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No official or unofficial records were ever made available. No college transcripts, published records, or even contemporary newspaper announcements about his education have been released.
Obama remarkably relates in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father" that, beginning at Occidental, he surrounded himself with an assortment of radicals, socialists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists and communists.
Obama, however, provides neither names nor clues.
"The Manchurian President" uncovers a slew of radicals with whom Obama associated during his college years.
SDS founder
It was at Occidental that Obama first engaged in community activism, delivering what has been described as the first political speech of his career. On Feb. 18, 1981, Obama addressed students gathered outside Coons Halladministration building, exhorting Occidental's trustees to divest from South Africa.
Obama writes in "Dreams" about the rally in which he took part, reportedly led by the Black Student Alliance and Students for Economic Democracy.
Tom Hayden at 2004 Democratic National Convention |
Obama agreed to deliver the opening remarks for the rally, for which, he writes, "the agenda had been carefully arranged beforehand." In the middle of his speech "a couple of white students" were to come onstage, "dressed in their paramilitary uniforms," to drag him away. "A bit of street theater, a way to dramatize the situation for activists in South Africa," Obama writes.
Students for Economic Democracy, or SED, was a national student advocacy group established by soon-to-be California State Representative Tom Hayden, now a professor at Occidental, and his former wife, actress Jane Fonda
Hayden authored the 1962 "Port Huron Statement," the first official political manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS – the radical 1960s protest movement from which Ayers' Weathermen terrorist organization splintered.
An example of Hayden's brash rhetoric dates to his December 1968 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the Chicago "anti-war protests."
At the committee, a portion of Hayden's SDS manifesto was read:
"Disobey your parents: burn your money: you know life is a dream and all of our institutions are man-made illusions effective because YOU take the dream for reality. … Break down the family, church, nation, city, economy; turn life into an art form, a theatre of the soul and a theatre of the future; the revolutionary is the only artist. … What's needed is a generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy, angry, irreligious, childish and mad: people who burn draft cards, burn high school and college degrees; people who say: "To hell with your goals!"; people who lure the youth with music, pot and acid; people who re-define the normal; people who break with the status-role-title-consumer game; people who have nothing material to lose but their flesh. …"
When asked if this was "the way to have a better America," Hayden called them "beautiful sentiments."
The official mission statement for Hayden's SED, for which Obama delivered a major speech, espouses socialist ideology:
"Economic democracy means that ownership and control will be spread among a wide variety of public bodies: city, state and Federal governments, churches, trade unions, cooperatives and community groups, small business people, workers and consumers."
Hayden later was a founding member of Progressives for Obama, a matrix of radicals who supported Obama's presidential candidacy.
Meanwhile, "Manchurian" relates Obama's involvement with the anti-apartheid movement, which sparked a firestorm of activism at Occidental.
Political mentors
The book rejects as unlikely speculation from various media outlets that two Occidental professors, Roger Boesche and Eric Newhall, served as Obama's political mentors at the time.
Instead, "Manchurian" finds the most likely candidate to be Occidental professor Gary Chapman, whose background includes "military service, academic research and organizational experience."
Chapman's political organization and campaign experience also includes "peace issues" with the New American Movement, or NAM. The lineage of NAM is associated with that of the Democratic Socialists of America. NAM also is identified as a "splinter group" of Hayden's and Ayers' SDS.
Appeared with Columbia activist, Ayers
Obama has revealed almost nothing about his last two years as an undergraduate at Columbia University's Columbia College.
Columbia University |
Obama has said he was involved with the Black Students Organization, which emerged in the 1960s in response to a growing black student population at Columbia. Undergraduates formed the Student Afro-American Society, "which was concerned with the affairs of black students and issues of the greater black community."
The Coalition for a Free South Africa, or CFSA, began as a Black Students' Organization committee to promote Columbia University's divestment in stock in companies doing business in South Africa.
CFSA, which split from the Black Students' Organization in 1981, was a loosely structured group with a predominantly black steering committee of about a dozen individuals who made decisions by consensus, and a less active circle of about fifty students who attended meetings and the group's protests and educational events."
Early CFSA leaders were Danny Armstrong, a Columbia College student who played forward for Columbia's basketball team, and Barbara Ransby, a student from the School of General Studies
As CFSA spokeswoman, Ransby famously convinced Columbia's student senate "to support full divestment."
Ransby, now an associate professor of African-American studies and history at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the executive director of Public Square, was in the class of 1984 at Columbia, only one year behind Obama, who would later publicly appear with both Ransby and Ayers.
In April 2002, Ransby appeared at a University of Illinois-Chicago forum and sat on the same panel – "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis: Experiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations" – with both Obama and Ayers.
Obama knew FCC chief from Columbia activism?
Another name that emerges from Obama's involvement with the Black Students' Organization and Coalition for a Free South Africa is that of Julius Genachowski.
In October 2008, Genachowski, co-founder of the venture capital firm LaunchBox Digital, was described as "an adviser to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama."
Obama and Genakowski were later Harvard Law School classmates.
In August 2008 it was reported in the New York Times that Genachowski, who led the Obama campaign's technology working group, was also a big fundraiser. Genachowski raised at least $500,000 as an Obama "bundler."
In March 2009, Obama nominated Genachowski to chair the Federal Communications Commission, and he was sworn in June 29, 2009.
Book uncovers radical nexus
Along with a chapter on Ayers, "The Manchurian President" includes an extensive investigation into Obama's own background. The work uncovers, among many other things, Obama's early years, including his previously overlooked early childhood ties to a radical, far-left church connected to Ayers' ideology.
Obama's associations with the Nation of Islam, Black Liberation Theology and black political extremists are also revealed, with extensive new information on the subjects.
Also detailed are Obama's deep ties to ACORN, which are much more extensive than previously documented elsewhere. The book crucially describes how a socialist-led, ACORN-affiliated union helped facilitate Obama's political career and now exerts major influence in the White House.
"The Manchurian President" contains potentially explosive information not only about President Obama but also concerning other officials in the White House, including top czars and senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod.
"The Manchurian President" also exposes how Obama's health-care policy, masked by moderate populist rhetoric, was pushed along and partially crafted by extremists, some of whom reveal in their own words that their principal aim is to achieve corporate socialist goals and a vast increase in government powers.
"I believe this work is crucial to Americans from across the political spectrum," says Klein, "including mainstream Democrats who should be alarmed that their party has been hijacked by an extreme-left fringe bent on permanently changing the party to fit its radical agenda.
"Indeed, this book will document, with new information, Obama's own involvement with a socialist party whose explicit goal was to infiltrate and eventually take over the Democratic Party and mold it into a socialist organization," Klein claims.
Klein began investigating Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and broke major national stories. He first exposed the politician's association with Ayers in a widely circulated WND article.
The story prompted the Nation magazine to lament, via the CBS News website, that "mainstream reporters now call the Obama campaign to ask about Klein's articles."
It was in a WABC Radio interview with Klein that Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to Hamas, "endorsed" Obama for president, generating world headlines and sparking controversy. Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and Obama repeatedly traded public barbs over Hamas' positive comments.
Klein was among the first reporters to expose that Obama's "green jobs" czar, Van Jones, founded a communist organization and called for "resistance" against the U.S. government. The theme was picked up and expanded upon by the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, leading to Jones' resignation last September.
Co-author Brenda J. Elliott is a historian, author and investigative researcher known for her blogging during the 2008 presidential election about Ayers, Tony Rezko and other controversial figures linked to Obama. Since 1988, Elliott has been responsible for a number of historical projects, has won an award by Project Censored for her work and has been named "One of the Intriguing People" by Central Florida magazine.
The introduction to "The Manchurian President" relates: "Barack Obama is backed by and deeply tied to an anti-American fringe nexus that, as this book will show, was instrumental not only in mentoring Obama and helping him to build his political career, but essentially in overthrowing the moderate wing of the Democratic Party and in securing and powerfully influencing Obama's presidency.
"As will be seen, these radical associates not only continue to influence Obama and White House strategy, but some are directly involved in creating the very policies intended to undermine or radically transform the United States of America."
