CHAPTER III: FOUNDATION-FUNDED RACISM IN
CHICAGO: JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND MICHELLE
White folks’ greed runs a world in need. – Jeremiah Wright, “The Audacity of Hope” sermon
“What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the
world.” – James Cone.
Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for. I have a
number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in
the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely. –
Obama to Cathleen Falsani, 2004.^18The Obama campaign is very fond of pointing to the great personal sacrifice made by their
candidate after leaving Harvard Law School. They stress that with his prestigious law degree,
Obama could have written his own ticket to any number of lucrative positions in Wall Street, the
corporate world, or the top law firms. But this type of propaganda ignores the fact that Obama’s
career was now being guided, fostered, assisted, and directed by the networks of the Trilateral
Commission and its banking allies. Obama was now a young man who was destined for great
things thanks to these super-rich and powerful backers. Again and again we will see the marvelous
process by which obstacles are removed from Obama’s path, and adversaries are eliminated, even
as wonderful and unprecedented opportunities open up for him as if by magic. It was clear to
Obama’s Trilateral case officers that a career solely played out in the elitist world of board rooms
and country clubs would not be sufficient to provide him with a left cover required should
candidacy for political office be part of his future, as they fully intended that it would. Therefore,
Obama had to be sheep-dipped in the world of community organizing during the 1980s to develop
his ability to manipulate and con the people he met in the streets. Now, he needed an entrée into the
left-leaning Chicago Democratic political machine, where radical black nationalists and veterans of
the Weatherman terrorist group were well represented. Obama needed to burnish his resume with
activities that would reinforce his image and credentials as a true progressive, while banishing any
suggestion that he was in fact an agent of finance capital.
‘Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work
as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself
is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer.
The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to
work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you. So, why
or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law
Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley? Sidley had been longtime
outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed’s key
outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern
alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out that Bernardine Dohrn
worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-
in-law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar. Dohrn was not
admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the
murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the
“Revolutionary Armed Task Force”) “comrades,” including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of
Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after
serving 22 years of a plea-bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a