II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 79Every institution in the city quickly chose sides between the teachers union and the black
community control apparatus, splitting New York into two opposed camps. It is this kind of
ominous precedent which allows us to predict that an Obama presidency carried on with these same
foundation methods of social engineering will bring civil war in the United States as a whole much
nearer. In the fall of 1968,
a typical day brought out pickets and counter-pickets, shouting at each other across wooden
police horses, threatening each other and inciting schoolchildren. Both sides organized rallies at
City Hall; both spread hateful and largely racial innuendo. Black anti-Semitism (many of the
teachers were Jewish) vied in fury with whites’ race-charged fear and anger, and the cumulative
venom spiraled out of control. The eight schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district were at
the center of the storm – and many white teachers there reported they feared for their lives. But
the striking union gave as good as it got, spreading bitterness throughout the city by shutting
down the entire school system and causing more than 1 million students to miss nearly 40 days
of the fall term. By November, when the strike was settled, integration – and race relations in
general – had been set back 20 years or more. (Tamar Jacoby)
Naomi Levine described how the Ford Foundation under McGeorge Bundy used Ocean Hill-
Brownsville to deliberately provoke a confrontation:
Why did the Ocean Hill governing board order the “termination of employment” of the nineteen
teachers and administrators in Ocean Hill in such a peremptory manner and at a time when the
State Legislature was considering various proposals that would have enacted into law many of
the Bundy report recommendations? Why did the union react so strongly? [...] The conclusion
is inescapable that the Ocean Hill governing board wanted a confrontation with the Board of
Education in order to fix its powers and responsibilities once and for all, and that it created the
situation to provoke such confrontation. (Salandria, “The Promotion of Public Discord,”
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t7653.html )
Significant parts of the community control experiment were rolled back, but by then the vast
damage had already been done. There was even a backlash against the high-handed and elitist
approach of the Ford Foundation, but this fell far short of wiping out this poisonous and malignant
institution:
In the end, state education authorities approved a much watered-down version of the Bundy
panel proposals. But Ford was made to pay dearly for its activist involvement. Conservative
journalists and congressmen riding the backlash of the late 1960s seized on the foundation’s
involvement in both Ocean Hill and Cleveland. These were only two small grants, a few
hundred thousand dollars of the many millions Ford had spent on race relations – for education,
voter registration, housing integration and poverty research. But that did not stop critics like
Texas congressman Wright Patman, who suggested apocalyptically on the House floor that “the
Ford Foundation [had] a grandiose design to bring vast political, economic and social changes
to the nation in the 1970s.” Thanks largely to his efforts, in 1969 Congress passed legislation
that significantly restricted all foundation giving (not just Ford’s) with excise taxes and federal
oversight. (Tamar Jacoby)
Wright Patman was that rarity, a genuine populist fighter against the Federal Reserve and the
financier elite in general.
The events around the New York City teachers’ strike of 1968 partially destroyed the
government of the City of New York in a manner from which it has never really recovered. It also