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Who Pulls Obama's Strings?


For OpEdNews: Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall - Writer

In 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama to the presidency as an antiwar progressive change maker despite having virtually no knowledge of his life prior to 2004. In the 18 months since the election, our new president seems to have undergone a 180 reversal in his politics. As well as reneging on nearly all his campaign promises, he has continued and expanded the pro-war, pro-torture, pro-covert assassination and anti-civil liberties policies of his predecessor George W. Bush. Eighteen months into Bush's presidency, the major corporate players who influenced Bush and Cheney were blatantly obvious. Bush had extensive prior (family) ties with the oil industry and Cheney with both oil companies and defense contractors. While Obama also seems to be at the beck and call of corporate backers, exactly who they are is much less clear. The question has led many analysts on both sides of the political aisle - to take a closer look at his background before he came on the national stage as a US senator from Illinois senator in 2004.

Obama's secrecy and evasiveness about his early life hasn't helped. In fact there are gaping holes in his resume that have led to all kinds of (mainly right wing) conspiracy theories about the authenticity of his birth certificate, his secret adherence to the Muslim religion, a possible stint with the CIA during the years nobody remembers him at Columbia, and his allegiance to a secret international Marxist/socialist conspiracy. I think the birth certificate issue is a red herring to distract people from growing evidence that Obama has a past in intelligence. Likewise a so-called Marxist/socialist conspiracy would require financing - and wealthy elites are very reluctant to fund Marxist-Leninist groups that seek to deprive them of their wealth.

According to Obama's unofficial biographer Webster Tarpley and Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency employee and member of the Association for Intelligence Officers, more and more credible evidence is surfacing that Obama had some type of intelligence career before entering public life. The Russians certainly thought he did when they detained Senators Obama and Lugar in 2004 following a three day fact finding mission related to disarmament talks. In fact they accused Obama of spying for the British (?) and demanded to search his aircraft (as he was leaving, not entering, the country).


It's also a matter of public record that Business International Corporation, Inc.(BIC), which employed Obama for one year after he graduated from Columbiain 1983 was a front company for the CIA (see New York Times 12/27/77). BIC used journalists as non-official cover (NOC) agents around in a number of foreign countries. A NOC (Valerie Plame is the best example) is an intelligence operative who assumes a covert role in an organization with no official ties to the government they are acting for. Obama's job was to do research and to write for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly newsletter.

Other evidence of Obama's intelligence links is either indirect or from off-the-record intelligence sources. However as far back as 1981, when Obama was 20 and made his first trip to Pakistan, he seems to wind up in interesting places with interesting people for reasons that don't quite add up to me. For example, he supposedly traveled from Occidental College in California to stay with Muhammadmian Soomo (who would become acting president of Pakistan in 2008) in Karachi to go partridge hunting. Though Obama also used the opportunity to visit his mother, Ann Dunham, in Lahore. Ann Dunham, who worked for the Ford Foundation and USAID (another notorious CIA front operation) in Indonesia, moved to Lahore in 1981 to work as a "consultant" for the Asian Development Bank. As Madsen points out in the Wayne Madsen Report, this was at a time when the CIA was increasing its presence in Pakistan to build the Afghan mujaheddin to fight the Soviet invasion.


Who Obama Worked for in Chicago
In 1984 Obama left New York to move to Chicago, where he became a civil rights lawyer and involved himself in a number of "progressive" foundations like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Gamaliel and Wood foundations. However Tarpley, Barry Zwicker, Bob Feldman, Lila Rajiva, Michael Barker and others have raised serious questions about the progressive credentials of these and similar "liberal" foundations. They point to increasing evidence that the Ford Foundation (of which Gamaliel is a subsidiary), the Rockefeller, Wood, MacArthur and similar foundations actually play a "gatekeeper" or "counterinsurgency" function to suppress genuine grassroots organizing.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was one of the first to raise the alarm and launched an investigation in 1967 about the CIA's use of these and other foundations as "conduits," "pass-throughs," and "fronts" to disguise CIA funding for domestic operations (it is technically illegal for the CIA to operate on US soil under federal law). The late journalist and judicial reformer, Sherman Skolnick, used to investigate foundation tax returns and traced a lot of "liberal" foundation funding to private right wing elites.

In Barrack H Obama: the Unofficial Biography, Tarpley focuses at length on the "counterinsurgency" function played by the Ford Foundation, particularly under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy (1966-1979).

Who Was McGeorge Bundy?
Tarpley's review of Bundy's public life sheds light on his pivotal role in the creation of so-called "left leaning" or "liberal" foundations to suppress and re-direct grassroots dissent. An army intelligence officer during World War II, Bundy became National Security Advisor to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and was largely responsible for the cynical "strategic hamlets" policy in Vietnam. Bundy left government in 1966 to head the Ford Foundation, where he totally revamped the foundation's agenda to focus on the oppression of African Americans and other minorities. This was accompanied by a simultaneous shift away from funding broad economic needs, such as housing, education, mass transit and health care to more divisive political and cultural programs that specifically target white blue collar racism as the cause of minority disadvantage.

It was Bundy's view that the efforts of Martin Luther King (who opposed racial quotas because of their inherent divisiveness) and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee to merge the struggle of the black community with the labor and antiwar movement posed a serious threat to the Wall Street interests he represented. His strategic response was to target white blue collar workers as the main barrier to black self determination and to pour millions of dollars of Ford Foundation race baiting black separatist and nationalist organizations, such as the Congress of Racial Equality.

Another of Bundy's strategic moves was to break up the traditional black-Jewish progressive coalition in New York City. He did so by funding minority community coalitions to churn out rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda directed at leftist Jewish teachers and administrators, many of whom had radical New Deal backgrounds. The demand posed by these community groups (backed by $1.4 million from the Ford Foundation) for the right to arbitrarily hire and fire teachers was a blatant violation of their union contract and an important precipitant of the disastrous 1968 teacher's strike.

Following Nixon's election in 1968, Bundy, Nixon and Shultz collaborated in pushing affirmative action and quota legislation through Congress. Many Americans are totally unaware that Nixon, a Republican president, is the father of both affirmative action and hiring quotas. Or that he and Shultz deliberately launched these programs not to promote the interests of women and minorities but to splinter and suppress a progressive voice in the Democratic Party that was becoming a threat to business interests. In fact Nixon himself stressed in meetings with Republican Congressional leaders, his desire to exploit mandatory hiring quotas "drive a wedge between civil rights groups and organized labor."

Obama's Role in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge

Obama's "official" biography reveals that he first gained public prominence in Chicago as the first chairman of the board of the "liberal" Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). However on close examination the CAC itself, where Obama was a board member for six years (three years as chair), appears to have replicated Bundy's 1968 strategy to pit minority boards (in Chicago they were called Local School Councils) against the teachers' unions. As Tarpley's research uncovered, the campaign to give LSC's the power to fire teachers and several hundred school principals was championed, not by grassroots minority groups, but by business interests headed by Thomas Ayers. Ayers, by coincidence, happens to be the father of Obama's pal the former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. Tom Ayers also has impeccable corporate credentials, which include heading Commonwealth Edison for seven years in the seventies, and serving on the board of General Dynamics, Searle, Chicago Pacific, Zenith, Northwest Industries, First National Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Tribune.

This may possibly explain his son Bill Ayers' "magical ability" to secure foundation funding. Ayers wrote the grant to secure Annenberg funding for the CAC and he credits himself as one of its co-founders. He was also influential in getting his buddy Barack Obama, a 34 year old with no education credentials whatsoever, appointed as CAC's first chairman. Obama's annual salary as board chairman was $70,000 (in addition to the substantial income from his law practice).

By Obama's own admission, the project on which CAC spent $100 million was unsuccessful. It not only failed to improve the educational achievement of black students, but also to meet "soft" targets, such as "self image," "personal efficacy," school attendance and persistence. What the CAC did accomplish, very successfully, was to drive a wedge between minority parents and the teachers unions when they could have united to block extensive federal and state educational cutbacks. It also threw Chicago schools into such chaos (deliberately it seems) that they became ripe for school privatization efforts, championed by the same elite business lobby that pushed through the 1988 School Reform Act (creating the Local School Councils).

Terrorist Bill Ayers' Magical Transformation
This raises the tricky question of how Obama's pal Bill Ayers transformed himself from a bomb making terrorist to a tenured Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and pre-eminent education reformer. Many former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members believe the Weather Underground was actually a US intelligence creation, formed with the specific objective of infiltrating and shutting down SDS. This view is substantiated by FBI documents that came to light 1973 revealing the role of agent provocateurs in infiltrating and instigating much of the violence attributed to the Weathermen which Ayers used to have his weapons and bomb making charges dismissed.

There is also considerable circumstantial evidence to support these allegations. First and foremost is the striking "coincidence" that many of the Weather Underground leadership were, like Bill Ayers, the sons and daughters of wealthy members of the corporate elite. Second is the report of contemporary SDS members that the Weathermen, who did no fundraising to speak of, appeared to have unlimited funds to spend on organizing and military style training. Third are their classic (successful) Cointelpro style tactics in destroying SDS. And last the troubling question of how Bill Ayers can openly brag about his terrorist activities in his 2002 book Fugitive Days and yet instead of facing the death penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, enjoys status and privilege as a tenured Professor of Education.


Who (Besides the CIA) Funds "Gatekeeping" Foundations?

In general the same Wall Street elites who fund the neoconservative foundations and think tanks also fund the liberal "gatekeeping" foundations and think tanks. The difference lies mainly in the public figureheads who represent them and slightly difference policies for achieving global domination.

In general liberal gatekeeping foundations seek to expand US corporate domination (at home ,and abroad), less by military and police violence and more by "softer" methods of social engineering, World Trade Organization mandates, and the use of development lending to impose brutal "structural readjustment" regimes.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor, and Obama's long time mentor, is the individual most closely associated with this "social engineering" approach. Brzezinski openly advocates increasing the executive power of the US presidency for the sake of building the American empire. As he himself states in his 1998 The Grand Chessboard (p. 35), "Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

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