The Education of Two Con Artists
All the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can’t see.1
—Gang leader Chotta Shakeel, in
Suketu Mehta, Maximum City
It’s one thing to pull off a con from outside the government; it’s quite another to turn the government itself into a con operation. Cons are not new to American government. At the local level, Tammany Hall was a racket. The Daley machine in Chicago was a racket. Other cities have had equivalent rackets. And even at the national level, we have seen how government cons its citizens through shakedown schemes that are sold through false advertising and false promises.
Social Security, for instance, is marketed as a program to enable people to save for their own retirement. People put money into the program while they work, and collect benefits when they retire. One might imagine that each American has a Social Security account in his name, in which his savings accumulate, and then he has access to that account at retirement age.
Sounds reasonable, right? It is reasonable. Yet this is not what Social Security is. This is not how it was designed. Rather, Social Security is a scheme in which working Americans put in money that is paid out now to older Americans, so that the system has no accumulated funds to provide for the retirement of the people who are currently paying into it. The government’s obligation to future retirees is called an “unfunded liability.” Between Social Security, Medicare, and federal pensions, our government has around $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
President Franklin Roosevelt designed Social Security in such a way—he boasted—that no future politician could undo it. In effect, the whole program is a Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi was an Italian who came to the United States in the early twentieth century. In 1920, he caused a sensation by starting a new type of investment company. He raised money from investors promising to pay them exorbitant returns. Some of his bonds pledged 50 percent interest payable every three months; others promised to double your money in six months. His promises attracted hordes of new investors, and he would pay the old investors their interest out of the funds put in by the new ones. But he had no money to pay those new investors. He simply accumulated his “unfunded liabilities.” Ultimately the racket was exposed and Ponzi was arrested. He served prison time and was eventually deported back to Italy.2
Social Security is based on the Ponzi principle. It pays existing retirees out of the seed corn from existing workers. It does not have the money to pay those existing workers. When the time comes, it will figure out what to do with them. Millions of Americans are paying into a fund not because they want to but because they have to. They are doing so in the expectation that their government will eventually provide for them—that government has an obligation to look after them when they need it. Little do they realize that government has no such obligation. Promises, after all, are only promises.
Why design a program this way? The answer is that it advances the purpose of progressive government, which is to establish an empire of control over the lives of the citizens. Progressive government seeks to make citizens dependent on the state, and then to ensure that progressives are elected to run the state. Social Security advances both objectives.
Ponzi went to prison, but FDR is absurdly lionized. And FDR’s prediction proved correct. Progressives run for office as the champions of Social Security. Progressives viciously attack any politician who exposes the financial irresponsibility or speaks out against the Ponzi scheme as being “against Social Security” and “against seniors.” The Ponzi scheme becomes more precarious each year, but it’s still going on.
Hillary Clinton attempted another con in the early 1990s, but it failed. Barack Obama finally pulled it off, in a slightly different form. The con is called Obamacare. As with Social Security, the health care law was offered in response to a genuine problem—actually two genuine problems. What were the genuine problems? They were, first, that health care costs too much in America, and second, that several million Americans who wanted health insurance could not afford it. Clearly these were two aspects of the same problem, because health insurance premiums were unaffordable to many because they had risen in tandem with rising health care costs.
So why does American health care cost so much? The main reason is that the person receiving the service is not the one paying for the service. Imagine if you could go to Safeway or Giant, fill your cart with food, and then have someone else pay for it. Obviously you would get all kinds of stuff you don’t really need. Obviously the food chain would charge whatever it felt like, and you wouldn’t care, because you would not be the one paying.
Now imagine further that the third party paying for the food was itself relatively indifferent to what it was charged. It raised its money through premiums paid for by millions of customers, and it could simply pass the cost to those customers in the form of higher premiums. This would be a scenario virtually set up to ensure runaway food costs. We don’t have it for food, but we do have it for health care.
The good news is that this problem has an obvious solution. The solution is to redesign the system in such a way that the person who receives the service pays for the service. This would ensure that there is real bargaining and real competition. That alone would dramatically lower costs. Government could help those who still couldn’t afford insurance—it could provide, for example, catastrophic insurance to people below the poverty line. Catastrophic coverage costs a lot less than full medical coverage because catastrophic events are relatively rare. So this would be a modest program with a relatively modest price tag, utterly different than what Hillary wanted and what Obama eventually got.
Obamacare is a program designed to shift control of the health care industry from the private sector to the public sector, from doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies to the federal government. The program was sold by Obama feigning outrage over insurance companies refusing to grant insurance to people with “preexisting conditions.” But this is the same as an insurance company not granting fire insurance to a guy whose house has already burned down. The whole point of insurance is to share the risk before the catastrophe occurs, not to have a catastrophe and then get other people to pay for your losses.
Having castigated the insurance companies to gain public support, Obama then turned to the insurance companies to get their support for Obamacare. This might seem like an uphill, if not impossible, task. Yet Obama pulled it off. He managed to get many corporations and most insurance companies to support his health care plan and even to pay for ads promoting it.
Why would corporations and insurance companies do that? Why would they support the man who publicly excoriated them, and consent to a health care takeover scheme by the government? In the case of corporations, Obama assured them that the law would enable them to drop employees from their health care coverage so that those people would then be forced to sign up for the Obamacare health exchange.
Obama also informed the insurance companies that a big part of the law was to force Americans who didn’t want to buy health insurance to do so. In other words, Obamacare guaranteed the insurance companies millions of new customers! Obama also assured the insurance industry that by giving millions of other people the right to free insurance, the federal government would be on the hook to pay for all those premiums. Insurance companies would give up some control to the state, but in exchange they would get bigger profits that would be, in effect, guaranteed by the state. Corporations could reduce their health care costs by dumping workers and turning over their health care problems to the state. It was a worthwhile deal for these profit-making entities. That’s why they lined up behind Obamacare.
The insurance companies recognized, of course, that Obamacare was a rip-off. But they also knew the target of the rip-off wasn’t them. It was the American taxpayer. Obamacare was a scheme to extract more money from the taxpayer through a combination of higher taxes and mandates. Basically the ordinary American would pay more for health care and get less in return.
This rip-off relied on a series of blatant lies. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” “The average family will save more than $2,400 per year.” “Health care costs will decline.” “Health care premiums will go down.” “Everyone in this country will now have health insurance.” Even though Obama kept saying these things, none of them was true. These statements were simply part of the con man’s “pitch.”
For progressives, Obamacare was a prize. The prize was control of the huge American health care system, representing virtually one-sixth of the whole economy. Obamacare put progressives in charge of more than 10 million doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and technicians and support staff. Obamacare gave progressives control of more than five thousand hospitals and almost a million hospital beds. The system included hospitals and also drug companies, insurance companies, and the producers of hospital equipment, not to mention research and educational institutions. Obamacare was a heist with a very big payoff.
A heist like this is not easy to pull off; it requires extensive theft education. This chapter is about the education of two Alinskyite con artists, both of whom studied the Godfather’s techniques. The first one happens to be the president of the United States, and the second one an aspiring president of the United States. Is it possible we will have two thieves in a row as custodians of the U.S. Treasury? Unlikely though it seems, this may be the case, and the two, who despise each other, are nevertheless working together to achieve common goals. In other words, we have a situation of two Alinsky acolytes attempting to set up a con man’s regime. Here we explore how they met their Godfather, what they learned from him, and what distinctive elements they themselves brought to the con man’s trade.
Con men abound in my confinement center, and the younger ones quickly attach themselves to mentors. A young black guy, Flip, was undoubtedly the most charismatic guy in the confinement center. He was extremely tall, around six feet six inches, and usually dressed in sports attire, as if he was getting ready to play basketball. In a society where guys pull their pants down to reveal their underpants, Flip had his pants pulled almost down to his knees! He also wore legible underpants—underpants with all kinds of writing—and I found it interesting to try to read what messages they conveyed.
Flip went around telling everyone who would listen that he was a basketball star who averaged “twenty-eight baskets and fourteen rebounds.” He showed little respect for the confinement center staff, frequently taunting them with lines like, “I got a thing for you, Miss Chavez” and “Hey, hurry up and check me in, homie, I gotta make a doo-doo.” He complained relentlessly about the place, and on one occasion, in a fit of rage, he tried to rip a thermostat out of the wall because he wasn’t able to adjust the temperature.
Flip hated the food in confinement, contrasting it unfavorably with what he ate in prison. “This food is like sh*t, man. At Taft, I ate better than I do at home. I had Stromboli. I had meat loaf. One time they had banana bread. I ate the best carrot cake I ever tasted. In the commissary they got carnitas, they got avocados, they got peaches.” Flip insisted, “If I couldn’t get out of this hellhole during the day, I’d ask to go back to prison.” Flip portrayed himself as a real ladies’ man, seducing women of all races and ages whenever he was let loose.
Flip was a young scammer who was into everything: petty burglary, car theft, growing and selling marijuana, even a little male prostitution. He developed a strange, fascinating relationship with the oldest guy in the confinement center, Hickey. While Flip was in his late teens or early twenties, Hickey was around seventy-five. He wore the same clothes every day—brown pants, brown shirt, very thin belt, black leather shoes—and walked with a limp. Hickey was almost bald and wore glasses with distinctive frames—the frames had mirrors along the sides, so that you could see yourself in them. Hickey was an institution man if there ever was one. He had been in prison most of his life. Hickey was an old con artist, a confidence man, who had done it all, from counterfeit money to real estate scams to selling “vitamins” that had no nutritional value.
The rumor was that Hickey had killed someone, way back in the early 1970s, and done a long sentence. I wasn’t scared of him; no one was; clearly now he posed no threat to anyone. Indeed his sole mode of violence these days is his rhetoric. Hickey’s specialty is to bark epithets at other guys from his bunk, when everyone is trying to sleep.
“You young bucks are making too much noise!” yells Hickey, making the most noise of all. “This isn’t the jungle, remember? An old man is trying to sleep!”
From which a chorus of insults comes back at him—“Shut the f*ck up, old man!”—and he responds heartily, “I ain’t shutting up, you m*therf*ckers!” I put on my earphones. Eventually the racket subsides and everyone dozes off.
Flip and Hickey, I noticed, became inseparable right away. They ate together, did weights together, and played dominoes every evening. Even so, the relationship between Flip and Hickey was not entirely harmonious. The following exchange, which I noted from a recent dominoes game, could be heard by the entire top-floor dormitory. It was punctuated by the crashing sound of dice being slammed on the table.
Flip: It’s game time, sh*tface!
Hickey: Leave the winning to me. You just remember to wash your ugly ass every now and then.
Flip: F*ck you, old man! You are going to die soon! Good riddance, you stupid piece of sh*t!
Hickey: Goat-smelling ignorant m*therf*cker! Somebody raped your mama and got you! What a dumdum!
Flip: This ain’t over, homie! I’m going to kick your ass so badly you won’t be limping no more. You going to be in a wheelchair.
Hickey: Count my money, n*gger. And you can eat this while you at it.
Flip: Somebody bring a wheelchair for this old m*therf*cker.
Hickey: Lowlife African, even the monkeys climb the trees when they see you.
Certainly I found this dialogue of anthropological interest, both in terms of the vocabulary and the underlying concepts. But at first I didn’t know its purpose. In the subsequent weeks, I realized: this is a surrogate father-son relationship. Through the peculiar argot of insults, Flip had found in Hickey an older guy who knew the system and could initiate him in its labyrinthine methods. Flip didn’t just want to survive; he wanted to thrive, both on the inside and on the outside. He thought that maybe Hickey could help him do that.
Over time I saw that Hickey was actually Flip’s hero. The young con artist was actually modeling himself on the old con artist, even to the extent of developing a slight limp himself. And while I doubted that Flip could actually write a book, if he could I would not be entirely surprised if he wrote one called Dreams from My Father.
At first glance, comparing the president of the United States, Barack Obama Jr., with a part-time prostitute and street hustler like Flip may seem, well, a bit flippant. How can I liken the relationship between Barack Jr. and his father, Barack Sr., to the relationship between two foul-mouthed cons?
A good deal of the scholarly writing on Obama might make this seem implausible. In fact, my own previous work on Obama makes the analogy seem strained. But during that research I missed an angle about Obama that is needed to complete our understanding. Once we fill in those blanks here, we’ll see that the two Obamas are not so distant from Flip and Hickey.
In my two previous books on Obama, I stressed his affinity with his dad, how he absorbed the dreams of his father. This wasn’t some bizarre theory I made up; I got it directly from Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams from My Father, which conveys its main thesis in the title. I previously argued that while Obama saw that his dad was a failure, and refused to emulate his personality, he nevertheless embraced his Kenyan father’s anticolonial ideology. Consequently Obama has sought to diminish America’s wealth and power out of a moral commitment to global redistribution. My thesis was that Obama wants America to go down so that other countries can come up.
As an immigrant, I found this despicable, even abominable. I refused to believe that the American people, even Democrats, signed up for this. And over his two terms Obama has shown himself consistent in pursuing these objectives. My predictions about Obama have all come true.
Even so, I now see that I got an important part of my Obama story wrong. Obama’s relationship to his dad was not one of ideological emulation; it was also one of the junior scam artist following the trail of the senior artist.
Obama came to admire his father from a very young age. At that point he was naïve: he aspired to become just like dad, a lion of a man, a figure of history. When Obama became a young adult, however, he discovered his father was no lion of a man, no figure of history. Rather, he was a petty con man. His cons involved an unending series of poses, impostures, and lies to make himself into something he was not, for the purpose of getting to America, or getting others to pay his bills, or seducing women, or advancing in his career, or attracting social admiration and prestige for things he had not done. While Barack Obama Sr. had some early successes in pulling off his scams, eventually they came crashing down on him, and he died a bitter, broken man.
Obama now realized that his father was a failed con man. Yet this did not cause Obama to give up on his childhood dreams. Obama still aspired to follow in his father’s path. He decided to become a con man himself. And part of this involved embracing the con man’s pitch, which was anticolonialism. This pitch was marketed as a “dream.” In fact, it was less a dream than a scheme.
From the outset of his career, young Obama put that scheme to work. He knew, however, that he would have to redesign his father’s con. He had no intention of being a petty con man. He wasn’t going to do this for bigamy, social exhibitionism, or free drinks; he set his sights on the summits of wealth and power. Moreover, he was determined that while his father had failed, he would succeed. And one must admit that he has.
Obama was first exposed to the scams of his father when Barack Sr. visited his son in Hawaii. Obama was ten years old. Already he was quite the little con artist. “I explained to a group of boys that my father was a prince. ‘My grandfather, see, he’s a chief. It’s sort of like the king of the tribe, you know . . . like the Indians. So that makes my father a prince. He’ll take over when my grandfather dies.’ ” When the boys asked him if he were next in line, Obama Jr. responded, “ ‘Well . . . if I want to, I could. It’s sort of complicated, see, ’cause the tribe is full of warriors. Like Obama. . . . the name means Burning Spear. The men in our tribe all want to be chief, so my father has to settle these feuds before I can come.’ ”
But this was youthful braggadocio. Obama was actually worried that his father would embarrass him. He had images of poverty and primitivism and mud huts in his mind. So when his teacher invited his father to speak at school, Obama was filled with dread. “I spent that night and all of the next day trying to suppress thoughts of the inevitable: the faces of my classmates when they heard about mud huts, all my lies exposed, the painful jokes afterward. Each time I remembered, my body squirmed as if it had received a jolt to the nerves.”
Yet Barack Sr. wowed the teacher and the class by arriving in spectacular African robes and regaling the group with fables of the Luo tribe, punctuated with a fantastic story of how as a young boy he had to kill a lion to prove his manhood. “When he finished,” Obama Jr. wrote, “Miss Hefty was absolutely beaming with pride. All my classmates applauded heartily. . . . The bell rang for lunch, and Mr. Eldredge came up to me, ‘You’ve got a pretty impressive father.’ The ruddy faced boy who had asked about cannibalism said, ‘Your dad is pretty cool.’ ” Young Obama was blown away, and right then, right there, he resolved to become like the great one. He had witnessed the lion slayer, and he wanted himself to learn the secret to Barack Sr.’s power.3
In fact, Barack Sr. was no lion slayer; he was actually a lion-size prevaricator. We see this pattern by briefly following his career. He said he came to America on the great airlift that brought promising African students to study here through an effort pioneered by President Kennedy. Proving himself to be his father’s son, Obama Jr. repeated that fable when he was running for president. In fact, as the son knew, the father had taken the competitive examination for the airlift and failed. He needed a first-division score and he got only a third-division score.
Robert Stephens, the cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Information Service, interviewed Barack Sr. and remembers he tried to lie about his performance. “He really prevaricated about his school record,” Stephens said. “He was a very good talker and tried to talk me out of it, but there was nothing I could do. He just did not have the grades.”4 Barack Sr. was rejected for the airlift.
Then Barack Sr. set about getting to America by an alternative route. He spent months charming two American missionary women, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney, to help him secure admission at an American university and to help him pay for his education. Mooney, who was unmarried at the time, was entranced by the young African, especially after he showed a personal interest in her and frequently took her dancing. She wrote him a letter of recommendation to several American colleges, and later, when he was admitted to the University of Hawaii, contributed a substantial fraction of her salary to cover Barack Sr.’s first-year expenses. Later Barack Sr. would try again to extract money out of her, but by this time she was married with stepchildren and was unable to help.
Barack Sr.’s own marital history was checkered, and also a testament to his con man skills. He had married a woman named Kezia in Kenya and left his family for America when she had borne him a child, with another on the way. Shortly after enrolling in school, Barack Sr. seduced a white teenage woman, Stanley Ann Dunham. He told her nothing about his family in Kenya. Soon he impregnated her, and Barack Jr. was conceived. At this point, Barack Sr. convinced Stanley Ann to marry him. His marriage to this American wife made Barack Sr. a bigamist, since he was now married to two women at the same time.
For him, however, it was no big deal. In fact, at one point he even conned Stanley Ann into believing that he was obligated under Luo tradition to take other wives in Kenya and have children by them, or else he would lose his position in the tribe. Only later, she found out that was untrue. Theirs was in any case an abbreviated courtship; indeed, Barack Sr. abandoned his wife even before Barack Jr. was born.
Then Barack Sr. got a scholarship to Harvard, where he told the authorities that he could manage financially because his wife had decided to put up their child, Barack Jr., for adoption. Once they bought his story, Barack Sr. settled in at Harvard and took up with yet another woman, Ruth Baker. By this time he was divorced from Stanley Ann but not from Kezia. He married Baker, and took her back with him to Africa, where he had a son by her, and where he also reunited with his first wife, Kezia, and had two more children with her.
Later in life Barack Sr.’s mobility was hampered because of his habit of drunk driving, which got him into several accidents, including one severe one in which both his legs had to be amputated and replaced by iron rods. This did not, however, undermine his courtship style, because he impregnated his fourth wife, Jael Otieno, in that condition, producing another child, named George. Altogether Barack Sr. had four wives—normally two at a time—and altogether he produced eight known children. Polygamy, he said, was customary for the Luo. But the Luo also customarily look after their wives and children. Barack Sr. did not. He mistreated all his wives and neglected all his children.
At Harvard, Barack Sr. got his nickname “Double Double” because he liked to order a double Scotch and tell the waiter, as soon as it was delivered, “Another double.” He also became known for having others foot the bill, which they often did, because he was such a suave talker. Eventually, Harvard became suspicious of his falsifications and so did the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Harvard refused to renew his enrollment, and Barack Sr. was forced to return to Kenya.
Still, there as in America, he continued to tell his stories, which were amusing but utterly ridiculous. As one of his friends, Nyaringo Obure, later recalled, “One story he told over and over was about how when he was a boy he was looking after the family cattle. Suddenly a group of lions appeared and started to attack the cows. Barack pulls out a spear and kills the first lion by stabbing him in the chest. Then he goes for the rest, stab, stab, stab. Of course I knew it was a lie. Another time he said a buffalo attacked one of his relatives. Barack happened to be in the tree overhead and he dropped down on the buffalo’s back and wrestled it to the ground. And so his stories went on and on.”5
Barack Sr. frequently lied about his academic credentials not only to social acquaintances but also while applying for jobs. He said he was a Harvard graduate even though he had not completed his degree and had been effectively deported back to Kenya. He insisted on being called “Dr. Obama” even though he didn’t have a Ph.D. He said he studied under Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow even though Arrow did not arrive at Harvard until several years after Barack Sr. left there. In his work as an economist he would cite certain propositions as proved by his Ph.D. thesis, but when he was asked to substantiate his claims, he could not produce the document; he insisted that burglars had broken into his house and stolen it.
At first Barack Sr.’s lies paid off. He was given promising positions working as an economist in the government. During this time he cultivated a British accent and insisted that people call him “Bearick,” not “Barack.” He also liked to correct other people’s English and insisted that words be pronounced and spelled the British way. He expressed his dissatisfaction to hear bureaucrats speaking to each other in Swahili. He also wore silk suits, drove a green Mercedes, and employed house servants who bowed to him, Japanese-style, when he returned home. All of this may be considered the ego-satisfying rewards of scam artistry, comparable to how Henry Hill felt when he brought his girlfriend to the nightclub.
Alas for Barack Sr., the music soon died. Barack Sr. was eventually fired from every job he held, either due to his chronic drunkenness, irresponsibility in carrying out assignments, or pure deception. While his peers moved up in life, Barack Sr. moved down, being consigned eventually to make-work jobs. Even while his career was languishing and he held relatively low-level positions in government, Barack Sr. became known for impersonating important people so he could be treated as a celebrity. On one occasion, he attended a conference in Ghana where he pretended to be Z. T. Onyonka, the Kenyan minister for economic planning. When the real Onyonka showed up, the organizers thought he was the impostor. Needless to say, Onyonka was not amused and Barack Sr. was severely reprimanded.6
Eventually Obama found himself working for the Kenya Tourism Board, in a low-level post. Even there, he was discovered making unilateral decisions to award tourism contracts without getting proper approval, presumably to benefit people he knew or to get kickbacks. One board member, G. M. Matheka, said that before he joined the tourism board, when he worked in the tourism industry, he had met Obama, who was “posing as deputy general manager,” a post that did not exist.7 Once these deceptions piled up, the tourism board forced Obama to resign and, when he refused, fired him. In 1982, disgraced and virtually broke, Barack Sr. got drunk in a bar in Nairobi and drove his car into a tree, killing himself.
As a child Barack Jr. simply idolized his father, but in his mid-twenties he visited Kenya and, through interactions with his relatives, realized that his father was not any of the things he had imagined him to be. This was a shocking revelation. “I felt as if my world had been turned on its head, as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men,” he wrote in Dreams from My Father. “To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost.”8
But in Africa, Barack Jr. saw that Barack Sr.’s real talent had been as a poser and a fabricator, and that through a skein of lies and disguises he had managed to con various people over the years until the cons were finally exposed. Barack Jr. saw that lying and fakery were actually Barack Sr.’s talismanic secrets. He also figured out that these were precisely the skills he had inherited from his father.
Barack Sr. had huge con man aspirations. In an infamous article that he published in the East Africa Journal he proposed the idea of tax rates as high as 100 percent. “Theoretically,” he said, “there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”9 Barack Jr. seems to have resolved at that point to build on those skills, and also to attempt cons far beyond what his dad could have pulled off, or even imagined. Basically Obama Sr. envisioned confiscating the entire private earnings of the nation and putting it in the hands of the government, which would then be controlled by people like, well, him. Unfortunately this scheme came to nothing, but one can easily envision how it may have inspired his son. Perhaps where the father had failed, the son could succeed.
Back in America, Obama Jr. decided he needed high-level training to pull off his cons. The only place to get such training, he figured out, was Chicago. Obama had no ties to Chicago. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and went to college in California, New York, and Massachusetts. Chicago, however, was the base of the political operative Saul Alinsky. By this time Alinsky was dead but his organization had built a formidable network in the city, with satellite operations in several other cities as well.
Obama visited Chicago several times during his college years before attending Harvard Law School. He didn’t go to Harvard Law to learn how to practice law but rather because, in his words, “it was the perfect place to examine how the power structure works.”10 Upon graduating, he received numerous offers on account of his well-publicized presidency of the Harvard Law Review. Yet Obama turned them all down to return to Chicago. His first job was with an Alinsky community organizing outfit, and it paid $10,000 a year. It was a meager sum even then. Obama didn’t care about the money; he cared about the training. The money, he knew, would come later.
Obama was hired by Jerry Kellman, one of Alinsky’s top deputies. Kellman was delighted to see that Obama was smart, and equally delighted to see that he was black. The Alinsky shakedown operations worked closely with blacks, and Alinsky himself had written, “Native or indigenous leadership is of fundamental importance in the attempt to build a People’s Organization, for without the support and cooperative efforts of native leaders, any such venture is doomed to failure from the very beginning.”11 Obama wasn’t exactly “native” to Chicago, but Kellman was sure that he could form ties with local African American shakedown activists, and he was right.
According to Obama biographer David Remnick, “Kellman may well have played the most influential role in Obama’s life outside of his family.” Later Kellman introduced Obama to other professional Alinskyites, such as Greg Galluzzo and Mike Kruglik. All three were top extortion men who recognized in Obama the potential to equal, or even surpass, the master. From the beginning Kellman saw that Obama wasn’t a slacker; indeed, he brought a certain work ethic to his apprenticeship in the shakedown business. Kellman said of Obama, “He was very disciplined in the way he lived. He wasn’t dating. He was doing his interviews, doing his reports. . . . He was very focused, monkish not in the sense of being a celibate but of holing up and reading.”12
Obama quickly taught himself Alinsky’s shakedown techniques. So good was the student that he soon became a teacher. Obama began to instruct other aspiring community activists in the shakedown technique. We can find online from those days a picture of Obama standing before a blackboard, explaining to a group of attentive acolytes how to use power to extort money and concessions from businesses and government entities. Eventually Obama would become the first Alinskyite to take over the White House.
The first, but perhaps not the last. Hillary Clinton met Saul Alinsky while she was in high school. Hillary had been raised as a “Goldwater girl,” a conservative, but in her teen years she became enamored of a left-leaning Methodist minister who convinced her that capitalism was a system based on theft and injustice. Hillary then became a liberal idealist seeking ways to fight the evil business establishment.
The Methodist minister introduced Hillary to Alinsky, and this is where Hillary’s political education truly began. When Hillary went to Wellesley College she invited Alinsky to speak there. She wrote her senior thesis on him. This is an important document that has not been adequately analyzed. For many years Wellesley kept it under lock and key, hidden from public exposure. Only when sufficient pressure was applied by journalists and others insisting that the document should be made public did the college release the thesis. It is now available on the Web, and makes instructive reading.
Hillary admires Alinsky’s martial rhetoric, quoting him saying, “How do you gain a victory before you have an army? The only method ever devised is guerilla warfare: to avoid a fixed battle where the forces are arrayed and where the new army’s weakness would become visible, and to concentrate instead on hit-and-run tactics designed to gain small but measurable victories.” For Hillary, as for Alinsky, politics is not a contest between friends who disagree about the direction of the country; it is a form of warfare and the other side is an enemy to be vanquished.
Hillary’s thesis is titled “There Is Only the Fight.” The title is a trademark Alinsky phrase that appeals to Hillary because it suggests a move from the politics of idealism to the politics of power. Alinsky convinced Hillary that idealism gets you nowhere; the only way to get somewhere is through power. Hillary recognizes, however, that politics requires a pretense of idealism, or at least an appeal to it. In her thesis she invokes labor leader John Lewis, who was asked to comment on spontaneous labor strikes involving trespassing and seizure of private property. Such lawlessness seemed indefensible, but Lewis declared, “A man’s right to a job transcends the right to private property.” Hillary notices how an appeal to the higher principles of social justice can be used to legitimize conduct that would otherwise be reprehensible.
Alinsky was so impressed by her that when she graduated from Wellesley he offered her a job as a community organizer in his Industrial Areas Foundation. Alinsky himself described this organization as providing “training for professional radicals.”
Hillary, however, turned him down. The reason is that by this time the student had become smarter than the teacher. Hillary figured out two flaws in Alinsky’s approach. “One of the primary problems with the Alinsky model,” she writes, “is that the removal of Alinsky drastically alters the composition.” Hillary sees that Alinsky is a unique character, particularly creative and gifted in the art of outsider shakedown techniques. The Alinsky method, to be most effective, requires Alinsky.
Hillary’s second point is much more profound. She observes that Alinsky relies on neighborhood organization, and she comments that “the territorially-defined community is no longer a workable societal unit.” In other words, people don’t operate through their local aldermen and neighborhood reps anymore. “Accompanying the decline of the traditional neighborhood as a living unit,” Hillary writes, is “the massive centralization of power on the federal level.”13 This, she sees, requires a different type of organization—what we may term the Hillary method.
How does the Hillary method differ from the Alinsky method? Alinsky had insisted that community activists be outsiders, that they use their pitch to recruit allies and threaten the establishment. From this point of view, the “take” would be whatever could be cajoled or extracted from that establishment. Hillary figured out that there was a way to do a bigger con. This con was built on a simple insight: the government has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
Hillary realized that if she could figure out a way to take over the government, she’d have all the powerful instruments of government, from the military to the FBI to the IRS, at her disposal. Today many agencies of government have become militarized, a process that began under George W. Bush but has expanded greatly under the Obama administration. We might expect the FBI, for example, to have its own SWAT teams. But now multiple federal agencies—including the Department of Agriculture, the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Bureau of Land Management, the Railroad Retirement Board, and the National Park Service—all have SWAT teams.
These SWAT teams have access to military equipment, from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers. They break into homes using battering rams and incendiary devices called flash grenades, which blind and deafen anyone in the vicinity. Journalist Radley Balko reports that they are frequently used against nonviolent citizens, in other words, as instruments of terror.14
This is the enforcement apparatus for the legalized thievery that is carried out by progressive government. If you don’t do the state’s bidding, the state is literally ready to kill you. If this seems like an exaggeration, consider a thought experiment. Imagine if I write a letter to the government, saying that I understand it has a scheme called Social Security to help me provide for my retirement. Being an emancipated American, however, I have decided I don’t want it. I am perfectly happy to provide for my own retirement. If my efforts fail and I become dependent when I am old, I will rely on friends and family, or private charity. So I’ve decided to stop paying into Social Security.
If I did this, what would happen? The government would insist I pay, and send me notices with penalties. I would then ignore those notices. Eventually they would come to get me. Seeing armed people approaching my home, I would attempt to defend myself. And this would be no contest: the SWAT teams would take aim and I would be dead. This is the prospect facing every citizen who doesn’t meekly conform to government coercion and pay up.
Here is Hillary’s insight. If you control the militarized apparatus of government, then you have thousands—actually hundreds of thousands—of killers with badges at your disposal. You are then the biggest crime boss in the world. You can use this power to extract money from citizens, against which they are virtually powerless. Imagine the shakedown possibilities! You can also use this force against your enemies, to terrorize them into capitulation or silence. In other words, Hillary transcended Alinsky by shifting the ground of community activism: why be a shakedown artist on the outside when you can be a shakedown artist on the inside? Why try and shake down Fort Knox when there might be a way to take over Fort Knox?
Hillary set her sights not on this retail store or that local government; she set her sights on the wealth of the nation. Her con would be of a kind never previously imagined. To pull off this type of a con, Hillary realized, the pitch would have to change; it would have to be a pitch to voters. The con would be constructed within democratic politics; it would involve exploiting discontent to recruit political allies to empower the con artist to pull off the biggest heist ever imagined: theft of the accumulated wealth of America. Why try to extract money and benefits from corporations and government when you can use government power—including the FBI, the police, and the IRS—to extract money and benefits from the private sector and from the taxpayer? Hillary, in other words, figured out a way to steal America.
But Hillary had a problem: she needed a pitchman. Obama didn’t; he was his own pitchman. Hillary, however, was not a gifted snake-oil salesman like Obama. So she found Bill, a Rhodes scholar who dodged the draft by skipping off to Oxford. Hillary met Bill at Yale, where he was the fast-talking charmer. She saw that behind his infectious charm Bill had a burning ambition, but it was nothing more than a personal hunger to be popular. To summarize Bill’s personality I recall the self-absorbed devil Belial in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds, timorous and slothful.”15
Hillary saw that Bill also enjoyed the attention of the ladies. Satisfying these appetites seemed for Bill to be the height of his aspirations. In exchange for tolerating his affairs, he would be her lifelong pitchman, and she could accompany him as his “roadie” until he made it big—really big. Then, perhaps, it would be her turn.
Hillary did have a pitch to make. She had to pitch Bill on this arrangement. And Bill was smart: he went for it. He married the plain girl with the heavy spectacles because he recognized that she could take him to places where he couldn’t go himself. Once there, he would have all the power and all the money and all the chicks he wanted.
She, for her part, would have to put up with Bill’s bimbos; ideally he would have the discipline to be discreet about them, but if they ever surfaced she would have to cooperate in discrediting them and shutting them up. If this became impossible she would have to stick by him and play the long-suffering wife. This would be her pitch to the American people, and if she played her role well, some of them might even feel sorry for her. So when Bill’s bimbos started surfacing, Hillary knew she had to do her part. She did it unhesitatingly. This is what she signed up for; it was just part of the deal.
Hillary has never openly confessed to “the deal,” although in a 1979 interview—granted while Bill was still governor of Arkansas—she came very close. Asked about strains in her marriage on account of Bill’s reputation for womanizing, Hillary was remarkably nonchalant. “We have, for me, an excellent marriage,” she said, conceding, however, that “I’m not sure that it would suit other people.” Even so, she added, all marriages have their own strains “and each couple has to work out an accommodation for whatever reasons there may be.” As for her and Bill, “We’re worked out ours and we’re very happy.” Asked if she ever had anguish or second thoughts about Bill’s conduct in the marriage, she responded emphatically, “No, no, never, never.”16
Bill and Hillary both detest Obama. They regard him as a small-time hood. From Hillary’s point of view, he is an Alinsky wannabe while she not only mastered Alinsky’s techniques but also ultimately went beyond Alinsky. During the 2008 campaign, Bill remarked to Senator Ted Kennedy that Obama was such a nobody that only “a few years ago this guy would be getting us coffee.”17 Even so, when Hillary ran against Obama for the Democratic nomination, the small hood beat the big hood.
This happened in part because, in the politics of the Democratic Party, race trumps gender. Blacks are regarded as bigger victims than women, and therefore the imperative for a black president is stronger than that for a woman president. Obama exploited this advantage. But he also beat Hillary because he was slicker than she was, and had a better pitch than she did. Even Bill, the consummate pitchman, couldn’t change this. Bill did his song-and-dance routine for Hillary, but even he couldn’t stop Obama because people realized that the person on the ticket was Hillary, not Bill. So to the amusement and even delight of many conservatives, Obama beat Hillary for the Democratic nomination. He then carried that momentum by routing John McCain and winning the presidency. The Alinsky acolyte who started on the outside, like Alinsky himself, ended up on the inside.
Hillary must have been crushed. The big hood knew she would have to kowtow to the small hood for an excruciating eight years. Still, the situation was not hopeless. The insider plan could still work, but it would now have to be reformulated to promote Hillary’s succession to the presidency after Obama. Around the time of Obama’s race for reelection, Bill and Hillary decided to make a deal with Obama. Although Obama has no affection for either Clinton, this was a deal he wanted. His popularity was down in the months leading up to the election, and he knew Clinton could help shore up his chances. Basically the deal was that Bill would put aside his contempt and shamelessly campaign for Obama; in exchange, Obama would agree that Hillary would be his anointed successor four years later.18
On this basis of mutual interest, two rival operations—the Clinton gang and the Obama gang—met and made their peace. Both sides have lived up to the deal. Clinton campaigned tirelessly for Obama’s reelection and helped rouse the faithful at the Democratic National Convention. In January 2013, Obama reciprocated by appearing alongside Hillary on the CBS show 60 Minutes, where he just about endorsed her as his anointed successor.
Is it possible, one may ask, for the Bloods and the Crips to make a deal? Yes, it is; rival gangs do work together to pull off common heists. Indeed, I learned from one of its former members that the Mexican mafia, which used to hate blacks, now employs blacks. In one insurance scheme, the Mexican mafia recruited black gang members to sign up homeless African Americans for life insurance; then the Mexican mafia would kill them, and the two groups would share the payout. “Black and brown,” this guy told me, “sometimes come together for the green.”
I wanted to learn more about gang rivalry and gang cooperation so I raised the topic in the confinement center with a South Sider named Emiliano. “The Aryan Brotherhood,” he told me, “works with the Mexican mafia.” But the Mexican mafia, he elaborated, is rivals with the Mexican gang La Nuestra Familia. Apparently the mafia is mainly urban Mexicans while La Nuestra is mainly rural Mexicans. And because the Mexican mafia opposes La Nuestra, Emiliano said, its ally the Aryan Brotherhood also opposes La Nuestra Familia. Not surprisingly, he added, the white supremacists are known enemies of all the black gangs including the Bloods, the Crips, and the Black Guerilla Family. Meanwhile, “The black gangs sometimes work with other black gangs and also with La Nuestra Familia, which makes them an enemy of the Mexican mafia.” Despite this complex web of alliances, Emiliano stressed that even rival gangs sometimes make temporary deals when they serve common interests.
The same is true, I suppose, with political gangs. They don’t have to like each other; it’s strictly business. The Obama gang and the Hillary gang have come together to share access to the U.S. Treasury. Hillary knows that, more than anything else, she wants to control that wealth and power. Obama knows he can’t run again so someone has to succeed him; why not hand the baton, on his terms, to another Alinskyite con artist like himself?
The goal of the two hoods—the little hood and the big hood who wants to succeed the little hood—is not totalitarianism or communism. It’s not any kind of “ism” at all. The mafia’s goal is not to make a “new man” or to achieve some kind of utopia but rather to steal the labor and wealth of existing human beings. It’s basically mob rule, by which I mean rule by the Obama mob followed by the Hillary mob. If this reads like a crime story, that’s because it is. For me, it is a story that retains its interest and suspense even though I know that I—we—are the intended victims.