What has this corporate power elite done that is so reprehensible? For Alinsky, this is the wrong question. The real question was a very simple one: Who has the money?
Alinsky realized he could recruit allies and direct their hatred to the corporations by appealing to motives such as envy, resentment, and hatred, but all packaged in the rhetoric of equality and justice. He had no illusion that any of this was related to actual justice.
For Alinsky, justice is a province of morality, and morality is a scam. Morality is the cloak of power. Activists appeal to the language of morality but recognize that it is a mere disguise. As Alinsky puts it, “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times. . . . In action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent with one’s individual conscience. . . . You do what you can with what you have, and then clothe it with moral garments.”7
In his book Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky takes up the fashionable liberal cause of “reconciliation.” He proclaims the very idea totally unrealistic, “an illusion of the world as we would like it to be.” In the real world, Alinsky says, “Reconciliation means that one side has the power and the other side gets reconciled to it.”8 Alinsky was determined to have the power on his side, so that his opponents would become reconciled to being shaken down by him.
Alinsky’s contempt for traditional morality can also be seen in the way he admiringly cites Lenin. “Lenin was a pragmatist,” he writes in Rules for Radicals. “When he returned from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns.”9 What Alinsky meant by this is that activists should invoke principles like free speech and equality under the law in order to protect themselves, but once they come to power they should ignore these principles and not extend them to their opponents. Modern progressives seem to have taken this lesson to heart.
RIPPING OFF THE GOVERNMENT
While Alinsky attempted to direct middle-class frustration against private corporations, he was not above targeting the government for his shakedown schemes. He gleefully described the way he forced Chicago mayor Richard Daley to give in to some of his extortionist demands. Daley was a very powerful man who regarded Chicago as his personal domain. In this, Alinsky found Daley’s Achilles’ heel.
Daley was especially proud of the efficiency of Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Now in those days, before 9/11, anyone could go through security and enter the main airport. Alinsky’s scheme involved deploying several hundred activists to completely immobilize all the airport’s restroom facilities. He knew that passengers usually wait to get off the plane before heading for the bathroom.
Alinsky’s idea was to have activists take up every stall, armed with, as he put it, “box lunches and reading material to help pass the time.” Male activists would be positioned at every urinal, with other activists waiting to replace them as they finished their business and moved to another Men’s Restroom. “What were desperate passengers going to do?” Alinsky said. “Is some poor sap at the end of the line going to say, ‘Hey pal, you’re taking too long to piss?’”
Alinsky was confident that his “shit-in,” as he called it, would completely paralyze the airport. “O’Hare would become a shambles.” Alinsky didn’t even have to carry out the scheme: he leaked it to the press, and Daley caved. The city agreed to increase its hiring and to use Alinsky’s network to provide the new recruits.
On another occasion, Alinsky got Daley to give in to another shakedown—this one involving government contracts and jobs funneled throughout Alinskyite organizations—and once again, he didn’t actually need to carry it out. “We threatened to unload a thousand live rats on the steps of city hall. Daley got the message, and we got what we wanted.”
Alinsky didn’t mind that these tactics seemed absurdist or puerile, as long as they worked. His biographer Sanford Horwitt describes an occasion, in the spring of 1972, when Alinsky organized a student protest at Tulane University’s annual lecture week. A group of anti–Vietnam War protesters wanted to disrupt a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, and an advocate for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies.
While the students planned to picket the speech and shout anti-war slogans, Alinsky told them that their approach was wrong because it might get them punished or expelled. Besides, it lacked creativity and imagination. Alinsky advised the students to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan—complete with robes and hoods—and whenever Bush said anything in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and holler and wave signs and banners saying: “The KKK Supports Bush.”
This is what the students did, and it proved very successful, getting lots of media attention with no adverse repercussions for the protesters.10 We see here how Alinsky relies on the progressive canard of the Big Switch. He identifies—and counts on the media to identify—the Klan with Bush’s Republican policies, even though, as we have seen, the actual Klan was entirely a vehicle of the Democratic Party.
On another occasion, Alinsky targeted government welfare agencies that in his view were trying to administer programs themselves rather than funnel the money through Alinskyite organizations. Alinsky framed this as an issue of the government deciding for itself what poor people need, rather than trusting the poor to run their own lives. In reality of course, Alinsky wanted himself—rather than government bureaucrats—to allocate the money.
In order to pressure the government to change its approach, however, Alinsky urged black activists to dress in African tribal costumes and greet government officials flying into Chicago from Washington, D.C. This action, he said, would dramatize the “colonial mentality” of the anti-poverty establishment. I learned about this particular Alinsky caper from Hillary Clinton’s thesis.11
SHAKING DOWN EASTMAN KODAK
Alinsky met with tactical success, not only in tackling government agencies and government representatives, but also in shaking down the private sector. In Rochester, New York—at that time a company town, home of Eastman Kodak—Alinsky organized a campaign called FIGHT and attempted some stunts at the corporate headquarters, but they didn’t work. Ostensibly Alinsky was asking that Kodak hire more blacks, but Kodak’s president Louis Eilers detected a larger agenda. “It is more and more clear,” he said, “that all the talk about unemployment is only an issue or device being used to screen what FIGHT is really doing—and that is making a drive for power in the community.”12
Eiler was on to Alinsky. But Alinsky was not done with Eastman Kodak. He realized that the city and Eastman Kodak took great pride in the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, which the company helped to fund and on whose board top officials of the company sat. Alinsky organized a group of one hundred blacks to attend concert performances. Before the performances, he planned a “pre-show banquet consisting of nothing but huge portions of baked beans.”
The plan was basically to have an organized “fart-in.” Alinsky found that his activists were excited to participate. “What oppressed person doesn’t want, literally or figuratively, to shit on his oppressors?”
But this wasn’t just for the psychological benefit of the participants; it was also to force the establishment to back down. Alinsky explains, “First of all, the fart-in would be completely outside the city fathers’ experience. Never in their wildest dreams could they envision a flatulent blitzkrieg on their sacred symphony orchestra. It would throw them into complete disarray. Second, the action would make a mockery of the law, because although you could be arrested for throwing a stink bomb, there’s no law on the books against natural bodily functions. Can you imagine a guy being tried in court on charges of first-degree farting? The cops would be paralyzed.”
With tactics like these, Alinsky brought Eastman Kodak to the negotiating table, and he got most of his shakedown demands met. These demands included the hiring of Alinsky cronies and also the steering of city contracts through Alinsky’s activist network.
On another occasion, Alinsky was working in his home base of Chicago to force Chicago’s department stores to give jobs to black activists who were Alinsky’s cronies. On this issue of course Alinsky was competing—or working in tandem, however we choose to view it—with Chicago’s number one racial shakedown man, Jesse Jackson.
Jackson mastered a simple strategy of converting race into a protection racket. He would offer to “protect” Chicago businesses from accusations of racism—accusations that the businesses knew were actually fomented by Jackson himself. The businesses would then pay Jackson to make the trouble go away, and also to chase away other potential troublemakers.
In return for his efforts, Jackson would typically receive hundreds of thousands in annual donations from the company, plus jobs and minority contracts that would go through his network, and finally other goodies such as free flights on the corporate airplane, supposedly for his “charitable work.”
Later Jackson would go national with this blackmail approach. In New York, for example, Jackson opened an office on Wall Street where he extracted millions of dollars in money and patronage from several leading investment houses including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and Prudential Securities.
On the national stage, another race hustler, Al Sharpton, joined Jackson. For two decades these shakedown men in clerical garb successfully prosecuted their hustles. Jackson was the leader at first, but eventually Sharpton proved more successful than Jackson. While Jackson’s star has faded, Sharpton became President Obama’s chief advisor on race issues.
SEEMS WE’RE IN AFRICA
While Jackson used the blackmail threat of alleging racism or backing race discrimination suits to extract money from corporations, Alinsky had his own distinctive strategy. “One of the largest stores in the city and in the country,” Alinsky recounts, “refused to alter its hiring practices and wouldn’t even meet with us.”
So Alinsky figured out how to teach them a lesson. He lined up several hundred blacks from the inner city to swamp the store. “Every Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week we decided to charter buses and bring approximately 3,000 blacks from Woodlawn to this downtown store. Now you put 3,000 blacks on the floor of a store, even a store this big, and the color of the store suddenly changes. Any white coming through the revolving doors will suddenly think he’s in Africa. So they’d lose a lot of their white trade right then and there.
“But that is only the beginning. At every counter you’d have groups of blacks closely scrutinizing the merchandise and asking the salesgirl interminable questions. And needless to say, none of our people would buy a single item of merchandise. You’d have a situation where one group would tie up the shirt counter and move on to the underwear counter, while the group previously occupying the underwear counter would take over the shirt department.
“This procedure would be followed until one hour before closing time, when our people would begin buying everything in sight to be delivered COD. This would tie up delivery service for a minimum of two days, with additional heavy costs and administrative problems, since all the merchandise would be refused upon delivery.”
Once Alinsky had his plan, he said, “We leaked it to one of the stool pigeons every radical organization needs and the result was immediate. The day after we paid the deposit for the chartered buses, the department store management called us and gave in to all our demands. We’d won completely.”
This was Alinsky transcending Don Fanucci and acting in true Godfather style. In the vocabulary of Don Corleone himself, Alinsky had made them an offer they couldn’t refuse! And when other retail establishments learned of his techniques, they surrendered in advance because they didn’t want to risk the kind of mayhem that they knew Alinsky could cause.
“We didn’t win in Woodlawn,” Alinsky said, “because the establishment suddenly experienced a moral revelation. We won because we backed them into a corner and kept them there until they decided it would be less expensive and less dangerous to surrender to our demands than to continue the fight.”
For Alinsky, this was not a matter of coercion. Rather, it was “popular pressure in the democratic tradition. People don’t get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it. That’s where you need organization—first to compel concessions and then to make sure the other side delivers. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.”
One can see here that for Alinsky, democratic politics is basically a mechanism of legal extortion, justified by appeals to justice and equality.
A HANDSOME PROFIT
Alinsky profited handsomely from his rackets. Even Hillary Clinton notes in her thesis that while Alinsky spoke endlessly about poverty and disadvantage, he himself lived very comfortably, far removed from the people on whose behalf he allegedly fought.13 It was part of Alinsky’s shtick and they both knew it.
Toward the end of his life, Alinsky moved to Carmel, California. By this time Alinsky was a millionaire. He enjoyed dining in Carmel’s exclusive restaurants, and taking walks on the white-sand beach. It was in ritzy Carmel that Alinsky died of a heart attack in 1972.
His biographer Sanford Horwitt portrays this as a paradox. “This is not the way Saul would have preferred it, not the ending he would have written, not such a prosaic death. And in Carmel of all places! That postcard-perfect oasis where not a speck of the world’s troubles was to be found on the soft, white beaches caressed each day by gentle Pacific waters.”14
Actually, I agree that if Alinsky had his way he would have concocted some fantastic report about how he was gunned down by his dangerous enemies, while in pursuit of social justice! But in reality Alinsky would have known that it was all a big lie. In reality there was nothing peculiar about Alinsky dropping dead in affluent Carmel. That’s the whole point of being a thief, to get rich.
Would Don Corleone have been in the least bit embarrassed to live in a mansion by the sea? Horwitt may have his own blinders on, but Alinsky had no illusions that at his core he was not a social justice guy; he was a guy who used social justice as part of his business plan. Like mafia dons in the movies and in real life, Alinsky understood that crime is a business in which the godfather’s goal is to get rich.
Personally, I wish Alinsky ended up like Henry Hill. At the end of Goodfellas, Hill has lost the high life, and he is in the witness protection program. “Today everything is different,” he says. “I have to wait around like everyone else.” Hill, in other words, is forced to become a normal person again. Alinsky, however, lived like a racketeer and also died like one. He experienced normal life before he hooked up with the mob; it would have been good for his soul to experience it again before he died.
Still, Alinsky’s own take was comparatively small. The reason is that throughout his life, Alinsky remained, as he put it, an “outside agitator.” He firmly believed that activists should not become part of the government. Hillary Clinton felt differently. Alinsky offered Hillary a job after college, but she turned him down to go to Yale Law School.
Recalling the incident later in her book Living History, Hillary wrote, “We had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside,” Hillary said. “I didn’t. My decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.”15
Hillary’s insight was summarized by writer Michael Tomasky: Why remain on the outside when it may be possible to get inside the government? Why fight the power when you can be the power?16 Outside agitators have limited access and limited resources. But the agencies of government possess enormous coercive authority, including, ultimately, virtually unlimited military firepower.
Control of the government includes control of the Justice Department; you get to deci
de who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. It includes control of the NSA, where you have access to all kinds of interesting information. Finally, what better instrument of control than the IRS with its terrifying power to audit, confiscate, and prosecute virtually any citizen in the United States? Hillary saw, as Alinsky never did, that government is the best instrument of control, intimidation, and large-scale theft that any community activist could ever wish for.
Alinsky died long before he could see his students ascend to the high corridors of power. Both Hillary and Obama have used the power of the government to shake down the taxpayer and punish their critics, me included; as Alinsky’s students, they have one-upped their master. Even so, had Alinsky lived he could take justified pride in being their guiding star, their acknowledged godfather. He was the one who taught progressivism its new and improved contemporary racket.
CHAPTER 8
THE ENABLER
TALES FROM THE CLINTON PLANTATION
Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported.1
—Hillary Clinton, November 23, 2015
This chapter is about the sex life of the Clintons. Many progressives and Democrats regard this as a tedious and unnecessary topic. What’s to discuss? Sure, Bill Clinton is a lifelong philanderer, an American Don Juan. Poor Hillary, they suggest, is the victim of these escapades. Even so, she loves Bill and has come to accept—or at least endure—his multiple infidelities. She has accepted the “stand by your man” role. But so what? It’s all in the family! The rest of us should butt out. It’s their business, not ours.
According to the progressive Democratic narrative, Hillary is running because she wants to be the first woman president. She will symbolize—and dedicate herself to—the cause of women’s rights. The Hillary progressives want us to envision is the Hillary who went to the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and gave a stirring speech on women’s rights. That, progressives say, is her actual record; what does any of this personal stuff have to do with Hillary’s qualifications to be president?
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Page 21
