The friend's
name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about
twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser
to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince
Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy
Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
Malia,
Michelle, Barack and the College Admissions Scandal
What shocked even
the old timers in my hometown was that Mayor Hugh Addonizio, the man who gave
me my Eagle Scout Award, would accept kickbacks in cash right across his desk.
They were troubled less by his criminality -- that was expected in Newark --
than by his lack of subtlety. Addonizio paid for his indiscretion with a
lengthy prison sentence.
So it is with the
current college admissions scandal. People have been scamming their ways into
prestige universities for decades, maybe centuries, but in the past they have
had the good sense not to put the cash on the table. It seems that in this
scandal a few of the bribers and their brokers may well pay for their
indiscretion with prison sentences as well.
The media pretend
to be shocked. In an editorial on the scandal, the New YorkTimes singled
out Harvard University for its “special admissions preferences and back doors
for certain applicants.” This is the same New York Times, however, that published an entirely uncritical article three years prior headlined, “Malia Obama Rebels, Sort of, by
Choosing Harvard.”
Malia is the fourth
member of the Obama
family to attend that august university, none
of whom, save
perhaps for Grandpa Obama,
deserved to be there.
Let’s start with
Obama Sr., the only member of the extended family to attend college before the
affirmative action/diversity era. Obama arrived at Harvard in the early 1960s
with the goal of getting a Ph.D. in economics. According to biographer Sally
Jacobs, Obama “struggled” with his studies but managed to get a Masters degree.
Alas, the
university booted him on moral grounds before he could get his doctorate. An
inveterate playboy despite his two ongoing marriages, Obama had an affair with
a high-school girl. Denied his Ph.D., says Jacobs, “He goes on to claim the
title, nonetheless. He's Dr. Obama. The older he gets, the more he claims it.”
As will be seen, intellectual fraud runs in the family.
Michelle was the
next to attend Harvard, in
her case Harvard Law School. “Told by
counselors that her SAT scores and her grades
weren’t good enough for an Ivy
League
school,” writes Christopher Andersen
in Barack and Michelle, “Michelle applied to
Princeton and Harvard anyway.”
Sympathetic
biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance
on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.” She did
not write well either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis,
"Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," as “dense
and turgid.”
The less
charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, “To describe [the thesis] as
hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the
strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known
language.” Hitchens exaggerated only a little. The following summary
statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of
grammar and most of logic:
The study
inquires about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the
following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community,
God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the
human species as a whole.
Michelle
even typed badly. Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Princeton
and Harvard Law. I have been told by those on the inside that there are
ways of recognizing affirmative-action admissions. Still, one almost feels
sorry for Michelle. She was in so far over her head it is no wonder
she projected her angst onto the white people around her. “Regardless of the
circumstances underwhich [sic] I interact with whites at Princeton,” she
wrote in the opening of her thesis, “it often seems as if, to them, I will
always be black first and a student second."
Barack was
the smarter and better educated half of the couple. That said, had Obama’s
father come from Kentucky not Kenya and been named O’Hara not Obama, there
would been no Harvard Law
Review, no Harvard, no Columbia.
In his
overly friendly biography, The
Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama was an “unspectacular”
student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back
to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference
for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too
well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be
unearthed before those are.
How such an
indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores
typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80
and 4.00 is a subject Remnick avoids.
Obama does
too. Although he has admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative
action programs” during his academic career, he has remained mum about some
reported “back door” influence peddling that may have been as useful to him as
affirmative action.
In late
March 2008 the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy
Sutton appeared on a local New York City show called "Inside City
Hall." When asked about Obama by the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the
former Manhattan borough president calmly and lucidly explained that he had
been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”
The friend's
name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about
twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser
to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi
prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused
Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
According to
Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of
[Obama]... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at
Harvard and gladly did so.
Three months
before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political
figure had publicly announced that an unapologetic anti-Semite like al-Mansour,
backed by an equally anti-Semitic Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s
career perhaps for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and
unnatural death.
As for
Malia, whose grades and scores are as much a state secret as her father’s, the
old man damns with the faint praise of “capable” and “conscientious.” But
hell, Bill’s daughter Chelsea got into Stanford and George’s daughter Barbara
got into Yale, so this particular path to the back door was well worn.
Barack Obama’s
back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the
dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask
just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.
Harvard grad student strike in second week
The strike by graduate students at Harvard University enters its second week today. The approximately 4,500 striking members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Automobile Workers (HGSU–UAW), which represents more than 4,500 graduate and undergraduate teaching staff and graduate research assistance across Harvard, began their strike on December 3, the last day of classes at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at the Ivy League school’s campuses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Longwood in Boston.
The strike has impacted teaching responsibilities covered by the student workers, including holding review sessions, grading assignments, and hosting office hours. Exams, which are set to begin today, could also be affected.
Harvard grad strikers at a gate to the university
However, the Harvard grad student’s union has made clear that its picket lines are “porous,” allowing students, professors and professional university staff to pass through them. Despite the support of campus workers for the grad students, there has been no effort by the UAW-affiliated HGSU to call for a shutdown of the campus, or to call for support from the tens of thousands of university workers in the Greater Boston area.
Instead, the union has called on Democratic Party officials, both locally and in the US Congress, to give their half-hearted “support” for the strike. The HGSU–UAW’s website is filled with a who’s who of the Massachusetts Democratic Party establishment and presidential candidates, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, along with local Cambridge and Boston Democratic Party officials. Local and national trade unions have also indicated their support for the strike.
US House Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Katherine Clark, both Democrats, spoke to striking grad students in Harvard Yard on Monday morning. Pressley said: “I want to make sure that this university hears our collective voices, to confirm the humanity and dignity of all workers… I just want to say what an honor it is to share these steps and to do this work with Katherine Clark, the vice chair of our caucus, who is the leader on so many social justice issues—from workers’ rights, to gun violence prevention.” She cited abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass in her remarks, declaring, “we have to demand basic rights for you.”
Her words of support are hollow. The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have carried out savage attacks on jobs and living standards for workers, as well as on education. The Obama administration oversaw the wholesale conversion of public school systems into for-profit charters, and his former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel oversaw dozens of school closures as mayor of Chicago. Moreover, since the 2016 elections they have focused their opposition to Trump entirely on a pro-war basis, while ignoring the real crimes against the working class carried out by his administration.
The HGSU-UAW’s conduct of the strike is part of a deliberate strategy to isolate and defeat the graduate students. The UAW employed similar methods in the General Motors strike earlier in the fall, when it isolated the strike to GM, tried to starve them into submission on a paltry $250 per week strike pay and ultimately forced through historic concessions, including plant closures and a blank check for the company’s use of temps. The UAW is currently seeking to push through even deeper concessions at Fiat Chrysler.
At the same time, Democratic presidential candidates flocked to the picket lines for photo-ops whose aim was to bolster the credibility of the union, which has been exposed by a massive bribery scandal as a management-controlled labor syndicate.
World Socialist Web Site reporters covering the Harvard grad student strike have sought to raise the necessity of uniting workers at Harvard and beyond in a political struggle which is not tied to the two big-business parties and the pro-capitalist and nationalist trade unions.
The WSWS spoke to strikers and their supporters leaving a support concert for the strike at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard on Monday.
Our reporter spoke to Michael: “You’ve been on strike since Tuesday. Obviously, there’s a tremendous need for this to take place, considering the use of grad students as low-paid labor. What we are saying in particular is that there’s a need for the widening of this strike throughout the campus, but not simply for moral support. It’s difficult to figure out how the issues in the strike are going to be resolved outside of that.”
Michael said, “I think the more support, the better, obviously. But the hope is that right now there is an initial pressure point, there is a lot of end-of-term work, some of the students are not being advised, or graded or proctored. And what if this really carries on a while, the new semester will be the second big pressure point.
“Hopefully it doesn't get to that, but the hope is that we’re standing in a moment that it will cause paramount disruption. At least at that those two moments. Obviously, it’s long past due for Harvard to agree to a new arrangement in terms of compensation and healthcare with arbitration. Personally, my feeling is that if it doesn’t happen now, my worry is that it will extend into January.”
We asked Michael if he knew anything about the recent history of the UAW and the GM strike that took place.
“Yes, I was following the GM strike a bit,” he said.
The WSWS described how the UAW, which has pushed through the contracts at the other auto companies, has allowed the continuation of two-tier wages and part-time work. The conditions which the UAW has worked to enforce at these multi-billion dollar corporations are similar to the part-time work by graduate students at Harvard, which has a $41 billion endowment.
The fact that the UAW was ultimately able to force through concessions at GM and Ford was not due to a lack of determination to fight on the part of autoworkers, but due to the betrayal of the UAW.
Harvard grad students on strike, in order to win their struggle, need organizations that will fight for their social and democratic rights. But such organizations must be democratically controlled rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and the two big-business parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
Grad students’ allies are not to be found within the unions and the Massachusetts congressional caucus. Rank-and-file committees should reach out to the thousands of transit workers, service employees and research and tech workers in Greater Boston to fight the Trump administration’s austerity measures and the millions of workers around the work fighting the obscene levels of social inequality created by the capitalist system.
We urge grad students who agree with this fight to contact the International Youth and Students for Social Equality today.
Forget ‘Michelle for President’
Our betters in the MSM, and related ruling-class mouthpieces, have set the narrative: the lackluster, too-crazy pack of Democrat presidential candidates, even with a few token billionaires, will ultimately give way to the entry of Michelle Obama into the race. The former First Lady, author of an apparently best-selling memoir, will inject palpable blue energy throughout the nation, return black America to a 95+% Democrat voting bloc, consolidate the Obama voting coalitions that won two presidential elections, and the evil interloper Trump will be sent packing.
Don’t buy this narrative.
In a country of 320+ million people, there is always a sizable segment who will not be willing or able to discern or question anything beyond what they are told by the MSM, and will follow the narrative. That segment is actually becoming smaller every year; the reality of fake news has diluted the MSM’s influence to a far greater degree than they understand. But that’s not why I’m not buying the narrative.
Here’s why:
‘Obama’ is how we got Trump. For all the gigabytes devoted to explaining how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, the simplest two-word explanation has always been: Barack Obama.
Most Americans never agreed with the radical
left-wing policies that President Obama instituted,
nor did they appreciate his subtle, persistent
denigration of America’s character, identity and
place in the world. But Americans did salute to the
notion that we should be especially careful not to
criticize America’s first black President.
In short, the absence of strong criticism of President Obama and his policies was not due to their popularity, but rather due to a surrender to the political reality enforced in great degree by the MSM that any such criticism would be labeled as racist. His policies and view of America were in fact alarming to many Americans, who silently bided their time until he was out of office.
The truth is that Barack Obama was and is a radical leftist ideologue who in his own words sought to fundamentally transform America. A few observers saw this agenda from the beginning of Obama’s appearance on the national scene, but they were voices in a wilderness dominated by a sycophantic media. The American people never supported a fundamental transformation of their country -- in leftist terms, a shredding of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage in favor of a godless, George Soros-vision of an Open Society, directed and controlled by almighty secular government -- and the more they understood the truth of who Obama was and what he was trying to do, the angrier and more resentful they became.
Donald Trump was the anti-Obama for one simple reason: he loves America.
And so…the “Michelle Obama riding on the residual goodwill of the Obama name!” campaign narrative, doesn’t resonate.
‘Blexit’ is real. Candace Owens deserves tremendous credit for branding and building the “Blexit” movement, and for devoting her amazing intelligence and energy to its articulate messages. Yet well before Blexit was a thing, Donald Trump planted the seed with black Americans when he said in August 2016: “What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?”
Three-plus years later, with black unemployment the lowest in recorded history, polls that show roughly a third of likely voting black Americans supporting President Trump are not an accident or a fluke. (And they may just mark the floor of his support in 2020.) They reflect conscious recognition among black Americans of simple truths: black lives generally did not get better under eight years of Obama; black lives generally have gotten much better under less than three years of President Trump.
And so…the “Michelle Obama will bring back the good old days of black prosperity!” campaign narrative falls flat.
Barack Obama is the elephant in the room re Barr/Durham. Of all the names that engaged Americans associate with the Russia Collusion hoax -- Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, Rosenstein, Simpson, Steele, etc. -- there is one that is going to loom larger and larger in public thought as the Horowitz IG report and Barr/Durham followup becomes public: Barack Obama.
Our own guess is that when the truth finally comes out, Americans across the political spectrum will be stunned at the level of criminality and corruption in the Obama administration. It will shock the collective conscience of the nation that all of this was directed to brazenly and arrogantly overturning the will of the American people for the ugly but simple reason that Donald Trump was an outsider who threatened the Obama/leftist/globalist hold on power.
If the Horowitz report and Barr/Durham follow-up reveals, as seems increasingly likely, the deliberate and nefarious concoction of the Russia Collusion Hoax by leaders in the CIA, FBI, and DoJ, the vast majority of Americans, including millions who have historically identified themselves politically as Democrats, will be fiercely offended at this historic, unconscionable abuse. And who is at the top of all the plotting and scheming and lying and weaponization of government against the will of the people? Barack Obama.
And so…the ”Michelle Obama will bring back the days of the scandal-free Obama administration!” campaign narrative reeks.
Michelle’s heart isn’t in it… and may not be a happy heart anyway. Mrs. Obama is on record saying she has no interest in running, and of course, those words by themselves mean nothing as to whether she will enter the race. But we think they do signal that at her core, her heart is not in it. And ‘it’ refers to the pressure, the nastiness, the unrelenting spotlight, the every-word-and-every-smirk-on-video scrutiny of an American presidential race.
Michelle Obama’s eight years in a soft, adulatory spotlight as First Lady are not the same as the brass tacks rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. And even if the MSM did everything in its power to shield her (and it surely would), the MSM is not the gatekeeper it once was. Plus, winners tend to be happy warriors. There has always seemed to be an undercurrent of anger in Michelle Obama’s countenance, and if it ever flared on the campaign trail, she could quickly find herself in a big hole. Anger doesn’t win elections.
Michelle Obama may or may not get into the race; it’s probably a 50/50 proposition at this point. And if she does get in, she’ll have access to the best messaging talent the left can buy. So she’d make waves for a while. But soon enough, the reality of Barack Obama’s unpopularity, the reality of the criminal abuse by his administration in trying to frame and otherwise take down President Trump, and the reality of a booming economy helping all Americans, would take the air out of her balloon. “Bring Back Barack” is not a winning campaign theme. And if a tweet or two happened to get under her skin, the result could be ugly.
“Michelle Obama for President” is not inevitable or invincible.
Eric Georgatos is a former corporate lawyer who operated the Brushfires of Freedom blog from 2008-2016 (a book of top postings from the blog is available at America, Can We Talk?).
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