II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 85The dead hand of foundation grant officers has also helped to throttle the creative arts in this
country by imposing their bankrupt and artificial notions of diversity and multiculturalism. These
can be seen for example in the world of drama, where
The large foundations now practice what Robert Brustein, director of the American Repertory
Theater, calls “coercive philanthropy,” forcing arts institutions to conform to the foundations’
vision of a multicultural paradise—one that, above all else, builds minority self-esteem.’
(Heather Mac Donald)
During the 1990s, it sometimes seemed that the counterinsurgency and social manipulation
efforts of the foundations have been so successful as to turn the United States into a political
graveyard. As Heather Mac Donald of the neocon Manhattan Institute comments,
the impulse toward the activism that over the past 30 years has led the great liberal foundations
to do much more harm than good remains overwhelming. In a pathetic statement of
aimlessness, the president of a once great foundation recently called up a former Ford poverty
fighter to ask plaintively where all the social movements had gone.’ (Heather Mac Donald)1980s COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS AND
COLLABORATIVES: OBAMA’S BACKGROUND
By the time Barack Hussein Obama arrived on the foundations scene in the mid-1980s, the
original community action/community control/local control counterinsurgency strategy of the
foundation community had somewhat evolved into community development corporations. These
CDCs were first of all a reflection of the fact that economic conditions had become much more
desperate as a result of rampant economic misrule under the Reagan regime. The trade union
movement in its traditional form had now been largely broken. The CDCs were basically apolitical,
in that they presuppose that any attempt to change the policies of the government in Washington
was hopeless, and that the most that could be attempted was to make the slide into de-
industrialization and poverty a little more comfortable. The CDCs were also corporatist in the strict
sense borrowed from the Mussolini fascist corporate state: as an organizational form, they brought
together workers, bankers, foundation bureaucrats, and government officials in an attempt to cajole
corporate interests into creating a few jobs in poverty-stricken and blighted neighborhoods.
Alternatively, they sought some minor reform such as measures to reduce asbestos or lead
poisoning in schools and public buildings.
This is precisely the strategy which Barack Hussein Obama was implementing for the Gamaliel
foundation, a satellite of the Ford Foundation, in the Altgeld neighborhood on the south side of
Chicago. Obama was therefore a second-generation poverty pimp carrying out an overtly
corporatist political plan designed to maintain the control of bankers and financiers over the city of
Chicago in just the same way that McGeorge Bundy had done this in New York.
Ford never exactly repudiated community control – or Black Power. Nor did it give up entirely
on Bundy’s paradoxical idea that the best way to spur integration was to bolster separate black
institutions and strengthen black identities. Yet Bundy and his officers quietly retreated to a far
safer form of black institution-building – investment and grants for ghetto-based enterprises
known as “community development corporations.” [...] The theory is simple: Ford - and the
government and private lenders - funnel money to a local nonprofit “board” that builds up the
neighborhood and tries to attract business. These businesses create jobs, while the “corporation”- acting as a kind of local government – provides an array of social services. In the past 20