82 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyin their drive for political power. One of the Ford Foundation’s goals has been to fundamentally
change the direction and control of New York City’s public-school system. City educational
institutions provide the Ford Foundation with a vehicle in their drive to control minority and
ethnic groups in urban areas through dollars distributed to key personnel who will be beholden
to them. (Salandria)A DISASTROUS WATERSHED IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Salandria, who was a leftist, typifies the rage of Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish, and other New
Yorkers who had witnessed the rape of the city by a group of leftist elitists in the pay of the Ford
Foundation. He reflects:
But let us not be so outraged as to lose our bearings. Yes, admittedly I have difficulty at times
in maintaining my poise. This is especially true when I hear that McGeorge Bundy, the great-
nephew of A. Lawrence Lowell, one of the murderers of my Italian brothers, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, through Ford Foundation grants will provide aid aimed at increasing
minority opportunities in higher education. How ironic that the Ford Foundation which has
polluted the urban school systems with its provocateur activities and thereby foreclosed
educational opportunities for so many ethnic children, seeks to parade as the ethnics’ friend by
buying off scholars of ethnic backgrounds! (Vincent J. Salandria, “The Promotion of Domestic
Discord,” an address at the conference of the New England Branch of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, October 23, 1971)
The aftermath of the strike was marked by a rapid rightward shift by many of the white ethnic
groups. In fact, the emergence of the neoconservative or neocon movement is unthinkable without
the backlash generated by the foundation operatives through these events. There were of course
many other causes, but this strike was the one which more than any other turned the nation’s largest
city into a raging political and social battlefield, where reason and reconciliation were inevitably the
first casualties. Every left-wing organization in New York City had to take a position on one side or
the other of the teachers’ strike. The Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic
Society split into two factions over this issue. The anarchist, proto-fascist “action faction” of
spoiled suburbanite youth under Weatherman co-founder Mark Rudd enthusiastically supported the
Ford Foundation racist provocateurs, and were eager to bust the union. Rudd was reportedly already
on the foundation payroll as a provocateur. This group quickly joined forces with the SDS national
office clique around Bernardine Dohrn, and became the terrorist-fascist Weatherman tendency.
Obama’s affinity for the Weather Underground bombers Ayers and Dohrn accordingly has deep
roots, since these figures represent the most militant and aggressive anti-working class figures from
that degraded sector of the self-styled left who chose to support and uphold the fiendish strategy of
the Ford Foundation and the US intelligence community to divide and conquer on racial lines. The
Weathermen gave precious left cover to McGeorge Bundy, and it is no accident that they find
themselves today at the side of Obama, a second-generation racist provocateur for the foundations.
The Weathermen were the most violent of those who wanted radical politics to follow the line
dictated by the oligarchical foundations. So it is not surprising to find Ayers and Dohrn as darlings
and grant recipients of the foundations today, even as they act as the core of Obama’s support
network. The pro-labor part of the Columbia SDS chapter was the part already known as the Labor
Committee, and soon expanded to other cities as the New York-Philadelphia Labor Committees,
and then as the National Caucus of Labor Committees; the present author was a member of the