The Enthralling Connections That Make “Viable” Presidency Candidates
By Mark Mondalek
I was in college when I first read President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father. It was just a little over a year after his inauguration and the book had been curiously assigned in an advanced nonfiction reading course featuring the works of Mark Twain, James Baldwin and George Orwell. A natural aversion to political memoirs undoubtedly left several literary-minded classmates feeling skeptical over the selected reading material, myself included. Not only was the 2008 election still very fresh in our minds, but we were additionally attending classes in Chicago at the time, the very city that had launched it. Many of us had been present for the beginning and the end of Obama’s historical march to the American throne, swept up into a frenzy of youthful optimism and “hope” as we lined the streets outside Grant Park for what seemed like miles on end just for the chance to hear him speak that previous November: tears rolling down Jesse Jackson’s cheeks, Oprah Winfrey’s self-entitled photo op; sporadic puffs of marijuana smoke rising into the sky on an atypical warm Chicago night.
I had mostly skimmed through the majority of it, admittedly. However, the immediate and lasting impression of the text, which likewise seemed to take us all a bit off-guard at the time, was the startling fact that, by God, the man wrote a novel, after all. As someone quite clearly seeking public office, on the surface-level, he seemingly veered unabashedly into the personal, writing in clear, concise, and sometimes startlingly beautiful prose. It can even be argued that Dreams is the anti-political memoir, in a sense: a carefully placed “Establishment-friendly” record of Obama’s past quietly waiting in the wing––like a timed mine.
He could have been a professional novelist, some say. Instead, he wanted to be president.
I don’t wish to mislead readers on the actual tone and content of Andrew Kreig’s Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney, and Their Masters (Eagle View Books, July 2013) by my own fixation with Obama’s infamous memoir, published just a little over a year prior to his first electoral victory as an Illinois senator. I simply equate it to being something of an interesting embodiment of what Puppetry, at its core, directly confronts: further exploration of the many gaps of time and pivotal appendages of information that the political powers of the United States and, indeed, its array of global handlers, manages to keep so intricately hidden from view. With a population largely contented by the steady stream of the 24-hour news cycle and the manufactured narratives it endlessly proliferates––from political memoirs to election coverage that makes a sport out of the democratic process––a great effort is clearly being made to simulate what is, in actuality, a very false sense of transparency. Better understanding the dichotomy of the puppets themselves is the only way to realize the rationale of those who remain lurking in the shadows, silently pulling their strings.
Obtaining a solid grasp of Barack Hussein Obama II’s background, for starters, is a difficult enough task on its own, even when armed with a best-selling memoir to use as a roadmap. School and university records, including grades and courses taken, along with his and his family’s passport and similar travel records, have been kept hidden or made unavailable “in a manner that is virtually unprecedented in modern times.” The maintaining of such secrecy would seem to be extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, without a great deal of assistance from the intelligence community occurring behind the scenes.
Wayne Madsen, a political affairs commentator, investigative reporter, and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report, provides much of the ground-level research into the matter. “By his account,” writes Kreig, “Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, their daughter, Ann, and grandson, Barack, each worked in political intelligence while using a variety of retailing, banking, non-profit, foundation, and academic covers,” in accordance with U.S. efforts to combat communism in such former European colonies as Kenya and Indonesia. A 1977 New York Times article hidden in plain view is one of the more intriguing sources available to help support such a theory. It alleges that Obama’s first employer after graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Business International Corporation, was, according to the owner’s son, a CIA front company at some point in its history. Other authors on the subject, though at times differing greatly with Madsen, include left-wing author Webster Tarpley and conservative author and professor, Angelo Codevilla.
World history runs surprisingly parallel with the personal narratives involved, from Madelyn Dunham’s unlikely role as vice president of the largely Rockefeller-owned Bank of Hawaii to Ann Dunham relocating to Indonesia with her young son during a monumental period of violence in the region that left more than 500,000 dead. Explaining her role as a researcher, Kreig makes note of the fact that “Ann Dunham was funded in Indonesia by the Ford Foundation, whose New York-based director of international grants was Peter Geithner, father of Obama’s controversial Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner.” The Ford Foundation would likewise help fund Obama’s later work as a community organizer in Chicago.
The Geithner connection underscores why the Dunham-Obama past is not so far removed from the present, as indicated by many news stories during the summer of 2012 about Geithner and global banking scandals fleecing the public. Obama kept Geithner as Treasury secretary for four years despite Geithner’s ascendancy through the same Wall Street banking hierarchy that caused the 2008 financial collapse.
Geithner is just one example of many in terms of the strange cast of characters that pollutes the Obama biography. In 1981, Obama spent three weeks in Pakistan supposedly under the guise of “partridge hunting,” during which he reportedly stayed as an overnight guest at the affluent household of Muhammad Soomro, an internationally recognized banker who became acting president of Pakistan after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf in 2008. Former Carter Administration National Security Advisor and Rockefeller-asset Zbigniew Brzezinski is alleged to have been a professor or advisor of Obama’s during his time at Columbia University. According to Carter’s principal aide for the Iran hostage crisis, Dr. Gary Sick, a mutiny in favor of a Republican victory in 1980 was perpetrated by disloyal CIA, Defense Department and even Carter White House staff members. Brzezinski’s White House aide at the time, Robert Gates, has been suspected of being a key player in the controversy. As time would tell, Brzezinski became Obama’s top foreign policy advisor in his 2008 campaign. Under George H. W. Bush, Gates became head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense under Bush-2, a position that he likewise maintained during the Obama administration until 2011.
Such sordid connections as these pinpoint an important subtext to the work assembled together between Puppetry’s pages: while different figures and events may be decades or more apart from one another, within the brevity of history, such gaps of time aren’t nearly as significant as they appear at first glance. This understanding likewise holds a great deal of import in terms of examining the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, Obama’s 2012 Republican rival.
Romney considers himself a figure destined by history and by God to lead a nation unified under Mormon leadership into a church-state theocracy, as Mormon founder Joseph Smith himself envisioned before his assassination during his 1844 presidential candidacy. Romney, as a church leader whose family support of Smith reaches back to that first presidential campaign in 1844, is driven by a historical and eternal vision that make the temporal promises and position-switches far less important to him than to his audiences. What political pundits might report as policy switches or false statements, Romney and his backers apparently believe to be routine tactics to achieve power. In this way, they have sought such goals as religious advancement, moneymaking, and the ability to bestow charity, war, and government contracts upon those whom they regard as most deserving.
Delving quite bravely into the history of the Mormon Church, Kreig declares it to be a religion that was founded on principles of “divine revelation to leaders, male supremacy, racism, and secrecy.” To his credit, these aren’t vague critiques. Rather, his views are well thought out and thoroughly examined within the context of Romney’s background and political ideology. Romney’s disdain for 47% of the U.S. population, his dreams of empire building, and, of course, his hidden history at the helms of Bain Capital are all prime examples of the nefarious underpinnings that support Kreig’s deep suspicions over one of the more obvious political puppets in recent years. Hidden tax records and numerous reports of possible Bain unscrupulousness, including an early $9 million start-up investment “from Salvadoran families linked to Death Squads that killed more than 10,000 men, women, and children to protect the elite,” along with strange personal and family connections between men like Joseph Smith, Howard Hughes, and Benjamin Netanyahu––an early colleague of Romney’s at the Boston Consulting Group––bring about the same kind of concerns present in Obama’s background.
While Mitt Romney is only a portrait of a presidency that might have been, revisiting his 2012 campaign helps to provide further scholarship into the thought-process behind the conjuring up of presidential candidates by the puppet masters themselves. As Kreig importantly notes, some candidates are groomed for office “because of their vulnerabilities, rather than despite their shortcomings. A track record of deceit makes a candidate more amendable to control.”
Andrew Kreig is the executive director and co-founder of The Justice Integrity Project, a research and education initiative established in 2010 to improve oversight of abusive prosecutorial and judicial decisions in the federal justice system, including political and other arbitrary prosecutions, as well as official corruption cases. Along with two decades experience as an attorney and non-profit executive in Washington, D.C., he likewise occupies decades of experience in the field of investigative journalism, with enough sources scattered throughout the vastness of Puppetry to prove it, and over 1,100 endnotes to boot. One of the more interesting accounts came from an investigative team assembled by the highly respected Free Press organization and was provided exclusively to the book: a bizarre GOP-linked media campaign to sabotage President Obama’s foreign policy resume, implicating Karl Rove and the David Petraeus camp, as well as whoever was behind the mysterious “The Innocence of the Muslims” viral YouTube movie preview.
Enthralling connections such as this one help guide Puppetry into territory far beyond the traditional scope of a book fixated only on the 2012 election. Kreig expounds greatly upon other figures such as Joe Biden, Paul Ryan, John Brennan, Michael Leavitt, Chuck Hagel, and the entire Bush Dynasty, with deep insights into mass voting fraud, Benghazi, the bin Laden raid, the Boston Marathon bombing, and even the anthrax scares that took place after 9/11. The topics and themes discussed in Puppetry, though widely available to those willing to seek them out, are almost unanimously shunned by the mainstream media. Indeed, it’s the sort of book that makes one question everything; view the game a whole different way. Thus, any notions strong enough to provoke doubt in the democratic process from the U.S. citizenry––of which Puppetry is fearlessly engulfed in––will continue to be curtailed by any means necessary by the powers that be.
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Mark Mondalek – BFP contributing author, is a writer and editor based in Detroit. Follow @ Twitter
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