In part I we outlined Kindergarten through High School 1967-1979. In Part II we outlined High School, Occidental College (CA) through his entrance into Columbia College (NY) 1979 – 1982.
We pick up in this part in the fall of 1982 Columbia College (NY) and continue….
The Obama File The Obama File Archive is an open website that documents the life and times of Barack Hussein Obama II [..] the archive and the forum is available to all researchers and interested persons.
1982 Columbia University – Obama has revealed almost nothing about his claimed last two years as an undergraduate at Columbia University’s Columbia College. Note the wording “claimed last two years”. We specifically state “claimed” because despite the Obama narrative of two years attendance Columbia records only show him attending from September 1982 to May 1983 when he graduated. One School Year.
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 (CFSA), began as a Black Students’ Organization committee to promote Columbia University’s divestment in stock in companies doing business in South Africa.
Coalition for a Free South Africa, 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.” Barbara 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.
“I stopped getting high. I ran 3 miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry,” he wrote in “Dreams.”
He went to the Marxist-Socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn and started lecturing his relatives until they worried he’d become “one of those freaks you see on the streets around here.”
Cooper Union – Each year from 1983 to 2004, the City University of New York’s (CUNY) chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) sponsored the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) at Cooper Union, a privately funded college for the advancement of science and art. Socialist Scholars Conference events featured the elite of socialist academia as well as union activists, political revolutionaries, reformers, and opponents of “corporate greed.” According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists,”…….. and, Barack Hussein Obama.
Cloward And Piven – Obama studied the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis in Political Science classes at Columbia University.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy is to overcommit government, growing it past the point of sustainability by causing crises. This, while developing an organized proletariat of dependent classes and applying them to disrupt society and revolt against American freedoms. All, to ring in the new “egalitarian” (neo-Marxist) state. That would be a big “change.”
Barack Obama Meets Bill Ayers? – Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers were at college, within a quarter mile of each other, for two years in 1982 and 1983. When Obama was at Columbia, Bill Ayers was at Bank Street College (BSC), where he received an M.A. in Early Childhood Education exactly 371 yards down the street.
Bank Street College has no student housing, everyone lives off Campus. Columbia DOES have housing and encourages students to live on campus. However, Fox News interviewed 400 former students from his graduating class and no-one remembers him! At his own admission Obama lived off campus also.
Obama and Ayers had mutual friends. One was Edward Said, the left-wing Columbia superstar was just recently out of hiding. It is essentially inconceivable, given their concentric politics, that they did not know each other, or at least have some contact during the 1982/83 timeframe. They held the same interests, attended the same events, had the same associations etc. etc. Obama won’t release his transcripts (actually he won’t reveal any documentation from his past). Was it because it would reveal his ties to Ayers, a class in common (BSC has collaborations with Columbia), or maybe something else? There is so much information, connections, and possibility with the radicalization of Obama, and his formulative ideologies that we’ve made a decision to just make that another entire thread.
- They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
- They lived near each other.
- They went to school near each other.
- They had the same political interests.
- Their circles of friends and associates intersected.
By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected. Or was it not a coincidence at all? (Part IV, so more later).
The Mystery of The Thesis – One of the latest reports on Obama’s missing thesis comes from, wait for it…, MSNBC, in 2008 – surprise. Written his senior year (and only year) at Columbia University, Obama’s thesis was presumably about Soviet nuclear disarmament. It’s only natural to wonder what the budding socialist turned presidential candidate thought of nuclear proliferation in the early 1980s.
“We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News.
The Obama campaign has been less than forthcoming with details. “Spokesman Ben LaBolt wouldn’t even say whether Sen. Obama threw out his copy or lost it.” At an earlier date, an aide actually told the New Republic the junior senator couldn’t recall what he had written about, but as that editor notes, “who doesn’t remember their senior thesis?” To get the inside scoop, MSNBC contacted the former professor who taught Obama’s senior seminar and who recalls the content of the paper better than Obama himself:
His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other. For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Perhaps all of those conversations from Occidental College with the former CIA operative turned professor came in handy. The professor was, after all, a close collegue of Zbigniew Brzezinski. [You’ll recall: At Occidental, Obama meets a professor of politics who is a CIA expert on the Soviet Union and an associate of Zbigniew Brzezinski] Looks like that association payed dividends.
*Another footnote: in 2009 another Obama writing was discovered by left leaning politico titled “Breaking the War Mentality“. It is a 1983 article attributed to Obama. It’s crap, for the most part. You’ll have to read it and decide for yourself.
Obama graduated from Columbia College in 1983 at the age of 21, and after spending a year in New York, moved to Chicago. The timeframe from May/June 1983 through 1984 he remained in New York. Returning to Chicago sometime in 1984 until he attended Harvard Law School in 1988. The period 1983 to 1988 will be in Part IV, for the sake of this thread theme I want to stick to education. So we’ll skip to Harvard.
Harvard Law – Even though Obama’s Columbia grades fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard, Obama began Harvard Law School in 1988 at the age of 27. Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood.
“He then and now is very hard to pin down,” said Kenneth Mack, a classmate and now a professor at the law school, referring to the senator’s on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand style. Mack added, “Obama stood out from the beginning. He seemed more mature. Everyone understood he was a liberal. He didn’t hide that.” (In 2008 it was noted that all the yearbooks for the year Obama graduated have been yanked from Harvard’s library)
Harvard Law Review – On February 6th, 1990, Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School. He managed to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a SINGLE piece of signed, written work — not one! Obama did do interviews and *Politico claims that an unsigned — and previously unattributed — 1990 article was produced by Obama and offers a glimpse at his views on abortion policy and the law during his student days, and provides a rare addition to his body of work.
The six-page summary, tucked into the third volume of the year’s Harvard Law Review, considers the charged, if peripheral, question of whether fetuses should be able to file lawsuits against their mothers. Obama’s answer: No.
*Left leaning Politico was asked how they knew the document was produced by Obama, since it is “unsigned — and previously unattributed.” They never responded.
Obama’s timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha. Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty. This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.
Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.
“Obama cast himself as an eager listener,” the New York Times reported, “sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.”
In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all day affair, Obama’s fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR’s small conservative faction threw him its support. Obama was elected after a meeting of the review’s 80 editors that convened Sunday and lasted until early this morning, a participant said.
Until the 1970’s the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank. Among these were Elliot L. Richardson, the former Attorney General, and Irwin Griswold, a dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, “A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time. “After his appointment, the NY Times carried a story in February 1990, which included a few quotes from Obama:
“The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. “It’s encouraging.” “But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment…
On his goals in his new post, Mr. Obama said:
“I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective. I’m fairly opinionated about this. But as president of the law review, I have a limited role as only first among equals.” Therefore, Mr. Obama said, he would concentrate on making the review a “forum for debate,” bringing in new writers and pushing for livelier, more accessible writing.
Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note. In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government’s interest in “preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair.” Well, the new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review. And, it worked! In other words, Obama was the first affirmative action President of the Harvard Law Revue.
A Bizzare Einstein And The Law Article (Harvard) w/Obama – In a page-one footnote of what may be the zaniest-titled article ever published by the Harvard Law Review: “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics,” authored by noted legal scholar Laurence Tribe and assisted by young Obama.
The 39-page densely argued treatise argues that constitutional jurisprudence should be updated in a similar way that Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, a view that would release judges from the original intent of the Founders of America. Published in 1989, with help of the much younger and politically greener Mr. Obama, the long-ago article could indicate his views on the Constitution, which, now could come into play in such matters as his choice of nominees to the Supreme Court.
Since Mr. Obama captured the White House, he might not curve space but may settle for setting aside a high-altitude seat on the Supreme Court for his former teacher, Mr. Tribe, who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. At the very least his progressive views at constitutional evolution reflect how he considers molding the founding framework as opposed to interpreting it.
Juris Doctor – Obama graduates from Harvard Law School in 1991. He supposedly received his Juris Doctor law degree, magna cum laude — although there are no records available to validate this assertion. Obama has sealed all Harvard Law School Records.
How exactly did Barack Obama pay for his Harvard Law School education? – The way the Obama campaign answered the question was simply hard work and student loans, even though Obama’s financial disclosures found no trace of any outstanding college loans, going back to 2000. Michelle Obama contradicted this claim by saying that the couple had “only just” paid off their student loans after receiving book royalties paid out in 2005 and 2006.
But questions were raised about Obama’s student loans and Obama’s ties to a radical Muslim activist who reportedly was raising money for Obama’s Harvard studies during the years 1988 to 1991. The allegations first surfaced in late March 2008, when former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton told a New York cable channel that a former business partner who was “raising money” for Obama had approached him in 1988 to help Obama get into Harvard Law School.
In this video interview, Sutton says he first heard of Obama about twenty years ago from Khalid Al-Mansour, who Sutton described as advisor to “one of the world’s richest men,” Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Prince Alwaleed catapulted to fame in the United States after the September 11 attacks, when New York mayor Rudy Guiliani refused his $10 million check to help rebuild Manhattan, because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that America’s pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks. Sutton knew Al-Mansour well, since the two men had been business partners and served on several corporate boards together.
As Sutton remembered, Al-Mansour was raising money for Obama’s education and seeking recommendations for him to attend Harvard Law School.
“I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,” Sutton told NY1 city hall reporter Dominic Carter. “The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas.”
Apparently, al-Mansour serves on the Board of, among others, Saudi African Bank and was responsible for the Africa investment activities of Kingdom Holdings, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s investment company.
Obama released seven years of tax returns on March 25 of 2009. The returns, dating back to 2000, indicate that the couple paid no interest on their student loans. The interest from such loans would have been deductible on their joint income tax returns. For 2000 through 2004, taxpayers declared student loan interest as a deduction on line 24 of federal form 1040. After 2004, the deduction can be taken on Line 33. But the Obamas never declared a dime of interest in student loans on their return.
The Student Loans – Michelle Obama tells of the collection calls they used to get from the “loan debt people.” Mrs. Obama clearly implies that the family’s hardship was caused merely by living in this hellhole that is America, usually right after she mentions their onerous student loans.
However, the Obamas have thus far refused to validate these stories of loan collection, despite requests from Chicago papers, or the source of the debt. Obama’s personal loan of $20,000 to his failed Congressional race seems like a very likely culprit for any loan collection calls they might have received. Thus, the Obamas should provide the financial records that validate their claims about bill collector calls, if they exist, and be honest about the source of the debt. Certainly, the loan itself gives lie to the Obamas’ stories about their financial hardship due to their being “just regular people;” regular people don’t loan themselves large sums of money for rash and obviously doomed congressional races.
The most trivial, and yet in many ways the most revealing, of the Obama campaign distortions involves their incessant invocation of their school loan burdens. Yet the Chicago Tribune has asked them to produce evidence of their school loans and they never complied. Tellingly, they made too much money since 2000 for their loan interest to be deducted, so they can’t even prove that they finally paid off the loans in 2003, as they constantly claim.
Obama received a full scholarship to Occidental, which he abandoned after two years in favor of Columbia. He left Occidental after his Sophomore year (spring 1981), took a trip to Pakistan, then reappears at Columbia College (fall 1982). Did he get any similar deal for the year at Columbia? What grants and loans did the Obamas receive while at Harvard?
Again, these may seem like trivial amounts, or trivial questions. However, the Obamas have consistently presented their life story as a rags to riches tale in which they triumphed over the odds just like ordinary people. But they’ve offered no proof. Given Obama’s career reliance on patronage and kingmakers, the reality may be considerably different from their touching campaign anecdotes.
Life After Law School – The elites weigh in…. Abner Mikva, a five-term congressman from Illinois who was at that time Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit, tried to recruit Obama as a clerk, a position considered a stepping stone to clerking on the Supreme Court, but Obama turned him down.
“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said. “After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted.”
The Carl M. Loeb Professor at Harvard University, Laurence H. Tribe, taught Obama and employed him as a research assistant. He remembers him as a “brilliant, personable, and obviously unique” person. Tribe said that Obama’s theoretical perspective on applying modern physics to law was “very impressive.”
“He is obviously a serious intellectual as well as a fantastic campaigner who can reach across boundaries,” Tribe said. “He will make an extraordinarily fine president.”
David B. Wilkins , the Kirkland and Ellis professor of law, said he advised Obama to become a Supreme Court Clerk. “Obama recognized the honor in pursuing that post,” Wilkins said, but quickly added that he wasn’t interested. “He said that he wanted to write a book about his life and his father, go back to Chicago, get back into the community, and run for office there”. He knew exactly what he wanted and went about getting it done,” Wilkins said.
Obama works hard to dispel the image of having sought his superstar status. “It’s not about me, it’s about you,” he likes to tell his crowds. But according to those who know him, he has been talking about the presidency for more than a decade. “It was clear to me from the day I met him that he was thinking about politics,” says Harvard Law School classmate Christine Spurell.
The AP reported that attorney Judson Miner, who was the communist mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington’s, lawyer, called Harvard to offer a job to a graduating student named Barack Obama and didn’t expect to be showered with gratitude. Still, he wasn’t expecting the reception he got. “You can leave your name and take a number,” the woman who answered the phone at the Harvard Law Review said breezily. “You’re No. 647.”
That was 1991 and even then Obama was a hot commodity. As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama had his pick of top law firms. He chose Miner’s Chicago civil rights firm, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.
The one thread, that remains consistent, throughout Obama’s life, is his teachers’, mentors’ and friends’ recollection of Obama’s single-minded pursuit of high political office.
Couple of odd footnotes to finish up with. It is expected and customary that lifetime associations or influences would celebrate the successful accomplishment of one of their own. Indeed all schools attended by a President celebrate their connection to it. The same was true with Obama’s alma maters, but with a slight twist. From his high school to his graduate school everyone claimed a small piece of the president – at gatherings throughout the inaugural week:
Hawaiian Punahou Primary School alum Steve Case, founder of America Online, hosted a brunch for about 250 people, many of whom made the trek to DC from Hawaii.
Occidental College’s held a gathering on January 19th 2009 for about 250 people, including alum and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll. “The reaction was terrific,” said Jim Jacobs, Occidental’s director of alumni relations, saying their 250 reservations are “were than we ever anticipated” for the free celebration.
More than 1,000 Harvard Law School grads paid $100 per ticket to attend a Sunday, Jan. 18th 2009 brunch at the historic Willard Intercontinental Hotel, once a common place to spot President Abraham Lincoln. It was hosted by the school’s dean, who was tapped as U.S. Solicitor General, and then appointed to the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan.
Only Columbia didn’t do anything, nothing, no party, no event, no gala, nothing for their presidential graduate. What’s the story with Columbia? What was Obama up to in the years between Occidental and Business International Corp? He gets back from Pakistan and disappears. Why is it that nobody — absolutely nobody — remembers Obama at Columbia College? Columbia College of Columbia University is a small school. Current enrollment is 4,100. Big Man On Campus and Class President Wayne Allyn Root says:
“I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever! … Nobody recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.
Wayne Allyn Root graduated from Columbia College in 1983 at the exact date of Obama, Majoring in the exact same major (political science) with the same emphasis (pre-law). Hmmm?