III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 109leaving the black ghetto in its current predicament. Alderman Tillman’s record must be read in
connection with her track record for corruption: ‘Obama had endorsed ...Dorothy Tillman, calling
her “a very early supporter of my campaign.” Tillman was then under fire for her stewardship of the
scandal-plagued Harold Washington Cultural Center, where contracts benefited members of her
family. Obama rejected the notion that such endorsements conflict with his promotion of ethics
reform in government.’ (Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2007)
Reverend Wright argued in his sermon on Christmas Day 2007 that resistance against the Obama
presidential candidacy was predicated on the fact that Obama did not “fit the mold.” “He ain’t
white!” exclaimed the Reverend. A half truth at best, since Obama is half white. “He ain’t rich!”
Manifestly false, since the Obamas reported a 2005 income of about $1.6 million, with Michelle
pulling down $325,000 as gatekeeper to push black ghetto victims out of the University of Chicago
Hospital, plus $101,083 in 2006 for serving on the board of the wage-gouging, union-busting Tree
House (a Walmart supplier). Obama got almost $70,000 per year as a mere lecturer at the
University of Chicago Law School, a very good deal for a mere adjunct. They live in a mansion
with a wine cellar containing a thousand bottles of the finest vintage wine – as many bottles of wine
as Imelda Marcos had pairs of shoes. By mid-2008, it was estimated that the Obamas were worth
about $7 million overall. They were rich by anybody’s measure. “He ain’t privileged!” Another lie,
as Michelle’s Princeton and Harvard degrees, made possible by affirmative action, sufficiently
document.
In a cynical attempt at deceiving voters, Obama has tried to pretend that sermons with incendiary
contents were the exception rather than the rule at Trinity United. This is obviously disingenuous.
Obama was not just listening to Reverend Wright, he was also subsidizing the oratory of hatred with
his generous financial contributions to the church. Obama was helping to pay for Reverend
Wright’s microphone! Hatred was obviously Reverend Wright’s weekly stock in trade. Did Obama
ever walk out of a sermon? Did he ever tell Reverend Wright to tone it down — before he began
running for president at the end of 2006? Did he ever threaten to quit the congregation? Evidently,
he did not.
By mid-March 2008, the Reverend Wright affair had placed Obama in a bind. Would he remain
a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ under Reverend Wright’s hand-picked successor,
reportedly a worthy disciple in his apostolate of hatred? If he did, you could be sure that Reverend
Wright’s taped outbursts would continue to knock him off message. If he tried to cut his losses by
exiting from the congregation, he could be sure that an entire phalanx of Reverend Wright’s co-
religionists of the black theology school would condemn him as a sellout who was capitulating
under the pressure of the white man. All Obama could do was to attempt to paper over the entire
question with his mellifluous and ambiguous rhetoric of reconciliation, which was sounding
increasingly hollow in this new context. Even when he later pretended to repudiate Wright, it was
done with qualifiers – he said that his relationship with Wright had changed, not that it was over. He
also remained an active member of Trinity United, which now passed under the leadership of Ford
Foundation grantee Otis Moss III. Obama left Trinity United only when the primaries were over and
he was beginning his hard right turn.
THE CASE OF FATHER PFLEGER, RENEGADE THEOLIB PRIEST
The new Otis Moss regime brought new problems for Obama. On Easter Sunday, Moss preached
that Wright had been subjected to a crucifixion, thus returning to the rhetorical tropes of
victimization and persecution so favored by affirmative-action race-mongers when they get into