I realize that most of the individuals who frequent this forum are either "conservatives" or Austrian School "libertarians" who, as such, don't have to be told that there are certain "liberals" and "progressives" who don't necessarily have their best interests in mind.
Nevertheless, I assume at least
some of the many hundreds of "guests" here are left-leaning independents and relative newcomers to the world of politics. It is primarily to them that I address the following.
If Ralph Nader is a classic example of a true and sincere
liberal who, as such, is genuinely concerned with eliminating poverty, Barack Obama is a classic example of both (a) a smug, manipulative, insincere “
limousine liberal” and (b) a
foundation-funded “poverty pimp” whose only real concern is with protecting the vested interests of the ruling-class oligarchs pulling his strings, while fooling his gullible followers with carefully crafted,
euphemism-laced rhetoric into believing all the while that he’s serving
their interests.
With particular regard to elite “foundations,” it seems that most people are woefully unaware of the alarming extent to which these supposedly “benevolent” institutions have shaped the horribly and increasingly dysfunctional social and political realities that have grown up around us in recent decades.
It is thus my hope that the following excerpts from Chapter 2 of Webster Tarpley’s book,
Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, will help spark a dramatic reduction in this acute lack of mass awareness.
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Pages 69-76:OBAMA’S WORLD: THE FOUNDATIONSWe 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 clans 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 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 FOUNDATIONSWhen 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, dead-end, 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 groups 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 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 that the organization was demonstrating against Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. The Carnegie Corporation pumped nearly $20 million into various left-wing 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 1960sIn 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 organization 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….
Right-wing commentators…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 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….
FORD FOUNDATION COMMUNITY ACTION AND THE 1960s GHETTO RIOTSThe 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--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 1965-1967. 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 Program (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, 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….
MCGEORGE BUNDY: FROM VIETNAM STRATEGIC HAMLETS TO COMMUNITY CONTROLIn 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 Bundy, 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....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-in-the-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 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 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)
GONZALEZ: FORD FOUNDATION “REVERSE RACISM” AMONG LATINOSBundy 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....
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 $636,000 to the Southwest Council for LaRaza. He said: The 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 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 KINGMartin 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 anti-poverty 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 for their demands.
FORD’S MCKISSICK, ANTI-MARTIN LUTHER KINGThanks 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 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 race-based “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 into 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 them to help other blacks articulate their needs.’ (Tamar Jacoby, “McGeorge Bundy: How the Establishment’s Man Tackled America’s Problem with Race”)
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.
Page 85:1980s COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS AND COLLABORATIVES: OBAMA’S BACKGROUNDBy 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 de-industrialization and poverty a little more comfortable. The CDCs were also corporatist in the strict sense borrowed from the Mussolini fascist corporate state: as an organization 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 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.
Page 88:”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 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 to 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.
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Bottom line: just as anti-war/anti-police state/anti-
debt-money “conservatives” must not allow themselves to become the unwitting dupes of yet another
pro-war/
pro-police state/
pro-debt-money “
neocon,” anti-war/anti-police state/anti-debt-money “progressives” must not allow themselves to become the unwitting dupes of yet another
pro-war/
pro-police state/
pro-debt-money “liberal” or "progressive" (whether from the corporate world or foundation world).
Because to support either one is to support the
same overall agenda.
