12 years, the

Democratic presidential hopeful first befriended Khalidi when the two worked together at the

university. The professor spoke on condition of anonymity. Khalidi lectured at the University of

Chicago until 2003 while Obama taught law there from 1993 until his election to the Senate in

2004. Khalidi in 2000 held what was described as a successful fundraiser for Obama’s failed

bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, a fact not denied by Khalidi. Speaking in a

joint interview with WND and the John Batchelor Show of New York’s WABC Radio and Los

Angeles’ KFI Radio, Khalidi was asked about his 2000 fundraiser for Obama. “I was just doing

my duties as a Chicago resident to help my local politician,” Khalidi stated. Khalidi said he

supports Obama for president “because he is the only candidate who has expressed sympathy

for the Palestinian cause.” Asked about Obama’s role funding the AAAN, Khalidi claimed he

had “never heard of the Woods Fund until it popped up on a bunch of blogs a few months ago.”

He terminated the call when petitioned further about his links with Obama. Contacted by phone,

Mona Khalidi refused to answer WND’s questions about the AAAN’s involvement with

Obama. (Aaron Klein, “Obama worked with terrorist; Senator helped fund organization that

rejects ‘racist’ Israel’s existence,” WorldNetDaily, February 24, 2008)

OBAMA AND THE CHICAGO ARAB UNDERWORLD: ATA “THE RAT”

In addition to such figures as Khalidi, Obama also came into contact with the gangsters, grafters,

hoodlums, and other sociopaths who populate the wormy underside of the Chicago Arab

community. We will talk in a coming chapter about the Syrian-Levantine Antoin Rezko, his fellow

Levantine Nadhi Auchi, and the renegade Iraqi Electricity Minister Alsammarae. Here we will refer

to a smaller fish, but a very significant one: Ali Ata, who was caught up in the FBI dragnet of

Operation Board Games around the Illinois Combine for graft and corruption, which has a division

for every ethnic group in Chicago. Ali Ata, now a convicted felon, gets us very close to Obama: all

the way to Obama’s godfather and moneybags Antoin Rezko, and all the way to Illinois Governor

Rod Blagojevich. Here we begin to see what kind of perks might emerge as by-products of Obama’s

role in helping get money for the US-controlled factions of the PLO:

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 157

The Tony Rezko trial opened the door to more Board Game cases not yet tried and more

Combine members threw in the towel. Ali Ata, the former director of the Illinois Finance

Authority, entered into a plea agreement on April 22, 2008… Ata pled guilty to charges that

included tax fraud, and lying to the FBI in saying he received nothing in return for $50,000 in

contributions to Blagojevich when according to the plea agreement, he did “receive something

for those contributions, specifically employment with a state agency ... with an annual salary of

approximately $127,000.” The agreement notes that Ata met with Blagojevich, not Rezko, in

2000 or 2001, and Blagojevich asked for his support because he was contemplating a run for

higher office. Ata testified that he held his first Blagojevich fundraiser in the 1990s when he

was asked to raise money for Blagojevich’s run for Congress within the Arab community. Ata

made a $5,000 donation to Obama on June 30, 2003. Talat Othman was also appointed to this

Board, and he donated $1,000 to Obama on June 30, 2003. David Gustman was made chairman,

and his wife, Lisa, also gave Obama $1,000 on June 30. Ata is a former president of the

Chicago Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He represents “a

deeper corruption” in the Arab American community, “an aspect of the story that has not

received much attention,” according to a May 2, 2008 report by Ray Hanania in the Southwest

News-Herald. Hanania points out that many in the Arab community are calling Ata a “rat.” But

he’s not alone, Hanania says: “The real rats are those who used their positions as “leaders” to

rape and pillage their own community. The real rats are the so-called “leaders” who worked to

benefit themselves pretending they were doing it for the benefit of the community.” In his

report, Hanania explains how Ata and others would often gather at a “hookah” café on Harlem

Avenue, where they helped organize political dinners attended by Arab Americans from the

Southwest suburbs at which politicians where “honored.” “These Arab community leaders,” he

says, “would tell the community that if they bought tickets to their candidate’s nights,” their

organization fundraisers or donated through them to local politicians, these politicians would

respond by giving the Arab American community empowerment.” “They said the politicians

would give the Arab Americans a voice in their governments,” he reports. “In truth,” Hanania

says, “these political leaders lied…. They did get jobs, contracts and clout,” he notes, “but the

people who benefited were not members of the community but rather the relatives, children,

friends and business associates of these leaders.” (Pringle, “Curtain Time for Barack Obama -

Part IV,” op-ed news)

Here again, the narrow and divisive identity politics purveyed by the Ford Foundation reveals its

bankruptcy: it creates a thin layer of rich exploiters, while leaving the majority of each ethnic group

worse off than when they started.

THE ROBERT MALLEY AFFAIR AND THE SOROS-BRZEZINSKI

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP

Obama’s relations with the Middle East agent community were also illuminated by the Robert

Malley affair. Robert Malley worked for the International Crisis Group, which is heavily funded by

George Soros and has Zbigniew Brzezinski on its board. With this, we know everything we need to

know about the International Crisis Group: its operatives do not want peace in the Middle East, but

rather mobilization of the Arabs and Moslems against Russia and China in the framework of

Brzezinski’s apocalyptic vision of confrontation. Robert Malley’s father Simon Malley was born in

Cairo to a Jewish-Syrian family. He moved to France in 1969, where he founded the pseudo-left

journal Afrique Asie; the name was changed to L’Economiste du Tiers Monde in the 1970s. This

was supposedly radical third world nationalist, but gave ample scope to Fanon and the future Pol

158 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Pots and Bani Sadrs. Many suspected that Simon Malley was in fact running a British operation.

Simon Malley was also used to sabotage French foreign policy in the third world, which is often in

conflict with London and Washington. In October 1980, the French had had enough of Malley’s

constant wrecking operations, and they deported him, hustling him onto a plane bound for New

York. Simon’s son Robert obviously continued the family business of being a left-cover operative

in the orbit of the US-UK imperial line.

After months of inconclusive sniping by various web sites against Robert Malley, he was

quickly dumped by the Obama campaign from his role in Obama’s Middle East Advisory Council

at the end of the first week in May when it became known that he had been meeting with the

Palestinian group Hamas. Malley told the London Times that he had been in regular contact with

Hamas, which rules Gaza. Malley claimed that, when he met with Hamas, he was wearing his

International Crisis Group hat, and not his Obama advisor’s hat. “I’ve never hidden the fact that in

my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people,” Malley said. Ben LaBolt, a

spokesman for Obama, attempted damage control: “Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts,

provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he

will not play any role in the future.” The rapid departure of Mr Malley came after two days of

heated clashes between John McCain, the Republican nominee-elect, and Mr Obama over Middle

East policy. (London Times, May 10, 2008) Malley was a much less important advisor to Obama

than the overall campaign controller and guru, Zbigniew Brzezinski. If Malley could be fired over a

few meetings with Hamas, why was Brzezinski not fired because of his sponsorship of Ilyas

Achmadov, the Chechen terrorist ambassador who was living high on the hog in Washington DC at

US taxpayer expense as a result of Brzezinski’s lobbying – lobbying in which Senator McCain was

also a key participant?

THE IKHWAN ENDORSES OBAMA

The Muslim American Society (MAS) is an organization closely linked to the Muslim

Brotherhood. On its website’s “Personality Page,” the MAS displays a photo and short bio of

Barack Hussein Obama along with those it calls other prominent Muslims, such as Malcolm X,

Saladin and Moqtada al-Sadr. A 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that, after a

contentious debate, U.S. leaders of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the classic British

intelligence vehicle for fighting progressive nationalist regimes in the Arab world like Kassem of

Iraq and Nasser of Egypt with benighted mystical reactionaries, decided in 1993 to begin calling

themselves the Muslim American Society. The Brotherhood’s goal is ostensibly to spread the rule

of Islamic law throughout the world, but exceptions are made whenever required by British

interests. Key Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, including founder Hassan al-Banna (whom we

have already met as the father of British and Israeli-controlled provocateur Sabri al Banna/Abu

Nidal), have endorsed violence as a means of doing so. Today, MAS’ leaders admit that the group

was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, but claim that MAS has evolved since then.

MARK RUDD: THE WEATHERMEN AS FBI PROVOACTEURS?

It must always be understood that the Weathermen were in no way honest radicals gone astray,

nor yet authentic communist revolutionaries: they were wreckers, saboteurs, and provocateurs who

had been sent by the intelligence community into the student and peace movements for the purpose

of destroying them. Here again, Thomas Ayers’ seat on the board of General Dynamics, the largest

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 159

US defense contractor for the Pentagon in most years, tells us everything we need to know about the

relations of the Ayers family to the intelligence community. Rumors that Bill Ayers was a spook

circulated in SDS in the late 60s. One Weatherman leader who appears obsessed by the appearance

that his old terrorist gang was in fact a tool of the FBI is none other than Mark Rudd. (Or, at least,

Rudd chooses to harp on the FBI, perhaps to draw attention away from his more likely sponsors in

the intelligence community, such as the domestic counterinsurgency operations of the Ford

Foundation, with which Rudd has been linked by published sources.) At the time of the SDS split

convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969, Mark Rudd was without question the most famous

Weatherman leader because of the media attention to his role at the Columbia strike, and it was he

who was chosen as the national secretary of the rump faction of SDS controlled by the Weatherman

crazies after the expulsion of the Progressive Labor Party, the International Socialists, the Labor

Committees, and a number of smaller Trotskyist groups. Rudd had been chosen by the New York

City television stations as the authentic student anarchist voice of the Columbia University strike in

April 1969, and this had given him a significant national profile. Rudd was sent on a national tour

of university campuses and SDS chapters to make the case for the lunatic Weatherman point of

view. The bomb throwing and cop killing Weatherman faction, however, considered Rudd as a

lightweight and intended only to use him as a disposable figurehead. These crazies soon drove

Rudd out of the Weatherman organization. In the following decades, Rudd appears to have

developed some rudimentary understanding of the precious services rendered to the FBI and the

intelligence community in general through the destruction of SDS by the Weatherman action

faction. Rudd returns again and again to the idea that the Weathermen were doing exactly what the

FBI wanted them to do, even though he also hysterically asserts that the Weathermen were not paid

agents, conscious agents, or witting operatives. Here is a sample of Rudd’s ruminations, dating back

to an interview recorded in 2004: ‘… we in the leadership of Weatherman (predecessor to the

Weather Underground Organization) made a historically criminal decision at the end of 1969 to

scuttle Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student anti-war and radical organization, with

over 300 chapters on college campuses and high schools. We mistakenly believed that we could

bring into existence a revolutionary movement, led by an underground revolutionary army; SDS,

with its purely legal above-ground existence and its reform agenda, was seen as an impediment to

the growth of the revolutionary army. Our faction was in control of the national and regional offices

of the organization, plus its newspaper. I remember sometime in January, 1970, dumping the

membership lists of the New York Regional Office into a garbage barge at the W. 14th St. pier. How

could we have done the FBI’s work better for them? I believe that we weakened the larger

movement, whose goal was uniting as many people as possible to end the Vietnam War. Besides

causing people to drop out, we gave the government ammunition to smear the whole anti-war

movement as violent crazies bent on destruction of the society. Did our actions help attract the huge

middle of American society who might otherwise have joined the anti-war movement, public

opinion being vastly against the war? “Bring the War Home,” was as counter-productive a line in

1969 and 1970 as it was in 2001 at the World Trade Center. Last, and probably most important, the

Weather Underground forced a debilitating ideological debate in the much larger anti-war

movement over the “necessity” of engaging in armed “revolutionary” actions. In the summer of

1969 Weather-organized actions even disrupted the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam

(“Mobe”) mass anti-war events and demonstrations. People became demoralized and left the antiwar

movement because they didn’t want any part of an armed revolution. We destroyed SDS

because it wasn’t radical enough (it couldn’t take the final step of anti-imperialism to armed

action), thereby doing the work of the FBI.’ (Radical History Review, Spring, 2006, emphasis

160 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

added.) In fact, the control mechanism for the Weathermen ran through the foundations rather than

through the FBI, for obvious reasons.

These same themes are developed in Rudd’s retrospective analysis of how the proto-fascist

Weatherman provocateurs succeeded in destroying SDS, which had been growing rapidly until the

crazies seized control of the Chicago National Office in June and July of 1969: ‘Students for a

Democratic Society had been growing almost effortlessly since 1965 when the U.S. attacked

Vietnam with ground troops. By 1968 there were over 300 autonomous chapters on college

campuses, high schools, and even post-college; the number of active members may have been more

than 100,000 (though dues-paying national membership was much smaller). The story of what

happened became known as The Days of Rage has been told elsewhere, including the 2003

documentary, “The Weather Underground.” What’s significant for this story, though, is that the

SDS chapters rejected en masse support for the action. Most chapters had been independent, neither

PL nor RYM, and didn’t participate in or even understand the argument. The effect of the split at

the June Convention was to cut them off from the National Office. We in what became known as

Weatherman had lost our base. But we kept going without one. The effect on SDS as a whole was

disaster. By the beginning of 1970 the national organization had ceased to exist. We in the

Weatherman leadership had made a decision that SDS wasn’t radical enough, that it was an

impediment to the building of a revolutionary movement in this country. We needed an

underground guerilla army to begin the revolutionary armed struggle. So we disbanded the National

and Regional Offices, dissolved the national organization, and set the chapters adrift. Many chapters

kept organizing, in their own ways, against the war and racism; demoralized, others disbanded. We

couldn’t have done the FBI’s work better for them had we been paid agents, which I know we

weren’t. [Maybe not of the FBI, but how about the foundations?] We were just stupid kids too in

love with our ideas to realize they weren’t real. We believed they were real because we thought

them… My recall is that my comrades and I in the leadership of Weatherman made specific bad

decisions based on our evolving and deepening ideology toward the chimera of revolution and the

strategy revolutionary guerilla warfare. One thinks of the roads not taken. We could have chosen to

fight to maintain the organization, to strengthen its anti-imperialism and anti-racism among

students, to build the largest possible coalition against the war. Perhaps we could have ended the

war sooner, who knows?’52 Rudd is certainly right that without the efforts of the Weatherman

wreckers and saboteurs, the Vietnam War might have been brought to an end much sooner, and

other positive causes could have been advanced on the domestic front. But of course, the

Weatherman domestic program was nothing but race war. Rudd’s commentary on youthful

fanatics, not far removed from their delusions of infantile omnipotence, who hysterically insist that

their egocentric ideas must be real simply because they are thinking them gives us some insight into

the mentality of Obama’s swarming adolescents today. Perhaps someday, when the US and

foundation archives are opened, we will be able to reconstruct the story of how the intelligence

agencies destroyed SDS; we can be sure that an especially lurid chapter in this tale will feature the

activities of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

THE URGENCY OF COUNTERINSURGENCY, 1986-1988:

ADLAI STEVENSON’S DEBACLE, AXELROD, AND THE 1313 GANG

The beginning of Obama’s career with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge under the sponsorship

of Thomas Ayers and Bill Ayers takes us back to a moment when the bi-partisan, financiercontrolled

social control apparatus ruling Chicago appeared to be undergoing definite strain and

possible crisis. In the Illinois Democratic primary of March 18, 1986, the corrupt Chicago

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 161

Democratic machine was supporting the gubernatorial candidacy of Adlai Stevenson III, a former

US Senator and the son of two-time Democratic presidential candidate and Illinois governor Adlai

Stevenson, a favorite of the New York investment banks and a man who put a professorial face on

the dirty Cook County Democratic organization, but lost the presidency to Ike Eisenhower in 1952

and in 1956. For Illinois Secretary of State, the Democratic machine wanted the political hack

Aurelia Pucinski, who came from a politically prominent family and was supported by the party

organization. The Democratic machine was stunned when the Democratic nominations for

Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State were won by Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, two

supporters of the political movement of Lyndon LaRouche. The national media went berserk over

the idea that Illinois voters had chosen Fairchild and Hart, despite their association with LaRouche,

as the most effective vehicles for an explosive protest vote against the existing order of things.

Janice Hart said on the day after the primary: “I’m going to revive the spirit of Abraham Lincoln

and General Patton. We’re going to roll our tanks down State Street.” Democratic National

Committee chairman Paul Kirk joined in the hysteria, exclaiming, “Good Lord, we have a problem

here.” At this point, Stevenson could have kept his own hopes for the governorship alive by bowing

gracefully to the will of the voters, and gracefully and silently taking his place at the top of a

Democratic ticket including Fairchild and Hart for statewide office. After all, actual terrorist

bombers and accused murderers like Ayers and Dohrn had already been welcomed back into the

Chicago Democratic machine in those years. Fairchild and Hart had never killed or bombed

anybody. Neither one had ever appeared on the FBI’s most wanted list; neither had a criminal

record. But, of course, Ayers and Dohrn were different: they had always been working as

provocateurs for the intelligence community and the financiers. So Stevenson decided to go berserk,

slandering the candidates chosen by the Illinois Democratic voters, and ruining his own hopes for

the governorship in the process.

AXELROD PUSHES STEVENSON TO SELF-DESTRUCT

Ironically, the campaign manager who goaded the younger Stevenson to destroy himself was

none other than Obama’s current Svengali, the Chicago machine hack David Axelrod: ‘Political

consultant David Axelrod, who today runs Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, was in 1986

managing the campaign of Adlai Stevenson III for governor. Axelrod told Stevenson he should quit

the race, rather than run in the general election on the same, Democratic, ticket with the LaRouche

supporters. ‘“I thought he should resign. He couldn’t run with those maniacs,” Axelrod said later.

Stevenson decided to quit the Democrats but to run as a third party candidate. Axelrod later recalled

how Stevenson fared, under his guidance: “In the following months, Stevenson was battered by the

press and deserted by the politicians. It reached the point of the absurd. It was the political

equivalent of AIDS.”’ (Chicago Magazine, December 1987). David Axelrod grew up in New York

City, where his mother, Myril Axelrod, was vice president of the Young & Rubicam advertising

agency and was a pioneer of the use of “focus groups” for profiling the population, long before

Frank Luntz and company had arrived on the scene. Attending the University of Chicago beginning

in 1972, majoring in political science, Axelrod became associated with the financier-directed

“political reform” movement centered at that University. While he was writing articles for the Hyde

Park Herald, he was taken under the wing of Don Rose, a political operative of the Public

Administration Service school at the University. That school was a component of the notorious

1313 building complex at the University of Chicago, a national center for the manipulation of

America’s public policy and municipal administrations. According to a 2004 article in the Hyde

Park Herald, “1313 grew from a 1930 lunchtime conversation in Geneva, Switzerland between

[University official Louis] Brownlow and Beardsley Ruml. Ruml was executive director of the

162 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Spelman Fund of New York, a relatively new entity created to disburse Rockefeller dollars.

Brownlow pressed his case for a public administration clearing house, Ruml enthusiastically

embraced the idea and, in 1937 the [Rockefeller-controlled] Spelman Fund disbursed $1 million to

the University of Chicago to underwrite the construction of what became 1313.” (Mr. Ruml also

helped organize the fascist psychiatry enterprise known as the Josiah Macy Foundation.) Don Rose

recommended young Axelrod for an intern’s job at the Chicago Tribune daily newspaper, where the

intensely plugged-in Axelrod eventually rose to become political editor. Don Rose later told

Chicago magazine, “Axelrod was the first political reporter at the Trib who was really associated

with the liberal reform movement. He was sympathetic to the movement ... and he developed a lot

of contacts. One of the reasons he looked good was because the people he developed associations

with were on the ascendancy....” In 1984, Axelrod quit the Tribune to manage Paul Simon’s senate

race, followed later by jobs with Stevenson, Harold Washington, and others. Throughout, Axelrod

has been identified with the movement for political “reforms” — such as privatization, budget cuts,

etc. — representing the oligarchs at the University of Chicago and their financier sponsors. David

Axelrod is the Obama campaign’s overall director; Axelrod’s partner (in the firm AKP Media),

David Plouffe, is Obama’s official campaign manager; and Axelrod’s other partner, John Del

Cecato, is a strategist for the campaign.’ (larouchepac.com, April 24, 2008)

Stevenson formed the Solidarity Party and ran with Jane Spirgel as the Secretary of State

nominee and Mike Howlett for Lieutenant Governor. Hart achieved 15% of the vote, with Spirgel

taking 17%. Hart and Spirgel’s opponent, Republican incumbent Jim Edgar, won the election by the

largest margin in any state-wide election in Illinois history (until Barky’s 2004 defeat of the

carpetbagging buffoon Allan Keyes), with 1.574 million votes (67%). Fairchild was defeated, and

Republican Big Jim Thompson took the governorship over the hapless Stevenson.

THE 1987 CHICAGO TEACHERS’ STRIKE

As we have seen, one of the targets of any foundation-funded school reform is automatically to

weaken or bust the teachers’ union. In September 1987, the Chicago teachers’ union went on strike

for 19 days. This was the ninth strike in two decades. Secretary of Education William Bennett, in an

attempt to encourage the busting of the union after the 1987 school strike, declared the city’s

schools the “worst in America.” Under the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago had deliberately

maintained a highly segregated system. ‘As whites fled to the suburbs and many remaining white

families sent children to the large Catholic school system, citizen support for the public schools

diminished. Daley tried to buy labor peace with the unions through financial sleight-of-hand that,

after his death, resulted in full-scale crisis in 1979. In response to the crescendo of discontent which

was also orchestrated by foundation operatives, Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first black

mayor, convened an “education summit” in 1986 to persuade businesses to guarantee jobs to public

school graduates if they met performance standards.” The LSC ploy also succeeded in splitting the

black community, with Jesse Jackson lobbying forcefully against reform, fighting implementation,

and battling, for example, to save the job of his old protégé, Manford Byrd, the superintendent of

schools who was forced out. The black middle class, many of whom were school employees, was

the political and financial base for Jackson’s Operation PUSH, despite his vocal advocacy of the

disenfranchised poor. When PUSH came to the shove of disgruntled black parents, Jackson’s

organization sided with the black administrators, above all, and the teachers.’ About 550 positions

have been cut out of a central bureaucracy of about 4,100, while top administrators have done

everything they could to save themselves. Veronica Anderson, writing in the March 2008 issue of

Catalyst Chicago, described the local control institutions as generally moribund, observing that

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 163

“The death knell is ringing for Chicago’s local school councils, as it has been for years.” ‘One of

the biggest abuses of the local control system is that principals have no tenure, and have to cater to

the whims of local groups of parents who often have no concept of education except their own likes

and dislikes. Anderson also reports that “the constant onslaught of negative buzz regarding LSCs

has created the widespread impression that LSCs are hapless, ineffective, and at times as the case of

Curie High School seemingly illustrates, dangerous to school improvement.” The interest of the

foundations, and their grant money, was steadily fading.’ (David Moberg, “Can Democracy Save

Chicago’s Schools?,” American Prospect, November 30, 2002) One of the few tangible results of

the creation of the LSCs at the individual school level was that several hundred experienced and

previously tenured principals were fired, which drastically lowered the administrative quality of the

system, but which promised a big savings to the greedy banks who owned the Chicago municipal

bonds marketed by firms like Nuveen and Co, and who wanted to be sure that their interest

payments had top priority.

BILL AYERS: FROM TERRORIST TO EDUCATION REFORMER

Thanks to the fact that his father Tom had intelligence community connections on a very high

level, Bill Ayers was able to emerge from clandestine criminal life and re-invent himself as an

education reformer. A key part of this was his magical ability to get money from the foundations.

His knack was so deft that it suggested that he had been a foundation operative all along, even

before Executive Order 12333. Steve Diamond has chronicled the process by which the former

fugitive Bill Ayers was transformed into a few short years into a top authority on education policy,

and above all into a dispenser of tens of millions of dollars of corporate largesse: ‘Bill raised money

to start the Small Schools Workshop in the early 90s and eventually hired another former Maoist

from the 60s (and actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS disintegrated)

named Mike Klonsky to head it up. Bill’s brother John later got in on the small schools approach

also, raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program started by Bill and chaired by

Obama… A leading figure in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting and

“efficiency” in the Chicago schools in the 1980s was Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers…. Tom

Ayers co-authored a report of a joint public-private task force on school reform and was later

nominated to head up Chicago United, a business backed school reform group that Ayers helped

found, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was opposed successfully by black community activists.

When the 1988 Reform Act was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE) was

formed…by the elite business lobby that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly

elected local school council members. Some 6000 LSC members were elected. And they became a

huge thorn in the side of school administration in Chicago. Interestingly, one LSC member was

John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993, John was made head of the LQE - which, by

then, according to Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to re-centralize control of

the schools in the hands of the mayor. In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to

law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up

with the Ayers family.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22,

2008) Again, this cannot be seen as a matter of pure coincidence, but rather of people like

Huntington and Brzezinski putting their protégé in contact with an important regional leader of the

US financier establishment.

164 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

OBAMA’S BIG BREAK: AYERS AND

THE CHICAGO ANNENBERG CHALLENGE

Diamond stresses that getting tapped to head up the prestigious and massively funded

Annenberg Chicago Challenge – based on no visible qualifications – constituted Obama’s key

inflection point or career take-off. Diamond is of course attempting to explain this process based on

more or less chance encounters among individuals, rather than being aware that we are watching an

intelligence network which goes back well over half a century. Obama and the Ayers clan came

together not by chance, but thanks to the fine Trilateral hand that fosters some careers and strangles

others. Diamond recounts: ‘Then, in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was

probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago

Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago

schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the

grant proposal and shepherded it to success. The purpose of the program was to defend the

controversial and troubled local schools council effort that had been put in place back in 1988. The

first Executive Director of the Challenge was Ken Rolling, who came there from the much

discussed Woods Fund (where he had been a program officer). The Woods Fund had provided

grants to Obama’s DCP in the late 80s and Rolling was a part of the school reform effort in which

both Bill Ayers and Obama participated. Obama joined the board of the Woods Fund in 1993 in

1999 he would be joined on the board by Bill Ayers.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’

globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)53

Obama’s role in heading up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge meant money, prestige, and

above all an excellent chance to network with the lakefront oligarchs: ‘… the Annenberg Challenge

money came through anyway due to the efforts of Bill Ayers, among others. It had to be matched 2

to 1 by corporate and foundation money (in fact, they raised an additional $60 million by 1999), so

the Board Chairmanship would have allowed Obama to be in touch with the powerful money

interests in Chicago, including possibly the Pritzker Family and others that Kaufman mentions in

his story. Penny Pritzker would join the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund which

received its startup funding from the Annenberg Challenge as the Challenge wound down in 2001 -

the Challenge, in effect, handed the baton of support for school reform to the CPEF. Penny Pritzker

[who owns a share of the Hyatt Hotel fortune, built on the backs of super-exploited Hispanic

cleaning ladies] is now a key Obama campaign insider in charge of fund raising.’ (Steve Diamond,

‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

Today, Ayers presents himself not as terrorist vermin, cowardly butcher and mass murderer, but

rather as a theoretician of educating children, and Midwest moralist to boot. Ayers wrote on his

website in a January 19, 2008 essay on school reform: “The dominant narrative in contemporary

school reform is once again focused on exclusion and disadvantage, race and class, black and white.

‘Across the US,’ the National Governor’s Association declared in 2005, ‘a gap in academic

achievement persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their white counterparts.’

This is the commonly referenced and popularly understood ‘racial achievement gap,’ and it drives

education policy at every level. Interestingly, whether heartfelt or self-satisfied, the narrative never

mentions the monster in the room: white supremacy….Gloria Ladson-Billings upends all of this

with an elegant reversal: there is no achievement gap, she argues, but actually a glancing reflection

of something deeper and more profound—America has a profound education debt. The educational

inequities that began with the annihilation of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans, the

conquest of the continent and the importation of both free labor and serfs, transformed into

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 165

apartheid education, something anemic, inferior, inadequate, and oppressive. Over decades and

centuries the debt has accumulated and is passed from generation to generation, and it continues to

grow and pile up.” (Emphasis added.)54

In April 2008 Sol Stern of the neocon Manhattan Institute gave a series of interviews seeking to

show that Ayers’ politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. According to Stern,

‘Ayers still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism, but

he does this now from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University

of Illinois, Chicago.55 Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to

indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons

to their public school students. […] ‘In late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was

probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago

Annenberg Challenge….’56 This was initially a $50 million grant program to funnel money into

social engineering, manipulation, and divide-and-conquer efforts at Chicago schools. ‘It turns out

that the architect of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the grant

proposal and shepherded it to success.’ (Pundita, noquarterusa.net)57 Naturally, this must be

considered a true elective affinity between Ayers and Obama, but it also reflects the network which

was supporting them both: the left CIA foundation network was promoting the careers of its

stalwarts, even as it carried out its appointed tasks for the banking elite.

Steve Diamond pointed out on Noquarterusa.net that ‘the link between Obama and Ayers had to

pre-date the November 1995 event because [by 1995] Obama was already Chairman of the Board

of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant program. The Annenberg Challenge was a $50 million

grant (to be matched by additional donors 2:1) to a new Chicago non-profit entity to make grants to

schools in Chicago. The grant proposal was conceived of and written by Bill Ayers. Ayers was

named Chicago’s “Citizen of the Year” for his efforts. He was featured on the PBS News Hour to

discuss the grant. In every assessment of the program Ayers was given credit for leading the charge

on the program. He began the design of the proposal in late 1993 and the grant was awarded in

January 1995.’ Steve Diamond goes on to elaborate that ‘the Annenberg Challenge was not a

random school improvement effort. The purpose of the Challenge was to help shore up the ongoing

reform effort then underway in the Chicago public schools. It was a counter-attack by Ayers in what

some commentators called the “Chicago school wars.” The reform effort was floundering and

facing increasing opposition from business groups and others. The reform was built on a 1988 law

that imposed “local school councils” (LSCs) on the school system to create a new power center that

would challenge both the Chicago teachers’ unions and the school system administration. Both

Ayers and Obama were supporters of these 1988 reforms. (One little discussed fact about the reform

effort - when it targeted the union and the school administration, it was taking on two institutions

that had been a new and important source of attractive professional jobs for black Chicagoans.)”’

Diamond’s suspicions are more than confirmed: since the New York City teachers’ strike was

broken in 1968-69, the stock in trade of the Ford Foundation and its co-thinkers has been to

organize black parents into community control councils which can then be used to attack the

teachers’ unions, while also tearing down the school system itself. The goal is the financiers’ aim of

destroying free universal public education of any sort in this country, to facilitate the reduction of

America into serfdom. So Ayers is doing his job as an affirmative action foundation provocateur

eager to play black parents against teachers, many of them also black or Hispanic. The name of the

game is always divide and conquer, playing one group of little people and victims of the system

against another, to keep Wall Street and the financier elite above the fray. Caught between the topdown

privatized business model, with private interests bilking the system, the voucher-school

166 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

choice-charter school route, and the lunatic left community control model peddled by Ayers with its

eternal petty conflicts, quality education would never stand a chance. Real progress required

resources, the rebuilding of neighborhoods, and the hope of good jobs on the horizon – all things

which the US ruling financier elite had proven itself incapable of providing.

Diamond adds that ‘…it was not clear that the LSCs were helping students learn more. In 1995 a

new law would pass in Springfield re-centralizing power, but this time in the hands of the mayor

(Richard Daley) through a new CEO for the school system. This gutted the power of the LSCs. Bill

Ayers opposed this re-centralization (I believe because Ayers saw the LSCs as a potential means by

which to impose his authoritarian “social justice” education agenda). To lead the Challenge Ayers

would certainly have wanted a board chairman who was sympathetic with his goals. That suggests

that Obama and he had already established a relationship that convinced Ayers that Obama was the

right man for this key leadership role. As I have said here, it is possible Ayers and Obama first met

during the campaign for the creation of the LSCs in the wake of the 1987 teachers’ union strike, an

event that galvanized community and business support in Chicago for the LSC idea. Both Ayers and

Obama were active in that campaign for the LSCs.’ The self-defeating counterinsurgency strategy

of community control had, of course, been what Obama was selling when he worked for the

Alinskyite wreckers at the Gamaliel Foundation. But there was also a Trilateral hand guiding his

destiny, as we must never forget.58

WILL OBAMA DEMAND REPARATIONS?

Other than Ayers, who qualifies as a top racist FOB (Friend of Barky), Senator Obama’s main

education advisor is Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent national theoretician of

education policy who teaches at Stanford University’s School of Education. Darling-Hammond

operates through something called the Forum for Education and Democracy (FED). Darling-

Hammond’s program for education reform starts off with the need to ‘Repay the “education debt.”’

This is a concept which is left vague, but which could very easily serve as a cloak for a demand for

reparations for the black community only, a demand sure to create a violent paroxysm of racial

tension and indeed race war if it were to gather strength under the present conditions of economic

breakdown. The education debt, says Professor Darling-Hammond, is a concept invented by

Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings, of the University of Wisconsin and a “convener” together with

Professor Darling-Hammond of the FED. It is aimed at replacing the concept that has dominated

much education reform discussion in recent years called the “achievement gap.” As Darling-

Hammond has written: “[T]he problem we face is less an ‘achievement gap’ than an educational

debt that has accumulated over centuries of denied access to education and employment, reinforced

by deepening poverty and resource inequalities in schools. Until American society confronts the

accumulated educational debt owed to these students and takes responsibility for the inferior

resources they receive, [Gloria] Ladson-Billings argues, children of color and of poverty will

continue to be left behind.”59 This might well serve as a cloak for reparations demands.

The suspicions grow when we find Ladson-Billings quoting veteran foundation race operative

Randall Robinson in an article on educational debt in Educational Researcher (Oct. 2005), where

we read: “What is it that we might owe to citizens who historically have been excluded from social

benefits and opportunities? Randall Robinson (2000) states: ‘No nation can enslave a race of people

for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a

hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the

heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel and left alone, can never touch. (p. 74)’”

The book by Randall Robinson which is cited here is The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 167

which is a strident demand for reparations to be paid by non-blacks to blacks to redress the impact

of slavery and discrimination. Darling-Hammond has also argued that there is in America “a

growing number of ‘apartheid’ schools that serve racial/ethnic minority students exclusively —

schools that have little political clout and are extraordinarily impoverished.” (Steve Diamond,

noquarterusa.net) Once more, the implied correct answer seems to be reparations. Let it be clear:

class-based, race-blind economic recovery programs for those facing poverty and exclusion will

enjoy wide support and will help to overcome the depression. Demands for some groups to pay

reparations to other groups because of a theory of collective guilt will lead towards race war and

civil war, to say nothing of deepening depression. Obama by all indications is leading towards the

latter.

OBAMA PROMISES DEEDS, NOT WORDS, FOR REPARATIONS

In a Chicago speech at the end of July 2008, Obama made clear that he will indeed attempt to

impose reparations if elected, doubtless on the basis of American collective guilt. These reparations

would apparently go to Native Americans and to African-Americans, and possibly to Hawaiian-

Americans as well. ‘“There’s no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as

well as other persons of color in this country, we’ve got some very sad and difficult things to

account for,” Obama told hundreds of attendees of UNITY ‘08, a convention of four minority

journalism associations. The Hawaii-born senator, who has told local reporters that he supports the

federal recognition bill for native Hawaiians drafted by U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, noted other ethnic

groups but did not mention native Hawaiians when answering a question about his thoughts on a

formal U.S. apology to American Indians. “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the

tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said. “I

consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American

issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer

words, but offer deeds.”’60 Let there be no doubt: under depression conditions, this policy is a recipe

to move the United States towards civil war in the form of race war. This is apparently the firm

intent of Obama’s Trilateral masters.

FATHER PFLEGER, REPARATIONS, AND RACE WAR

Another long-term close friend of Obama who is evidently supporting the concept of reparations

is the renegade priest, Father Pfleger, who became a focus of controversy in late May 2008. Pfleger

visited Trinity United, and was introduced by Otis Moss as “a friend of Trinity.” Pfleger then

launched in to a diatribe which seems to suggest a campaign for reparations: “I must now address

the one who says, ‘don’t hold me responsible for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the

benefits of what your ancestors did! And unless you are ready to give up the benefits — Throw

away your 401 fund! [sic] Throw away your trust fund! Throw away all the money that been put

away in the company you walked into ‘cause your daddy and your granddaddy and your great

granddaddy — Unless you are willing to give up the benefits, then you must be responsible for what

was done in your generation! ‘Cause you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy!”61 There

seems to be little doubt that the first year of an Obama presidency will be marked by convulsive

campaign to impose punitive reparations on the non-black sectors of American society. Needless to

say, this entire concept has been spawned by the cynical ruling class operatives of the foundation

community as part of their eternal strategy of divide and conquer to keep the American people as a

whole in submission to the Wall Street financiers, who are the ones that ought to be taxed for the

benefit of the people as a whole.

168 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Steve Diamond sums up the situation, noting that Obama’s backers are heavily committed to the

idea of reparations, specifically in the educational sphere: ‘If you believe the rhetoric of the “social

justice” crowd influencing the Obama camp’s approach to education policy - the authoritarian

leftists Bill Ayers and his sidekick Mike Klonsky as well as ed school professors like Linda

Darling-Hammond and Gloria Ladson-Billings - only reparations for 400 years of oppression of

non-whites will allow us to close the “achievement gap” between the oppressors, whites, and the

oppressed, minority kids….Lying behind this argument is a pernicious concept - that white workers

benefit at the expense of black workers and that more widely American workers live off the backs

of workers in the third world. This is at the heart of the authoritarian and anti-union politics of the

Ayers/Klonsky crowd.’ (http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/06/26/white-guilt-politics-of-Obamacrowd-

undermined/) Better than call Ayers an authoritarian, we should dub him a totalitarian liberal

who has already reached stormtroop junction.

Very large sums of money were involved in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and it is well

worth our while to follow them: ‘The CAC was established in 1995 as a result of a $49.2 million

grant from Walter Annenberg to support education reform in Chicago. Bill Ayers and Anne C.

Hallett co-signed a letter submitting the grant proposal to Brown University President Vartan

Gregorian on November 8, 1994 where the national Challenge office would be headquartered. The

letter was on the letterhead of the University of Illinois at Chicago (“UIC”). Ayers identified

himself as representing the UIC and the “Chicago Forum for School Change.” Ms. Hallett is

identified as the Executive Director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform. At the

bottom of the letter, a parenthetical states: “On behalf of the Chicago School Reform

Collaborative.”’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-

Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) ‘The letter and the attached detailed

proposal grew out of a process that began in December 1993 when a small group led by Ayers,

Hallett and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation ‘met to discuss a proposal to the Annenberg

Challenge for support of this city’s public school reform efforts.” ‘This group became the nucleus

of the larger Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC,

which Ayers would co-chair and on which Hallett and Chapman would serve.’ (Program Report,

CAC, Jan. 1, 1995 through Mar. 31, 1996 at 1). (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My

Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)

The Chicago banking and finance elite includes the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago

Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, critical parts of the modern

derivatives bubble. Did these ruling interests fear that Chicago was on the verge of a mass strike, in

which white and black, employed and jobless, would demand economic concessions from the

parasites that ran the city? There is some evidence that this fear might at least have dawned on the

more far-sighted of them, especially after the Stevenson debacle of 1986 and the teachers’ strikes

leading up to 1987. Perhaps we can feel some of the ruling class fear in their bombastic prose when

they write: “Chicago is six years into the most radical system-wide urban school reform effort in the

country. The Annenberg Challenge provides an unprecedented opportunity to concentrate the

energy of this reform into an educational renaissance in the classroom.” (Steve Diamond, ‘That

“Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net,

June 19, 2008)

In reality, even before Bill Ayers became engaged in the CAC, patriarch Thomas Ayers of

General Dynamics had already started the ball rolling: ‘The Alliance for Better Chicago Schools

(“ABCs”) was formed then to push for the LSC idea in the Illinois state legislature. Active in the

ABCs was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project, and Chicago United, a

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 169

group of businessmen concerned about race and education issues founded by Bill Ayers’ father,

Tom Ayers, once CEO of the large Chicago utility, Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon).’ (Steve

Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’

noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)

From the counterinsurgency point of view of Bill Ayers, it was the Local School Council

institutional machinery that mattered most, since these could be turned into a battering ram against

the teachers’ union on the one hand and the board of education bureaucracy on the other, wrecking

both while the municipal bond holders laughed all the way to the bank: ‘…in 1993 the CAC grant

proposal was seen by Ayers as an attempt, in part, to rescue the LSCs. The grant proposal states,

“We envision a process to unleash at the school site the initiative and courage of LSC’s….” Later, it

states “[t]he Local Schools Councils…are important both for guiding educational improvement and

as a means of strengthening America’s democratic traditions.” (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who

Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19,

2008)

Chicago was competing against many other cities for the massive largesse of the Annenberg

Foundation. In writing the grant proposal, Ayers obviously had to show that the Annenberg

Foundation could get more bang for its counterinsurgency buck by investing in the Chicago system:

‘Indeed, the CAC proposal effort led by Ayers and Hallett was a critical part of what the Project

Director of the CAC, Ken Rolling, described as the “political wars” being waged over schools in

Chicago at that time. Ken Rolling was a veteran of those wars because in his previous role he had

been a program officer of the Woods Fund, which supported the school reform effort through its

grants, including grants to Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project. Other groups in other

cities were competing for the same pool of funds (a total of $500 million made available by

philanthropist Walter Annenberg) and, perhaps even more importantly, other groups in the city of

Chicago with different policy views were applying to receive funds. However, the Ayers/Hallett

proposal was successful in the end with the decision made in late 1994. In January of 1995 the

formal announcement of a grant of $49.2 million was made. That money would have to be matched

by contributions from the private and public sector 2:1 for a total amount over the life of the project

of approximately $150 million dollars to be disbursed in Chicago. (Apparently the actual amount

raised was an additional $60 million for a total of $110 million.) The CAC set up an office in rentfree

space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Bill Ayers taught.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That

“Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net,

June 19, 2008)

The one aspect of the Chicago Annenberg challenge which had no readily evident rational

explanation was the choice of the unknown mediocrity, Barack Hussein Obama, who, as we already

know, had been earmarked by the Trilateral Commission for greater things: ‘The first chairman of

the CAC Board was Barack Obama, at that point, 32 years old and a second year attorney at Davis,

Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm. He began the Board position in early 1995

and stepped down from the chairmanship in late 1999, though he remained on the Board until the

CAC phased itself out of existence and handed off its remaining assets to a permanent new

institution, the Chicago Public Education Fund, in 2001. The Board began to meet in March of 1995

and formally incorporated the CAC as a non-profit entity in April 1995. Other board members

included numerous already prominent Chicagoans: Susan Crown, Vice President of the Henry

Crown Company; Patricia A. Graham, President of The Spencer Foundation; Stanley Ikenberry,

President-Emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Handy Lindsey, Executive

Director of the Field Foundation; Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and

170 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

then President of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White,

Executive Director of the Community Workshop on Economic Development. Some of these

individuals would resign and be replaced by other equally prominent Chicagoans.’ (Steve Diamond,

‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’

noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)

For practical purposes, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a monster with two heads. One

was the Board, where Obama presided. ‘The second operating entity of the CAC would be the

Collaborative that would represent various constituencies in the Chicago schools and wider

community. […] The co-chair of the CAC’s Collaborative from 1995 until 2000 was Bill Ayers.

Thus, the leaders of the two operative arms of the CAC from its inception until 2000 were Bill

Ayers and Barack Obama. (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind

the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) Note the foundation jargon term,

“the collaborative,” which we have seen in a previous chapter.

One of the tasks which Obama and Ayers had to work on together derived from the fact that,

even though the grant proposals had alleged that there was an insatiable hunger for community

control among Chicago parents, there was overwhelming indifference throughout the city to the

Local School Councils, and it soon proved to be very hard to recruit any candidates to run for the

available posts. Accordingly, more foundation money had to be offered to convince parents to run

for the LSCs. (The Chicago local school councils each consisted of the principal, two teachers, six

parents, two community members, and a student representative in the case of high schools.) This

question can be regarded as a crucial experiment which shows that community control of schools is

generally not a spontaneous grass-roots demand by parents, but rather represents a completely

artificial tactic introduced from the outside by cynical foundation operatives for purposes of

manipulation and political wrecking. ‘The Collaborative and the Board became direct players in the

Chicago LSC elections held in 1996. According to the CAC Report: “In 1996 the Chicago Public

Schools were scheduled to hold the fourth election of Local School Council (LSC) representatives

since the school reform of act [sic] of 1988 was passed. As in the past two elections support from

the central office of the Chicago Public Schools appeared to be minimal. Until, that is, members of

the Collaborative coalesced with school reform groups around the city and began to put pressure on

the Chicago Public Schools’ central office to promote the elections both by recruiting enough

candidates for the open seats so that contested elections would be held and by urging parents and

community members to vote. […] The Board approved a grant of $125,000 for this effort. One of

the first grants awarded in 1995 was a $175,000 Implementation Grant to the Small Schools

Workshop. The Workshop had been founded by Bill Ayers in 1992 and was headed up by his

former Weather Underground comrade, Mike Klonsky.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in

My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) We

have already seen that to suppose that conflicts between Ayers and Klonsky represented nothing

more than the division of labor between two operatives.

$100 MILLION OF GRANT MONEY, HUNDREDS OF PRINCIPALS FIRED, BUT

“NO MEASURABLE OR SIGNIFICANT GAIN” FOR CHICAGO SCHOOL KIDS

And how did the Annenberg Chicago Challenge pan out? If increasing levels of student

achievement were the goal, it was an abject failure. A posting by Steve Diamond on

noquarterusa.net pointed out that in a ‘study that was done on the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago

Public Schools—the one where Obama was Chairman of the Board, after all that funding which

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 171

included the $50 million from Annenberg and matching funds from state, Federal and other

resources, the study concluded that there was “no measurable or significant gain” on the part of

students.’62 In other words Ayers and Obama promoted a program that spent millions of private and

public funds and accomplished nothing. I would note that the rubric used for this evaluation

included not just student gains in hard core academic achievement areas but also in soft areas such

as self-image, personal efficacy, school attendance, persistence, etc. Voters, bloggers, media

analysts and MSM should be asking an essential question: If Obama was the chair of this Board (I

think for its duration adding up to about 8 years) and nothing was really accomplished to improve

the achievement and capacities of children to learn, what makes us think he will be successful on a

national scale?’63 A good question. The answer must reflect that the goal of the Annenberg Chicago

Challenge never had anything to do with helping students or improving schools. Its goal, and that of

the foundation community that funded it, was social control through the divide-and-conquer

counterinsurgency method of pitting Local School Councils against the unions and the

administration. In this regard, it appears to have been reasonably successful. The Chicago political

crisis of 1986-1987, which might have turned into a mass strike of all working people and

unemployed people against the lunatic policies of the Reagan-Bush-Big Jim Thompson-Thomas

Ayers financiers, was defused and deflected. The LSCs were also somewhat effective in providing

cover for the system to fire principals, managers, and other trained and experienced personnel,

possibly replacing them with political hacks looking for sinecures. Finally, the futility and constant

strife of the LSCs wore out the existing parent activists until the situation was ripe for a partial

privatization under corporate and business auspices, ratcheting everything down yet another big

notch. Soon, the foundation oligarchs could see, the useless burden of universal free compulsory

public education in the United States would cease to exist – a great savings from the point of view

of Wall Street, but the death-knell for representative government in the United States.

THE BIGGEST PROJECT OF OBAMA’S LIFE ENDS IN ABJECT FAILURE

In 2003 the final technical report of the CCSR on the CAC was published. The results were not

pretty. The “bottom line” according to the report was that the CAC did not achieve its goal of

improvement in student academic achievement and nonacademic outcomes. While student test

scores improved in the so-called Annenberg Schools that received some of the $150 million

disbursed in the six years from 1995 to 2001, “This was similar to improvement across the

system….There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between

Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there

was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” The report identified the political conflict between the

Local School Council promotion efforts of the CAC – such as the $2 million Leadership

Development Initiative - as a possible factor hindering a positive impact on student achievement.

(Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama

Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)

We must therefore conclude that Barack Hussein Obama, in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge,

the biggest and most ambitious project of his life up until 2007, was an abject failure. His efforts

produced no gain for Chicago school students. It should be clear in retrospect why he almost never

talks about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. On the one hand, he would have to talk about his

close personal cooperation with the unrepentant terrorist bomber Bill Ayers. On the other hand, he

would have to dodge embarrassing questions about what the positive impact of all of this sound and

fury had finally been.

172 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

By 1997, the entire LSC community control project was visibly moribund, but it may well have

served its purpose of warding off a political upsurge by a united city against the lakeside financiers.

It had certainly functioned as a colossal manpower sink, consuming the energies of yet another

generation of ignorant and naïve activists. ‘The annual report for 1997 made special mention of the

surrounding political context of the CAC’s work. Director Ken Rolling noted that a goal of the CAC

was “seeking a changed policy environment” but that this “has been the most elusive to date with no

major progress to report at this time. He explained further: “The Challenge began its work in 1995

at the same time a dramatic change in the leadership and management of the Chicago Public

Schools took place. The Illinois state legislature awarded complete control of the…Schools to the

Mayor of Chicago in 1995. A new management team and Reform Board of Trustees was installed

and a major emphasis began on administration, financial stability and accountability measures that

are tied to specific test scores. The Challenge began its program at the time the central

administration of the public schools took off in a different direction.” Indeed, the 1995 law gave the

Mayor and the Board the power to dissolve LSCs – the very bodies that the CAC was trying to

bolster.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama

Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) Counter-insurgency operations cannot be Johnny

one note — they must always be modulated and varied according to sharp turns in the political and

economic situation. ‘By the end of this 1999, … Barack Obama would step down from the role of

Board Chair as he anticipated an upcoming run for Congress.’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who

Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19,

2008) Obama cultivated his glittering career, while the hapless victims of the Chicago Annenberg

Challenge drifted off into educational mediocrity and personal obscurity.

Evaluations of the impact of Obama’s Annenberg meddling have been largely negative. ‘A

report authored by Dorothy Shipps on the first three years of the Annenberg Challenge program,

when Obama was its Board chair, concluded: “The Challenge sought to build on the momentum of

the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act which had radically decentralized governance of the Chicago

Public Schools.” While apparently several hundred school principals had been fired by the LSCs,

kids were still doing poorly in schools and there was chaos of sorts in the system…. Interestingly,

Shipps concludes that the local control movement in Chicago, though backed by radicals like Ayers,

gave “business the clearest voice in system-wide reform.”’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’

globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008) Shipps discovered the obvious post festum when she

pointed out that the scale of the LSCs was too fragmented, too minuscule, to be able to implement

positive reforms; she recommended a district-wide or city-wide assembly, but this is still too narrow

and parochial, since schools cannot be successful unless there are good jobs waiting for the

graduates.

Diamond’s estimate is that the political sponsors of Obama were the extended Ayers family. As

long as we are limited to the purview of Chicago, this is doubtless a sound analysis: ‘Thus, we have

one possible answer to the question: Who “sent” Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom,

John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn. It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer

would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something

as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not

already known Obama very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to Ayers in the

battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the 80s. One guess as to why Obama does

not play up his educational experience more thoroughly now – it certainly could be of use to him

one would think in beefing up his “I have the experience to be President” argument – is that it

would lead to a renewed discussion of the Ayers connection, which is clearly toxic for Obama. And

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 173

it turns out the impact of the Annenberg Challenge on actual students in Chicago schools is

considered mixed at best, although Bill Ayers deemed it a success on political grounds. Indeed the

1995 and 1999 legislative attempts to recentralize power over the schools in the hands of the mayor

did not quite succeed in wrestling control completely away from the LSCs, instead it helped, in the

words of Alexander Russo, “keep the flame alive for decentralized, community-based school reform

- even as the system was moving in a very different direction.”’ (Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent”

Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008) Of course, Obama came from much farther

way – he came from the Trilateral Commission and the worldwide Bilderberger Group.

ABC DEBATE: OBAMA’S BLATANT LIES ABOUT

“ENGLISH PROFESSOR” BILL AYERS

On April 16, 2008, ABC News in the person of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos

hosted a debate in advance of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary. This debate stood out from

more than a score of previous debates because of the refusal of the moderators to capitulate to the

blackmail of the Obamakins and their demand that the Perfect Master be given a free ride. Since

this was the first debate since the explosion of the Jeremiah Wright “God Damn America”

controversy, Obama was asked about his relations with Wright. Obama went into serpentine

contortions in response, at one point affirming that he had “disavowed” Wright, only to have to

backtrack and specify that he had only disavowed the hate-monger’s incendiary statements. Most

offensive to the Obama acolytes was Stephanopoulos’ query about Obama’s relations with the

deranged Weatherman terrorist bomber-provocateur, Bill Ayers. In response, the Perfect Master had

disappeared into a cloud of stuttering, stammering, and tergiversation. On these and other questions

regarding his personal associations and his character, Obama was exposed as a desperate

demagogue running away from most of his own past, while testily harrumphing that the inquiries

were irrelevant. This was network television, and the audience for this debate was by the far largest

of any debate of the 2007-2008 cycle, with 10.7 million viewers, some 96% of whom stayed until

the end. This was in many cases their first exposure to Obama, and they were treated to the

epiphany of a scoundrel.

We can argue that Bill Ayers and his charming consort Bernardine Dohrn, along with Tony

Rezko and the Jeremiah Wright TUCC crowd, represent Obama’s closest and most intimate circle

of backers, sponsors, benefactors, and cronies. Obama was thus lying big time in the Philadelphia

debate when Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers and the Perfect Master massively played down

the nature of his symbiosis with the Weatherman leader and his pasionaria. As Diamond notes,

‘This likely explains why Obama tried a kind of head fake when asked about Ayers by George

Stephanopoulos in the TV debate with Clinton prior to the Pennsylvania primary. Obama said Ayers

was a “professor of English.” Yet, Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and

served on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on grants to Chicago

schools. And he did not know that Ayers was a professor of education? That strains credulity.

(Steve Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)

BILL AYERS IN OBAMA’S KITCHEN CABINET

Diamond summed up: ‘The Chicago Annenberg Challenge allowed Barack Obama and Bill

Ayers to work together, no doubt closely, in the heat of political battle to help disburse more than

$100 million to allies, particularly in the LSCs, in the Chicago School system. Under the

circumstances, it seems more than a bit disingenuous of Senator Obama to dismiss Bill Ayers as

174 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

“some guy who lives in my neighborhood.”’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My

Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) In

reality, there is every indication that Ayers functions as a close political adviser to Obama, and his

umbilical cord to key parts of the intelligence community who have a say in the actions of the

Perfect Master. As Diamond points out, ‘Perhaps this would be of just historical interest if it could

be firmly established that Bill Ayers no longer has any role in the Obama campaign. But that is not

something we know for sure yet. In a recent television interview with Greta Van Susteren, John

Murtagh, a Republican town council member from Yonkers, New York, said that Ayers is currently

an “advisor” to Obama. Murtagh has a particular and understandable sensitivity to the Ayers-

Obama connection besides his Republican politics: his father was a New York Supreme Court (in

NY the Supreme Court is a trial court) judge who presided over a trial of the “Black Panther 21” in

1970-71…. Murtagh was 9 years old at the time. During the trial Murtagh’s home was fire bombed

and Murtagh claims the Weather Underground was responsible for that bombing along with several

others in “solidarity” with the Panthers. He charges, specifically, that Bill Ayers’ wife Bernardine

Dohrn later took credit (apparently on behalf of the entire WU group) for the bombing.’ (Steve

Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008) Nor is this all. There

are indications that the Weatherpeople regard Obama as one of their own, whose seizure of power

will crown with unimagined success their long march through the institutions began in late 1969

and early 1970 when they went into clandestine and underground life. Does Obama bear the

Weatherman tattoo flaunted by Ayers? Will Obama function as a Weatherman in the White House?

Will he pardon Weatherman fanatic and butcher Dave Gilbert, thanks to whose efforts two cops and

a security guard died in the Brinks robbery attempted by the Weatherpeople?

Large parts of the federal bureaucracy might well be in continuous insurrection against Obama

from his hypothetical first day in office. This would include parts of the Justice Department and

various individual law enforcement officials. Here are some excerpts from an April 18, 2008

interview by CNN’s Lou Dobbs with Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor:

On CNN, April 18 — DOBBS: Bill Ayers, we’re hearing today from Mayor Daley that he also

knows Ayers and he’s just a fine fellow and no problem, don’t be — please don’t be

discomforted by Senator Obama’s relationship with him.

MCCARTHY: Look, of all the people who’ve ever bombed the Pentagon and the State

Department and the New York City police headquarters, I’m sure he’s one of the best. But I —

my sense is that regular Americans aren’t going to see it that way.

DOBBS: Senator Obama, you are declaring rather straight forwardly, is denying some relatively

close relationships that he is suggesting are not — are distant.

MCCARTHY: Yeah, well he’s denying the relationship, but I think more importantly what he’s

trying to obfuscate is that there’s a trajectory to all of this and there’s a theme that runs through

it and whether its some of the statements made by his wife or Reverend Wright or Bernardine

Dohrn and Ayers, the fact is he’s comfortable...Bernardine Dohrn being Ayers’ wife. The other

Weather Underground terrorist who was Ayers’ wife. But, he’s comfortable with people who

hate this country. And I think when he talks about and makes the theme of his campaign

“Change,” and since he hasn’t really explained to us much about the change, we’re entitled to

infer, from the people he’s comfortable with, who are social revolutionaries, the kind of change

he wants to make in America.

DOBBS: You’re including, obviously, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

MCCARTHY: Of course, right.

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 175

DOBBS: And — and Ayers. Others?

MCCARTHY: Well, there’s Rashid Khalidi, who was a recipient of some of the largess that

Obama controlled when he was on the Woods Board. He is somebody who was –

DOBBS: He was on the board with Ayers?

MCCARTHY: Yes, when Obama was on the Woods Board with Ayers, they gave grants to

Rashid Khalidi, and his work…. (Lou Dobbs, CNN, April 18, 2008)

We note once again in passing that the primitive analysis which is typical of right-wing

observers insists on viewing figures like Ayers as authentic radicals or revolutionaries, rather than

the cynical foundation-funded intelligence community operatives which they actually are. In any

case, we can see here that a future President Obama would have a hard time bringing the executive

agencies of his own regime together, quite apart from his grandiose promises of bringing together

the majority and the opposition in Congress.

OBAMA FANATICS WANT THE AYERS QUESTION DECLARED TABOO

Even while the Philadelphia debate was continuing, there was much wailing and gnashing of

teeth among the Obamakins squatting in the outer darkness. The shrillest of the effete snobs that

evening was probably Tom Shales, the television critic of the Washington Post, which had long

since joined in the swoon for the new messiah. Shales howled that the debate “was another step

downward for network news – in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia

and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in

shoddy, despicable performances…Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and

gossipy trivia that has already been hashed and rehashed.” Shales mocked Gibson for “looking

prosecutorial and portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class.” Obama had brought

“refreshing candor” into the debate. The moderators could only be compared to “dogs.” (Tom

Shales, “In the Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser is ABC,” Washington Post, April 17, 2008)

The center-right oligarch David Brooks, by contrast, found that the ABC questions were

“excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions,

contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each

looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault. We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah

Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W.

Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will

respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. The Democrats have a problem. All the signs point to a

big Democratic year, and I still wouldn’t bet against Obama winning the White House, but his

background as a Hyde Park liberal is going to continue to dog him. No issue is crushing on its own,

but it all adds up. For the life of me I can’t figure out why he didn’t have better answers on Wright

and on the “bitter” comments. The superdelegates cannot have been comforted by his performance.

Final grades: ABC: A; Clinton: B; Obama: D+” (David Brooks, No Whining About the Media, New

York Times, April 16, 2008) The ABC questions, far from representing a modern Torquemada

treatment, had barely scratched the surface concerning Obama’s relation to Ayers.

THE JOYCE FOUNDATION AND RULING CLASS PLANS FOR GUN CONTROL

Larry Johnson has reported that for eight years, Obama sat on the board of Chicago’s Joyce

Foundation — earning $70,000 in compensation — an influential board that ‘funneled almost $3

million in grants to political groups opposing gun rights,” according to Politico.com reporter

176 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

Kenneth Vogel. This raised another duplicity problem for Obama, since his campaign has worked to

assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t

want to take away their guns. As Jarlyn at TalkLeft indicated, “At Wednesday’s debate, Barack

Obama wouldn’t say what his position is on the DC law banning handguns.” In her view, Obama

“dodged, saying he wasn’t familiar with the facts of the case.” She had the audacity to wonder

didn’t Obama answer the question at the debate instead of weaving and bobbing? Was it because he

didn’t want to alienate PA voters, many of whom favor strong gun ownership rights? And, did he

fail to tell the truth? According to the said Jeralyn, in November, “his campaign told the Chicago

Tribune he supported the ban. (Chicago Tribune November 20, 2007.)’ (Larry Johnson, “Obama on

Board That Funded Handgun Bans,” Noquarterusa.net, April 20, 2008)

The Joyce Foundation website announces: “Our program areas are Education, Employment,

Environment, Gun Violence, Money and Politics, and Culture. We focus our grant making on

initiatives that promise to have an impact on the Great Lakes region, specifically the states of

Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. A limited number of environment

grants are made to organizations in Canada. Education grant making in K-12 focuses on Chicago,

Cleveland, and Milwaukee; early childhood grant making focuses on Illinois and Wisconsin.

Culture grants are primarily focused on the Chicago metropolitan area, except for the Joyce

Awards, which extend to other Midwest cities. We do not generally support capital proposals,

endowment campaigns, religious activities, commercial ventures, direct service programs, or

scholarships.” This adds up to social engineering and mind control. Between the role of the Ford

Foundation as the flagship US counterinsurgency foundation, plus the influence of the terrorist

Bill Ayers as a theoretician of education, it is easy to see how Obama was able to become a

beneficiary of the Joyce Foundation after having served on the Gamaliel Foundation and the

Woods Fund, two other Ford satellites.

According to a focus group set up by the Pennsylvania television station WPVI held the night of

the debate, “Senator Clinton is the debate winner, at least according to our focus group. 23% believe

Senator Obama won while 50% believed Senator Clinton won.” (WPVI Post-Debate Analysis,

April 16, 2008) According to Chuck Todd of NBC News, Obama “did not have a good night….His

answer on Ayers and the flag question were simply weak; He seemed unprepared for them; Kinda

surprising because he normally has a decent rant against “old politics” and yet “old politics”

questions seemed to stump him.” (NBC First Read, April 16, 2008) The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder

opined that there was “no way Obama could have fared worse. Chris Cillizza noted that Obama

“struggled quite a bit more when asked to answer for Wright, his former pastor.” (Washington Post,

The Fix, April 16, 2008) Katharine Seeyle of the New York Times was impressed by how much

better Hillary Clinton fared: “She’s becoming expansive, seemingly in her element as she goes into

details; Mr. Obama does not look as thrilled to be still standing there.” (New York Times, The

Caucus, April 16, 2008) A Philadelphia commentator chimed in: “Obama is again less certain, and

rambles a bit when asked about the Washington D.C. gun ban. Gibson asks him to deny that he has

ever advocated a complete ban on hand guns in 1996. Obama says no. But whatever the truth, no

other answer is possible.” (Philadelphia Inquirer Blog, April 16, 2008) This was actually a case of

bare-faced, outright lying by Obama, since he denied the authenticity of a policy questionnaire

which bore his own handwriting. Unnoticed by most was yet another pro-GOP testimonial by

Obama, who this time pontificated that the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush was “wise” – this

of the criminal adventurer who bombed Iraq back into the stone age in order to re-impose the

regime of his own former business partner, the slave-holding Emir of Kuwait, and by doing so

started the long agony of the US military presence in the Gulf.

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 177

BITTERGATE BY THE GOLDEN GATE;

FASCIST HATRED OF THE WORKING CLASS

During a visit to San Francisco, Obama unwisely blurted out a series of remarks which revealed

the extraordinary degree he shares the outlook of the present day foundation world. Obama showed

himself to be a very reckless individual, not capable of hiding thoughts and ideas which are proving

extremely damaging to his political ambition. This was especially the case when he turned away

from the glass plates of the Teleprompter and had to speak extemporaneously.

One can imagine Obama meeting with a group of wealthy, ultra left, San Francisco elitists from

whom he expects to get enormous amounts of bundled contributions for his political campaign. We

can imagine some elitist of the general type of Gordon Getty, the partial heir to the Getty oil fortune

and a person who shares with the Emperor Nero the conviction that he is the greatest lyric artist of

the age. Getty or someone like him must have asked Obama why he is doing so poorly in Ohio and

Pennsylvania, and the perfect Master is cut to the quick, since these are obviously the states which a

Democrat must win in order to get the presidency. Obama therefore responds with these fateful

words, which projected the questions of oligarchy, elitism, and class consciousness into the center

of the US political debate in a way so extraordinary that it has not been seen in many, many

decades:

OBAMA: “So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we

are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about

government. The people are mis-appre...I think they’re misunderstanding why the

demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just

ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’

That’s...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind

of implies that it’s sort of a race thing. Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big

industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they

feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being

cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by —

it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laughter),

then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter). But — so the questions you’re most likely

to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ What

they wanna hear is — so, we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — close tax

loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax

breaks to middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American. So we’ll

go down a series of talking points. But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people

persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You

go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest,

the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through

the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has

said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not

surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people

who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to

explain their frustrations. Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what

you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can

go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama

178 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just

be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.”64

This very imprudent outburst reveals much about the characteristic outlook of the foundationfunded

political intellectual in the United States today. First of all, this utterance is dripping with

patronizing condescension and contempt for the people he is describing. Obama, well-trained by

his procommunist anthropologist mother, has been in effect on fieldwork in Ohio and Pennsylvania,

and is reporting to a group of his peers about the strange mores of the peculiar populations he has

been attempting to profile and manipulate, with limited success. Obama is trying as hard as he can

to treat the American people like malleable ethnographic material, but they have realized this and

do not like it.

Obama does not mention that the deindustrialization of the United States, and thus the

destruction of the economic viability of the communities he has visited, were the direct result of the

policies imposed by his own Trilateral Commission backers back at the time almost 30 years ago

when Trilateral member Jimmy Carter, probably acting at the prodding of Trilateral member

Zbigniew Brzezinski, place Trilateral member Paul Adolph Volcker at the helm of the Federal

Reserve; it was Volcker’s 22% prime rate which effectively destroyed the industrial infrastructure

of the United States, including especially its export industries. This kind of historical background is

seldom included in the analysis developed by a bankers’ boy when it comes time to assign the

blame.

It is not surprising that Obama is contemptuous of religion, gun ownership, and sports shooting.

The reference to “antipathy” obviously suggests that the people he is dealing with really are racists

after all. Most interesting of all is the reference to “anti-trade,” since the suggestion here is that

anyone who disagrees with economic and financial globalization is somehow irrational, anti-social,

or even paranoid. This puts Obama’s statement closely in line with the classics of academic and

foundation-backed anti-worker ideology. We will not try to develop here the case that economic and

financial globalization have effectively wrecked the world economy, leading to an overall world

immiseration in the form of declining standards of living, and declining economic opportunity. We

have made this case already in Surviving the Cataclysm. Today, the financial order of globalization

is dissolving before the horrified eyes of world public opinion, with the entire system going to the

brink of a systemic explosion of the world banking system on the Ides of March with the looming

bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, which threatened to set off chain reaction bankruptcies throughout the

world financial community in 2008.

One of the sources for the idea that anyone who opposes the prevailing economic and financial

line of Wall Street, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve is suffering from some form of

psychopathology is the work of the deeply dishonest and much reviled Columbia University

historian, Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter was the author of “The Paranoid Style in American

Politics,” (Harper’s, 1964), and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He was especially brutal in

his slanders of the late 19th century protest movement among farmers who called themselves the

Populists. Hofstadter was one of the leaders of the school of “consensus historians,” an approach

which he described with the remark that “It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot

hang together at all unless there is some kind of consensus running through it.” His favorite

technique was to psychoanalyze protest movements, always coming to the conclusion that the

dissidents and critics of the established regime were hopelessly irrational, after probing into their

unconscious psychological motives, status anxieties, hatreds, and paranoia, presenting these

syndromes as the real cause for their political discontent. His favorite way of dismissing a critic was

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 179

to accuse that person of suffering from a “status panic.” Hofstadter’s work boils down to the idea

that politics is a morass of fear, hatred, provincial ignorance, and insanity, and that the only thing to

do is to support the Establishment and its existing order at all costs. Inevitably, Hofstadter had been

a communist, but he insulted Franklin D. Roosevelt by dismissing him as “The Patrician as

Opportunist.” Conservative commentator George Will once described Hofstadter as “the iconic

public intellectual of liberal condescension,” who “dismissed conservatives as victims of character

flaws and psychological disorders — a ‘paranoid style’ of politics rooted in ‘status anxiety,’ etc.

Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.”65

Hofstadter, like so many pompous professors, was little more than a paid apologist of the financier

ruling class.

And even such ideas as Hofstadter had were not really original, since most of them came from

the 19th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim’s critique of religion is based on an

idea drawn from Feuerbach that God’s kingdom is merely the projection into eternity and theology

of the existing social relations in a given human group. Durkheim taught that God was “society

divinized,” that “God is society, writ large.”66 Here again there was a very strong overtone that

anyone in the position of a critic, a naysayer, an outsider, a maverick, or a protester was an example

of social pathology rather than being a valuable corrective to the undeniable abuses of a failing

system.

Most importantly, Obama’s Bittergate comments documented that once again his deep hatred for

the American working class, a hatred which constitutes the first and central point in the

Fanon/Weatherman political doctrine: blue-collar white workers are racist, warmongering

“honkies” who have been bought off by capitalist concessions and integrated into the system so that

no revolution, but only bloody race war, remains possible. This concept, in turn, is congenial to the

bosses of the foundations, and to the US financier oligarchy in general, since it happens to coincide

so totally with their plan for a campaign of savage austerity, draconian reductions in the standard of

living, and related genocidal policies against US working people as a means of dealing with the

current world economic and financial depression. Jimmy Carter was of course a useful tool to the

Trilateral bankers, but his effectiveness was sometimes undermined by the qualms, reticence, and

second thoughts suggested by the Christianity he professed. With Obama, there is no such danger;

quite the contrary, Obama will bring to his appointed task a ferocious criminal energy which will

help him to attempt to flay the American people alive.

OBAMA: A DEEP COVER AGENT OF THE 1313 GANG?

The dominant component controlling Obama in terms of his policies and tasks is, as we have

stressed, the Trilateral Commission, founded with Rockefeller family money by David Rockefeller

and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s controller and Obama’s top political director. In a general way,

Obama can be accurately described as a controlled asset of the Rockefeller family and its allies. The

Rockefeller apparatus of political and social manipulation which is sponsoring Obama has been

around for a long time – more than a century. For them, manipulating elections is nothing new. The

University of Chicago is a long-standing center for Rockefeller subversion. As we have seen, the

University of Chicago 1313 gang was set up with the help of the Spelman Fund, a foundation

created in December 1928 by the outrageous robber barons and sociopathic monopolists John D.

Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller Jr., the great-grandfather and grandfather of today’s fanatical

Obama backer Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV of West Virginia. The Spelman Fund got $10

million 1928 dollars from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, which were to be used for

social engineering in favor of financier interests in the field of child study, “parent education,” race

180 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

relations, and cooperation with public agencies–a whole range of meddling with the bitter clingers,

and not mere humanitarian concerns. The mission statement of the oligarchical Spelman Fund

bluntly stated that “the interest of the Spelman Fund is not in improvement of some social practice

or function, but is rather in the contribution which maybe made to all aspects of public welfare

through increase of efficiency, technical competence, and rational purposefulness in the operation

of the machinery of government.” Not social progress, but totalitarian control was the goal.

A recent journalistic account of 1313 informs us: ‘1313, completed in 1938, embodied the vision

of two men, Charles E. Merriam, and Louis Brownlow. Brownlow had forged a career (without

benefit of formal education) as a city manager and as a forceful advocate for the public service

professions. Merriam was a University of Chicago political science professor with a bent for

activism that led to service as a Chicago alderman and to two (unsuccessful) runs for the Mayoralty.

The two men conceived 1313 as a vibrant center for (in the words of a 1963 booklet) “the

improvement of the organization, administrative techniques, and methods of government –

municipal, county, state, and federal – in the United States.” Within a few years, 1313 had clearly

become a nerve center for American public administration. By 1963, it was organizational home to

22 non-profit entities, including: American Public Works Association, American Public Welfare

Association, Council of State Governments. American Society of Planning Officials, American

Society of Public Administration, National Legislative Conference, Public Administration Service,

National Association of State Budget Officers, and the National Association of Attorneys General.

Proximity was a key factor in the Merriam-Brownlow concept: proximity of the building’s

organizational inhabitants both to each other and to the resources of the University of Chicago. The

lively, continuous, cross-fertilizing exchanges ensuing from these proximities were to advance the

professionalization of public administration in the U.S.’67 1313 appears as a Rockefeller deployment

running parallel to European fascism, and aiming at the destruction, under the banner of good

government and efficiency, of the large urban political machines which were to be so important in

the 1932-33 coming of the New Deal, which the reactionary Rockefellers were eager to see headed

off.

AXELROD’S 1313 GANG AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Some of the 1313 gang’s efforts were disrupted by World War II, but the 1313 operatives were

quick to bounce back: ‘First, the 1313-Spelman boys were thinking hard about the ways and means

to organize a New World Order. A lot of them were involved in the brainstorming that was to

give birth to the new international organizations: their concern for integrating public administration

had now a new level, the international one, in the hope that it would be possible to build a more

efficient system than the League of Nations.’ Rockefeller-funded 1313 operatives played key roles

in creating the United Nations, UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which dealt with refugees and

displaced persons, the World Bank, and other components of the supernational bureaucracy. To

each of these organisms the Rockefeller men imparted their characteristic features of sinister

cruelty, manipulation, and the shameless pursuit of world supremacy for the Anglo-American

financier oligarchy. The 1313 gang is thus central to the efforts for new world order: ‘Thus, the

Ford consolidated the work of international organization that had begun in the 1930s, placing the

urban international under discrete but effective American patronage. It added stone to what could

be called a “Chicago consensus” on urban issues at the international scale, this consensus being

circulated through the net of links created since the 1930s, and put in action thanks to the

overlapping personnel of the Ford, the Chicago organizations, the international societies, and the

IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 181

international institutions. It needs more work to be able to say if the US involvement supported or

engineered by the Big Foundations changed the way in which the city was imagined at the

international scale, or rather created some new frame in which the city was imagined and managed.

It seems that the big foundations heavily contributed to create a new market for governmental

consultancy, quite close in its operation to the one that had been created on the domestic scene in

the 1930s. A vital role in this development was the one played by 1313 leaders, when they

cooperated with the Spelman and when they shaped the action of the Ford.’68 Here, in typical

barbarous foundation-speak, is a good description of the interlocking nests of foundation operatives

which constitute the political, social, and intellectual milieu from which Obama has emerged: the

foundations.

During the Eisenhower years, right-wing critics of the financier elite inevitably viewed the 1313

gang – in reality the proponents of a collectivism based on Wall Street finance capital, not the

proletariat — as tinged with communism, and thus as ‘a secret nest and nexus of totalitarian evil in

the U.S. One lead voice in the chorus of accusations was a woman from southern California named

Jo Hindman. In 1959 and 1960 she published six articles in the American Mercury magazine that

identified an insidious threat to American values and traditions that she termed “Metropolitan

Government” – Metro, for short. In a 1963 book entitled Terrible 1313 Revisited, Hindman

disclosed to the world that “. . . .in the late 1950’s, location of the Metro capital was discovered at

1313 E. 60th Street, Chicago 37, Illinois, a twenty-two organization clearing house. This arsenal of

totalitarianism spews Metro directives, programs, and projects all over target U.S.A….In concept,

practices, and in rapidly multiplying instances, Metro has wrecked private homes, businesses,

property rights, and the ballot franchise. Upon the shambles of these basic concepts in American

government, Metro seeks to force upon Americans collectivized Metropolitan Government, totally.”

Metro’s key devices as enumerated by Hindman included zoning, public health measures, building

codes, urban renewal and transjurisdictional authorities like the New York Port Authority. An

Internet search still finds many references to Terrible 1313 on right-wing websites today.” (Bruce

Thomas, “1313’s Hidden History,” Hyde Park Herald, May 23, 2004) Ms. Hindman’s analysis may

have lacked sophistication, but she was surely on firm ground when she ascribed a basic world

outlook of malevolence and oligarchical arrogance to the 1313 gang. This look back at 1313 as the

later spawning ground for David Axelrod has also provided us with the immediate pre-history of the

Ford Foundation “community control” and “local control” counterinsurgency methods of the late

1960s.

Now a new generation of the 1313 project is poised to take power in the person of Ford-

Rockefeller operative Obama, the Manchurian candidate whose campaign is dominated by David

Axelrod, an operative who owes his training to the 1313 operation.

Obama’s sordid associations suffered another implicit blow on the eve of the Pennsylvania

primary, when Pope Benedict XVI concluded a visit to Washington and New York with the

benediction, “God bless America,” as he boarded his plane for the journey back to Rome. Many

recalled the “No! No! No! God damn America!” rant of the satanic racist provocateur Jeremiah

Wright of the foundation-funded black liberation theology synthetic religion, from whom the

Perfect Master had imbibed hatred and political support for two decades.

CHAPTER V: OBAMA’S HEART OF DARKNESS: REZKO,

AUCHI, ALSAMMARAE, AND CHICAGO GRAFT

“I am the first one to acknowledge that it was a boneheaded move….” – Obama

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” – Obama

“Illinois is awash in scandal and corruption.” – Jay Stewart, Illinois Better Government

Association

“The Illinois Combine… the bipartisan Illinois political combine.” – US Senator Peter Fitzgerald

If Obama ever reaches the White House, he will certainly be classified as one of the most corrupt

winners of a presidential election in the history of our country. Past presidents from Grant to

Harding have been generally considered corrupt, but it is likely that a future Obama administration

would eclipse them all. As this chapter will make clear, Obama has climbed out of a veritable

sewer of corruption, crime, graft, bribery, kickbacks and rake offs to assume his current role as

seraphic advocate of good government and public probity. Obama may not be the most corrupt

individual ever to approach the presidency, but he is in all probability the person in whom the

reality of corruption and a hypocritical pretense of clean government are most at variance. In this

sense, Obama qualifies as a hypocrite greater than Molière’s Tartuffe, greater than Dickens’ Mr.

Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit.

At the center of Obama’s universe of corruption are three godfathers. They are all Levantine

Arabs from the eastern Mediterranean, corsairs of those dark seas where dirty machine politics and

illegal financial manipulations flow together. The first is Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a nominal

Catholic from the port of Aleppo in Syria, who has been Obama’s most immediate sponsor, backer,

friend, and bagman during his entire political career. Rezko has probably bilked the public treasury

for something approaching one hundred million dollars in the form of public-and private

partnerships allegedly designed to rehabilitate, renovate, and restore decayed slum properties and

make them fit for human habitation. In reality, the properties have been given over to rats and

cockroaches, while Rezko has grown fabulously rich. Obama and his wife Michelle personally

participated in this ill-gotten gain when Rezko assisted them in acquiring the bombastic and

ostentatious mansion in the Kenwood district in which this nouveau riche couple now resides.

Rezko got his start in Chicago opening Subway sandwich shops in places that needed city

concessions. Rezko then became close to Jabir Herbert Muhammad, former manager of

heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and son of the late Nation of Islam leader, Elijah

Muhammad, and he entered active politics in 1983 to support the successful mayoral candidacy of

Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.

The second of Obama’s three godfathers is Nadhmi Auchi, who was born in Iraq, professes the

Roman Catholic religion, and is ranked as the eighth (or 18th, depending on the account you read)

richest person in the United Kingdom with a personal fortune approaching £2,000,000,000 or about

$4 billion. In 2003, Auchi was convicted of fraud in the Elf Aquitaine bribery scandal, probably the

largest corruption investigation in the history of postwar Europe. Auchi has a 15 month suspended

sentence hanging over his head. The Elf scandal came complete with accusations against former

French police Minister Charles Pasqua and former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, plus the

involvement of the Corsican mafia and various Freemasonic lodges. The basic charge was that a

network including scores of oligarchs had conspired to lose the French state owned oil company

V. Obama’s Heart of Darkness: Rezko, Auchi, Alsammarae, and Chicago Graft 183

Elf-Aquitaine of about 3 billion French francs (about $750 million), principally during the 1980s

and 1990s. As a newspaper account related at the time of the Elf trial,

Another powerful figure whose dealings were examined by the magistrates is a British-Iraqi

businessman, Nadhmi Auchi. Defense attorneys said the magistrates investigated Mr. Auchi’s

alleged role in Elf’s 1991 purchase of the Spanish oil company, Ertoil, from its Kuwaiti owner.

According to French press reports, Mr. Auchi helped Elf by initially buying the company

quickly - and avoiding regulatory delays - and then selling it on to Elf. Defense attorneys said

Mr. Auchi allegedly received a commission from Elf of more than 300 million French francs for

his role. Among the magistrates’ questions is whether Mr. Auchi funneled any “retrocommissions”

on the deal back to Elf executives or political figures in France. Commissions

and corporate bribes for foreign officials were legal under French law at the time - indeed, they

were tax deductible. But it was illegal to kick money back to France through these so-called

retro-commissions, which nonetheless are thought to have been widespread on major oil and

arms deals. Mr. Auchi has denied any wrongdoing, and defense attorneys said he had offered to

buy Ertoil back and repay any commissions he received. But he has refused to appear in France

before the magistrates, who have issued an international arrest warrant for him. Although Mr.

Auchi’s name is almost unknown to the French or British public, he is sometimes described as

the eighth-richest man in Britain, with a broad portfolio of assets grouped under his holding

company, General Mediterranean. At one time, he was also reputed to be the largest individual

shareholder in the French bank, Banque Paribas, and a member of its international advisory

board. According to press reports, the French government last year seized his shares in Paribas,

said to be worth $500 million. Queried about his holdings Thursday, Paribas failed to respond.

(Joseph Fitchett and David Ignatius, “Lengthy Elf Inquiry Nears Explosive Finish, International

Herald Tribune, February 1, 2002)69

Aiham Alsammarae (also known as Ayham al-Samarie or Ahyam al Samarrai) is the third of

Obama’s godfathers, and a picaresque figure in the annals of international crime. Alsammarae is

officially listed as a Sunni Arab Iraqi politician and the former Iraqi Minister of Electricity. In his

ministerial post, Alsammarae was accused of looting funds from the Iraqi Electricity Ministry

during the reign of the feckless neocon proconsul, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the Viceroy of the so-called

Coalition Provisional Authority. In August 2006 Al-Samarie was arrested on corruption charges

involving irregularities in the letting of contracts and the misappropriation of millions of dollars. He

was convicted in October 2006 of corruption relating to a $200,000 generator purchase, and was

sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. In December 2006, his conviction for corruption was thrown

out, but he remained in jail awaiting trial for twelve additional corruption cases. Alsammarae fled

his trial in Iraq on corruption charges after hiring Blackwater USA to break him out of prison. He

currently resides in Chicago. . Alsammarae’s international flight to escape prosecution on felony

corruption charges was openly aided and abetted by the Bush regime, since an American plane

carried him out of Iraq to Jordan. Alsammarae is one of the international jackals whose looting of

Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority helped to created the armed backlash of a national

resistance which has so far cost the United States well over 4000 dead.70

Now, o muse, let Nixon’s Bebe Rebozo be silent; let Albert Fall of Harding’s Teapot Dome and

Grant’s Credit Mobilier sink into obscurity. Let LBJ’s Billy Sol Estes and Reagan’s Gorbanifar and

Kashoggi go gibbering into Hades, while Carter’s Bert Lance and Clinton’s Marc Rich retreat to the

shadows wrapped in Sherman Adams’ vicuna coats from the Eisenhower era. A new champion of

crime and logothete of corruption is at hand, and he is Obama.

184 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

THEN: TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE;

NOW: ALSAMMARAE TO AUCHI TO REZKO TO OBAMA

Obama has boasted and strutted about his alleged October 2002 speech opposing the idea of a

US attack on Iraq, but it is quite possible that blood money looted from the Coalition Provisional

Authority may have found its way into Obama’s infamous Kenwood mansion. The old Chicago

Cubs double play went from Tinker to Evers to Chance. Obama’s new triple play of corruption may

have gone from Alsammarae to Auchi to Rezko to Obama, with the US taxpayer being one of the

main victims. As Jerome Corsi commented, “Following this twisted trail of suspicious millions,

investigative reporters have drawn a line from Obama to Rezko to Saddam Hussein’s Oil for Food

scandal, with the key connecting point being billionaire Nadhmi Auchi.”71

Most of the funding of Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority came from the Bush regime,

and this was the money appropriated from the Iraqi Electricity Ministry by Alsammarae. Might

Alsammarae then have transferred some of these funds to Auchi in London in the course of certain

joint ventures in which these two were engaged? Might some of those same dollars then have

made up part of a $3.5 million loan from Auchi to Rezko? Such money might have helped Rezko

recoup some of his largesse to Barky involved in the earlier below-cost purchase of the lot next door

to Obama’s mansion, a transaction which was indispensable to allow Barky and Michelle to get

control of the property they wanted and later to expand the size of their yard:

When Obama bought his mansion in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, Rezko’s wife Rita,

purchased adjoining land for $625,000 – land that the house’s owners insisted on selling at the

same time. Seven months later, she sold the Obamas one-sixth of her lot, for $105,000, so they

could expand their yard.72

According to another account, this time from a left liberal source:

Troubling to the Obamas’ image of civic rectitude is their entanglement with a campaign

contributor named Antoin (Tony) Rezko in a 2005 real-estate deal. (Rezko is now awaiting trial

on corruption charges.) That year, as the Tribune reported, the Obamas moved to a $1.65-

million Georgian Revival mansion in Hyde Park, which features a thousand-bottle wine cellar

and bookcases made of Honduran mahogany. On the day they bought the house, Rita Rezko,

Tony’s wife, purchased the adjacent lot, which was wooded and empty, for $625,000. After the

deal went through, Michelle contacted the city’s landmarks commission, which she had served

on, and received an e-mail from a deputy commissioner with suggestions for obtaining permits

to erect a fence between the parcels. The Obamas paid for legal, architectural, and landscaping

work, while Rezko got the bill for the fence’s construction, for fourteen thousand dollars. (New

Yorker, March 11, 2008)

The impudence and flagrance of this corrupt transaction underline once again what can only be

called Obama’s megalomania, a sense that he has been absolved of obedience to the law in the same

way that earlier false messiahs have proclaimed the suspension of all the rules. It was reckless folly

for Obama to insist on getting the mansion with an assist from an organized crime figure, but he

went ahead anyway. This is the same kind of antinomian mentality which we can detect in the

crimes of presidents from Nixon to Bush. As Pringle comments,

Obama’s entering into real estate deals with Rezko, while it was public knowledge that he was

under investigation for funneling illegal contributions to Illinois politicians, was not a

“boneheaded” move, it was motivated by pure greed. While knowing that he would get caught

up in a major scandal, Obama went ahead with the deal because he and his wife wanted that

V. Obama’s Heart of Darkness: Rezko, Auchi, Alsammarae, and Chicago Graft 185

mansion, with four fireplaces, six bathrooms, and a wine cellar, period. (Evelyn Pringle,

opednews.com)

THE ILLINOIS BIPARTISAN COMBINE; MOTHER SHIP FOR OBAMA

At the center of this worldwide network of crime and intrigue we find the one form of bipartisan

political cooperation to which Obama is sincerely devoted: this sinister centerpiece is the bipartisan

Illinois Combine, a continuing criminal enterprise under the definitions of the RICO statute through

which a gang of racketeers composed of elected officials of the Democratic and Republican parties

have systematically looted and despoiled the public treasuries of the city of Chicago, Cook County,

and the state of Illinois in particular. In his specific capacity as a ward heeling machine hack

political operative, Obama looks to this criminal bipartisan Illinois Combine as his mother ship.

Due to the pervasive presence and overwhelming rapacity of the bipartisan Illinois Combine, it may

well be that Illinois and Chicago specifically represent the most filthy and corrupt jurisdictions

anywhere in the United States today. How ironic that Obama, the self-styled angel of clean

government, has chosen to climb out of this repulsive sewer.

The working hypothesis of this book is that the Rezko conviction, which may well be followed

by similar convictions of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and of Chicago Mayor Daley, will not

be used by Soros and the Trilateral financiers to sabotage the candidacy of their own handpicked

bankers’ boy during the 2008 contest. This would of course represent a self-defeating exercise in

futility, a contradiction in terms. It is instead likely as Operation Board Games represents a

capability which will be kept in reserve for the future, should it ever become necessary for the

banking faction to remind the megalomaniac Obama about who is boss. If Barky becomes too

rambunctious, he can be threatened with indictment and incarceration using the testimony of his

longtime crony Rezko. Alternatively, Operation Board Games and the Rezko conviction might be

used as convenient detonation devices, should the Trilateral bankers ever feel the need to jettison

their puppet in a big hurry. This use of a large-scale federal investigation of the corrupt operations

of a statewide political machine recalls a similar pattern which emerged around the puppet President

Harry S. Truman, who could always be disciplined by reminding him that his patron and the

architects of his political career, boss Tom Pendergast, had been sent to the federal penitentiary in

1939, where Harry could also be sent at any time if he were to forget whose servant he actually was.

This grim reality of the Rezko conviction being available to enforce permanent puppet status on

Obama, no matter what the latter might desire to do once he got to the White House, is yet another

consideration for voters looking for an independent-minded president in 2008.

The Rezko case, like a lugubrious Greek chorus, provided an ominous counterpoint to Obama’s

activities during the primary season. Rezko was arrested at his home in Wilmette, Illinois on

January 29 by federal agents and was taken forthwith to the hoosegow. Federal authorities said that

Rezko had violated the conditions of his bail bond. Jury selection for the Rezko trial began about a

month later. At this time, the Chicago newspapers were much more aggressive than the swooning

national media who made up most of the press corps that was accompanying Obama on his

campaign travels. None of the national pundits was the least bit interested in the fact that the

Perfect Master had such a dirty godfather, but the Chicago types were more hard-bitten. Chicago

papers demanded that Obama come clean, issuing the following set of demands just as the Rezko

trial preparations were beginning:

Jury selection began Monday in the trial of political influence peddler Tony Rezko. This would

be the time — before a single witness takes the stand — for Barack Obama to finally share

186 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

every detail of his relationship with Rezko. Rezko stands accused of funneling state business to

companies that lined his pockets and made campaign contributions to Gov. Blagojevich. Rezko

allegedly directed $10,000 to Obama’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. For months, Sun-

Times investigative reporters have had a standing request to meet with Obama, face to face, to

get answers to questions such as these: How many fund-raisers did Rezko throw for Obama?

Obama is donating $150,000 to charity that Rezko brought into the campaign. But how much in

all did Rezko raise? Did Rezko find jobs for Obama backers in the Blagojevich administration

or elsewhere? Why did Obama only recently admit — after Bloomberg News broke the story —

that Rezko had toured his South Side mansion with him in 2004 before he bought it? Dribs and

drabs of people’s lives have a most unfortunate way of coming out in trials.’ (Chicago Sun-

Times, “Sen. Obama, time to call us about Rezko: (312) 321-2417,” March 4, 2008)

FITZGERALD DELIBERATELY SHIELDED OBAMA IN THE REZKO TRIAL

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, whose status as a high-level enforcer for the ruling class had

been established during the Scooter Libby prosecution, elected not to bring Obama’s name into the

Rezko trial at the numerous points where mentioning Obama would have been pertinent. Even in

the original indictment against Rezko, Fitzgerald’s office had bent over backwards to avoid

negative publicity for Obama: ‘The list of names in the indictment includes about eight persons

referred to as “Co-Schemers,” and reads like a “who’s who list” of major campaign donors to

Obama, Blagojevich, Daley and other powerful Illinois politicians. Blagojevich is referred to as

“Public Official A,” Obama is referred to as a “political candidate,” and there is a list of

“Individuals” from “Individual A” all the way up to “Individual HH.”’ (Evelyn Pringle,

opednews.com) The same tender regard for Obama’s reputation continued through the entire Rezko

trial: ‘Newly unsealed documents show that prosecutors sought to call witnesses to testify about

Rezko’s ties to Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. The Illinois senator was

the recipient of “straw” campaign contributions made by others on behalf of Rezko — money that

Obama has since given to charities, but only after he got caught. The documents indicate that

prosecutors considered offering witnesses to explore why Rezko used others to contribute to Obama

and also to Blagojevich, and U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve ruled that they could. But they did

not end up offering a