President Weatherman, part II

Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to mobilize poor and working people against imperialism. 
- The Weather Underground, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism

Everything about the Trayvon Martin case suggests that this killing has been cherry-picked and profiled as an iconic outrage of racially motivated injustice in order to refocus the seething discontent of America's blacks away from the underpinnings of their continuing economic plight, and back onto a white devil bogeyman. In President Weatherman part I we noted the methods by which so-called "community organizers" shape public discourse and activism in such a way as to induce a predetermined outcome; we summarized the methodology in a nutshell as profile, agitate, nudge. In the case of the Trayvon Martin killing and subsequent George Zimmerman trial, however, the latter step of this triad seems to have been replaced with the intent to ignite - in other words, to agitate even more, to what purpose we can only speculate, outside of the general aim of refocusing the attention of America's increasingly desperate underclass away from headlines such as...

Crew of 42: Black Youth Unemployment Hits 43.6%, 10 Point Spike Over 3 Months

...when meanwhile...

CNNMoney: Goldman Sachs profits double

...and as the following should dispel any illusions about Barack Obama wanting to do anything about such obscene discrepancies in the distribution of wealth...

FireDogLake: Obama’s “Smoking Gun”: His Hamilton Project Speech shows his links to Goldman, Entitlement Cuts (Part 1)  (Part 2)

...it should be clear then, Weathermen doublespeak notwithstanding, who is on the side of financial imperialism.

-But never mind all that; the media says we need to have a conversation about this...

USAToday: Remembering Trayvon Martin

What, when it happened in late February 2012, was a local story to Orlando, Florida, suddenly was propelled a month later into network headlines as a yet another case for the "national conversation" on race. The delay would suggest that this particular tragedy was the most suitable candidate selected out of - in Patrick Buchanan's words - "a scavenger hunt for a hate-crime".

The visuals of the case were inflammatory enough - a black teenager with nothing but Skittles and a hoodie traipses through a gated community only to be profiled and pursued by a wannabe cop... a scuffle ensues and the white-looking George Zimmerman (notwithstanding Afro-Peruvian ancestry from his mother) shoots Trayvon Martin dead. The legal details of the case however were much more ambiguous; Zimmerman as a self-appointed cop did go against the instructions of a dispatcher in following the pedestrian, and he got much more than he bargained for when the "suspect" proceeded to beat him to a pulp. The circumstance of mortal peril however was enough to give Zimmerman a sturdy self-defense position if and when the case should eventually come to court.

There were other incidents around the country that were equally inflammatory in their visuals but not as ambiguous in their details. Many of these were black on white crimes however and so were out of the question. Others did involve racially motivated white on black violence, including the case of Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr. an elderly black veteran killed in his own apartment by white policemen calling him "nigger" on a recording. This case, however, is unheard of in the national media. Had it received the same degree of attention as Trayvon, it likely would have resulted in a reconvening of the grand jury and the conviction of the accused. Such an unambiguous hate crime, however, does not satisfy what was made to order. Trayvon Martin's death combined the tragic element of a youth snuffed in the prime of his life with the outrage of the "thug" who took it likely getting off scot-free. The stage was thus set to potentially turn this "national conversation" on race into a national conflagration. The American public had been profiled and divided into black and white factions, with a subset of the latter - being "white-guilt" afflicted - expected to take the side of the former.

With the case selected, thanks in large part to the efforts of PR executive Ryan Julison...

WaPo: Trayvon Martin story found the media

...the agitation machine then got into gear, with full assists from the "liberal" media...

Newsbusters: NBC Never Tells Viewers it Smeared Zimmerman with Doctored Audio

...and even with a little bit of help from Eric Holder's Justice Department...

Judicial Watch: Documents Obtained by Judicial Watch Detail Role of Justice Department in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests

The arrest and, most importantly, the overcharging of George Zimmerman ensued. The intent was never "justice" (for which a manslaughter charge would have at best been suitable), but acquittal. The fuse was thus lit with the intention of igniting a race-bomb and a crisis necessitating further advancement of the police-state juggernaut.

For the most part, the bomb has fizzled, though not without some incendiary incidents...

Baltimore Sun: Witness claims youths yelled 'this is for Trayvon' in beating

Daily Caller: Conservative filmmaker - Trayvon Martin protesters in Oakland ‘slugged me,’ ‘kicked me’ in the head

Infowars: Trayvon Martin Supporters Stage Second Night of Fury

So then, the agitator elites may not have gotten the big enchilada - a full-blown race war - out of this operation, but they did manage to divert the attention of "seething discontents" for a little while longer. More importantly, this case - by virtue of the legal ambiguities guaranteeing that many, especially whites, would take the side of Zimmerman - has only further deepened the racial entrenchment that, following the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, certain agitators among the ruling class have expended considerable effort in ensuring would never abate...

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To get past racism, we must here take account of race. - McGeorge Bundy, in The Issue Before the Court..., The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1977

That is to say, following the classic British imperialist "divide and conquer" stratagem, we must tribalize and hyphenate America...

So it seems to me that when a man calls himself Afro-American or Mexican-American or Italian-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American, what he’s saying is “I’m a divided American.” - John Wayne, The Hyphen

The Duke might have been surprised to learn that perhaps no one did more to introduce the hyphen into the American psyche than such a prototypical establishment figure as Skull and Bonesman McGeorge Bundy in his capacity as head of the Ford Foundation beginning in 1966. As we read in this passage censored from the 1972 edition of James Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries, and quoted in...

Swans: Elite Philanthropy, SNCC, And The Civil Rights Movement, Part III

After the call for Black Power had become popular in the United States and other countries, McGeorge Bundy, former National Security Advisor under the late President John F. Kennedy, called a meeting at the Ford Foundation in New York City of twenty or more Black leaders. At that time McGeorge Bundy was the President of the Ford Foundation. Bundy announced to the assembled Black leaders that a decision had been made to destroy the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to save the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This decision was based on an assessment that it was possible to wean CORE away from the concept of Black Power through massive infusion of money for its operation. In the case of the SNCC, however, the assessment was that it was too late to save it; it had to be destroyed. 

Was the intent really to wean these groups away from separatism? As Tamar Jacoby writes in McGeorge Bundy: How the Establishment's Man Tackled America's Problem with Race...

And it wasn't long before Ford found itself paying for street gangs and avowed Black Power leaders. Among the most controversial of these grants went to the Cleveland chapter of CORE. Like even the most moderate civil-rights organizations, CORE had been drifting leftward through the 1960s. Its integrationist national director James Farmer had been replaced in 1966 by the younger and angrier Floyd McKissick, who along with Carmichael was among the first proponents of Black Power. Outflanked on the left by SNCC and even tougher ghetto leaders advocating violence and a separate black nation, McKissick felt under strong pressure to prove his militancy. He began to talk of "revolution" and to forge links with black Muslims; he explicitly repudiated the phrase "civil rights," replacing its appeal to morality with bristling talk of race-based "power." Before long, his escalating racial rhetoric had driven most white members out of CORE. By 1967, SNCC had actually expelled whites, and in July CORE deleted the word "multiracial" from its constitution. With this, it dropped all pretense that it was pursuing integration or the hope of progress based on racial harmony.

None of this apparently bothered the Ford Foundation, which announced two weeks later--even as the Newark ghetto erupted in riots--that it was giving $175,000 to CORE's Cleveland chapter. Bundy explained at a press conference that his board had considered the grant "with particular care." (In fact among some 16 trustees, only Henry Ford himself had expressed any doubts.)

Among those swept up in the racial rage that McBundy's Ford Foundation had been fostering was a future Attorney General of the United States, but who in 1970 was thoroughly hyphenated as a leader in the "rise of black consciousness" with the Student Afro-American Society (SAS)...

Daily Caller: As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC office

While the SAS itself was not directly funded by Ford, another group present at the 1968 Columbia strike - The Weathermen - did have some support from the Foundation, according to a 1976 report of the LaRouche associated US Labor Party, Carter and the Party of International Terrorism...

The Weathermen were created as a joint project of the Ford Foundation, IPS [Institute for Policy Studies], and the Institute of Social Research (ISR) [at the University of Michigan]. The group was spawned in May, 1968 at a "secret meeting" in the midst of the Columbia University student strike. Weatherman founder Mark Rudd constituted the initial cell around a Ford Foundation grant under which the group agreed to bust the strike through anarchist provocations... - cited in Webster Tarpley's Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, 2008, Pg. 187.

Following the dialectical method of manufacturing a crisis - here through the Weathermen - in order to arrive at an outcome more amenable to the ruling class, Ford at the same time funded a moderate group that brought the conflict to a resolution while sidelining those less tractable factions of the Students for a Democratic Society...

Red Pepper: 1968 The mysterious chemistry of social change

Leadership passed from SDS to the more broad-based Students for a Restructured University, which, with the aid of a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, negotiated a compromise with the university administration. 

The SRU hence came to relieve the SDS once it had been factionalized from within...

Weathermen were constituted as a national faction within the IPS-dominated Students for a Democratic Society by means of the selection process conducted during 1968-1969 through a series of position papers published in the Radical Education Project, run by Marcus Raskin and Arthur Waskow. In fact, the position papers... were synthetic belief structures drafted by psychological warfare experts at ISR and published under the bylines of SDS leaders like Bill Ayers and Jim Mellon - both ISR graduate students... - USLP, Carter and the Party of International Terrorism, Tarpley, ibid.

Bill Ayers was the son of Thomas Ayers, chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison, and board member of defense contractor General Dynamics. His future spouse, Bernardine Dohrne, came under ruling class tutelage via future Attorney General (under President Ford) Edward Hirsch Levi...

EIR (Vol 33 No 3): Where Terrorism And Terrorists Get Their Legal Start

Levi returned in 1945 to the University of Chicago as a 
Professor of Law... Although Levi held no official 
government position during this period. he functioned as a 
national security operative. running missions for the Rocke­-
feller family. Those missions included:...recruitment of 
Bernardine Dohrn. also a student of Levi, to the Weathermen...

It may be said that such "tutelage" was hardly received in good faith by the likes of Ayers and Dohrne. They might have laughed that they were really sticking it to "the man" by utilizing these resources in their war against "the system". In the end, however, they would find themselves the butt of the joke, whose punchline they failed to anticipate in so far as their activism was simply one phase of a dialectical system designed to keep "the man" on top of things. Much as we would chide current Russian activists like Voina and Pussy Riot to be wary of whose geo-political and economic interests their aktions ultimately serve, so it goes for Ayers and Dohrne; if they were sincere in their war against imperialism, then they failed to see this coming...

Real Clear Politics: Bill Ayers - Try Obama for War Crimes

While Ayers would dismiss his relationship with Barack Obama - particularly the launching of his career in politics in Ayers and Dohrne's living room - as not very 'thought out,' it would appear nevertheless that somebody was thinking these things out with a long logic that reveals itself in the individuals and institutions with which they were mutually associated. Steven F. Diamond has examined Barack and Michelle Obama's relationship with the Ayers family on his Global Labor/King Harvest blog entries...

That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship

Barack Obama’s Visit to the Other Ayers House

...where we learn: according to Thomas Ayers' postman, Obama received financial support towards his tuition at Harvard Law School from the Ayers patriarch; that the Obamas would have known the Ayers and Dohrne at Sidley and Austin, the law firm where in fact Barack and Michelle first met; and that Obama and Ayers probably first met when they were both advocates for "local control" in the Chicago school system, a movement which enjoyed ascendance following the 1987 teachers strike. This strike and its outcome was in many ways similar to the 1968 teachers strike in NYC. We can't devote much attention to these strikes here other than to say that they share certain common denominators, particularly in the tendency for "local control" of schools to devolve into ethnic favoritism, i.e. a consequence the sort of racial "consciousness" fostered by Ford Foundation programs. Without traditional union protections, teachers were thus at the mercy of the local boards who often had ulterior (racial) motives in hiring and firing teachers. Needless to say, the ruling class stood to benefit from weakened teachers' unions and hence supported this movement, as did Bill Ayers' wealthy father Thomas. It is in this context that we should consider, as Diamond writes in Who "sent" Obama?, that...

...in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama... was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers, who convened the working group that designed the grant proposal, he sheparded it to success and had responsibility for appointing its board members, including Obama.

A parenthetical observation of Diamond's in Peeling the Obama/Ayers Onion is also worth noting here...

Interestingly, this issue – watch dogging teachers and administrators – is one reason why it is hard to accept the idea of the right that Ayers and Obama are traditional left wing radicals. In fact... Ayers and Dorhn are really neo-stalinists – a type of anti-capitalist that thinks there are bureaucratic and authoritarian solutions to problems created by capitalism.

Obama meanwhile became an advocate of "public-private partnerships" throughout his political career, purportedly a sort of hybrid of capitalism and socialism, but more deserving of the epithet "crony capitalism" or "corporate feudalism" which we regrettably find supplanting the system of rule of law constrained free market capitalism.

Nothing could be more exemplary of governmental and corporate intermingling (and the disasters spawned) than the chartered maze of front companies fostered by the Central Intelligence Agency. Diamond in his articles focuses on Obama's time in Chicago, but he would perhaps get a more telling answer to the question, "Who 'sent' Obama?" if he looked to NYC, where Obama was first employed upon graduation from Columbia University...

Export Blueprint (WMR): Verified CIA Front, Business International Corp, Paid for Obama’s Columbia College Tuition

WTPOTUS: Taking Care of Business International Corporation - Obama’s Co-Workers

Curiously enough, the history of the man called "Obama" traces in rough outline that of the Weathermen, from their role at the Columbia strike in '68 to their eventual transformation into terrorist cells as the Weather Underground out of Chicago in late 1969 - it is said that the targeted assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton at the hands of the Chicago police in December 1969 was the catalyst of this transformation. The rough outline here is ironic enough, since Obama would go on to become a perpetrator of targeted assassinations as president. These assassinations along with every other extra-constitutional measure instituted by George W. Bush and continued if not enhanced by Obama of course have their impetus in a certain spectacular attack that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001. Many commuters into lower Manhattan and executives arriving in their offices would have read, in that morning's New York Times, just as the shit hit the fan....

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen

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Further reading...

Chapter IV of Webster Tarpley's Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography, summarized here...

The Most Revolutionary Act: Who Did Obama Work for in Chicago?

More on the Chicago foundation networking...

CNS News: Ayers Brothers Led Annenberg Grantees and Contributed to Obama

PJ Media: Obama and the Woods Fund

LaRouche on Ayers on the eve of the election...

Executive Intelligence Review: The Weathermen

Jack Cashill's comparative analysis of Obama's Dreams from My Father and Ayers' Fugitive Days as well as the Weather Underground's Prairie Fire (which Ayers co-wrote) leads him to the conclusion that Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams. (For instance the name of French author Frantz Fanon is misspelled "Franz" in both Prairie Fire and Dreams). It is a claim that is difficult to prove, but tantalizing nonetheless...

American Thinker: Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters

Finally, a sundry speculation: as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrne were deployed to discredit the SDS and anti-war movement in the late '60s, so are Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman similarly deployed to discredit the Occupy Wall St. movement?

Conservative Hideout: Alleged OWS Activitst, Aaron Greene, Caught With Bomb Making Materials

Pragmatic Witness: New York Couple’s Terrorist Connection to the Sandy Hook Tragedy