We’ve Been Had Sample Chapters

Chapter 4 Meet the Socialists

“Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”   (Thomas Jefferson)

A cover of Newsweek magazine declared, “We are all Socialists Now.”  The National Review featured Obama on its cover with the headline, “Our Socialist Future.”

While these declarations are slightly premature, they do illustrate an undeniable movement in American government toward socialism.  Government is getting bigger, industry is becoming more controlled, more wealth is being transferred to the underclass, and individual liberty and accountability are diminishing.  America’s drift toward socialism was turbocharged with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency.  This chapter will demonstrate that Obama has been immersed in a continuous socialist milieu since his birth.  He has no significant experience in the private sector.  His professional experience has been primarily rooted in the public sector.  Accordingly, the early initiatives of his administration are moving us further down the socialistic path of wealth redistribution and government control of the economy.

Let’s begin with a brief definition of socialism.  Socialism is a system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods are either owned collectively or by a centralized government that plans and controls the economy.  In Marxist theory, it is the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism, in which the proletariat has not yet achieved full collective ownership of the economy.  The Marxist phrase, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” succinctly defines socialism and communism.

This chapter uses the terms socialism, communism, collectivism, and Marxism interchangeably.  While these terms have specific technical definitions that distinguish one from another, it is sufficient for our purposes to recognize them as similar points bunched near the end of the political spectrum where the state controls the economy and the distribution of wealth.  At the opposite end of this spectrum is capitalism and constitutional republicanism, where the role of the state is primarily to protect individual rights and private property.

The interchangeable use of these Marxist terms is necessary, partly because many of the sources referenced in this chapter use the terms loosely, and partly because certain disingenuous people who are trying to avoid these labels for political reasons rely on definitional loopholes to dodge around them and between them.  In the end, these terms all represent the same politico-economic intent.   No matter their precise definition, socialism, communism, Marxism, and collectivism all define a desire to transform society away from individual rights and private property toward collective rights and collective property.

Socialists are not new to America.  They have tried to gain a foothold here for more than a century.  Their attempts have historically not fared well, because socialism is anathema to America’s founding principles.  Until recently, socialism has been generally contrary to the spirit of Americans.  The election of Obama and a radical Congress may represent a fundamental shift in the American political and economic paradigm.  In contrast, the TEA Party movement and the resurgence of conservatism represent a fundamental affirmation of America’s founding principles.  It remains to be seen which movement will ultimately hold sway.  The future of our country depends heavily on which direction the middle class leans.

The Socialist Party in America was born at the turn of the 20th Century and grew rapidly in its early years.  From 1900 to 1920, charismatic leader Eugene Debs ran for President on the Socialist ticket.  During those two decades, membership in the Socialist Party increased dramatically.  In 1912 alone, Debs was marked on 900,000 ballots, which equated to six percent of the presidential votes cast.  Also that year, hundreds of state and local officials and legislators were elected as socialists around the country.  At the time, there were at least 300 socialist periodicals with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Much of this momentum was a reaction to the coercive influence of large, monopolistic corporations.

During this era, the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.  This amendment empowered the Federal Government to levy income taxes on individual taxpayers, initially at a maximum tax rate of 7%.  As the decades unfolded, the ability to directly tax citizens enabled the drift toward Big Government and socialism.   Other building blocks for the future expansion of Federal Government power were established during this period, including the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission.  Several presidents during this era classified themselves as Progressives, a term that indicated sympathy with initiatives of the socialist movement.

The Socialist Party’s popularity waned after WWI because of government suppression and public disapproval.  The 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, bombings in the United States, and a series of labor strikes led to the Red Scare in 1919.  Citizens suspected of being Marxists were jailed.  Meanwhile, the wild economic expansion of the Roaring Twenties seemed to validate capitalism and render socialism irrelevant.

Even when the stock market collapsed in 1929 and the nation plunged into the Great Depression, socialists struggled to regain their clout.  During the election of 1932, the Socialist and Communist parties, despite arguing that capitalism had failed, pulled less than one million votes combined.  It is likely that Roosevelt, with his proto-socialistic New Deal, co-opted any momentum that the Marxists would have otherwise enjoyed.

Even though the socialists were not successful politically, they had an impact culturally.  Elements of Roosevelt’s New Deal, such as Social Security and widespread public works programs, were actually significant steps toward socialism.  In FDR’s words, “Throughout the nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the government of the last years, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.”

F.A. Hayek, in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, coined the term “creeping socialism” to describe America’s drift toward a socialistic society during the New Deal.  Hayek warned that governmental controls on society and on the means of production did not deliver on their promises, and actually delivered dismal economic results.  According to Hayek, socialism strips man of his desire to succeed, and therefore robs society of the benefit of efficiency and accountability.  In contrast, the success that results from a person’s desire to get ahead simultaneously improves the lives of others.

Socialism temporarily stopped creeping in America after WWII.  Post-war prosperity fed a middle-class explosion, and the Cold War fed paranoia of Marxist influences.  Paid vacations and 40-hour work weeks were common.  Average income doubled compared to the prior economic boom in the 1920’s.  Many activists left the Socialist Party, believing that they could have more of an impact through the relatively mainstream Democratic Party than through radical organizations.  Membership in formal Marxist organizations dried up in the 1950’s.  Party membership was a considerable risk due to the aggressive efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover to root out suspected espionage during the Second Red Scare.

While this older generation of Marxists slowly ebbed into obscurity, a younger and more radical generation emerged to reenergize the socialist movement during the 1960’s.   This new generation of socialists was inspired by the Civil Rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the methods of Saul Alinsky.

At the vanguard of this movement was a radical organization called the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  This Marxist group aimed to overthrow America’s entrenched political, economic, and military establishment.  A specific objective was to end the war in Vietnam.  The group evolved from the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, which was formed in 1905 by Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair, among others.  Many SDS members were “red-diaper babies,” children of parents who were Marxist activists in preceding decades.

The SDS held its first formal meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1960.  It gained notoriety when it released its 1962 Port Huron Statement, drafted principally by Tom Hayden.  The statement denounced U.S. racism, American abundance, materialism, industrialization, and the threat of nuclear war, among other grievances.  It declared, “The allocation of resources must be based on social needs.  A truly ‘public sector’ must be established, and its nature debated and planned.  At present the majority of America’s ‘public sector,’ the largest part of our public spending, is for the military.  When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of ‘government spending’ is wrapped up in the ‘permanent war economy.'”

The anti-war fervor of the SDS resonated at universities across the country.  Hundreds of new SDS chapters were formed when Lyndon Johnson abolished student draft deferments in 1966.  The SDS staged draft card burnings and harassed military recruiters.  During the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, SDS protestors rioted as a challenge to Hubert Humphrey’s support of the war in Vietnam.  Hayden and several instigators were arrested.  They became celebrated by the Left as the Chicago Seven.

In 1969, the SDS began fragmenting.  One of the factions was a group called the Weatherman.  The Weatherman advocated launching a race war in the U.S.  They eventually morphed into a terrorist cult called the Weather Underground.  The Weather Underground orchestrated a series of bombings around the country.  This anti-American cult will be studied in Chapter Six, where we meet the Ayers family and explore the influence that veterans of the Weather Underground had on Barack Obama.

Another socialist movement that emerged in the 1960’s was called Black Liberation Theology (BLT).  This was a radical theology that Black Nationalists embraced.  BLT was an amalgamation of Marxist principles, civil rights activism, and Christianity.  It was derived from the broader Marxist Liberation Theology movement that was a growing presence in Christian America.  James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, was a strong proponent of BLT.   In Chapter Two, we examined the impact that Cone’s vitriol had on Barack Obama through his disciple, Jeremiah Wright.  Later in this chapter, we will explore the specific impact of Wright’s Marxism on Obama.

By the late 1960’s, the remnants of the SDS, Saul Alinsky’s various legacy organizations, and militant Black Nationalists had found common ground.   They share a belief in socialism, support for black civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, hatred of capitalism, and disdain for American wealth.  Remarkably, this new generation of socialists embraced these viewpoints despite the obvious failures of applied Marxism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

As David Horowitz explained in his book, Unholy Alliance:  Radical Islam and the American Left, the implosion of Soviet Communism and other Marxist states around the globe “ought to have thrown the Left into a profound crisis of faith.  It should have caused radicals to rethink their Marxist critiques of democratic capitalism and socialist ideas about the revolutionary future.  It should have caused them to reevaluate their opposition to American policy and their support for regimes that had murdered tens of millions and oppressed tens of millions more.”

But it didn’t.  The new generation of socialists ignored the disastrous results of Marxism in action.  They simply discounted the real-world examples of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, East Germany, Albania, North Korea, and an atlas full of other failed socialist countries.   Instead, they aligned with other activists, including environmentalists, feminists, black nationalists, radical Islamists, and anyone else opposed to America, capitalism, and Western principles.   Perhaps ashamed of the practical failure of Marxism around the world, these radicals camouflaged their support for redistribution of wealth and government control of the economy as “civil rights,” “social justice,” “change,” and “global warming”.

None of these will-o’-the-wisps had any practical value unless they could be attached to political power.  In the United States, socialism never became a serious political force per se.  However, American socialists gradually embraced Saul Alinsky’s philosophy that the revolution could only be achieved by co-opting the vast middle class.  So, they began collaborating with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which was a political force the American middle class had historically embraced.  The once venerable Democratic Party was thus gradually hijacked by radicals.

Among the hijackers was Barack Obama, a red-diaper baby in his own right.  Let’s explore his lifelong involvement with socialism.  A professor at the University of Chicago, where Obama was a lecturer, reportedly said that Obama was “…as close to a full-out Marxist as anyone who has ever run for president of the United States.”  That is a bold statement, especially since a number of other Marxists have run for President.  But, as we shall see, it may not be far from the mark.

Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was a Marxist.  In 1965, the East Africa Journal published one of his papers entitled “Problems Facing Our Socialism.”  Obama Sr. had at this point returned to Africa and was involved in Kenyan politics.   His paper argued that communal ownership of land was better than private property for achieving the desired classless society.  He also argued that an extremely progressive tax rate was necessary to avoid concentration of wealth and power.  He wrote: “Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed….What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all.  This is the government’s obligation.”  He demonized corporations and suggested that the government should nationalize foreign businesses operating in Kenya.

Some argue that Barack Obama, Jr. barely knew his father, and therefore wasn’t influenced by him.  However, Barack Jr.’s first book, Dreams from My Father, was precisely about his desire to understand the father who abandoned him.  He maintained correspondence with his father until Obama Sr. passed away in 1982.  Furthermore, Barack Jr. had a curious interest in his father’s socialist ambitions in Kenya.  When he was a U.S. Senator, he spent time helping Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga achieve power on a platform of Marxism and Islam.  Barack Jr. may have felt that a victory by Odinga would bring closure to his father’s own aborted political ambitions.  Perhaps it is just coincidence, but Obama Sr.’s socialism is consistent with the agenda that Barack Jr. is pushing today as President:  demonizing corporations, government takeover of businesses, massive tax increases, and redistribution of wealth.  Barack Jr.’s peculiar entanglement with the Marxist Odinga in Kenya will be examined in Chapter Five.

Barack Jr.’s mother, Ann Dunham, was also infatuated with Marxism.  Classmates at the University of Hawaii said, “When Dunham arrived in Hawaii, she was a full-fledged radical leftist….”  Ann met Barack’s father in a Russian language course at the University of Hawaii.  At the time, the Soviet Union was the iconic Marxist state in the world, so there is some poetic irony that the language of the communists is what brought Barack’s parents together.

Ann’s radicalism likely came from her parents.  Madelyn Payne Dunham and Stanley Dunham were linked to communist organizations in the U.S.  In 1956, when Ann was a teenager, the family moved to Seattle, Washington, which had an active radical community.  Ann attended Mercer Island High School, which employed some radical teachers who had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  John Stenhouse, a school board member who was raised in China, told the HUAC that he belonged to the Communist Party USA and that there were other Marxists on Mercer’s staff.  He was the subject of a 1955 Time magazine discussion about his fitness to remain on the Mercer school board.  Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman were two of the Marxist teachers at Mercer.  They taught a curriculum that included attacks on Christianity and readings by Karl Marx.  The hallway between them was called “anarchy alley.”

Wichterman said of Ann: “As much as a high-school student can, she’d question anything:  What’s so good about democracy?  What’s so good about capitalism?  What’s wrong with communism?”  Her best friend, Maxine Box, said of Ann:  “She touted herself as an atheist….She was always challenging and arguing and comparing.  She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn’t.”

In Seattle, the Dunham’s attended East Shore Unitarian Church, which was a radical congregation the locals called “the little red church on the hill.”  According to its website, the church acquired its nickname because of “well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China’ to the United Nations….”  Coincidently, Stenhouse was the president of this “church”.

Obama was also influenced by a man whom some allege was his real father, communist Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987).  Davis, a black anti-capitalist, was a poet and a journalist for various socialist publications.  He lived in Chicago for many years, and moved to Honolulu in 1948.  When Barack returned from Indonesia to live with his grandparents in Hawaii, Davis established a relationship with him and became his mentor, according to Dreams from My Father.

Early in his career, Davis was an executive editor for the Chicago Star, the communist newspaper of Chicago.  In the mid-1940’s, he joined the CPUSA, although he never publicly admitted it.  However, a book by Professor John Edgar Tidwell included a letter Davis wrote confirming that he had joined the Communist Party.

In Hawaii, Davis wrote a weekly column called “Frankly Speaking” for the Honolulu Record, a labor paper published by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.  One article he wrote in 1950 was titled “Free Enterprise or Socialism?”  In it, he speculated that America was at a turning point that might possibly lead to socialism.  He wrote: “Before too long, our nation will have to decide whether we shall have free enterprise or socialism…at the present rate, either the giant corporations will control all our markets, the greatest share of our wealth, and eventually, our government, or the government will be forced to intervene with some form of direct regulation of business.”

One of Davis’s poems is titled, “To the Red Army”.  Its concluding stanzas read:

Smash on, victory-eating Red warriors!

Show the marveling multitudes

Americans, British, all your allied brothers

How strong you are

How great you are

How your young tree of new unity

Planted twenty-five years ago

Bears today the golden fruit of victory!

Drive on, oh mighty people’s juggernaut!

Hear in your winning ears

Shadow songs of your departed comrades

Telling you, “Be avengers and kill our killers”

And when you have struck the last foe to the ground

Then drop their fascist dreams below hell!

The HUAC investigated Davis for his ties to CPUSA, and accused him of involvement in several communist front organizations.  For 19 years, he was under FBI investigation.  A 1951 report to the Hawaii Legislature pegged him as a CPUSA member.  He lived across the street from the University of Hawaii, where Ann Dunham attended college.  Between 1975 and 1979, he mentored teenaged Barack, sharing his radical perspectives and his general distrust of the American establishment.

Obama was influenced by this tutelage, because he described in The Audacity of Hope how he automatically “slipped into the cant:  the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily…and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility….”

Obama left Hawaii in 1979 to attend Occidental College in California.  There, he gave his first public speech to protest South African apartheid.  The event was organized by the Students for Economic Democracy (SED), the student branch of the socialist Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED).  The CED was chaired by Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the SDS.  Hayden received information about the rally from organizer David Peck.  It is possible that Hayden, given his protest activity and relationships at Columbia University, helped convince Obama to transfer from Occidental to Columbia in 1981.  Hayden may also have introduced Obama to fellow SDS radical Bill Ayers, who went to college only a quarter mile from Columbia.

Dr. John C. Drew, a college professor who knew Obama while he was enrolled at Occidental, also helped organize the anti-apartheid rallies that Obama spoke at.  Dr. Drew, a Marxist at the time, met with Obama in December 1980 specifically to discuss Marxism.  In a video interview about this meeting, he claimed that Obama embraced Marxism and praised the Soviet Union, describing it as a superior model.  He also claimed that Obama believed wealth in America needed to be distributed and that he looked forward to a revolution in America that would overturn the existing structure.

While at Columbia University in New York, Obama went to the Socialist Scholar Conferences sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America.  According to libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotskyites, black radicals, gay activists, and radical feminists.”  Later, when Obama’s half-sister Maya visited Obama in New York, she expressed concern that he’d become “one of those freaks you see on the streets around here,” according to Dreams from My Father.

Another influence on Obama was Dr. James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, which is adjacent to, and affiliated with, Columbia University.  Cone was a professor at Union while Obama was a student at Columbia.  Cone published a book in 1970, Black Theology of Liberation, which fueled the Black Liberation Theology (BLT) movement.  In it, he wrote:  “Insofar as this country is seeking to make whiteness the dominating power throughout the world, whiteness is the symbol of the antichrist….Black theology seeks to analyze the satanic nature of whiteness and by doing so, prepare all nonwhites for revolutionary action.”

BLT politicizes the Christian New Testament by teaching that it can only be understood in the context of social activism and Marxist class struggle.  BLT’s goal is to encourage the poor to revolt and replace capitalism with socialism.  If the poor accomplish this, they would become liberated from their material, and therefore their spiritual, deprivations.

Obama essentially embraced BLT by spending two decades at Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ and donating tens of thousands of dollars to it.  The church’s website states: “The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ is based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s seminal book Black Power and Black Theology.”  During Wright’s ministry, TUCC embraced Black Liberation Theology (BLT) as official church doctrine.  Jeremiah Wright is considered one of the North American leaders of BLT.

Black Liberation Theology’s anti-capitalist tone resonated with the Saul Alinsky activism prevalent in TUCC’s local community.  TUCC’s “10-Point Vision” included “a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY (emphasis in original)” and toward fixing “America’s economic mal-distribution!”   Wright believed capitalism was inherently unjust.  He declared, “Capitalism as made manifest in the ‘New World’ depended upon slave labor, and it is only maintained by keeping ‘Two-Thirds World’ under oppression.”

Wright launched a signature Marxist rant in September 2009 at an event celebrating a socialist publication called Monthly Review.  He was introduced by Robert W. McChesney, a co-founder of Free Press, an extremist organization that has been linked to the Obama administration.   In an earlier article in the Monthly Review, McChesney wrote, “Our job is to make media reform a part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”

In his speech, Wright said Monthly Review offers “no-nonsense Marxism.”  He praised the publication, saying, “You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism.”  He called America the “land of the greed and the home of the slave.”  He said, “My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”  Obama listened to rants like this from Wright for 20 years.

It is likely that Obama first met Weather Underground terrorist and socialist William Ayers while at Columbia.  Ayers took education courses at Bank Street College, which was less than a quarter mile from Columbia, before earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.  Obama and Ayers had mutual friends.  One was Edward Said, a left-wing Columbia professor who taught Obama, according to the LA Times.   Said wrote this dust-jacket testimonial on Ayers’s 2001 Weather Underground memoir, Fugitive Days:  “What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity.  Bill Ayers’s America and his family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows….For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading.”

Another likely influence on Obama at Columbia was Sociology Professor Richard A. Cloward, who, along with Frances Fox Piven, helped establish the National Welfare Rights Organization.  They proposed to add new burdens on government by encouraging poor people to become dependent on taxpayers.  Cloward and Piven’s intent was not to help the disadvantaged, but rather to subtly conscript them in an effort to overwhelm and collapse America’s capitalist society.  When the NWRO eventually disbanded, ex-members formed ACORN, the radical organization that used the Cloward-Piven Strategy to create electoral chaos and to abet America’s housing-related financial collapse in 2008.  Obama’s extensive relationship with the socialists at ACORN will be examined in Chapter Eight.

Obama has refused to release any transcripts or records regarding his activities and associations at Columbia.  Both of his books are also surprisingly silent about this period of his life.  It is tempting to presume that this is because a thorough airing of his Columbia years would reveal a deep immersion in radical circles that would contradict the synthetic Obama mythos that got him elected to the U.S. Senate and the Presidency.

After Columbia, Obama worked for three years as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project, an Alinskyite organization.  As outlined in the previous chapter, Saul Alinsky was a Chicago Marxist who trained activists in how to agitate for “change”, in order to methodically transform America into a socialist nation.

Obama then went to Harvard Law School.  After graduating, he worked for Project Vote, a subsidiary of ACORN.  He then worked at the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland.  Judson Miner, a name partner in this firm, was a former college classmate and fellow anti-war activist with SDS member and Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn.

In 1995, Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate seat that was being vacated by Alice J. Palmer, who was running for the U.S. Congress.  Palmer arranged for Obama, her hand-picked successor, to meet potential supporters at the home of Ayers and Dohrn.  Palmer also helped him gather signatures to get his name on the ballot.  One of the attendees at the party was Dr. Quentin Young, who was a rumored member of the CPUSA and a recipient of the socialist Debs Award.  He became an Obama supporter and contributor.

Palmer was a socialist.  In the 1980’s she was a board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a front organization of the Communist Party USA and also as an affiliate of the Soviet World Peace Council.

A June 1986 article entitled, “An Afro-American Journalist on the USSR” appeared in the Communist Party USA’s newspaper People’s Daily World.  The article said Alice Palmer had recently attended the 27^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Here’s what Palmer had to say about the event:  “The Soviets plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health, and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary….We Americans can be misled by the major media.  We’re being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production.”

During his State Senate run, Obama obtained the endorsement of the socialist New Party (NP) in Chicago.  According to New Ground, the Chicago newsletter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the New Party endorsement came with a price:  “Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP.  The contract mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP.”

Not only did Obama have a “visible and active relationship,” the New Party claimed him as their candidate on the ballot, even though Obama also ran as a Democrat.  In Illinois, candidates could run under the banner of multiple parties on a ballot.   The New Party announced after the Democratic primary: “Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day:  Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).”  After the general election, the Progressive Populist magazine reported, “New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate seat from Chicago.”

The New Party, self-described as “socialist democratic,” was co-founded in 1992 by union activist Sandy Pope and University of Wisconsin Professor Joel Rogers.  It used the political strategy of electoral “fusion”, nominating candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), so that its candidates could occupy two ballot lines and tally votes cast for both parties.  In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court declared electoral fusion unconstitutional.

The New Party was an alliance of labor unions, Marxist organizations, and black activists.  Most of its members came from the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and ACORN.  Cloward-Piven Strategy co-author Frances Fox Piven was a New Party member.  Another member was Carl Davidson, who was a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society and a supporter of Obama’s State Senate campaign.  His declassified FBI file says that he went to Cuba and worked with them to sabotage America’s Vietnam War effort.  Davidson helped organize the October 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made his now-famous speech against the Iraq War.  The event was sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Davidson belonged to a group called Progressives for Obama during the 2008 election.  This group included Mark Rudd, who was in the Weather Underground.  It included Tom Hayden, the SDS activist who organized riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and whose wife, actress Jane Fonda, collaborated with the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.  It included actor Danny Glover, a supporter of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.  It also included Barbara Ehrenreich, who is an Honorary Chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Other socialist supporters of Obama included William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.   As recently as 2007, these former terrorists from the SDS and the Weather Underground publicly praised communist heroes and described America as a monster.  The socialist pedigree of these two radicals will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Six.

Another socialist supporter of Obama was Mike Klonsky, a former chairman of the SDS.  In 1971, his SDS splinter group formed a pro-Chinese sect called the October League, which morphed into the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).  In 1977, he was one of the first westerners to visit the People’s Republic of China.  Chinese leaders recognized Klonsky’s group as the semi-official U.S. Maoist party.

When Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he earmarked over $1 million for a group founded by Ayers and run by Klonsky called the Small Schools Workshop.   Ayers, Obama, and Klonsky shared office space during the mid-to-late 1990’s while they collaborated on various projects.  Klonsky maintained a blog on Obama’s MyBarackObama.com until June 2008.  His blog “disappeared” after Obama’s presidential campaign turned toward the political center when the Democratic primaries were over.  Klonsky, whose parents were members of the CPUSA, said in 2007, “I was born into the Communist Party.”

When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he hired David Axelrod as his campaign advisor.  Axelrod’s mother, Myril, was a writer in New York City from 1940 to 1948 for PM, a leftist tabloid that featured a number of writers involved in the Communist Party.  PM was financed by Marshall Field III, who helped underwrite Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, where Obama was trained to be a community organizer.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) supported at least two of Obama’s political campaigns.   The DSA described itself as “the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”  The DSA boilerplate reads: “We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo….To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed….”

The DSA endorsed Obama for his 1996 State Senate campaign.  It also endorsed him for the Presidency in 2008 and provided campaign workers.  Here is their official 2008 endorsement:  “While recognizing the critical limitations of the Obama candidacy and the American political system, DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda.”

The DSA’s collectivist agenda includes “massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector….Free markets or private charity cannot provide adequate public goods and services.”  According to the DSA:  “Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party.  We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

In 1999, World Net Daily (WND) exposed the DSA’s direct link with the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus, which included roughly 33% of all House Democrats.  Until 1999, the DSA hosted the website of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  After the WND revelation, the DSA edited its website, removing the links between the two organizations.  It also removed some rather damning song lyrics that espoused hard-core Marxist thoughts.

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) also endorsed Obama in 2008:  “A broad multiclass, multiracial movement is converging around Obama’s ‘Hope, change, and unity’ campaign because they see in it the thrilling opportunity to end 30 years of ultra-right rule and move our nation forward with a broadly progressive agenda.  This diverse movement combines a variety of political currents and aims in a working coalition that is crucial to social progress at this point….The struggle to defeat the ultra-right and turn our country on a positive path will not end with Obama’s election.  But that step will shift the ground for successful struggles going forward.”

Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, wrote a letter to the party newspaper celebrating an Obama victory in 2008: “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.”

The following table, adapted from a compilation by Jim Simpson on the American Daughter website, compares the positions of Obama, the CPUSA, and the DSA on key issues contested in the 2008 Presidential election:

While there are some differences, this table makes it clear why both Marxist organizations chose to endorse Obama.

Rogue financier George Soros, a major supporter of quasi-socialist organizations, backed Obama for his U.S. Senate seat and the Presidency.  Soros’s right hand man, Aryeh Neier, is president of Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Soros Foundation Network.  Earlier in his career, Neier was the director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy.  He also worked with Tom Hayden and others to found the Students for a Democratic Society in 1959.  We will explore the massive involvement of Soros and Neier in Obama’s political career in Chapter Nine.

Obama formed a Black Advisory Council to support his 2008 presidential run.  Cornel West, a Marxist professor from Princeton, was a member.  West was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an admirer of Jeremiah Wright, and an advocate of the Black Liberation Theology of James Cone.  West once said: “Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest.  It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers.  It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit—often at the cost of the common good.”

Obama selected Reverend Jim Wallis to oversee drafting of the party’s platform at the 2008 Democratic national convention.  Wallis is a Marxist Liberation Theologian whom Obama calls a “good friend.”  Like Obama, he got his start with community organizing in Chicago.   Wallis once called the U.S. “the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and history in its totalitarian claims and designs.”

Obama’s lifelong immersion in socialism is driving him to replace free and independent citizens with government servants as the foundation of American society.  Here’s what he told graduating students at the University of Notre Dame in May 2009:  “Make it (service) a way of life.  Because when you serve, it doesn’t just improve your community, it makes you a part of your community….If nothing else, that knowledge should give us faith that through our collective labor…and our willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that more perfect union.”  Obama has suckled off from the public teat almost his entire career.   Because of his Marxist parents, mentors, and associates, he has essentially lived a socialist life.  So, we should not be surprised that his vision of a “more perfect union” is collectivist in nature.  Collectivism is all that he knows.

Obama and the radicals in charge of our government are leading us to a statist existence founded on servitude and dependency fit for helpless children rather than self-sufficient adults.  Humorist P.J. O’Rourke once said, “It takes a village to raise a child.  The government is the village, and you’re the child.”  Chapter Ten provides a detailed assessment of Obama’s policies and how they are leading us to a sheltered existence of childlike dependence on Washington in a socialist America.

Obama and the radicals in Washington demonize the private sector and laud the public sector.  In a Time magazine article, Obama confessed that he questioned “the idolatry of the free market.”  The radicals are punishing successful individuals and businesses by stealing their wealth and transferring it to failing enterprises and irresponsible individuals.  They believe that private property is a vice, and that theft of it by the collective is a virtue.  They believe that individual rights protected by a constitution are selfish, and that group rights protected by special interest coercion in Washington are morally superior.  They believe that government bureaucrats are somehow smarter than the rest of us, and magically know better what is good for us.  In other words, Obama and the radicals in charge of our government are socialists.

Socialism has been a catastrophic failure wherever it has been tried.  Marxist governments yield nothing but millions of murdered citizens, poverty, deprivation, and Big Brother control of private lives.  Once the state becomes the guarantor of your basic needs, it eventually becomes the regulator of your behavior and the rationing agent of scarce resources.  Once the state becomes the Master, you are by definition the Slave.  Once you cede your political independence in favor of government succor, you cede protection from all assaults on your wealth and freedom.

After Cuba’s communist revolution, its economy collapsed from being one of the best in Latin America to being one of the worst.  After the Soviet Union’s revolution, tens of millions of peasants starved to death.  Similar tragedies occurred in other countries that embraced Marxism, such as China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.  These social disasters are well-documented in other sources, and interested readers are invited to study them.

However, there is one particular story that is worthy of further discussion here.  The remarkable clarity of this story cuts through the propaganda of both sides in the debate between capitalists and socialists, who both vigorously defend their respective philosophies.  Each side has clever arguments explaining why the other side is illogical, why the other side is basing their arguments on faulty assumptions, and why the other side’s data is flawed or misrepresented.  For many in the middle class, this centuries-long argument is confusing and overwhelming.  Thus, it is not surprising that the political leanings of the middle class have been recently skewed by tantalizing social programs offered by charismatic radical leaders like Obama.  In times of stress, people naturally reach for their security blankets and dip into the cookie jar for comfort food.  Socialism is a gingerbread house on a societal scale.

Fortunately, the effects of socialism and capitalism can be compared side-by-side under almost identical circumstances.  Two countries offer a clear, objective, and unmistakable comparison between the two philosophies.  These two countries are the perfect politico-economic laboratories.

During WWII, Germany was completely devastated by Allied forces.  Its infrastructure was bombed to smithereens, it had lost nearly a whole generation in deadly warfare, it was financially ruined, its social systems were in chaotic disarray, and it was considered an international pariah.  From this brutal concoction, two separate countries were carved out after the war ended:  East Germany, based on socialism, and West Germany, based on capitalism.

Each of the newly created countries had the same starting point in this laboratory experiment.  East and West Germany were formed from the exact same culture, the exact same ethnicity, the exact same average level of education, the exact same wealth and resources, the exact same geography and climate, at the exact same time.  The only difference was their political and economic systems.  So, let’s flash forward four decades, to just before the Berlin Wall came down, to examine the results of the experiment.

Socialist East Germany’s lab results were tragic.  By all measures, East Germany had not progressed much beyond their disastrous starting point.  Their standard of living had fallen well below European standards, their education system was focused more on indoctrination than on development, their environment was filthy, their citizens were hounded by secret service spies, and their national spirit was in shambles.  Perhaps the most telling scorecard of all was that the East German government had to build a wall to entrap its own citizens and prevent them from fleeing the horrors of applied socialism.

Capitalist West Germany’s lab results were spectacular.  From the rubble of war and the chaos of a destroyed nation, the capitalist society of West Germany yielded a wealthy, satisfied culture that can be considered the envy of most of the world.  West German products were desired by consumers around the globe, its standard of living was the highest in Europe, its citizens were among the freest on earth, and its schools and universities were internationally recognized.  Perhaps the most telling scorecard of all was that East Germans would occasionally risk their lives by dodging sniper fire, climbing through the razor wire atop the Berlin Wall, and leaping to the Western side.  Socialist countries theorize about paradise on earth.  Capitalist countries actually create it.

The German experience is a dramatic real-world demonstration of the superiority of a system based on individual rights, individual responsibility and free markets, over a system based on government rights, communal responsibility, and state-controlled economy.  The beauty of the German example is that you don’t even need to know economics or political philosophy in order to understand the message.  You just need to be able to visualize a destitute, frightened East German risking his life to get from one side of the Berlin Wall to the other.  There is no more powerful or visceral understanding to be had.  An identical story can be told about North and South Korea, if readers are interested in studying another real-world laboratory comparison between socialism and capitalism.

If you are wondering how the middle class fared in East Germany and North Korea, the answer is chilling:  Neither country had one.  There won’t be a middle class in a socialist America, either.  Marxist economies don’t have middle classes.  As Vladimir Lenin put it, “The way to crush the bourgeoisie (middle class) is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”  The Marxists do not even approve of private property.  According to Lenin, “The goal of socialism is communism.  The theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence:  Abolish all private property.”   This leads to the end game of Marxism.  When you don’t own your own income, and when you don’t own your own home or property, you do not own yourself.  The state owns you.  And it’s all downhill from there.

The reasons for the repeated failures of Marxism are obvious.  As David Horowitz explained, socialism “provided no rational method for allocating resources and no effective work incentives, and no guarantees of individual rights.”  It simply doesn’t work, and when it fails, it takes whole civilizations down with it.  The “equality” that socialism promises does not mean everyone ends up being equally wealthy.  It means everyone ends up being equally poor, except for those special apparatchiks working for the government who mysteriously are more equal than everyone else, and who mysteriously have access to resources and privileges that the rest do not.  Instead of a middle class, there will only be a massive class of state dependents standing in long lines waiting for rationed resources that everyone has lost the will and the means to produce.  Shepherding these long lines and orchestrating the rationing will be those government elites who strangely don’t have to stand in a line.

The good news is that almost all former socialist countries, whether full-fledged socialist nations like Russia, China, and the countries of Eastern Europe, or the moderately socialist nations in Western Europe, have all realized that socialism is flawed.  They are shifting back toward capitalism and electing more conservative leaders.  The bad news is that we in America have not yet learned their lessons.  Given the results of the 2008 elections, we seem determined to learn them the hard way.  We will regret electing the radicals, not just as the four-year mistake of a disastrous presidential term or the six-year mistake of a disastrous Senate term, but as the multi-generational mistake of a disastrous shift in the direction of our society.

The Democratic Party is no longer the party of Johnson and Kennedy looking out for the common working American.  It is now the party of Alinsky and Soros and a host of other socialists.  It is now the party of wealth redistribution, government-run health care, government-controlled industries, centralized bureaucracy, and anti-free market zealots.  It is now the party of chronic dependents, radicals, illegal immigrants, and victims who are not invested in the American dream and who are not interested in being responsible for producing it.  It is now the party of bailing out Wall Street, automotive companies, and other corporate welfare gluttons.

It is time for middle-class Democrats to recognize that their party is not what it used to be.  The venerable Democratic Party of years gone by is dead.  Likewise, the venerable Republican Party also appears to be mortally afflicted with the same collectivist disease.  The Republicans have been only slightly less inclined than the Democrats to increase government spending and broaden social entitlement programs.  As a result, we are left with an increasingly socialistic government propped up by two feckless political parties that masquerade as champions of the middle class, but in fact are devouring it.

There is nothing middle class about the anti-capitalist sermons that Obama heard from Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, nor the anti-capitalist philosophies he absorbed from the rest of his socialist mentors throughout his life.  Perhaps it is even fair to say that there is nothing American about Obama’s worldview, either.  To Obama, the America that the rest of us live in is an unwelcome place of strange disproportion on the opposite side of his collectivist looking glass.  The America of free and independent citizens guided by a Constitution that protects inalienable rights and strictly limits government is a universe altogether unlike Obama’s purple-skied world of racial angst, economic injustice, redistribution of wealth, and Big Government.

Sam Webb, the leader of the Communist Party USA, wrote of Obama: “We now have not simply a friend, but a people’s advocate in the White House.”  Unfortunately, “the people’s advocate in the White House” is not a friend of the middle class, but rather an ally of parasites looking to sink their teeth into the middle class.

In closing, here are two pearls of wisdom for the middle class from Barack Obama.  First pearl:  According to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, Obama told him, “We don’t need the people.  We just need the checks.”  Translation:  “As Saul Alinsky trained us, middle-class people are just pawns to be used for achieving socialism by the ballot box.  Once they vote us into power, taking their money is all we care about.”  Second pearl:  Obama, who was explaining to self-employed Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher why Joe must pay higher taxes for everyone else’s benefit:  “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”  Translation:  “We’re going to take your wealth and spread it around to the underclass of America and to Wall Street bankers.  That’ll be good for everybody but you.”

Hey you, in the middle class…are you listening?

We’ve been had.

Chapter 6 Meet the Ayers Family

Bill Ayers is just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood….”  Barack Obama, during April 2008 debate

Barack Obama asserted during a Democratic primary debate in April 2008 that Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers was just a guy who lives in his neighborhood.  Bill Ayers did indeed live just three blocks from Obama in an upscale Hyde Park neighborhood.  However, Obama disingenuously left out the rest of the story.  This is another case of appalling dishonesty and deception that characterized his entire political career.

Here’s what Obama left out.  Barack and Michelle had a complex 20 year relationship with the Ayers family.  The patriarch of the family, Thomas Ayers, was one of the most powerful political brokers in Chicago.  Bill Ayers, his son, is a socialist, a terrorist, and a political activist who leveraged his father’s influence to advance the cause of Marxism.  Bernardine Dohrn, Bill’s wife, is a socialist and a terrorist who helped lead the violent Weather Underground to riot and murder.  All three of them nurtured Barack Obama’s career for two decades.

This chapter documents the entangled relationship between the President of the United States and a dangerous family that has blood on its hands and a frothing commitment to destroy capitalism and the middle class of America.  We will begin with a brief biography of the Ayers clan, and then we will explore their involvement with Barack and Michelle Obama.

Thomas Ayers was a wealthy businessman, philanthropist, and social activist.  He had so much local clout that he was sometimes referred to as the godfather of Illinois politics.  As CEO of Commonwealth Edison (later known as Exelon), he was tightly connected to many powerful figures in Chicago.  His influence or support could help elect a mayor, a governor, or a senator.

Tom Ayers served on the boards of philanthropies that had combined assets exceeding $5 billion.  He helped direct how they spent their money.  He leveraged this powerful network to manipulate political outcomes in Chicago.

The resume of Tom Ayers is a testament to his connections with the sociopolitical elites of Chicago.  He became President of the giant utility, Commonwealth Edison, in 1964, and was Chairman and CEO from 1973 to 1980.  He continued to exert influence over the utility until his death in 2007.  He served on numerous corporate boards, including Sears, G.D. Searle, Zenith, Northwest Industries, General Dynamics, First National Bank of Chicago, the Chicago Cubs, and the Tribune Company.  He was Chairman of several boards, including the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Bank Street College of Education in New York, the Chicago Community Trust, and Northwestern University Board of Trustees.

He was also connected with the Daley political machine in Chicago, and was Vice President of the Chicago Board of Education.  He used these and other corporate and philanthropic connections to nurture the career of his radical son, and then the career of Barack Obama.  He was steadfastly protective of the destructive political activities of his prodigal son, his criminal daughter-in-law, and their radical associates.   John Ayers, Bill’s brother, said, “Our father always stood by us.  He was an establishment guy, but he believed in us.  He believed in change.”  As we shall see shortly, Bill Ayers is a man that only a father or fellow radicals could love.

William Ayers was born in 1944 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.  He went to the University of Michigan, Bank Street College of Education, and Teachers College of Columbia University.  He earned an M.Ed and an Ed.D., and now works as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

At the University of Michigan, his career took a radical turn toward violence and crime when he joined the socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  As the conflict in Vietnam deepened, the anti-war SDS grew quickly.  By 1968, it had 300 chapters on college campuses with a combined membership of 100,000.  Ayers became increasingly influential in the SDS as the group engaged in anti-war violence in Chicago and on college campuses.  During the 1969 “Days of Rage” riots accompanying the trial of the Chicago Seven, 287 SDS protesters were arrested and 59 police officers were injured.

Ayers and wealthy girlfriend Diana Oughton became leaders of a militant regional faction of the SDS called the “Jesse James Gang.”  Ayers described the Gang as “the arms of liberation inside the monster,” and said, “We are tired of tiptoeing up to society and asking for reform.  We’re ready to kick it.”  The Detroit-based faction eventually morphed into the Weatherman, a name taken from the Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”).   During the June 1969 SDS national convention in Chicago, the Weatherman surreptitiously took control of the group, even though they were the smallest faction.  They snuck off to a separate location and essentially declared their faction to be in charge of the SDS.

In December 1969, the Weatherman declared “war on AmeriKKKa” at a War Council in Flint, Michigan.  They believed that the American system was irredeemable and that revolutionary war against the U.S. Government and capitalism should begin immediately.  They wanted to create a “white fighting force” to collaborate with the “Black Liberation Movement” to accomplish the “destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world:  world communism.”  Ayers called the group “an American Red Army.”   John Jacobs, a Weatherman leader, said, “We’re against everything that is ‘good and decent.’”  They likened themselves to the barbarians who destroyed decadent Rome.

FBI informant Larry Grathwohl reported that the Weatherman planned to build reeducation camps in the American Southwest, with the assistance of foreign communist regimes.  “Diehard capitalists” who resisted the revolution would be murdered.  According to Grathwohl, they estimated that 25 million Americans would have to be killed.  Ayers declared, “Kill all of the rich people.  Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home; kill your parents….”  Ayers was called “one of the chief theoreticians of the Weatherman” by the New York Times in 1970.

The group became fugitives after being indicted for the “Days of Rage” riots, and changed their name to the Weather Underground.  They went on a bombing spree to foment their revolution.  During a three year span, they bombed the New York City Police Headquarters, the Capitol Building, and the Pentagon.  When the spree was over, they were responsible for 30 bombings at government sites.  The human toll included five fatalities and scores of injuries.  Three Weather Underground terrorists were killed when a nail bomb they were assembling for an attack on Fort Dix exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse.  Ayers’s girlfriend, Diana Oughton, was one of the casualties.

Ayers was a cold, calculating terrorist.  In his words, “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.  The sky was blue.  The birds were singing.  And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”  During the planning for a bombing in San Francisco, FBI informant Grathwohl objected to the proposed placement of the bomb because it would kill innocent people.   Ayers replied, “We can’t protect all the innocent people in the world.  Some will get killed.  Some of us will get killed.  We have to accept that fact.”  He dismissed Grathwohl’s sentimentality as “unrevolutionary.”  According to Grathwohl, Ayers “seemed self-important, a controller of subordinates, the type who loved to give orders.”

Grathwohl also reported that the Weather Underground considered kidnapping politicians such as Spiro Agnew and Henry Kissinger to facilitate their communist revolution.  The group helped spring narcotics guru Timothy Leary from prison and arranged for his transport to Algiers.

During his fugitive years with the Weather Underground, Ayers lived in 15 states.  He hid in safe houses and experimented sexually as the radicals tried “smashing monogamy.”  His sexual partners included his best male friend.  Drug use, including LSD, was prevalent in the Weather Underground.

While a fugitive, Ayers coauthored the book Prairie Fire with Bernardine Dohrn and other Weather Underground members.  The book was dedicated to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy.  In the book, the authors wrote, “We are a guerrilla organization.  We are communist men and women, underground in the United States….”

Bernardine Dohrn became Ayers’s girlfriend after Oughton’s brutal death.  The two fugitives changed locations, changed jobs, adopted multiple aliases, and eventually got married.  They came out of hiding and surrendered to police in 1980.  However, the charges against them were dropped because of wiretapping improprieties.  A reasonable suspicion is that Thomas Ayers used his influence to clear the way for his son and daughter-in-law to surrender without consequences.  At the end of the saga, Bill Ayers declared, “Guilty as sin, free as a bird, America is a great country.”

After rejoining mainstream society, Ayers prepared himself to work within the system to achieve socialism in America.  He enrolled at Bank Street College of Education in New York, and then Teachers College at Columbia University, eventually earning a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in Education.  He began working for the University of Illinois at Chicago and is now a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.

Ayers specializes in public school reform in Chicago, which is unfortunate for middle-class Chicago school children and their parents.  It may have been safer for America when he was bombing buildings rather than perverting the minds of a new generation.  Ayers is a strong proponent of radicalizing schools.  According to Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, “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.”

Ayers has a six-figure income and lives in a lavish Hyde Park home.  This is an incredible turn of fortune for a bomb-setting terrorist who was a fugitive from the FBI for eleven years.  His remarkable rehabilitation would have been impossible without his powerful father.  For example, Tom Ayers was a board member of Bank Street College of Teaching where Bill began his rehabilitation and prepared for his career in education.  For all of Bill’s professed Marxist hatred of wealth in America, he is a spoiled beneficiary of it.  In spite of this, he did not lose his radical edge.  He still publicly defends his Weather Underground bombing spree, and he has suggested that they didn’t do enough.

Bernardine Rae Dohrn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1942.  She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1963 and from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1967.  She met Bill Ayers in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She was a member of the SDS who spoke and dressed flamboyantly.  She worked for the National Lawyers Guild, a group that was accused by the FBI of being a communist front.

During the Vietnam War, Dohrn connected with Castro’s Cuban delegation at the U.N.  She arranged for SDS groups to visit Havana as part of the infamous “Venceremos Brigade” to help Cubans with sugar harvests and to learn revolutionary tactics.  The FBI reported that the “Brigade” assisted the Vietnamese and Cubans to “bring war home” to America.  Some “brigadistas” learned how to assemble bombs, a skill they later employed with great effect.  Dohrn and others met with Viet Cong representatives in Hungary to discuss antiwar strategy.  Her influence grew in the SDS and she organized the October 1969 “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago.

At the December 1969 Weatherman War Council meeting in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn uttered some of the most disturbing comments imaginable.  Actress Sharon Tate, who was 8½ months pregnant, had recently been murdered by the Manson cult.  Tate was found with a carving fork protruding from her swollen abdomen.  Dohrn celebrated the slaughter by shouting, “Dig it!  First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them.  They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!  Wild!”  She praised the psychopath Manson as a true “revolutionary,” giving him a three-fingered “fork salute.”   Echoing Manson’s “Helter Skelter” call for a race war, she declared, “the best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the Revolutionary Black Liberation Struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement.”  She and the War Council issued a declaration of war against “AmeriKKKa,” which she frequently spelled with three K’s to highlight U.S. racism.

During the War Council, the 400 participants sang songs like “Communism is What We Do,” “I’m Dreaming of a White Riot,” and “We Need a Red Party.”  They also chanted “Sirhan Sirhan power!,” “Charlie Manson power!,” and “Red Army power!”  The meeting hall was adorned with large banners of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X.  One wall was papered with posters of murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton.  An enormous cardboard machine gun dangled from the ceiling.

Dohrn broadcast the group’s declaration of war against America on KPFK radio, declaring:  “If you want to find us, this is where we are.  In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope, and loading guns.”  In another communiqué, Dohrn warned, “Guard your planes.  Guard your colleges.  Guard your banks.  Guard your children.  Guard your doors.”

In 1970, after the explosion at the Greenwich Village townhouse, Dohrn skipped her “Days of Rage” trial.  She participated in the Weather Underground spree of bombings in the early 1970’s.  According to FBI informant Grathwohl, Dohrn planted a shrapnel-filled pipe bomb in a San Francisco Police station in February 1970 that killed one officer and partially blinded another.  No one was formally charged with the crime, although the FBI was reportedly close to indicting Ayers and Dohrn before the couple surrendered.  J. Edgar Hoover called Dohrn “la Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left” and put her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

When Ayers and Dohrn surrendered in 1980, the federal charges against them were dismissed.  Dohrn pled guilty to state charges related to the “Days of Rage” riots.  She was fined $1,500 and given three years probation.  This was remarkably weak punishment for a woman who J. Edgar Hoover described as “the most dangerous woman in America.”  When she surrendered, she declared, “I remain committed to the struggle ahead.  I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation.”

However, Dohrn’s legal troubles did not end there.  She was later jailed for seven months when she stonewalled a federal grand jury investigating a 1981 armored-car robbery that was carried out by remnants of the Weather Underground.  The grand jury demanded a handwriting sample from her, because she was suspected of renting the getaway cars.  Two police officers and a security guard were killed during the crime.  Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Susan Rosenberg eventually went to prison for their roles in it.   The robbery took place in New York City, where Ayers, Boudin, Gilbert, Dohrn, and Barack Obama were living at the time.

Dohrn has been unable to practice law since she returned to normal society because of her criminal record.  She is, however, a Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern School of Law, and an adjunct faculty member of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Bill Ayers works.  Coincidentally, Thomas Ayers was at one time the Chairman of the Northwestern University Board of Trustees, which might explain how Dohrn landed her associate professorship there.  Tom Ayers was a gift that kept on giving for his son and daughter-in-law.

Ayers and Dohrn adopted and raised Chesa Boudin, the son of terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were unable to parent because of their incarceration for the armored-car robbery and related murders.  Today, both Chesa Boudin and Bill Ayers are working with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, a Marxist, to “improve” the education system there.  Ayers and Dohrn named their first biological son “Malik” after Malcolm X and their second son “Zayd” after Zayd Shakur.  Shakur was a Black Panther who was killed in a firefight with police that left an officer dead.

It is important to note that Ayers and Dohrn were avowed Marxists.  Presented below are quotes from them that originated in the book Prairie Fire and a Dohrn article entitled Our Class Struggle that she wrote for a Weather Underground newsletter.

“We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism….The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history….We discovered thru our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle.”

“We are a guerrilla organization.  We are communist women and men…deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism….Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside….We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society….The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.”

Mark Rudd, a fellow SDS member with Ayers and Dohrn, wrote a pamphlet titled Columbia that described the SDS takeover of the Columbia University campus in 1968.  In it, he wrote, “It was no accident that we hung up pictures of Karl Marx and Malcolm X and Che Guevara and flew red flags from the tops of two buildings.”  The pamphlet quoted Communist Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung: “Dare to struggle, dare to win.”

In a 1995 interview, Ayers said:  “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist….Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it.”  According to Ayers, “Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism.  It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy.  Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit….Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed.”

Ayers has a memento from his days as an anti-war terrorist.   Vietnamese communists gave him a ring made from an American plane shot down over North Vietnam.  He was so moved that he “left the room to cry.”  According to Ayers, he realized then that America was evil.

Let’s examine the 20-year relationship between Barack Obama and the Ayers family.  From the outset, it is difficult to imagine Obama describing a suspected murderer, a terrorist, a communist, and an anti-American radical as “just another guy in the neighborhood,” but I suppose that depends on what kind of neighborhood you frequent.  Let’s look inside Mr. Obama’s neighborhood.

Obama was first exposed to the radical world of Bill Ayers at Occidental College in California.  He mingled with the Students for Economic Democracy (SED), a group headed by former SDS founder and compatriot of Ayers, Tom Hayden.  Obama’s first public speech, a critique of South African apartheid, was at an event sponsored by SED.

It is unclear when Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn first met, but there were numerous opportunities for these three socialists to link up when Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York City in 1981.

According to Obama, he continued to protest South African apartheid through the Black Students Organization at Columbia.  At roughly the same time, remnants of the Weather Underground were also involved in protests against apartheid around New York City.  When Obama was living in New York, Ayers was at Bank Street College of Education and at Teachers College of Columbia University.  Bank Street College is 371 yards from Columbia, where Obama studied.   Weather Underground terrorists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin lived in the same part of New York as Obama.  Dohrn lived four blocks away.  Weather Underground terrorists Dianne Donghi, Jeff Jones, and Mark Rudd were all former members of the Columbia University SDS chapter.  Weather Underground members were captured after a dramatic Brinks armored car robbery and chase that ended in three deaths right in the city.  Bill Ayers would likely have attended the annual Socialist Scholars Conference at nearby Cooper Union College, which Obama said he attended in Dreams from My Father.   It is reasonable to assume that the politically active Obama, already familiar with Hayden’s SED, would have been keenly aware of the highly visible SDS and Weather Underground presence in and around his home and university.

Perhaps Frank Marshall Davis connected Obama with Bill Ayers.   Davis was allegedly acquainted with Thomas Ayers from his own radical days in Chicago.   Davis certainly had a connection to the Ayers family via the family of Valerie Jarrett, who has been a close friend of Barack and Michelle for at least two decades and who is now a senior adviser to the President.

The Jarrett family and the Ayers family were connected over the course of two generations.    Jarrett’s mother, Professor Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erikson Institute in Chicago.  The board Chairman of the institute was Thomas Ayers.  Bernardine Dohrn was a board member.   Valerie Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was a noted Chicago Sun-Times columnist.  According to political activist Trevor Loudon, Vernon worked in the late 1940’s in the South Side Community Art Center and on the Chicago Defender newspaper, a journal sympathetic to communist causes.  Frank Marshall Davis also worked at the Art Center and the Chicago Defender.   Davis and Jarrett collaborated as officials of a citizens’ sub-committee supporting a CIO labor union strike.  The Davis-Jarrett-Ayers connection was a possible catalyst for the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers.

Obama refuses to release his Columbia University records.  Perhaps they indicate that he was in a seminar that Ayers or Dohrn presented at, or that he and Ayers attended the same class as students (Bank Street College collaborates with Columbia).   Obama studied under Edward Said, the left-wing Columbia professor who was friends with Ayers and Dohrn, so perhaps Obama’s records point to something there.

It is clear, though, that Obama met Ayers and Dohrn at this point, based on later events that would make no sense unless they had previously connected.  For example, Obama eventually interned at the same Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin, where Dohrn had worked.  One of Sidley’s major clients was the utility company that Thomas Ayers ran.  Out of all of the law firms in the U.S., it is an almost impossible coincidence that Obama would end up interning at the same one that Dohrn and Thomas Ayers were involved with, unless there was already some relationship between Obama and the Ayers family.

From 1984 to 1988, Dohrn worked as a legal clerk at Sidley & Austin in their New York and Chicago offices (she transferred when she and Bill Ayers moved from New York to Chicago in 1987).  Howard Trienens, a managing partner of the law firm, said that he hired Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers.  He said, “We often hire friends.”  Trienens succeeded Ayers as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Northwestern University.  Ayers’s firm, Commonwealth Edison, used Trienens at Sidley as a legal counsel for years.

Sidley & Austin was the law firm where Michelle Robinson, Obama’s future wife, began work in 1988.  Michelle worked in the area of entertainment law and intellectual property at the law firm.  She mentored Obama in the summer of 1989, after his first year at Harvard Law School.  Howard Trienens hired Obama as an intern, even though it was rare for big law firms to hire first year law students.  It seems likely that either Thomas Ayers, a major client of Sidley and connected to Frank Marshall Davis, or Bernardine Dohrn, a former employee of Sidley and recently arrived from Obama’s locale in New York City, recommended that Sidley hire Obama.

As we saw in the last chapter, it appears that Thomas Ayers helped Obama get into Harvard, which would make no sense unless they already knew each other.  Ayers collaborated on business and philanthropic efforts with Black Panther Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, who Percy Sutton reported was soliciting funds and letters of recommendation to help Obama get into Harvard.  Coincidentally, the Weather Underground, according to a claim by Bernardine Dohrn, firebombed the home and car of a New York judge named Murtagh who was presiding over the “Black Panther 21” trial in the early 1970’s.  Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn knew al-Mansour when he was Donald Warden.  At one point, Ayers, Dohrn, and Warden hid from the FBI together in San Francisco.

Another associate of Tom Ayers, John L. McKnight, wrote a letter of recommendation to Harvard for Obama.  McKnight, a Saul Alinsky admirer, was a Northwestern University professor when Tom Ayers was Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Northwestern University.

An eye witness reported that Obama was involved with the Ayers family shortly after he graduated from Columbia in the mid 1980’s.  According to Political Scientist Steve Diamond, a U.S. Postal worker claimed that Obama periodically visited the residence of Tom and Mary Ayers in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago.  Allen Hulton, the mail carrier who serviced the Ayers residence for years, had numerous conversations with Mary Ayers.  Such conversations would have been quite natural, because Hulton had graduated from the same high school as Tim Ayers, a son of Tom and Mary.  In one of the conversations, Hulton claimed “Mrs. Ayers told me that her family had been helping out a brilliant young black man.”

Hulton claimed that he encountered Obama outside the Ayers residence one afternoon and that he chatted with him for a while.  According to Hulton, Obama said he had come to thank the Ayers’s for helping with his education.  Hulton also said he occasionally ran into Bernardine Dohrn, who was living with the Ayers’s at the time.

Hulton claimed Mary Ayers said that she and Tom communicated in code with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn when they were fugitives.  He also said that when he complained about senior management at the Post Office, Tom Ayers commented about “the struggle between the common man and those with means or power,” which Hulton thought sounded Marxist.

After graduating from Harvard as President of the Harvard Law Review, Obama could have gone to any legal firm in the country.  He received advice from noted judges to pursue law clerkships that would culminate in a Supreme Court assignment.  Instead, he chose to work for a small Chicago civil rights law firm with ties to the Ayers family.  In 1991, Judson Miner of the Chicago law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland offered Obama a job.  Miner was a law school classmate and fellow anti-war activist with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago.  Obama joined Miner’s firm in 1993 after a brief stint working for ACORN’s Project Vote.

Miner served as legal counsel to Chicago’s mayor Harold Washington, from 1984 to 1987.  Coincidentally, Valerie Jarrett, the long-time friend of Michelle and Barack Obama, also served as legal counsel for Harold Washington.  Jarrett and Dohrn may both have been influential in arranging Obama’s hire at Miner’s law firm.  As we shall see in the next chapter, the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland connected Obama with Antoin Rezko and Allison Davis, both of whom later drew Obama into spurious real estate ventures.

Obama collaborated with organizations led by Bill and Tom Ayers that were focused on education reform in Chicago.  The reform movement began in 1987 after a strike by the teachers’ union.  Bill Ayers was involved in the effort though the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABC’s), which he later chaired.  This alliance included the Developing Communities Project, which Barack Obama led at the time.  The alliance also included Chicago United, which Thomas Ayers led.

These school reform efforts in Chicago got off to a rough start, so philanthropist Walter Annenberg stepped in to assist Thomas Ayers and other civic leaders.  As part of a broader nationwide $500 million initiative headquartered at Brown University, Annenberg offered a $49.2 million grant for a five-year program called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which was intended to improve student achievement.  In 1994, Bill Ayers set up and chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (CSRC) to develop a grant proposal for Annenberg.  The CSRC was eventually awarded the money to launch the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Ayers and the CSRC hired Barack Obama in 1995 to be the Chairman of the newly formed CAC.  Ayers and the CSRC had been instructed by Brown University President Vartan Gregorian to “engage people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Chicago” when staffing the CAC board.  Ken Rolling of the Woods fund, which had funded Obama’s earlier stint as the head of the DCP, was recruited to be Executive Director.  Obama was chairman of the CAC until 1999 and a member of the board until 2001.

It is unlikely that Ayers would have selected Obama out of millions of Chicagoans to lead this major project if they did not already know each other well.  At the time, Obama was an unknown associate at a small law firm, and could hardly have been considered an expert on education reform.  The board of the CAC featured several university presidents, including Stanley Ikenberry of the University of Illinois, who said, “It was unusual:  here you had a person trained in the law chairing a board on school reform.”  Clearly, Ayers must have had a significant relationship with Obama.  It is hard to explain his preferential hire of Obama for the prestigious CAC position otherwise.

Ayers and Obama worked together for five years disbursing the original $49.2 million in seed money and raising perhaps as much as another $100 million from local philanthropies and businesses, often leveraging connections made by Thomas Ayers.  The money was used to continue the radical school reform projects that Ayers, Obama, and others had started during the ABC’s collaboration years earlier.

Ayers and Obama ran the CAC and related sub-projects out of third floor offices in a building at 115 S. Sangamon Street in Chicago, so it is reasonable to conclude that they got to know each other pretty well.  One of the projects funded by the CAC was the Small Schools Workshop (SSW), which was started by Bill Ayers in 1992.  The CAC directed nearly one million dollars to this project.  This was an amazingly clever and incestuous arrangement.  Thomas Ayers and friends set up a philanthropic operation (the CAC), Bill Ayers ran the oversight committee (the CSRC), Obama was hired to run the CAC, and then Obama gave $1 million from the CAC to another Bill Ayers project (the SSW).   That arrangement has “scam” written all over it.  It also has all of the earmarks of a very personal relationship.

As Obama funneled money to Ayers for the Small Schools Workshop, Ayers hired Michael Klonsky, a former SDS member and founder of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, to help run it.  Mike’s wife, Susan Klonsky, a former member of the SDS, was also recruited to help on the project.

During their CAC collaboration, Ayers and Obama funneled money to other organizations focused on radicalizing students, parents, and teachers.  Reporter Stanley Kurtz wrote, “Instead of funding schools directly, it (the CAC) required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners’, which actually got the money.  Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down.  Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as ACORN.”

The CAC’s radical reform efforts in Chicago were similar to what Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is doing with education in Venezuela.  Coincidentally, Ayers is on the board of a Venezuelan think tank that is radicalizing education in Venezuela.  He made at least four visits to Caracas to assist Chavez’s education reform efforts.  During his 2006 visit, he told Chavez, “We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution….Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large.  La educacion es revolucion!”

Ayers’s adopted son, Chesa Boudin, is also assisting education reform in Venezuela.   Boudin was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002 at the University of Chicago.   Barack Obama wrote a personal letter of reference to Dennis Hutchinson, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago, in support of Boudin’s scholarship application.  This implies that Obama not only knew Bill Ayers well, he knew his son Chesa well enough to be an effective personal reference.

Ayers and Obama collaborated to run the CAC and to coordinate the flow of its money to radical organizations.  It is beyond incredible that Obama would later publicly claim that he barely knew Ayers.  In addition to their CAC collaboration, they also appeared together on various academic panels.  They appeared at the University of Illinois for a 2002 discussion called, “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?”  They also appeared on a panel at the University of Chicago Medical Center for a 1997 discussion called, “Should a child ever be called a ‘super predator?’”  This panel discussion was coordinated by Michelle Obama.

There is still no clear accounting of how Ayers and Obama disbursed the CAC money vacuumed up from Walter Annenberg, Thomas Ayers, and others.  The CAC files, accumulated in 132 boxes, were prevented from being released to reporters until Ken Rolling, an Executive Director of the CAC, had an opportunity to “review” the files.

The CAC did not accomplish anything significant, according to a University of Chicago team paid to assess the impact of their efforts.  The conclusion of the team’s 250 page report was that six years of CAC spending and activity had no impact.  Schools that were assisted by the CAC did not have better test results than schools that didn’t get CAC help.   There was “no Annenberg effect,” according to the report.   The audit stated: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools.”

From 1999 to 2002, the two men who barely knew each other were fellow board members of the Woods Fund.  Barack had been a member since 1993, and Ayers joined him in 1999.  The Woods Fund granted money to leftist organizations such as the Midwest Academy, the Tides Foundation, the Arab American Action Network, and ACORN.  Other notable recipients included Jeremiah Wright and the Northwestern University Law School Children and Family Justice Center, where former terrorist Bernardine Dohrn works.

One of the recipients of Woods Fund largesse, the Midwest Academy (MA), was co-founded by Paul Booth, former National Secretary of the SDS and a trainee of Saul Alinsky’s IAF.  The MA, which received $100,000 in grants from the Woods Fund, 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.”

The Woods Fund was established by the Woods family, which owned the Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier to Commonwealth Edison, which was coincidentally headed by Thomas Ayers.  Coincidentally, the Woods Fund financed Obama’s community organizer job at the Developing Communities Project in 1985.  Coincidentally, the Woods Fund appointed Bill Ayers to its Board of Directors along with Obama.  Coincidentally, the Woods Fund granted funds to Bernardine Dohrn’s university department and to a law school classmate of Dohrn’s.   Since the Woods Fund board met quarterly, and since the membership of Ayers and Obama on the board overlapped three years, the two men would have been in at least twelve board meetings together.  But, Bill Ayers was just another guy in Obama’s neighborhood.

In 1995, Barack Obama ran for Illinois State Senator.   The kick-off of his campaign was held in the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.  The event was coordinated by Alice Palmer, the incumbent State Senator who was vacating the seat.  She had handpicked Obama as the candidate to replace her.  She arranged the meet-and-greet to introduce Obama to potential supporters.  Palmer, a Marxist, probably recognized the affinity between her radical politics, the politics of the former SDS members who attended the party, and the radical inclinations of young Obama.

Dr. Quentin Young, the family physician of Ayers and Dohrn and an SDS sympathizer who visited North Vietnam in 1972, attended the party.  He said, “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….It was a small group, half a dozen.”  Young subsequently contributed to Obama’s campaign.  Maria Warren, another attendee, wrote on her blog, “When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.  They were launching him—introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

Obama continued consorting with the Ayers family during his political career.  He worked with Bill Ayers at the CAC while he was an Illinois State Senator.  He also worked with Thomas Ayers and his son, John Ayers, on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund (CPEF).  Obama was on this council from 2001 to 2004, overlapping service with the two Ayers’s.  The CPEF was the organization that the CAC turned its assets over to when it expired.

Obama was a board member of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002.  The Joyce Foundation funneled $600,000 to the CPEF, which Tom and John Ayers were involved in.  It also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Leadership for Quality Education, which was an umbrella group for another project that both John and Bill Ayers worked on.  In total, millions of dollars were funneled to projects involving the Ayers family from philanthropic foundations that Obama was a board member of.

When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004 and the Presidency in 2008, he used David Axelrod to help with his campaigns.  Axelrod was a lobbyist for Commonwealth Edison, which Thomas Ayers led.  According to anti-terrorism officer Larry Johnson, Axelrod regularly coached Bill Ayers during Obama’s campaigns on how to respond to questions about his relationship with Barack.

In 1997, Ayers published a book titled A Kind and Just Parent:  The Children of the Juvenile Court.  It blamed American society for the behavior of criminals, and compared the American justice system to South Africa under apartheid.  Obama endorsed the cover, describing the book as “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”

When revelations about Ayers began to reflect badly on Obama’s political career, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story titled “Who is Bill Ayers?”  The article suggested that the relationship between Ayers and Obama was benign, and that Ayers had reformed.  The source in the article said, “What Bill Ayers…did forty years ago has nothing to do with” Obama’s presidential run.  The source lauded Ayers’s work in public education.

The source in the article was Marilyn Katz, an Obama supporter and former SDS member.  Katz was in charge of SDS security during the 1968 Chicago riots.  William Frapolly, an undercover police officer, testified that Katz trained rioters on how to use SDS weapons: “She had two types.  One was a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends, and they were fastened in the center….She said these were good for throwing or putting underneath tires.  She showed another set that was the same type of nails sharpened at both ends, but they were put through a Styrofoam cylinder.”  Katz’s arsenal also included bags of human excrement and cans of urine.

Katz served on Obama’s national finance committee and was listed as a “bundler” on his website committed to raising $100,000.  She hosted fundraisers for him in her home and personally donated thousands of dollars to his campaign.  She also helped organize the now-famous October 2002 antiwar rally in Chicago where Barack Obama publicly opposed war in Iraq.  Katz once said she supported “sexual freedom and a democratic socialist paradise.”

What should we make of Katz’s assertion that what Bill Ayers did 40 years ago meant nothing in the context of Barack Obama’s political career?  We should conclude that her statement is rubbish.  Ayers and Dohrn started their bombing spree 40 years ago.  They did not surrender to authorities until 1980, at which point Obama was already politically active and involved with an offshoot of the SDS.  When Obama moved to New York City, the Weather Underground gang was all there, right in his neighborhood.  Remnants of the gang were involved in anti-apartheid protests, just like Obama was.

What should we make of Katz’s assertion that William Ayers is now a reformed citizen?  Is it true that he has changed since his days as a terrorist, a Marxist, and an anti-American activist?  Let’s review the public record.  Ayers was pictured trampling an American flag on a cover of the Chicago Magazine.   The related 2001 article was titled “No Regrets.”  In a 2001 New York Times interview, he said he was unrepentant for his violence: “I don’t regret setting bombs….I feel we didn’t do enough.”   He also said that the notion of the United States as a decent place “makes me want to puke.”

In 2007, Ayers and Dohrn spoke at a reunion of SDS members.  Ayers praised the rebelliousness of the SDS and quoted communist heroes.  Dohrn called the U.S. the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and said that she was living in “the belly of the beast” and “the heart of the monster.”  According to Ayers’s own blog, he was still carrying his SDS card in his wallet when he participated in a 2005 antiwar rally with Cindy Sheehan.

In 2007, Dohrn said she wants to “remove capitalism, that evil thing that it is…he is…she is.”  In a 2003 article for the Marxist periodical Monthly Review, she lauded domestic and foreign protests against American anti-terrorist security measures as a “resistance” to U.S. imperialism.  The Obama presidential campaign, unfazed by such anti-American rhetoric, defended Ayers and Dohrn in 2008 as “respectable fixtures of the mainstream in Chicago.”

Ayers and Dohrn released a new book in February 2009 titled Race Course against White Supremacy.  They discretely waited until after the election and inauguration of Obama before releasing the book.

On January 20, 2009, Bill Ayers was “overflowing with happiness, relief, love” when he and Bernardine and thousands of Chicagoans celebrated Obama’s inauguration in Grant Park.  Ayers and Dohrn spoke with an NBC reporter near the site of their 1969 “Days of Rage” riots.  “I couldn’t stop crying a couple of times.  I found the exact spot where I was beaten 40 years ago,” Ayers said.  They were perhaps celebrating the manifestation of a prophecy Dohrn made in 2006:  “Stay vigilant.  The light will come.”  It is certainly illustrative that Ayers connected SDS riots in 1969 with Obama’s inauguration in 2009.  He connected two very big dots.

The Ayers’s were celebrating two decades of purposeful nurturing of Obama’s career.  The Ayers family helped enable Obama’s Harvard education, hired him into numerous jobs, worked with him on various boards, used their home to kick off his political career, and made connections for him in Illinois politics.  Their nurturing built a foundation that helped a relatively unknown Chicago radical to suddenly become President.  The 40-year-old vision of SDS radicals to take over America finally came to fruition with the election of Obama as President.  This was an impressive accomplishment by Bill Ayers, who otherwise was “just a guy in the neighborhood.”

One can imagine Ayers’s vicarious thrill, in light of his youthful dreams to lead a revolution in America, seeing that his protégé was now in a position to do just that.  Ironically, Obama’s campaign logo, the blue oval with stripes on the ground, vaguely resembles the Weatherman logo with its semi-circle rainbow and lightning bolt.  This logo is tattooed on Ayers’s neck and also appeared on the dust jacket of his book Fugitive Days.  The Weatherman logo resembles the lightning bolt in a circle logo of the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (1935 to 1940).

What are we to think of this intimate 20-year relationship between the President of the United States and terrorists who declared war on “AmeriKKKa”, bombed the Pentagon, and cheered when the Manson clan slaughtered Sharon Tate?  What are we to make of the deeply intertwined lives and careers of Barack and Michelle Obama with a nefarious couple who continue to advocate Marxian destruction of private property and the middle class?  And what are we to think of a President who blatantly lied about the extent of these relationships in order to deceive American voters, with the help of a complicit media?

Based on what we’ve seen in previous chapters, and what we will see in chapters to come, we should think the worst.

We’ve been had.

Chapter 9 Meet George Soros

“Now it’s our Party:  We bought it, we own it….”  Eli Pariser, head of MoveOn PAC

In the first eight chapters, we reviewed Barack Obama’s biography, relationships, and influences.  These say a great deal about his character and how he will govern as President of the United States.  But they don’t tell us how he got elected President.  We saw in the last chapter that ACORN savaged the integrity of the electoral process to aid and abet their chosen radical candidates.  But ACORN is just a small cog in the machine that enthroned Obama.  ACORN’s unethical activities alone do not explain how an obscure politician from Illinois, with almost no national or international experience, suddenly rose to the pinnacle of American politics.

This chapter explains Obama’s sudden rise by introducing George Soros and his powerful network.  We have already learned that Obama is firmly committed to transferring wealth to the underclass because of his socialist pedigree.  But, understanding how Obama got elected will lead us to a very different world that he also owes his political allegiance to.  This is an elitist world of exclusive universities like Harvard and Columbia, oligarchic financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, billionaire financiers like George Soros and Peter Lewis, and international non-governmental organizations like the Ford Foundation and the Trilateral Commission.

Middle-class citizens should do some simple reckoning during this chapter.  If Obama’s socialist pedigree will drive him to transfer wealth to the underclass, and if his behind-the-scenes political allegiances will drive him to transfer wealth to the elitists (insert your own cynical anecdote here about government bail-outs of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Big Education, Big Labor, the International Monetary Fund, Fannie Mae, or other well-heeled power brokers), where does that leave the middle class?

The simple answer is that it leaves the middle class stuck between subsidizing the underclass and subsidizing the wealthy elites.  There’s an old saying that if you can’t figure out who the sucker is in a con, it’s you.  Guess what?  If you’re in the middle class, you’re the sucker in this con, no matter what political party you voted for.  Trillions will go to the poor.  Trillions will go to the Wall Street bankers and the government-sinecure elitists.  The middle class will eventually pay for it all when the bills come due.

George Soros is a rogue Hungarian-born billionaire and a one-man international wrecking crew.  He has the ability and the propensity to undermine the political and financial structures of entire countries.    He made a fortune speculating in currency markets, often by plotting to weaken currencies to profit from the wreckage.  He once said, “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood….It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of God, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

Soros broke the Bank of England to enrich himself and supported regime changes in Eastern Europe to amuse himself.  His latest target is the United States of America.  He publicly declared that removing George W. Bush from office was a “matter of life and death,” and that if someone could guarantee it, he would surrender his entire fortune to assist in that regime change.

Soros is the de facto puppet master of the Democratic Party.  He is its largest contributor, and he supports more than 30 leftist organizations that are now the real party machinery of the DNC.  Eli Pariser, a director of the Soros-funded MoveOn PAC, said of the Democratic Party: “Now it’s our party:  we bought it, we own it….”

Soros abhors Western principles and wants to establish a borderless “Open Society” that rejects the U.S. Constitution.  He is one of the most powerful men on earth.  He is reportedly worth $14 billion.  His shenanigans in financial markets cause currencies to go up or down.  As he reaps billions from these gyrations, others correspondingly lose billions.  Sometimes whole nations suffer.

This chapter examines George Soros’s biography and his profound influence on the Democratic Party.  It also discusses how his coercive sway over America’s electoral machinery elevated Barack Obama to the Presidency.

George Soros is the son of Jewish writer Tivadar Soros.  He was born as Gyorgy Schwartz on August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary.  In 1936, the family changed its name to the more ethnically Hungarian Soros, in response to growing anti-Semitism.  In 1944, Nazi Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary to oversee the “processing” of Hungarian Jews.  Tivadar Soros arranged fake identity papers for his children, who were shipped out to various Christian families to protect them.  George ended up with a Ministry of Agriculture agent whose job was to issue deportation orders to Jews and confiscate their property.

The Soros family moved to England in 1947 after Hungary fell under Soviet control.  For a brief period, the Communists afforded young Soros an alternative view of the world.  He told his father in 1946, “I’d like to go to Moscow to find out about communism.  I mean that’s where the power is.  I’d like to know more about it.”  This yen for proximity to power foreshadowed Soros’s future as one of the world’s most prolific power brokers.

George graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952 and began work at a merchant bank.  In 1956, he moved to New York City with $5,000 in his pocket.  While working as an arbitrage trader, he developed a theory he called “reflexivity”.  He postulated that the reaction of traders to market trends affects the valuation of markets in a pro-cyclical “virtuous or vicious” manner.  In other words, markets react not only to real economic information, but also to how market participants themselves are reacting.  This causes markets to gyrate as they overshoot or undershoot their equilibriums.

Soros realized that he could not exploit his concept of reflexivity until began investing on his own.  He quit his job in 1973 to form an investment company that became the Quantum Fund, which is how he earned most of his fortune.  This fund is headquartered in Curacao, beyond U.S. Government oversight.  During a three-year span, the Quantum Fund quadrupled in value.  As a result, Institutional Investor magazine named Soros “the world’s greatest money manager” in 1981.  In 1994, Financial World declared that his 1993 profits “exceeded the gross domestic product of at least 42 member nations of the United Nations.”

Many financiers rake in extraordinary wealth.  What distinguishes Soros is his ruthless disregard for sovereign nations and the institutions that enabled his wealth accumulation.  He blackened his soul while attacking the financial structures of whole countries for enormous personal gain.

For example, Soros gambled $10 billion in 1992 that the British pound would lose value compared to the German mark.  He bought Deutschmarks and dumped pounds, while the Bank of England did the reverse.  Other investors joined with Soros on the attack.  After weeks of maneuvering, the British were forced to devalue the pound by 20%.  Soros’s profit was nearly $2 billion.  He was consequently dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros’s financial machinations were not always legal.  In 1988, he bought shares in the French bank Societe Generale to illicitly benefit from advance knowledge of a takeover attempt.  A French court ruled in 2002 that it was insider trading and Soros was fined $2.3 million.

The New York Times said, “When Soros speaks, world markets listen.”  In 1993, Soros informed the Times of London, “I expect the mark to fall against major currencies.”  His mere words caused the Deutschmark to plummet in value in world markets.  In 1998 he said that Russia ought to devalue the ruble.  Consequently, during the Russia-gate scandal, the ruble plummeted in value and Russia sank into a depression and defaulted on its IMF loans.   The head of the U.S. House Banking Committee called the induced collapse “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.”

Soros’s assaults on countries were sometimes for political rather than financial gain.  His involvement in Georgia’s Rose Revolution was considered crucial to the 2003 uprising that toppled President Eduard Shevardnadze.  The LA Times quoted Soros:  “I’m delighted by what happened in Georgia, and I take great pride in having contributed to it.”  He reportedly spent $42 million supporting revolution leader Mikhail Saakashvili.  Many believe he was instrumental in several other coups in Eastern Europe, including the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic.  At one point, Soros bragged that “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.”  Keep this “regime change” hobby in mind when we discuss his impact on America later in the chapter.

Many governments have either banned Soros from activity in their nations or are prosecuting him for illegalities.  Turkmenistan and Russia banned Soros-sponsored initiatives.  Soros’s foundation in Belarus was fined $3 million for tax and currency violations.  Kazakhstan prosecuted the Soros Foundation for tax evasion.  When Soros short-sold the Malaysian currency, thereby trashing Malaysia’s economy, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad called Soros “a villain and a moron” and said “the poor people in these countries will suffer, and they are the people that have to be protected from George Soros, who has so much money and power but is totally thoughtless.”

Soros’s speculation against Thailand’s currency caused it to plummet in value.  He is now considered an “economic war criminal” in Thailand.   Thai activist Weng Tojirakarn said, “We regard George Soros as a kind of Dracula.  He sucks the blood from the people.”  Taiwan threatened criminal charges against “any person cooperating with Soros funds.”

Before we examine Soros’s rogue influence on American affairs, it is important to understand his philosophical bearings.  According to David Horowitz and Richard Poe in their book The Shadow Party, “all of his (Soros’s) political and philanthropic activities are directed towards one goal–fostering what he calls the ‘open society.’  The term was coined in 1932 by the French philosopher Henri Louis Bergson.  Bergson defined as ‘closed’ those societies whose moral code is tribal and chiefly concerns the good of the tribe itself.   Those societies which base their morality upon ‘universal’ principles, which seek the good of all mankind, Bergson defined as ‘open.’”

Philosopher Karl Popper expanded on Bergson’s concepts.  According to Horowitz and Poe, “Popper argued that even Christianity is insufficiently ‘open’ because it excludes people who do not embrace its beliefs.  To be truly ‘open,’ a society must accord equal respect to all beliefs, showing no favoritism toward any particular one.  A truly open person never assumes that his beliefs are superior to someone else’s….One who claims possession of ‘ultimate truth’ is an ‘enemy’ of the open society.”

As Horowitz and Poe observed, even the American political system can’t live up to Popper’s ideal.  Americans regard rights such as liberty as absolute and inalienable.  Popper, on the other hand, believed that absolute truth cannot be found, even in the U.S. Constitution.  As we shall see later, this is one reason why Soros ignores the Constitution.

Popper documented his philosophy in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a book published in 1945.  Soros studied under Popper in London and considered him his spiritual mentor.  Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) got its name and inspiration from Popper’s concepts.

Since 1979, Soros’s Open Society foundations have contributed $5 billion to left-wing causes.  Soros has been described as the “Godfather of World Socialism.”  He described himself as a “stateless statesman.”  His Open Society foundations operate in more than 50 countries.  In 1993, Soros established the U.S. branch of the OSI to support his socialist initiatives in America.

According to Richard Poe and David Horowitz on their website discoverthenetworks.org, Soros’s OSI agenda looks remarkably like that of Barack Obama and the radical wing of the Democratic Party.  The OSI agenda as summarized by Poe and Horowitz is presented below, with slight abridgment:

• Promoting the view that America is institutionally oppressive
• Promoting the election of leftist political candidates
• Depicting American militarism as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
• Promoting open borders, mass immigration, and neutering of current immigration laws
• Promoting expanded social welfare programs funded by higher taxes
• Promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
• Advocating unilateral disarmament and a steep reduction in military spending
• Promoting government-run healthcare
• Promoting radical environmentalism as a wealth-transferring mechanism
• Bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
• Promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world
• Promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
• Advocating stricter gun-control measures

Despite being a tycoon and a cutthroat financier, Soros despises capitalism and Western principles.  “The richest 1% of the world’s population receives as much as the poorest 57%,” Soros said in George Soros on Globalization.  To resolve this imbalance, he proposed curbing “global capitalism.”   He could solve some of the imbalance by giving his own money to the poor, but as we shall see shortly, he is using a big chunk of it to facilitate regime change in America instead.

Soros considers America an enemy of his philosophy.  Our heritage and culture of individual liberty protected by a Constitution compels most of us to reject his vision of a borderless international welfare state.  In Soros’s globalist worldview, not only is individual sovereignty irrelevant, so is the sovereignty of the United States.

Aryeh Neier has been the President of Soros’s Open Society Institute since 1993.  Earlier in his career, he was a leader of the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, which eventually morphed into the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Coincidentally, some of Neier’s brethren in the SDS directly supported Obama’s career, including Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson, Bernardine Dohrn, and Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN.  Neier’s SDS connection is perhaps one of the ways that Soros became aware of Obama as a young radical politician.  This cadre of SDS radicals has been percolating through our culture for four decades.

Groups funded by the OSI are a “who’s who” of the radical left and socialism in America, including ACORN, MoveOn.org, the ACLU, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, NARAL, the NAACP, and the National Council of La Raza.

Soros used the OSI to infiltrate American politics, culminating in the creation of what David Horowitz and Richard Poe dubbed the Shadow Party, which is a subterranean faction that controls the Democratic Party.  The Shadow Party is the mechanism that Soros used to push radicals into power and to elevate Obama to the Presidency.

According to Poe and Horowitz in their book The Shadow Party:

“The Shadow Party is the real power driving the Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The leader of these radicals is…George Soros.  He has essentially privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal control.  The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he exerts that control….It works by siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros.  He then uses that money to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit….The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money.  By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him.”

According to Poe and Horowitz, the Shadow Party was born in July 2003 when a team of strategists and donors met at Soros’s estate on Long Island.  The attendees included Morton Halperin of the OSI, former Clinton staffer John Podesta, labor leader Steve Rosenthal, and Democratic fundraiser Peter Lewis, among others.  Soros sketched out a strategy for deposing Bush in the 2004 election.  One participant reported, “By morning, the outlines of a new organization began to emerge, and Mr. Soros pledged $10 million to get it started.”  That organization was America Coming Together (ACT), an activist group assigned to harness the manpower of unions, environmentalists, and civil rights organizations.

By early 2004, the Shadow Party infrastructure included seven non-profit groups, including MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, America Votes, America Coming Together, The Media Fund, Joint Victory Campaign 2004, and the Thunder Road Group LLC.

This umbrella coalition was allied with other left-wing groups such as ACORN, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Environment 2004, the National Education Association, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Soros personally contributed to numerous left-wing politicians, including Charles Rangel, Al Franken, John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Charles Schumer, Joseph Biden, Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, and Barack Obama.  Soros was described by Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott as a “national treasure.”   He is essentially the treasurer of the radical faction of the Democratic Party.

Soros has essentially taken over the Democratic Party with the various organizations that he funds.  In 2004, the Shadow Party contributed $300 million to the Democrats.  Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said, “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

But how did Soros “buy” the Democratic Party?  The answer lies in the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which Soros pushed for years.

Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Russ Feingold co-sponsored legislation to reform how federal election campaigns were funded.  McCain-Feingold banned large donations to the Democrat and Republican National Committees, but it did not restrict donations to “527” organizations.  A “527” group is named after a provision in the U.S. tax code.  Such groups, though not directly affiliated with political parties, influence the nomination and election of favored candidates for public office.  They do not have to report their finances to the FEC.

Donors can contribute unlimited amounts to a 527 group.  This creates the opportunity for distorted influence in the political process.  In the case of the Democrat Party, the Soros-sponsored 527’s can reel in huge contributions, while the DNC itself is hamstrung by McCain-Feingold.  This opens the door for rogues like Soros to assert political control through financial leverage.

McCain-Feingold went into effect in November 2002.  According to Horowitz and Poe, Soros immediately began taking advantage of it.  Allusions to a shadow party began creeping into the press.  The Washington Post wrote about “shadow organizations” springing up to circumvent McCain-Feingold.[48]  In September 2003, Lorraine Woellert of Business Week applied the term Shadow Party specifically to the network of 527 groups that Soros was assembling.

Soros’s team of wealthy donors now contributes far more than prior campaign finance laws would have permitted them to donate directly to the Democrat Party.  As a result, Democrats are now dependent on Soros and his cronies for money.   In politics, money is often synonymous with power.  Soros has a lot of both.
 

Thus far, we have examined the influence of George Soros on the Democratic Party.  Now, let’s examine the role that he played in abetting Obama’s career and ascension to the White House.

Soros has overtly supported Obama since Barack’s run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, donating $60,000 to his campaign.  Four members of the Soros family also donated to Obama’s 2004 campaign, making Obama one of only a handful of candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle and Barbara Boxer, to receive such support.

Why did Soros single Obama out at this point, when he was still an obscure Illinois politician?  There are thousands of state-government legislators around the country.  Why did Soros include this unknown Chicago politician in equal favor with established national luminaries such as Hillary Clinton?  We have already surmised that OSI President and SDS founder Aryeh Neier might have alerted Soros to the articulate radical in Chicago who was bonding with Neier’s old SDS allies, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.  But, to fully understand the evolution of the Soros/Obama connection, we have to begin with the career of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother.

Ann moved to Indonesia from Hawaii after marrying Lolo Soetoro.  She taught English at the American embassy in Jakarta.  She also set up a village credit program for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and worked for the Ford Foundation formulating loan programs for poor Indonesian entrepreneurs.  She traveled widely to countries such as Thailand, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China.  During her career, she came in contact with some influential people.

One of those influential people was Peter Geithner, who oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance operation in Indonesia when Ann Dunham worked there.  He later became the director of the Asian program at the Ford Foundation, working out of New York.  Thus, Peter and Ann knew each other and collaborated on microcredit projects.  Ironically, their respective offspring, Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama, ended up working closely together a generation later.  Tim Geithner, whose career led him to become the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, joined Obama’s administration as Treasury Secretary.

Another influential person was Zbigniew Brzezinski, formerly a key member of Carter’s administration and the first head of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, a cabal of international power brokers.  In the 1980’s, Brzezinski led the Institute for Communist Affairs at Columbia University in New York, specializing in Russian affairs.  During that time, Obama majored in political science at Columbia and studied Sovietology under Brzezinski.  Coincidently, both Brzezinski and Obama were in Pakistan at the same time in 1981, shortly before Obama enrolled at Columbia.  Their visits occurred when Pakistan was under martial law and the U.S. State Department was discouraging travel there.  Obama’s 1981 trip overseas also included a visit to his mother Ann.

Prior to transferring to Columbia in New York, Barack Obama, by his own admission, was dabbling in drugs and the counter-culture at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  Ann had already tried to correct his chronic lack of ambition in high school, which he noted in Dreams from My Father.  He wrote that he felt like “letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”

Here’s the hypothesis.  It is based on circumstantial information, which is all that is available, since Obama refuses to elaborate on this period of his life or to release any documentation related to it.  Ann Dunham asked Peter Geithner for assistance in Barack’s erstwhile career, since she was living on the other side of the world and needed help setting Barack on a more productive path.  Peter would have been her only influential connection in America.  Geithner, who was well connected in New York, enlisted the help of Brzezinski.  If the Ford Foundation was indeed a CIA front as reported by numerous sources, Geithner may have intersected previously with Brzezinski, who was reportedly also involved with the CIA.  To conclude the hypothesis, Brzezinski recruited Obama to Columbia College, New York’s premiere university, to study under him and get serious about his academic career.

This hypothesis implies that Obama later picked Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary out of obligation.  It explains why Obama clung tenaciously to him despite a horrendously damning tax evasion scandal (Geithner, who now oversees the IRS in his cabinet position, cheated on his tax returns for many years, failing to pay over $34,000 in Social Security taxes when he worked for the IMF, despite signing forms acknowledging the requirement to do so).  Obama clung to Geithner even though The Nation magazine called his selection “Obama’s biggest mistake.”

This hypothesis explains why Obama suddenly left Occidental College in California, where he had Hawaii-like warm weather, a full scholarship, and many friends, to go to Columbia in New York, where he was a stranger in a strange land, except for this hypothetical Geithner/Brzezinski protectorate instigated by his mother.  According to a 2007 LA Times article, Obama helped lead the Occidental College Junior Varsity basketball team to an undefeated season, which makes it even more unusual that he would suddenly leave for Columbia.

Soros, who was a member of the Trilateral Commission, probably knew Trilateral Commission cofounder and fellow New Yorker Brzezinski.  Perhaps Brzezinski introduced Obama to Soros.  Soros was a contributor to the Ford Foundation, and his OSI was a contributor to most of the organizations that subsequently orbited around Obama, including the DCP, ACORN, the Woods Fund, the CAC, and the Joyce Foundation.

Aryeh Neier, who is President of Soros’s OSI and a compatriot of SDS radicals Ayers and Dohrn, may also have alerted Soros to Obama, a charismatic young politician in Chicago who was close to the Ayers family.  Soros surely would have been intrigued by a rising star who shared his anti-capitalist and internationalist world view, especially one educated by fellow Trilateral Commissioner Brzezinski.

To summarize the hypothesis, what began as a favor from Peter Geithner to Ann Dunham to help young Barack divert himself from the lifestyle of an alienated drifter in California, grew into a career-abetting juggernaut that included college mentoring by Brzezinski and then major foundational support and political leveraging by George Soros.  Along the way, Timothy Geithner became involved with the New York financial oligarchy that would later become a golden goose for Obama’s national political career.  Brzezinski eventually became a key foreign policy advisor on Obama’s presidential campaign staff and took credit for the arguments in Obama’s now-famous 2002 antiwar speech.

Coincidentally, Brzezinski’s daughter Mika, who is the sidekick for Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, led the partisan support for Obama on that show during the presidential election, which caused insiders to dub the network “Obamavision.”

Even though the preceding hypothesis is circumstantial, it is clear that Soros and Obama connected along the way.  Soros eventually became known as Obama’s “money man.”  In February 2004, Soros met Obama for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago.  Soros came away from that discussion “very impressed.”  In June 2004, he hosted a fundraiser at his home in New York for Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign.  According to Soros spokesperson Michael Vachon, Obama was the only political candidate that Soros met with personally in the 2004 election cycle.   This is a curious distinction, because at the time, Obama was just one among thousands of state-level legislators.

Ever since Obama excelled during his “audition” as the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004, he was financed by Soros and other billionaires.  They essentially created a national politician out of nothing more than Obama’s hyperbolic oratory and a lot of money from New York.  Prior to this, Obama had no national or international achievements, no discernable record, no experience as an executive, and no national brand recognition.   The honor of being keynote speaker at the convention was a clear signal that powerful forces were aiding the otherwise obscure Chicago politician.  In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “the process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me.”   He also wrote “by that time I had become accustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign.”

Obama won his 2004 U.S. Senate race, despite accomplishing almost nothing in his first six years in the Illinois State Senate.  He got 26 bills passed his final year there, but that was because Emil Jones, who became President of the Illinois Senate in 2003 when Democrats took the majority, became his “godfather.”  Jones designated Obama as the author of many bills that were actually written and championed by other state legislators with more seniority.  It is unclear what motivated Jones to artificially abet Obama’s rise to stardom.

It is clear, though, that Jones’s “assistance” jump-started Obama’s march to national prominence.   Prior to 2004, Obama was a relatively obscure politician, even in Illinois.  Fewer than 20% of Illinois voters knew who he was.  Obama directly sought out Jones to assist him in his quest for notoriety.  According to a New York Times account, Obama told Jones, “You have the power to make a U.S. Senator.”  Jones asked, “If I’ve got that kind of power, do you know of anyone that I can make a United States Senator?”  Obama replied, “Me.”

Rickey Hendon, one of the Illinois State Senators that Emil Jones swiped legislation from to give to Obama, told the Houston Press, “No one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”  He also suggested that Obama would run for the “king of the world” if the position was available.

It didn’t take long for Obama to become dissatisfied being a mere U.S. Senator and not “king of the world.”  Despite his vacuous background and brief tenure in the U. S. Senate, Obama brashly contemplated a run for the Presidency.  Such audacity, not of hope but of political hubris, was likely fueled by the knowledge that powerful forces could help catapult him over thousands of other more deserving and experienced politicians.  It was also an audacity of hypocrisy, because Obama declared in November 2004, “I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years.”  Even as he was making that fallacious statement, some of his Senate campaign workers were already visiting Iowa to establish relationships with the caucus machinery there.

On December 4, 2006, Obama met George Soros in Manhattan to discuss his presidential aspirations.  Afterward, Soros introduced Obama to wealthy prospective supporters, including UBS U.S. head Robert Wolf.  A week later, Wolf met with Obama to map out campaign strategy.  He eventually raised $500,000 for Obama’s campaign.

With money and connections assured, Obama, whose Senate accomplishments were limited to passing two minor bills (one of which was to name a post office), announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee on January 16, 2007.  A few days later, the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama in the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton, his previous gleam in the eye.  This was a remarkable turn of events, since Clinton was a clear frontrunner and Obama an obscure long-shot at best.  Soros announced, “I have very high regard for Hillary Clinton, but I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world.”

Steven Gluckstern, formerly the Chairman of Soros’s Democracy Alliance, hosted a fundraising party for Obama at his home in New York.  A photo of the event, published in New York magazine April 2007, shows George Soros seated obsequiously behind Obama, with puppet-master haughtiness.  In May 2007, Soros hosted a party for Obama at the mansion of Paul Tudor Jones, who runs Tudor Investment Corporation.

Thus, Obama’s meteoric rise from obscurity was fueled by money from Soros and his network of financiers.   The public mythology is that Obama’s campaign emerged from a grassroots movement and was financed by millions of small donations.  The truth is that the seed money for his campaign came from a small cabal of extraordinarily wealthy power brokers.  His campaign was born of his audacity and that of these wealthy brokers.  While the eventual small donations from average citizens became useful to Obama, his candidacy would have been non-existent without the billionaire seed money.

This should cause average citizens who think they have some influence over the Democratic Party to think again.  Remember, this cabal of billionaires cast its lot behind a candidate who barely registered on the presidential radar screen.  At the time, Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner in what seemed like a coronation rather than a primary race.  The implication is that no gambit is a long shot if the game is rigged.

Seven of Obama’s top 14 donors were officers and employees of major Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, UBS, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse.  These companies had financially supported Hillary Clinton, until Soros broke ranks and supported Obama.  The influence of these Wall Street power brokers continued right into Obama’s presidency.  Obama’s White House has seen a steady stream of Wall Street executives and financiers.  The visitor registry includes Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blanfein, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack.

According to Don Fredrick in The Obama Timeline, Senator Obama received as a U.S. Senator “about $300,000 in contributions each year from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Countrywide Financial, and Washington Mutual.”  According to Michelle Malkin, hedge funds and private equity firms donated $2,992,456 to Obama in 2008.  At least 100 Obama campaign bundlers were investment CEO’s and brokers.

In a remarkable show of hypocrisy, Obama lambasted credit card companies in June 2008, declaring, “We need a President who will look out for the interests of the hardworking families, not just their big campaign donors and corporate allies.”  Immediately after the speech, he attended a fundraiser at Credit Suisse, one of his major backers from the financial industry.  As Obama’s campaign progressed, the billionaire cabal supporting him grew to include Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox News Channel, and Warren Buffet, the founder of the fabulously successful Berkshire Hathaway fund.

In another show of hypocrisy, Obama promised that he would collaborate with Senator McCain to use only public funds for the fall campaign in 2008.  This policy was a mainstay of his early campaigning for the presidency.  However, when Midas-like cash began pouring in, he flip-flopped and chose instead to forego public campaign financing.

But it was more than just billionaire money that abetted Obama’s campaign.  Soros’s Shadow Party operatives grabbed the ball from the financial oligarchs and ran with it.  One ball-carrier was the Soros-backed Media Matters for America.  This organization monitors the “inaccuracies” of conservative journalists and media personalities.  It characterizes conservative assertions as “lies,” “smears,” “slander,” or “falsehoods.”  Media Matters pays listeners and watchers to monitor conservative broadcasts for controversial sound bites and mistakes.  The mistaken or inflammatory bites are then relentlessly hammered by liberal-leaning mainstream media outlets.  One of their projects was to pressure the Federal Government to ban Rush Limbaugh from American Forces Radio and Television Service.  The Obama campaign was a clear beneficiary of the “hate Bush” and “distrust Republicans” media frenzy that was inflamed by Media Matters.

Another agent of the Shadow Party is the 1.4 million-member MoveOn.org.  Soros jump-started this radical organization by supporting founder Wes Boyd, who had launched the website during the Clinton impeachment trial in 1998.  Early on, Soros donated $1 to MoveOn.org for every $2 Boyd raised from his members.  Soros and friends contributed $6.2 million at its inception.  Soros’s son Jonathan is involved with MoveOn.org’s activities.

MoveOn.org attacked General Petraeus with the famous September 2007 “General Betray Us” full page ad in the New York Times.  This was part of the Shadow Party push to demonize the war in Iraq and the Republican Party along with it.  Strangely, MoveOn.org has chosen not to demonize the Obama administration for continuing the overseas conflicts that began during the Bush administration.

Soros is adept at using the media to influence political trends.  Every year, he gives tens of millions of dollars to media operations that support candidates who share his agenda.  These media groups use the money to coordinate sympathetic publications, press releases, and activities.

Soros’s media tinkering began in 1996 when he launched the Soros Documentary Fund to “spur awareness, action and social change.”  This fund helped finance several hundred documentaries.  In 2001, the fund was absorbed into the Sundance Institute.  Its mission evolved to “support the production of documentaries on social justice, human rights, civil liberties, and freedom of expression issues around the world.”

Journalist Rondi Adamson wrote that most of the documentaries produced by these organizations “are highly critical of some aspect of American life, capitalism, or Western culture.”  Their themes convey “that America is a troubling if not sinister influence in the world, that the War on Terror is a fraud and terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters, and that markets are fundamentally unjust.”

According to Adamson, filmmaking was part of Soros’s strategy to influence American culture.  Soros said, “Documentary films raise awareness and inspire action.  The Open Society Institute gave vital support to filmmakers working to expose human rights abuses and helped the films find the widest possible audience.”

Soros has significant connections in the broadcast media.  PBS broadcaster Bill Moyers is a trustee of Soros’ Open Society Institute.  David Halperin, the founding director of the Soros-funded American Constitution Society, is the brother of Mark Halperin.  Mark Halperin was the political director of ABC News until 2007, and is now a political analyst for Time.  Mark issued a memo during the 2004 campaign instructing his reporters to be less critical of John Kerry than George Bush.   Halperin confessed to media analysts at a November 2008 conference on the presidential election that the mainstream media engaged in “extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”  He also said, “It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq War.”

Flash forward to June 24, 2009, when the media and government became one.  ABC became a giant megaphone for President Obama to propagandize the American people to support government-run health care.  ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson hosted World News directly from the White House.  The network moderated a forum called “Prescription for America” during prime time in the East Room.  ABC excluded any opposing viewpoints on the broadcast, despite a request from angry Republicans to get equal air time, and despite offers from conservative organizations to pay for opposing ads.  The mainstream media has essentially become a fourth branch of the government under the Obama administration, much like Pravda in the Soviet Union.

Anita Dunn, Obama’s White House Communications Director, revealed the media advantage that the Obama camp had during the election.  At a January 2009 event discussing the media tactics of the Obama campaign, she said, “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control….One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe (an Obama campaign manager) videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters;  we just put that out there and make them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter.  So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it.”

Coincidentally, Anita Dunn orchestrated an effort by the Obama White House to marginalize dissenting media voices, including Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.  Specifically, Dunn challenged the Pravda collection of media outlets like ABC and NBC to exclude Fox News from news-gathering efforts, because Fox News “is not a legitimate news organization.”   This is the same Anita Dunn who expressed admiration for Chairman Mao of Communist China, who probably used similar tactics during his regime.

This leftist media bias is apparent in the way they cover politicized events.  When Cindy Sheehan was protesting the war outside Bush’s Crawford Ranch, there were more reporters than actual protestors.  Four years later, when Sheehan held a protest against Obama on Martha’s Vineyard, reporters were conspicuously absent.  When hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens gathered in Washington on September 12, 2009 to express their discontent with the Obama administration, the media was almost invisible.   For many media outlets, events aren’t considered “news” until a left-leaning reporter with a microphone or a camera decides they are.

A disturbing example of this was the unremitting coverage of the Iraq war by the mainstream media, which spewed out a steady stream of negative “news” from the war zone in order to tarnish the Republicans.  However, in December 2008, ABC, CBS, and NBC stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq even though it was still an active war zone.  After Obama’s election, the war in Iraq was no longer news, because the left-leaning media decided it wasn’t.

The Soros network of foundations funds a variety of radical media operations, including the Center for Media Education, the Independent Media Institute, the Proteus Fund, the Youth Media Council, the Media & Democracy Coalition, the Media Action Grassroots Network, Public Radio International, and the Free Press Foundation.

Let’s take a peek at the Free Press Foundation, which has received at least $1 million from Soros’s Open Society Institute.  In the socialist Monthly Review, Free Press Foundation cofounder Robert McChesney declared, “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”   McChesney wrote an article for Monthly Review titled “A New Deal Under Obama?,” in which he declared, “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”   He also wrote, “We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimalize it, and perhaps even eliminate it.”

Obama won the 2008 election because everything that the electorate knew about him was pre-packaged and carefully meted out by media sycophants.  He was carried aloft by a tidal wave of orgiastic support and messianic acclaim from the media and popular culture.

With less than a year of experience as a U.S. Senator, he was on the cover of Newsweek.  In April 2005, just months after he was sworn in as a neophyte Senator, Time magazine called him one of “the World’s Most Influential People.”  His memoir was on the New York Times best seller list for 54 weeks.  The audio book version of Dreams from My Father won a Grammy in the “best spoken word album” category.  In October 2005, the British journal New Statesman named him one of the “10 People Who Could Change the World.”  In January 2008, author Deepak Chopra called his candidacy a “quantum leap in American consciousness.”  In December 2007, Oprah Winfrey said Obama’s “tongue (is) dipped in the unvarnished truth.”  In February 2008, MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews gushed, “He (Obama) seems to have the answers.  This is the New Testament.”

Remember, less than four years prior to all of this manufactured media acclaim and financial support from Soros, Obama was an obscure and unaccomplished state politician, and only 20% of the people in his home state of Illinois even knew who he was.

The media and cultural adulation continued unabated after Obama was elected President.  In December 2008, Time Magazine named him its “Person of the Year.”   Newsweek editor Evan Thomas declared, “…in a way, Obama’s standing above the country—above the world, he’s sort of God.”  Incredibly, the Nobel Committee awarded him its 2009 Peace Prize, for which he was nominated after having been President for just 11 days.  A painting titled “The Truth” depicted Obama as a crucified messiah with a crown of thorns.

Clearly, Obama had a media and cultural support network that was exceptionally unusual, especially since he had not really earned any of the caricatured hero worship that became eerily akin to the outlandish “Dear Leader” demagoguery usually found only in totalitarian regimes.

By June 3, 2008, Barack Obama had leveraged this manufactured adulation to win more committed delegates in the concluded Democratic primaries than Hillary Clinton.  However, she had not yet conceded defeat.  Clinton and her supporters were still working to swing the “super delegates” her way before the convention.  Three days later, a bizarre incident occurred that perhaps illustrated the influence of the forces supporting Obama and raised questions about who really is controlling the political process in America.  The following account of this incident is adapted from Don Fredrick’s version in his book The Obama Timeline.

On June 6, 2008, reporters traveling with Obama boarded his campaign plane near Washington, D.C. to head for Chicago.  However, Obama never boarded, opting for an unannounced meeting instead.  One reporter challenged Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs:  “Why were we not told about this meeting until we were on the plane, the doors were shut, and the plane was about to taxi off?”  Gibbs answered, “Senator Obama had a desire to do some meetings, others had a desire to meet with him tonight in a private way, and that is what we are doing.”[124]   When the plane landed in Chicago, Gibbs admitted that Obama was meeting with Hillary Clinton at an undisclosed location.

The meeting may have been at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, which was about three miles from where Obama’s plane departed without him.  At the Marriott, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and other elites were attending the annual conference of the Bilderberg Group, which is an organization analogous to the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Conspiracy theorists believe that these secretive groups are the puppeteers of a grand scheme to establish a powerful New World Order that is superior to the political governments of individual nations.  Other attendees included Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Tim Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve; Don Graham, CEO of the Washington Post; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; and various bankers, politicians, and media magnates.

Suspiciously, the Marriott’s fire alarm went off, and the hotel staff cleared out reporters covering the Bilderberg Group.  Reporters at the hotel claimed it was swarming with security.  Convoys with armed Secret Service escorts arrived at the hotel with unidentified occupants.  Of course, the mystery surrounding Obama’s meeting with Clinton and the suspicious events at the Bilderberg event invite speculation that Obama and Clinton met there.

On June 7, the day after the suspected Bilderberg Group rendezvous with Obama, Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic primary race to Obama.  Perhaps it was an uncanny coincidence, but it sure smells like Obama’s powerful “protectorate” finalized the primary in a secret meeting.

In addition to media support and Wall Street money, Soros-funded groups provided cadres of campaign workers for Obama.  America Coming Together (ACT) was given $18 million by Soros to coordinate “get-out-the-vote” activities.  ACT deployed 5,000 organizers supported by 80,000 volunteers to troll for left-leaning voter registrations in battleground states.  Patrick Gaspard, the national field director of ACT, was appointed Obama’s national political director right after the election.  Under Gaspard’s tenure at ACT, the organization was fined $775,000 for illegally redirecting money set aside for generic voter registrations to specific Democratic candidates instead.  This was the 3^rd largest civil penalty ever levied by the FEC.

Another “get-out-the-vote” organization that received OSI and Soros funding was ACORN.  This group fielded thousands of activists to support leftist candidates, sometimes in ways that savaged our electoral process.  As we saw in the last chapter, ACORN was charged with voter registration fraud in at least 14 states.  Citizens Services, Inc., an ACORN subsidiary, likely broke federal election laws and IRS regulations by overtly supporting the Obama campaign.

Anti-capitalist groups like ACORN are being consolidated into a large umbrella operation called the Apollo Alliance.  Van Jones, a leader of Apollo, was forced to resign as Obama’s Green Jobs czar when his deep involvement in communist and other extremist activities was exposed.  The Apollo Alliance is sponsored by the Tides Foundation, which is heavily funded by Soros.  The Apollo Alliance is an attempt to unify three key activist arms of the radical left—labor unions, environmentalists, and the social justice movement.  Apollo believes that government is the solution to most social and economic problems.

The labor wing of this alliance includes the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and the United Steelworkers. The SEIU PAC alone contributed $27 million to Obama in 2008.   The SEIU claims on its website to have knocked on 1.87 million doors, made 4.4 million phone calls, and mailed more than 2.5 million fliers in support of Obama.  The SEIU, the fastest growing union in America, is a perfect ally for Obama, because they aim to “kill capitalism” and “turn America back over to its rightful owners: our hard working union employees.”  Andrew Stern, the head of SEIU, visited the White House at least 20 times in the first nine months of Obama’s presidency, according to the White House visitor’s log.  Politico.com declared, “Andrew Stern practically lives at the White House.”

Van Jones described the Apollo Alliance as a “grand unified field theory for progressive left causes.”  He is an archetypal leader for a radical organization like Apollo.  Jones described how he converted to communism after being imprisoned for his involvement in the 1992 L.A. riots:  “I met all these young radical people of color—I mean, really radical Communists and anarchists. And it was like: this is what I need to be part of.  I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”

Van Jones is also the founder of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a Maoist organization that he was involved with for ten years.  STORM was a radical organization that advocated a Marxist revolution in America and the destruction of capitalism.  Jeff Jones, another radical member of the Apollo Alliance board, helped found the terrorist Weather Underground, along with Bill Ayers.   He was also a member of the socialist SDS, just like Aryeh Neier, the head of Soros’s OSI, and Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN.

The Apollo Alliance is helping draft legislation for the Obama administration.  They are emulating the example set four years earlier by the Soros/OSI-sponsored Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN).  According to David Horowitz, PLAN’s mission was to seed state legislatures with “model” legislation to support their radical goals.  PLAN is now called the Progressive States Network (PSN).

Have you ever wondered who writes the complex 1,000 page congressional bills that seem to magically appear from out of nowhere?  PSN and the Apollo Alliance have ghost written recent bills sponsored by Democrats.   The $800 billion Stimulus Bill of 2009, which basically rewarded patrons of the radical left, was drafted by the Apollo Alliance.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thanked them for helping to write it.  Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity said the Apollo Alliance “put out a draft stimulus bill (the Apollo Economic Recovery Act) in 2008…that included almost everything that ended up being in the final stimulus bill.”

Soros sponsoring radical organizations to ghost-write legislation is audacious enough, but nothing compares to the sheer audacity of his conspiracy to instigate regime change in America.

Soros told the Washington Post in November 2003 that ousting the Republicans from the White House “is the central focus of my life…a matter of life and death.”  He also said, “America under Bush is a danger to the world, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

Soros had earlier supported regime changes in Eastern Europe, so it was not uncharacteristic for him to conspire to do the same in America.  “I do not accept the rules imposed by others,” he wrote in Soros on Soros.  “I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted.  And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.”  Soros said in January 2007 that “America needs to…go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

Soros created the Shadow Party described earlier in this chapter to end the Bush regime, although his ambition extended beyond just defeating Bush.  In a Newsweek story, “Can a Billionaire Beat Bush?,” writer Marcus Mabry explained that even if Bush wins in 2004, Soros “will set about assembling the infrastructure” of a “new left.”

Soros failed in his mission to dethrone Bush in 2004, but his Shadow Party did succeed in helping the Democrats retake Congress in 2006.   More significantly, the momentum and infrastructure created by this regime change effort culminated in Barack Obama’s election as President in November 2008.

Now that Obama is President, what is his agenda?  Perhaps we should ask Soros.  According to the White House registry of visitors, Soros visited the White House four times in the first six months after Obama took office.  Their discussions were private, but it is uncanny how accurate Soros’s “prediction” was about Obama’s agenda, according to a November 2008 interview with Soros:

“I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets — because they are not allowed by the constitution to run a deficit.  For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars.  In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary.  In total, the cost would be in the 300 to 600 billion dollar range….I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence.  The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights.  I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy.”

The interviewer interjected: “Your proposal would be dismissed on Wall Street as ‘’big government.’  Republicans might call it European-style ‘socialism.’”  Soros replied:

“That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society….At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable….In 2010, the Bush tax cuts will expire and we should not extend them. But we will also need additional revenues.”

There is also curious similarity between Soros’s international objectives and those of Obama’s administration.  One example is the initiative to reduce global poverty through the United Nations Millennium Project.  The U.S. contribution to this international effort was sponsored by Barack Obama when he was a U.S. Senator, in form of legislation called the Global Poverty Act (GPA).

According to David Horowitz and Richard Poe in their book, The Shadow Party, Obama’s GPA legislation and the related U.N. Millennium Project are programs to siphon wealth from advanced nations to third world nations, primarily in Africa and Islamic regions.  Rich nations are expected to contribute 0.7% of their GNP each year until 2015.  This equates to $235 billion per year, of which the U.S. is expected to contribute $140 billion.  The U.S. contribution will be funded by Obama’s proposed Global Poverty Act, if it is eventually enacted by Congress.

Coincidentally, the man assigned to manage this international bonanza for the U.N. was Jeffrey Sachs, a former Harvard economist and long time Soros associate.  Sachs had earlier worked with Soros to implement “shock therapy” programs in Eastern Europe and Russia.  U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Sachs as the Director of the U.N. Millennium Project, which the Canada Free Press called, “The largest global wealth redistribution program ever conceived.”  Soros was so committed to the Millennium Project that he pledged $50 million of his own money in September 2006.

The April 2009 G20 conference that Obama participated in planted the seeds for another Soros international initiative called Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s).  Soros has been pushing this concept for a long time.  In 2001, just days after 9/11, Soros said, “It is not enough to fight terrorism, we must also address the social conditions that provide a fertile ground from which volunteers who are willing to sacrifice their lives can be recruited.  And, here, I think I do have something to contribute to the debate….I propose issuing Special Drawing Rights, or SDR’s, that the rich countries would pledge for the purpose of providing international assistance.  This is an initiative that could make a substantial amount of money available almost immediately….If the scheme is successfully tested, it should be followed by an annual issue of SDR’s and the amounts could be scaled up so that they could have a meaningful impact on many of our most pressing social issues.”

The April 2009 “London Summit, Leaders’ Statement” summarized the proceedings of the G20 conference and was therefore implicitly supported by participant Obama.  The statement began with boilerplate socialist pabulum:  “We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible; that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared; and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too; and must reflect the interests, not just of today’s population, but of future generations too.”  The statement also declared, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250B into the world economy and increase global liquidity….”   In effect, this authorized the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to print a de facto world currency out of thin air.

Soros told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo that the G20 conference was a “success,” probably because the G20 leaders’ statement mirrored his own global vision.

The London G20 Summit also endorsed a new global warming treaty and the creation of a global Financial Stability Board (FSB).  The FSB would “…extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments, and markets.”  It also urged nations to “…endorse and implement…tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms.”   In other words, the FSB established protocol for world-wide regulation of private businesses, including American ones.

Coincidentally, these G20 initiatives mirror the principles of the Socialist International.  The American affiliate of the Socialist International is the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Obama during his presidential run.  Carol Browner, Obama’s Director of White House Energy and Climate Change Policy, was formerly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society.

The G20 initiatives require Congressional approval, but that’s hardly a reassuring firewall for American taxpayers, especially when Congress has already supported extravagant domestic initiatives like TARP, the Stimulus Bill, and government-run health care.

Soros’s fingerprints are all over these international initiatives to undermine U.S. sovereignty and to transfer American wealth to foreign countries.  It is tempting to speculate that Soros tried to directly sabotage the United States during a critical juncture of the 2008 presidential election.   On September 6, 2008, McCain lead Obama in a Gallup poll by five points and appeared to have momentum in the presidential race.  Shortly thereafter, a financial “crisis” erupted that reversed this momentum and helped determine the outcome of the election.

According to U.S. Representative Paul Kanjorski, Chairman of the House Capital Markets subcommittee, here is what Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke told Congress in a September 2008 closed-door session:  “On Thursday, 9/15, at roughly 11:00 a.m., the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two.  Money was being removed electronically.  The Treasury tried to help, opened their window and pumped in $150 billion but quickly realized they could not stem the tide.  We were having an electronic run on the banks.  So, they decided to close down the accounts.  Had they not closed down the accounts, they estimated that by 2:00 that afternoon, within three hours, $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn and the entire economy of the United States would have collapsed, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed….It would have been the end of our economic and political system.”

An intriguing question is what role did Soros play in this run on banks?  No official determination of who triggered it has been announced.  Soros certainly had the publicly-declared motive (to destroy the Republicans), he had a demonstrated history of attacking the currencies of particular countries (recall his moniker as the Man Who Broke the Bank of England), and he was allied with a billionaire cabal that had sufficient resources to trigger such an event.  Most importantly, the political candidate he had been backing since 2007 had suddenly fallen behind near the end of the presidential race in 2008.

In typical fashion, Soros profited from the 2008 economic collapse, which adds to suspicion about his role in it.  He made $1.1 billion during the financial chaos.  He said in March 2009, “I’m having a very good crisis.”  He told The Australian newspaper that everything was coming together, “the American election, the financial crisis….”  He also said, “I have to admit that I actually flourish, I’m more stimulated by bust.  On the one hand, there’s the tremendous human suffering, which is very distressing.  On the other hand, to be able to handle the situation is exhilarating.”  In 2007, when the financial tsunami was beginning to sweep across the world, Soros earned an astounding $2.9 billion.

Profit aside, the economic collapse prompted growth in government stimulus spending and economic intervention worldwide, which had to please the socialist Soros.  In fact, he said of the world financial crisis to The Australian newspaper:  “It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work.”

If there is still doubt that Soros is one of the puppet masters manipulating Obama’s strings, consider Obama’s stunningly hypocritical loan to Brazil to develop oil resources off its coast.   The loan was made even though the Obama administration is fundamentally opposed to oil exploration off the U.S. coast.  Obama also supports an enormously expensive cap-and-trade program to limit fossil fuel consumption in America.

The United States Government committed to lend two billion dollars from its Export-Import Bank to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, for off-shore oil exploration in the Tupi oil field near Rio de Janeiro.  There are at least two counts of staggering hypocrisy by Obama in this action.  First, Obama has consistently castigated U.S. oil companies for taking taxpayer subsidies, yet he opened up the (empty) U.S. Treasury to help a Brazilian oil company.  Second, Obama and his Congressional allies have blocked new exploration of American oil fields off both shores in an effort to impede our oil addiction and reduce greenhouse gases, yet he helped Brazil do just the opposite.

What compelled Obama to loan our money to a Brazilian oil company, an act that is not only contrary to American taxpayer interests, but also contrary to Obama’s own deeply ingrained energy philosophy?   Here is a possible explanation:  George Soros repositioned himself to get dividends in Petrobras just a few days before Obama made the commitment to support Petrobras’s offshore drilling in a potentially lucrative oil field.   Welcome to Obama’s “new kind of politics.”  Soros has been determined to install a puppet in the White House.   It looks like he finally has one.

The Hungarian-born Soros does not like America.  In his words, “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”  In The Bubble of American Supremacy, he said “the Declaration of Independence is also open to different interpretations” and that its principles “are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding.”

According to David Horowitz and Richard Poe, Soros hired an army of radical mercenaries to wage war against America.  With his vast fortune, he constructed a Shadow Party that is not accountable to the American people or subject to their will.  It is simultaneously the party of rebels and the party of rulers.  It has unified the underclass and the elitist class in a war against the middle class.  That is why Soros was dubbed the “Lenin of the 21^st Century” by Ripon Forum magazine.

“My goal is to become the conscience of the world,” Soros narcissistically confessed to biographer Michael Kaufman.  What stunning self-importance!  Soros believes he is the arbiter of regime change and the puppeteer of compliant marionettes.  He’s a rogue agent with incredible influence over America’s fortunes.

Obama spent his adult life learning from middle class haters and socialists, including Frank Marshall Davis, the radical activist Saul Alinsky, the Black Liberation theologians James Cone and Jeremiah Wright, the SDS terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the community disorganizers at ACORN, and assorted other radicals and Marxist college professors who worshipped at the altar of wealth redistribution.

There is not a single free-market capitalist in Obama’s entire political and philosophical lineage.  As we will see in the next chapter, his policies will delay economic recovery, lead to chronic joblessness, discourage energy production and increase its cost, discourage investment, ration healthcare, expropriate private businesses in favor of government and union ownership, create unprecedented government debt, increase our borrowing from foreign countries, deflate the U.S. Dollar, and expand the size and scope of government.

Milton Friedman told us:  “The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons.  Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others….He thinks there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities….The businessmen are just the opposite—every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself, that’s a different question.  He’s always the special case.  He ought to get special privileges from the government….”  Obama is the ultimate Columbia/Harvard intellectual who believes his judgment is superior to ours.  Soros is the ultimate businessman who believes that the world is his playground, which means that all of the rules should be bent in his favor.

Obama is not only an advocate for the underclass, he is the puppet of billionaire oligarchs who lack conscience and who will economically rape America.  He will lead the middle class to a new period of austerity and perpetual economic malaise.  At the same time, he will siphon wealth to the Wall Street benefactors that empowered him and to the victimized underclass that he is the champion of.

Middle class citizens, including those who voted for Obama, should pause to consider how much control they actually have over where he and his powerful supporters are leading this country.  What appeared to be a Camelot-like ascendance by Obama was really the culmination of decades-old radical movements funded and coordinated by billionaire money.  Obama hinted at this political facade when he said, “I think that oftentimes ordinary citizens are taught that decisions are made based on the public interest or grand principles, when, in fact, what really moves things is money and votes and power.”  Behind this façade is an underclass/elitist alliance that will annihilate the middle class on the way to Big Government and diminished individual rights and wealth.

It is possible that Soros’s and Obama’s vision for the future of the world harkens back to the earliest days of the SDS, the group that helped spawn the socialist revolution unfolding in America today.  Soros’s right-hand man, Aryeh Neier, co-founded the SDS.  Obama was immersed among SDS veterans his entire life.  To understand how we arrived at today’s political predicament, let’s reflect back on the Weatherman war council meeting in Michigan in 1969.  Let’s ponder the words of Ted Gold, the leader of the Mad Dog faction of the Weatherman who would eventually blow himself into eternity a few months later making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

Gold said that the Weatherman was an “agency of the people of the world” that would run America after the defeat of U.S. imperialism.  Perhaps that agency has arrived in the form of billionaire jackals like Soros and United Nations initiatives like the Millennium Project and Special Drawing Rights.  Perhaps that agency has arrived in the form of an ascending Big Government that will transfer our wealth to the underclass here and abroad, reallocate our resources to fight global warming, and weaken our Constitution to usher in the borderless open society that Soros and his ilk fought for decades to achieve.

Here was Gold’s punch line at the Weatherman war council meeting 40 years ago:  “If it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”

Fascism?  Is that the ominous storm brewing on our horizon?  In the February 1997 edition of Atlantic Monthly, Soros declared:  “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”  He also said, “I contend that an open society may also be threatened from…excessive individualism.”  Journalist Matthew Vadum wrote about Soros: “The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.”   In other words, the state must intercede in our lives to make our decisions for us.  That is essentially the meaning of fascism, and that is essentially Obama’s and Soros’s view.  We are on the verge of subsuming ourselves into the beckoning womb of government, in exchange for allowing the state to become our parent, our provider, and our moral compass.  Other societies have made this mistake.  It always ends badly.

Obama hinted at this vision during a nationally televised propagandizing of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill in February 2009.  He told America that “only government” can end the recession.  He said the “private sector is so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life.”  According to Don Fredrick, Obama’s statement echoed Mussolini, who wrote in the Doctrine of Fascism, “State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved.  This intervention may take the form of control (auto companies, perhaps?), assistance (banks, perhaps?), or direct management (health care, perhaps?).”

Obama’s advisor and Columbia mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book in 1970 called Between Two Ages:  America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which described his vision of the future:  “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.  Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.  Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.  These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by authorities.”

Ominously, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memo in April 2009 warning about rising “rightwing extremist activity” as the TEA Party movement was starting.  The memo, called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” was sent to law enforcement agencies around the country.  It warned against citizens who reject “federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”  Allegedly, the FBI issued an internal memo to all 56 field offices to perform surveillance of the April 2009 tax protests and to keep track of the organizers.

The DHS “right wing extremism” memo also warned that returning veterans could be dangerous: “The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergency of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.”  The American Legion veterans group sent DHS head Janet Napolitano a letter objecting to the Rightwing Extremism report that said, “I think it is important for all of us to remember that Americans are not the enemy.  The terrorists are.”

Don’t be so sure that the terrorists are the enemy, in the eyes of Obama’s embryonic socialist administration.  As Obama hands over trillions of dollars to the banking oligarchy of Soros and his billionaire cohorts, and as he hands over trillions more to the underclass, recall the folk adage about cons.  If you can’t figure out who the sucker is, it’s you.  Sadly, the middle class of America has been conned into redistributing its wealth not only to the poor, but also to the rich.   Worse yet, the elitists executing this scam seemingly believe that they know better than us how to run our own lives.

In 2007, Bill Ayers described America as an “incipient fascist country”.  He may be right.

We’ve been had.