Here is the speech, referred to in the article. If only I had read it before
voting in 2008.
Robert-Fitch-on-Obama.pdf
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 on
my urban turban and try to play Karnak. It's a difficult role not only
because the future is
hard 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 interests-landlords
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
weak-
demonstrations, 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 Have
nots? 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. They're 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. By
1993, 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. African
Americans were prominent in developing and rehabbing the new housing for the
refugees
from the demolished projects-who 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 people-
in 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 thorough 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 nonprofit
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 subprime 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 Weatherperson; 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 wiseguy 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.
Morgan
Chase 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 $800
billion 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 billion- Daniel, 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 longtime
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
LA
Times 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.8 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 group-real 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 in
1995, 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
larger 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/wpdyn/
content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202813_pf.html
2. Pam Belluck, "End of a Ghetto, A special report: Razing the
Slums to Rescue the
Residents." New York Times, September 6, 1998.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E0D7173EF935A3575AC0A96E9
5826
0
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/communit
y
5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-swe
