72 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographythat ought to be uniting against Wall Street, rather than squabbling with each other for some petty
and futile local concession. Barack Hussein Obama is precisely one of these foundation-funded
political operatives or poverty pimps.
The Ford Foundation became more aggressive in its social engineering and more radical in its
methods in order to ward off the threat which was latently present in the political upsurge of the late
1960s: ‘From its start, Ford aimed to be different, eschewing medical research and public health in
favor of social issues such as First Amendment restrictions and undemocratic concentrations of
power, economic problems, world peace, and social science. [...] But by the early 1960s, the
trustees started clamoring for a more radical vision; according to Richard Magat, a Ford employee,
they demanded “action-oriented rather than research-oriented” programs that would “test the outer
edges of advocacy and citizen participation.”’ (Heather Mac Donald)
FORD FOUNDATION COMMUNITY ACTION AND THE 1960s GHETTO RIOTS
The beginnings of the local control-community control-poverty pimp apparatus of domestic
social engineering and counterinsurgency goes back to the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Project of
the 1960s, which was spearheaded by an obscure and highly influential Ford Foundation operative
named Paul Ylvisaker. ‘The first such “action-oriented” program, the Gray Areas Project, was a
turning point in foundation history and—because it was a prime mover of the ill-starred War on
Poverty—a turning point in American history as well. Its creator, Paul Ylvisaker, an energetic social
theorist from Harvard and subsequent icon for the liberal foundation community, had concluded
that the problems of newly migrated urban blacks and Puerto Ricans could not be solved by the “old
and fixed ways of doing things.” Because existing private and public institutions were unresponsive,
he argued, the new poverty populations needed a totally new institution—the “community action
agency”—to coordinate legal, health, and welfare services and to give voice to the poor. According
to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan... Ford “proposed nothing less than institutional change in the
operation and control of American cities.... [Ford] invented a new level of American government:
the inner-city community action agency.” Ylvisaker proceeded to establish such agencies in Boston,
New Haven, Philadelphia, and Oakland.’ (Heather Mac Donald)
The initial phase of Ford Foundation intervention into the black inner-city ghetto under the
rubric of the Gray Areas strategy helped to fuel the Watts, Detroit, and Newark riots of 1965-67.
The community action projects that were begun in these years did not deliver what they promised,
but did set the stage for the futile and self-defeating violence of “Burn, baby, burn,” which was
considered fashionable in the radical chic salons of the day. “Unfortunately, because it was so
intent on persuading the federal government to adopt the program, Ford ignored reports that the
community action agencies were failures,” according to historian Alice O’Connor.
Reincarnated as federal Community Action Programs (CAPs), Ford’s urban cadres soon began
tearing up cities. Militancy became the mark of merit for federal funders, according to Senator
Moynihan. In Newark, the director of the local CAP urged blacks to arm themselves before the
1967 riots; leaflets calling for a demonstration were run off on the CAP’s mimeograph machine.
The federal government funneled community action money to Chicago gangs—posing as
neighborhood organizers—who then continued to terrorize their neighbors. The Syracuse, New
York CAP published a remedial reading manual that declared: “No ends are accomplished without
the use of force.... Squeamishness about force is the mark not of idealistic, but moonstruck
morals.” Syracuse CAP employees applied $7 million of their $8 million federal grant to their own
salaries.’ (Heather Mac Donald) McGeorge Bundy should have been arrested for inciting to riot,