Re: [Futurework] BHO We Hardly Knew You

[Keith Hudson]

At 01:07 05/05/2012, Mike Gurstein wrote:
A very important read putting Obama in quite a different light.
http://www.scribd.com/webber3292/d/92392289-Fitch-on-Obama

Indeed, it is very important. If this is true 
(and its references suggest this) then Romney is 
honest and transparent in comparison (despite his 
underwear!) It also explains why Obama has no 
trouble getting massive campaign funds.

(I had problems downloading this. When I finally 
did so I thought I'd copy it here for FW in case 
anybody else does. The article deserves to be read and pondered over.)

Keith

<<<<<
THE CHANGE THEY BELIEVE IN

Speech for Harlem Tenants Association, November 14, 2008

By Robert Fitch

Nellie asks us to foretell what an Obama 
Administration is going to do for cities,housing 
and neighborhoods. Of course we can’t really know 
what’s going to happen in the future. We can only 
know what’s already happened. So it’s an exercise 
that reminds me a little of Johnny Carson’s old 
late night TV routine with his sidekick Ed 
McMahon. Carson played Karnak the Magnificent. 
McMahon would give him an answer. And 
Karnak,wearing a giant turban, and holding an 
envelope to his forehead, would guess the 
question inside the envelope. Ed would give an 
answer like. “A B C D E F G.” Karnak would reply 
with the question: “Earlier versions of Preparation H.”

What’s President-elect Obama’s prescription for 
urban pains? I’m going to put onmy urban turban 
and try to play Karnak. It’s a difficult role not 
only because the future ishard to predict; but 
because Obama himself is not easy to read. In my 
lifetime, we haven’t had a politician with his 
gifts: his writing talent; his eloquence; his 
charisma; his mastery of public policy; his 
ability to run a national campaign against 
formidable rivals. Obama projects so brilliant an 
aura that it’s almost blinding. He’s become the 
bearer of pride for forty-five million African 
Americans who want to be judged by the content of 
their character. He’s the prophet of hope; the 
apostle of change and the organizer of “Yes We Can.”

All this makes Obama’s actual politics very hard 
to put in any critical perspective. By actual 
politics I mean above all, the principal 
interests he represents; his authentic political 
philosophy. Where he fits on the on the 
Left-Right political spectrum. Obama resists 
being identified with either the Right or the 
Left. Even when he talks about his mom’s 
liberalism, it’s with a certain irony. “A lonely 
witness for secular humanism, a soldier for the 
New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper 
liberalism.” Obama is a partisan of the Third 
Way. In Europe, the Third Way means you’re 
neither socialist nor capitalist. In the U.S. it 
means you’re neither for liberalism nor 
conservatism. The Third Way is expressed very 
well in Obama’s 2004 convention speech.

“Well, I say…tonight, there's not a liberal 
America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

“There's not a black America and white 
America…there's the United States of America.“The 
pundits like to slice and dice our country into 
red states and blue States: red states for 
Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too.

“We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance 
to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Are traditional political vocations now obsolete? 
The Left stands for the interests of those who 
have to work for a living; for the tenants and 
the poor. For the victims of discrimination. The 
Right in America stands for the interests of the 
employers and the investing class. For those who 
own the land, the houses, the banks and the hedge 
funds.For Joe the plumber who was really Joe the 
plumbing contractor. And for those who see 
themselves as the victims of affirmative action.

In a way, though, the Left and the Right have 
more in common with each other than they do with 
the advocates of the Third Way. The Left and the 
Right argue that different interests matter. The 
Third Way says they don’t. According to them, the 
oppressed and the oppressors, the lions and the 
lambs should set down together and celebrate 
their unity in one great post-partisan, 
multi-cultural 4th of July picnic. One of Obama’s 
most repeated mantras resonates here: “a common 
good and a higher interest,” he says. “That’s the change I’m looking for.”

Where in the world most of us reside do we find 
that higher interest? I don’t know except perhaps 
in the higher interest rates that kicked in with variable rate mortgages.

What is the common good that tenants and 
landlords share? Not a lot I can think of. Maybe 
that the building doesn’t burn down? But some of 
you remember the ’70s when landlords burned down 
their buildings in poor neighborhoods to cash in on the insurance.

The haves and the have-nots have different and 
opposing interests­landlords want to get rid of 
rent stabilization; tenants have an interest in 
keeping it. Workers want to save their jobs; 
bosses want to save their capital, which means 
cutting workers. In pursuing their opposing 
interests, the have-nots are forced take up the 
weapons of the weak­demonstrations, direct 
action; filling the jails with conscientious 
objectors; taking personal risks. Who benefits 
when one side gives up without a struggle? The Haves or the Havenots?

Frederick Douglass reminds us: “Power concedes 
nothing without a demand. It never did. It never will.”

When the Third Way advocates insist that we share 
a common good; when they refuse to recognize that 
the interests of the oppressed and the interests 
of the oppressors don’t exist on the same moral 
plane; when they counsel us to stop being 
partisans of those interests -­ they’re not being 
non- or post-partisan; they’re siding with the powers that be.

In the same way, Obama’s notion of change claims 
to transcend the politics of interest while it 
steers sharply to the right. What kind of change 
does America need? Above all, America needs a 
change of heart: her people need to give up 
selfishness; all Americans rich and poor, white 
and black; the hod carrier and the hedge fund 
operator must give up self-interest; stop always asking “what’s in it for me?”

In a word, with his emphasis on change coming 
from people giving up group egoism and together 
pursuing the common good, while practicing old 
fashioned virtues,Senator Obama is a 
communitarian. In The Audacity of Hope he invokes 
the legacy of Ronald Reagan who, Obama believes, 
recognized America’s need to rediscover the 
traditional values of the American community: 
hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith.

Communitarianism flows from belief that we all 
share a common good. What’s needed to achieve the 
common good, communitarians insist, is sacrifice. 
But some parts of the community have to show the 
way in giving up their selfish, 
anti-communitarian habits.For communitarians, the 
first responders must be the poor. For black 
communitarians like Bill Cosby and Barack Obama it’s chiefly the black poor.

Obama insists that the key to change is not 
resistance to oppression; not a battle against 
the exploitation of workers; or against 
institutional racism, or the domination of 
unaccountable financial elites; or the interests promoting gentrification.

These all fade away compared to the need for 
community self-help, strengthening the community 
by building strong families; by the need to 
convince the African American poor to pull up 
their socks. And stop engaging in anti-social 
behavior. Speaking recently to a group of black 
legislators, Obama said, “In Chicago, sometimes 
when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I 
say, ‘You know what would be a good economic 
development plan for our community would be if we 
made sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.’” (1)

In fact, as Obama knows very well, for most of 
the last two decades in Chicago there’s been in 
place a very specific economic development plan. 
The plan was to make the South Side like the 
North Side. Which is the same kind of project as 
making the land north of Central Park like the 
land south of Central Park. The North Side is the 
area north of the Loop -- Chicago’s midtown 
central business district -- where rich white 
people live; they root for the Cubs. Their 
neighborhood is called the Gold Coast.

For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have 
lived on the South Side close to Chicago’s 
factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular 
Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they 
lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville -- 
and it’s the largest concentration of African 
American people in the U.S. -- nearly 600,000 
people -- about twice the size of Harlem.

In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were 
ripped through the black belt, demolishing 
private housing on the south east side. The 
argument then was that the old low-rise private 
housing was old and unsuitable. Black people 
needed to be housed in new, high-rise public 
housing which the city built just east of the Dan 
Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the 
Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as 
the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in 
America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor 
lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began 
to be made that the public housing needed to be 
demolished and the people moved back into private housing.

For a while, the election of the city’s first 
black Mayor, Harold Washington, blocked the 
demolition. But Washington died of a heart attack 
while in office, and after a brief interregnum, 
the Mayor’s office was filled in 1989 by Richard 
M. Daley -- whose father had carried out the 
first urban renewal. Daley was his father’s son 
in many ways. By1993, with subsidies from the 
Clinton Administration’s HOPE VI program, the 
public housing units began to be destroyed. And 
by 2000 he’d put in place something called The 
Plan for Transformation. It targeted tens of 
thousands of remaining units. With this proviso: 
That African Americans had to get 50% of the 
action -- white developers had to have black 
partners; there had to be black contractors. And 
Daley chose African Americans -- as his top 
administrators and planners for the clearances, 
demolition and re-settlement. Americans were 
prominent in developing and rehabbing the new 
housing for the refugees from the demolished 
projects­who were re-settled in communities to 
the south like Englewood, Roseland and Harvey. 
Altogether the Plan for Transformation involved 
the largest demolition of public housing in 
American history, affecting about 45,000 
people­in neighborhoods where eight of the 20 
poorest census tracts in the U.S. were located. (2)

But what does this all have to do with Obama? 
Just this: the area demolished included the 
communities that Obama represented as a state 
senator; and the top black administrators, 
developers and planners were people like Valerie 
Jarrett -- who served as a member of the Chicago 
Planning Commission. And Martin Nesbitt who 
became head of the CHA. Nesbitt serves as Obama 
campaign finance treasurer; Jarrett as co-chair 
of the Transition Team. The other co-chair is 
William Daley, the Mayor’s brother and the 
Midwest chair of JP Morgan Chase -- an 
institution deeply involved in the transformation 
of inner-city neighborhoods through its support 
for what financial institutions call 
“neighborhood revitalization” and neighborhood activists call gentrification.

If we examine more carefully the interests that 
Obama represents; if we look at his core 
financial supporters; as well as his inmost 
circle of advisors, we’ll see that they represent 
the primary activists in the demolition movement 
and the primary real estate beneficiaries of this 
transformation of public housing projects into 
condos and townhouses: the profitable creep of 
the Central Business District and elite 
residential neighborhoods southward; and the 
shifting of the pile of human misery about three 
miles further into the South Side and the south suburbs.

Obama’s political base comes primarily from 
Chicago FIRE -- the finance, insurance and real 
estate industry. And the wealthiest families -- 
the Pritzkers, the Crowns and the Levins. But 
it’s more than just Chicago FIRE. Also within 
Obama’s inner core of support are allies from the 
non-profit sector: the liberal foundations, the 
elite universities, the non-profit community 
developers and the real estate reverends who 
produce market rate housing with tax breaks from 
the city and who have been known to shout from 
the pulpit “give us this day our Daley, Richard Daley bread.” (3)

Aggregate them and what emerges is a 
constellation of interests around Obama that I 
call “Friendly FIRE.” Fire power disguised by the 
camouflage of community uplift; augmented by the 
authority of academia; greased by billions in 
foundation grants; and wired to conventional FIRE 
by the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1995.

And yet friendly FIRE is just as deadly as the 
conventional FIRE that comes from bankers and 
developers that we’re used to ducking from. It’s 
the whole condominium of interests whose 
advancement depends on the elimination of poor 
blacks from the community and their replacement 
by white people and -- at least temporarily -- by 
the black middle class -- who’ve gotten sub-prime 
mortgages -- in a kind of redlining in reverse.

This “friendly FIRE” analysis stands in 
opposition to the two main themes of the McCain 
attack ads. Either they try to frighten people 
into believing that Obama is a dangerous leftist 
who hangs with Bill Ayers the former Weather 
person; or they assert he’s a creature of the corrupt Chicago machine.

There are a few slivers of meat floating in this 
beggar’s broth of charges. Yes,Obama worked with 
Ayers, but not the Ayers who blew up buildings; 
but the Ayers who was able to bring down $50 
million from the Walter Annenberg foundation, 
leveraging it to create a $120 million a 
non-profit organization with Obama as its head. 
Annenberg was a billionaire friend of Ronald 
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Why would he give 
mega-millions to a terrorist? Perhaps because he 
liked Ayers’ new politics. Ayer’s initiative grew 
out of the backlash against the 1985 Chicago 
teachers’ strike; his plan promoted “the 
community” as a third force in education politics 
between the union and the city administration. 
Friendly FIRE wants the same kind of education 
reform as FIRE: the forces that brought about 
welfare reform have now moved onto education 
reform and for the same reason: crippling the 
power of the union will reduce teachers’ 
salaries, which will cut real estate taxes which will raise land values.

Is Obama a minion of Richie Daley? It’s true that 
Obama has never denounced Daley. He actually 
endorsed him for Mayor in 2007. Even after 
federal convictions of Daley’s top aides. After 
the minority hiring scandals. And after the Hired 
Truck scandal which showed that the Daley machine 
shared its favors with The Outfit.

But the Daley dynasty has expanded far beyond 
wise guy industries. The Mayor’s brother, William 
Daley, who served on Obama’s transition team, 
also serves now as a top executive of J.P. Morgan 
Chase. He heads the Midwest region. And chairs 
J.P. MorganChase Foundation, the core of friendly 
FIRE. Here’s an excerpt from a recent report

":…[we] achieved significant progress toward our 
10-year pledge to invest $800billion in low- and 
moderate income communities in the U.S. -- the 
largest commitment by any bank focused on 
mortgages, small-business lending and community 
development. In 2006, we committed $87 billion, 
with total investment to date of $241 billion in 
the third year of the program.

"Played a leadership role in the creation of The 
New York Acquisition Fund, along with 15 lenders 
and in conjunction with six foundations and the 
City of New York.The Fund is a $230 million 
initiative to finance the acquisition of land and 
buildings to be developed and/or preserved for affordable housing.” (4)

It’s also true that key Black members of the 
Obama inner circle are Daley Administration 
alumnae -- but they’ve moved up -- now they’re 
part of Chicago FIRE.  Like Martin Nesbitt. Obama 
is Nesbitt’s son’s godfather. He’s the African 
American chairman of the CHA. But his principal 
occupation is the vice presidency of the Pritzker 
Realty group. Although they’re not well known 
outside of Chicago, the Pritzkers rank among the 
richest families in the U.S. There are ten 
Pritzkers among the Forbes 400: Thomas is the 
richest at 2.3 billion. Anthony and J.B. are next 
at $2.2 billion; Penny in fourth, at $2.1 
billion­Daniel, James, Gigi, John, Karen, and Linda weigh in with $1.9 billion.

Penny is finance chair of the Obama campaign. 
Martin is the treasurer. Penny Pritzker herself 
has had a rocky career as a commercial banker. In 
1991, she founded something called the Superior 
Bank of Chicago which pioneered in sub-prime 
lending to minorities. Superior was an early 
casualty of the sub-prime meltdown, though, 
crashing in 2001 when it was seized by the FDIC. 
Depositors filed a civil suit against Penny 
charging that Superior was a racketeering 
organization. The government charged that 
Superior paid out hundreds of millions of 
dividends to the Pritzkers and another family 
while the bank was essentially broke. There was a 
complex settlement in which the Pritzkers were 
forced to pay hundreds of millions in penalties; 
but the agreement contained provisions that may 
enable the Pritzkers to earn hundreds of 
millions. Notwithstanding the Superior bank 
disaster, Penny is being touted as Obama’s next Secretary of Commerce.

Valerie Jarrett is another black real estate 
executive. Described as “the other side of 
Barack’s brain,” (5) she also served as finance 
chair during his successful 2004 U.S. Senate 
campaign. Jarrett was Daley’s deputy chief of 
staff – that was her job when she hired Michelle 
Obama. Eventually Daley made her the head of city 
planning. But Jarrett doesn’t work for Daley 
anymore. She’s CEO of David Levin’s Habitat -- 
one of the largest property managers in Chicago 
-- and the court-appointed overseer of CHA 
projects. (6) Habitat also managed Grove Parc, 
the scandal-ridden project in Englewood that left 
Section 8 tenants, mostly refugees from 
demolished public housing projects, without heat 
in the winter but inundated with rats. Grove Parc 
was developed by Tony Rezko, who’s white. And his 
long-time partner Allison Davis, who’s black.

Let’s look at Rezko and then Davis. It was 
Rezko’s ability to exploit relationships with 
influential blacks -- including Muhammad Ali -- 
that enabled him to become one of Chicago’s 
preeminent cockroach capitalists. Altogether, 
Rezko wound up developing over 1,000 apartments 
with state and city money. There was more to the 
Obama-Rezko relationship than the empty lot in 
Kenwood. Rezko raised over $250,000 for Obama’s 
state senate campaign. While Obama was a state 
senator he wrote letters in support of Rezko’s 
applications for development funds. But Obama 
ignored the plight of Rezko’s tenants who complained to Obama’s office. (7)

Rezko’s Grove Parc partner, Allison Davis, was a 
witness in the Rezko trial, he’s pretty 
radioactive too. But you could see why Rezko 
wanted to hook up with him. Davis was the senior 
partner in Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a 
small, black law firm, where Obama worked for 
nearly a decade. As the editor of the Harvard Law 
Review, Obama could have worked anywhere. Why did he choose the Davis firm?

Davis had been a noted civil rights attorney and 
a progressive critic of the first Daley machine. 
But in 1980 Davis got a call from the Ford 
Foundation’s poorly known, but immensely 
influential, affiliate LISC -- the Local 
Initiatives Support Corporation -- that had just 
been founded. LISC, whose present chair is 
Citigroup’s Robert Rubin, connects small, mainly 
minority community non-profits with big 
foundation grants and especially with bank loans 
and tax credit-driven equity. LISC wanted to 
co-opt Davis in their ghetto redevelopment 
program. He agreed and the Davis firm came to 
specialize in handling legal work for non-profit 
community development firms. Eventually Davis 
left the firm to go into partnership with Tony Rezko.

Meanwhile, Obama did legal work for the 
Rezko-Davis partnership. And for Community 
Development Organizations like Woodlawn 
Organization. In 1994, the LATimes reports, Obama 
appeared in Cook County court on behalf of 
Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., 
defending it against a suit by the city, which 
alleged that the company failed to provide heat 
for low-income tenants on the South Side during 
the winter. There were several cases of this 
type, but as the Times observes, Obama doesn’t 
mention them in Dreams from My Father. (9)

In the 1960s, under the leadership of Arthur M. 
Brazier, Bishop of the Apostolic Church of God, 
Woodlawn gained a reputation as Chicago’s 
outstanding Saul Alinsky-style community 
organization. Mainly, TWO [The Woodlawn 
Organization] battled the University of Chicago’s 
urban renewal program. But gradually, Brazier’s 
political direction changed. Now TWO is 
partnering with UC in efforts to gentrify 
Woodlawn. When Barack Obama left Jeremiah 
Wright’s church, he switched to Brazier’s Apostolic Church of God.

Brazier is typical of a much larger group­real 
estate reverends -- who play the Community 
Development game and in the process have acquired 
huge real estate portfolios. But it’s really a 
national phenomenon. Here in New York we have 
Rev. Calvin Butts whose church has a subsidiary, 
the Abyssinian Development Corp. In partnership 
with LISC, the ADC now boasts a portfolio of $500 
million in Harlem property alone. Rev.Floyd Flake 
of the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church 
in Jamaica, Queens has a sizeable portfolio of commercial property too.

Chicago’s disciples of development include Wilbur 
Daniel. He’s the Pastor of Antioch Missionary 
Baptist Church in Englewood who really did 
exclaim “Give us this day our Daley bread,” 
meaning free land and free capital for real 
estate development. Daniel’s prayers were 
answered in 2001, when with Daley’s help, Antioch 
was chosen to be the lead church in Fannie Mae’s 
$55 billion House Chicago plan for the redevelopment of the South Side.

How has Obama earned the support and allegiance 
of friendly FIRE? Where does he stand on the Plan 
for Transformation? Generally speaking, he’s been 
careful not to leave too many footprints. If you 
google Obama and public housing, nothing comes 
up. But in1995, a year before he ran successfully 
for state senate seat from South Side, in Dreams 
from My Father he wrote about his encounters with 
Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama says he was impressed 
by Wright’s emphasis on the unity of the black 
community. But he’s a little skeptical of too 
broad a unity; of achieving unity without 
conflict. He says, “Would the interest in 
maintaining such unity allow Reverend Wright to 
take a forceful stand on the latest proposals to 
reform public housing?” (Here he’s referring to 
Clinton’s Hope VI -- that provided matching 
federal money for the demolition of public 
housing. And the corresponding local initiatives, 
which culminated in the Plan for Transformation. 
“And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a 
stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage 
with real power and risk genuine conflict, then 
what chance would there be in holding the lrger community intact?” (10)

I have to stop now and put Karnak’s envelope to 
my forehead. What we see is that the Chicago core 
of the Obama coalition is made up of blacks 
who’ve moved up by moving poor blacks out of the 
community. And very wealthy whites who’ve 
advanced their community development agenda by 
hiring blacks. Will this be the pattern for the 
future in an Obama administration? I can’t read 
the envelope. But I do believe that if we want to 
disrupt the pattern of the past we have to make 
some distinctions: between the change they 
believe in and the change we believe in; between 
our interests and theirs; between a notion of 
community that scapegoats the poor and one that 
respects their human rights -- one of which is 
not to be the object of ethnic cleaning. Between 
Hope VI and genuine human hope.

Footnotes:
1. Perry Bacon Jr.,“Obama Reaches Out with Tough Love,”
Washington Post, May 3, 2007,p. 
A01.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202813_pf.html 


2. Pam Belluck, “End of a Ghetto, A special 
report: Razing the Slums to Rescue theResidents.”
New York Times, September 6, 
1998.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E0D7173EF935A3575AC0A96E958260 


3. John Kass, “The New Mayor Daley,” Chicago 
Tribune Sunday Magazine. August 25,1996.

4.http://www.jpmorganchase.com/cm/cs?pagename=Chase/Href&urlname=jpmc/community 


5.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-sweet/valerie-jarrett-steps-up-_b_65350.html 
[back]

6. Jarrett’s father was Robert Taylor, head of 
CHA, after whom a dozen of the nowdemolished projects were named.

7.http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/425305,CST-NWS-obama13.article

8. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/06/nation/na-obamalegal6

9. Ibid.

10. Dreams, p.286.


Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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