The Most Revolutionary Act

Wesbster Tarpley, in Barrack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography, uses the example of the Ford Foundation to outline how left gatekeeper foundations, often backed by CIA funding, have taken over some of the Cointelpro-type counterinsurgency functions of the US government. It’s really impossible to understand who Obama is or why he makes predominantly pro-corporate policy choices without understanding the Chicago left gatekeeping foundations he worked for prior to entering political life (see “The President with No Past” at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-President-with-No-Past-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110411-30.html).

Tarpley quotes extensively from conservative political commentator Heather MacDonald, “The Billions of Dollars that Made Things Worse,” City Journal, Autumn 1992 (http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_4_a1.html); Philadelphia attorney and writer Vincent Salandria “The Promotion of Domestic Discord,” October 23, 1971 (http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/16th_Issue/vs2.html); and immigration activist Tamar Jacoby, “McGeorge Bundy: How the Establishment’s Man Tackled the Problem With Race” (http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1303/Jacoby/Jacoby.html). He also cities MacDonald’s work in describing the pressure put on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Foundation (which they succumbed to) to follow the Ford Foundation’s example.

McGeorge Bundy: Former Army Intelligence Officer

McGeorge Bundy

What comes through clearly from these early investigations into left gatekeeping is that McGeorge Bundy, who assumed the leadership of the Ford Foundation in 1966, was principally responsible for expanding the Foundation’s counterinsurgency functions (which under McCloy were focused mainly overseas) to America’s progressive movement. A former army intelligence officer and National Security Adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson, Bundy was largely responsible for the cynical “strategic hamlets” policy in Vietnam.

Using Race to Divide the Progressive Movement

When Bundy left government to run the Ford Foundation, he was very open in his view that efforts by Martin Luther King and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee to merge the struggle of the black community with the labor and antiwar movement posed a serious threat to the establishment (i.e. Wall Street) interests. His response was to have the Ford Foundation use its grant making power to create factional divisions in an exploding movement that was demanding an end to the Vietnam War. The result was a massive shift in the Foundation’s agenda away from broad economic needs – such as housing, education, mass transit and health care – to a number of black and Latino organizations that specifically targeted blue collar racism as the cause of minority disadvantage. According to Heather MacDonald, education resources were re-allocated to funding race-based organizations, which went from 2.5% of grant funding in 1966 to 40% in 1970. MacDonald and Salandria also describe some of the militant black and Latino organizations these grants went to and how they were used to launch divisive race-baiting campaigns against working class whites.

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

Richard Nixon: the Father of Affirmative Action

In 1968, Bundy, Richard Nixon and his secretary of labor George Schultz collaborated in pushing affirmative active and quota legislation (Martin Luther King had opposed affirmative action and quotas, due to their inherent divisiveness). In meetings with Republican Congressional leaders, Nixon acknowledged that his primary agenda in sponsoring mandatory hiring quotas was to “split the Democratic Constituency and drive a wedge between civil rights groups and organized labor.” (Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era, New York: Oxford, 1990).

I find this extremely ironic. Exactly as Bundy, Nixon and Schultz predicted, these policies have created an enormous white blue collar backlash, which the Republicans have used very successfully to capture working class votes. Yet many progressives still mistakenly believe that affirmative action originated with the civil rights movement.

To be continued, with a personal account of left gatekeeper Cointelpro-type operations in Washington State’s single payer movement.