Saul Alinsky: A True American Exceptionalist
Newt Gingrich has adopted the late organizer as a punching bag, but he and Alinsky share a view of America and reverence for the Founding Fathers.
In his victory speech the night of the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich declared:
The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…. What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [President Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America.”
Gingrich’s statement raises two questions. One, what is the “classical America” of the founding fathers, and two, who is Saul Alinsky?
As an historian, Gingrich should know better than to confuse compromise with consensus. There was little all-encompassing agreement among the Founding Fathers. Does Gingrich mean to stake his campaign on Alexander Hamilton’s proposal of a life term for the president? James Madison’s idea that the federal legislature should be able to veto state laws? Would he have preferred Benjamin Harrison‘s proposal that slaves should be counted as half a person for purposes of representation, or is he satisfied with the three-fifths compromise? Enough.
As to Saul Alinsky, the Chicago organizer who died when Barack Obama was a 10-year old boy in Hawaii, it is hard to figure out why Gingrich is so fixated on a man whose most notable achievement was organizing Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s to combat inhumane working conditions. You would think from Gingrich’s allusions that Alinsky must have been a Marxist, maybe even a Communist. His biographer Sanford Horwitt is clear: Alinsky was neither. Or you can just read Alinsky himself — has Gingrich? — who wrote in his 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, “To protect the free, open, questing, and creative mind of man, as well as to allow for change, no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.'”
Indeed, one of the most striking things about Rules for Radicals is how engaged Alinsky is with the very people that Gingrich positions as his opposites. Alinsky opens his book with a quotation from Thomas Paine, and draws his examples, approvingly, from the lives of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Francis Marion, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the Federalist Papers.
Here’s a pop quiz. Below are four quotations. One is from Saul Alinsky, one from Newt Gingrich, one from Thomas Jefferson, and one from Thomas Paine. See if you can figure out which is which:
- “Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.”
- “[The] eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition…. This is my credo for which I live and, if need be, die.”
- “I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change…have a natural reaction…. I think because I’m so systematically purposeful about changing our world. [I am] much more intense, much more persistent, much more willing to take risks to get it done.”
- “I hope we shall crush… the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare… to challenge our government to a trail of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
It’s easy to cherry-pick quotations to serve your rhetorical point, but I am confident these lines represent the views of their authors: Paine, Alinsky, Gingrich, and Jefferson, respectively. Alinsky believed that people whose interests are not respected by government, who are maligned or discriminated against or taken advantage of, should organize to advocate for their interests. He fought against racism and for better working conditions. His politics were unequivocally left-wing, but he believed forcefully in democracy as “the best means toward achieving” the values he professed. And he believed democracy came with personal responsibility. Alinsky sounds downright Gingrichian when he criticizes “people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions.” For those people, “the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.”
So why is Gingrich so fixated on Alinsky? Maybe Gingrich is playing a game familiar to all graduate students: throw out a name you’re pretty confident few others have heard of in order to make yourself sound smart. If the name happens to sound Jewish and European, and therefore might raise the specter of a politics Alinsky himself wanted no part of, all the better. Gingrich has invented a straw man, an imagined un-American, and set him up against an imagined “classical” American past. None of that helps our political debate. As I have suggested elsewhere, bad history is worse than no history at all.
There may be reasons to criticize the real Saul Alinsky, but he belongs on the roll call of those who worked for, not against, a better America. Gingrich proclaims “American exceptionalism.” If the flawed, contentious Founding Fathers agreed on anything, it was that power does not come by divine right but rather from self-government. What better way, then, is there to show your fidelity to that spirit than to work, as Alinsky did, to “form a more perfect union”?
By: Andy Horowitz, The Atlantic, January 27, 2012
Buffett Rule Will Raise $50 Billion Per Year, Affect Just 0.08 Percent Of Taxpayers
When President Obama announced his latest vision for the so called “Buffett rule” — a 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires — during his State of the Union address this week, Republicans were quick to criticize it. For instance, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) derided the proposal as a “political gimmick.” “It’s a smokescreen,” added Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
However, as a new analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, the Buffett rule as laid out in the speech could raise up to $50 billion per year to pay down the deficit, while affecting just 0.08 percent of taxpayers:
Citizens for Tax Justice has calculated that President Obama’s “Buffett Rule” would, if in effect this year, raise $50 billion in a single year and affect only the richest 0.08 percent of taxpayers— that’s just eight percent of the richest one percent of taxpayers. […]
To calculate the $50 billion figure, we assumed that there would be a minimum tax that applies to adjusted gross income (AGI) minus charitable deductions. (We’ll call this modified AGI.)
We assumed that a taxpayer with modified AGI greater than $1 million would face a minimum tax of 30 percent of modified AGI. The taxpayer would pay whichever is greater, their personal income tax under the existing rules or this minimum tax.
Obviously, $50 billion by itself won’t balance the budget, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. At the same time, the Buffett rule will aid in correcting some of the problems in the tax code — like one quarter of millionaires paying lower rates than millions of middle class families and some millionaires paying no income tax at all — that have helped drive income inequality up to a level not seen in the U.S. since the 1920s.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, January 27, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Newest “Hardship”: Mom-And-Pop Bain Capital
Mitt Romney casts himself as a small-business owner on the stump in Florida.
Mitt Romney just can’t drop his phony everyman act, and he added a new spin on it Friday night: the struggling young businessman.
By this point anyone with even the slightest interest in politics is well aware of Romney’s extreme wealth. Criticism from his rivals finally forced Romney to enter his most recent tax returns into the public record, and the figures were astounding. He earned $21.7 million in 2010; he earns the average median household income in less than a single day.
Yet he continues to uncomfortably wear his regular-guy jeans over his Brooks Brothers suits, trying his hardest to convince voters that he can relate to their economic woes. When he was here in Florida last year he told a group of voters that he was also unemployed and, in New Hampshire, the Harvard MBA/JD said he had also had moments where he was concerned about getting a pink slip
Romney included a new narrative of hardship at a rally hosted inside a pant factory plant in Orlando on Friday night. He began by railing against the government before discussing the early parts of his career as a vulture venture capitalist:
“Let me tell you the difference between what happens in the real economy—the private sector—and when government is practicing crony capitalism, playing by their own set of rules. You see, when we first helped Staples (the office superstore) get started, we raised about $5 or $10 million, to get that first store going. The government put in $500 million into Solyndra. And our offices, by the way, were in the back of a shopping center, an abandoned shopping center. We had all old furniture. I remember these chairs we had for the board meetings; they were these mahogany hide chairs. We sunk so deeply you had to have an athletic body to get out of them.”
That must have only seemed like roughing it compared to the throne Romney sat on at Bain Capital. When consulting firm Bain & Company tasked Romney with spinning off a new private equity venture in 1983, he raised $37 million in funds to launch the new group the next year, hardly the type of budget to describe a group meeting in back alleys and sitting on leftover furniture purchased from Goodwill.
It’s mystifying why Romney continues to push this persona. America loves the idea of a self-made millionaire, and while that’s a bit of a hard sell given his father’s prominence in business and politics, it’s surely closer to reality than his current guise of a typical suburban small business owner.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, January 28, 2012
Ron Paul Pursued Strategy Of Publishing Controversial Newsletters
Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian, has also been a businessman who pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, said three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.
The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.
But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.
“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman’s.
The newsletters point to a rarely seen and somewhat opaque side of Paul, who has surprised the political community by becoming an important factor in the Republican race. The candidate, who has presented himself as a kindly doctor and political truth teller, declined in a recent debate to release his tax returns, joking that he would be “embarrassed” about his income compared with that of his richer GOP rivals.
Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.
The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, said those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.
Jesse Benton, a presidential campaign spokesman, said that the accounts of Paul’s involvement were untrue and that Paul was practicing medicine full time when “the offensive material appeared under his name.” Paul “abhors it, rejects it and has taken responsibility for it as he should have better policed the work being done under his masthead,” Benton said. He did not comment on Paul’s business strategy.
‘I’ve never read that stuff’
Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul “was a busy man” at the time. “He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country,’’ Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul’s campaign. “I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff.’’
In the past, Paul has taken responsibility for the passages because they were published under his name. But last month, he told CNN that he was unaware at the time of the controversial passages. “I’ve never read that stuff. I’ve never read — I came — was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written,’’ Paul said.
A person involved in Paul’s businesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing a former employer, said Paul and his associates decided in the late 1980s to try to increase sales by making the newsletters more provocative. They discussed adding controversial material, including racial statements, to help the business, the person said.
“It was playing on a growing racial tension, economic tension, fear of government,’’ said the person, who supports Paul’s economic policies but is not backing him for president. “I’m not saying Ron believed this stuff. It was good copy. Ron Paul is a shrewd businessman.’’
The articles included racial, anti-Semitic and anti-gay content. They claimed, for example, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys’’; they ridiculed black activists by suggesting that New York be named “Zooville” or “Lazyopolis”; and they said the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.’’ The June 1990 edition of the Ron Paul Political Report included the statement: “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”
It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters, but during the years he was publishing them, he reduced his debts and substantially increased his net worth, according to his congressional and presidential disclosure reports.
In 1984, he reported debt of up to $765,000, most of which was gone by 1995, when he reported a net worth of up to $3.3 million. Last year, he reported a net worth of up to $5.2 million.
The newsletters bore his name in large print and featured articles on topics ranging from investment advice to political commentary. Frequently written in first person, they contained personalized notes, such as holiday greetings from Paul and his wife, Carol.
The Washington Post obtained dozens of copies of the newsletters from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Texas news outlets wrote about them in 1996, and the New Republic published extensive excerpts in 2008. The issue resurfaced late last year, when Paul’s presidential campaign picked up momentum. The extent of Paul’s involvement and his business strategy had not been known.
Paul’s publishing operation began through a nonprofit organization he created in 1976, the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, which advocates for limited government and a free market. The group, founded the year Paul entered Congress, published Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, mostly a collection of his congressional speeches and commentaries.
Direct-mail, extreme views
In 1984, just before losing a Senate bid and leaving Congress, Paul formed Ron Paul & Associates. He soon began publishing the Ron Paul Investment Letter, initially offering mostly economic and monetary information. Texas tax records listed Paul as president of the business; his wife as secretary; his daughter, Lori Paul Pyeatt, as treasurer; and a longtime Paul associate, Lew Rockwell, as vice president.
Ed Crane, the longtime president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said he met Paul for lunch during this period and the two discussed direct-mail solicitations, which Paul was sending out to interest people in his newsletters. They agreed that “people who have extreme views” were more likely than others to respond.
Crane said Paul reported getting his best response when he used a mailing list from the now-defunct newspaper Spotlight, which was widely considered anti-Semitic and racist.
Benton, Paul’s spokesman, said that Crane’s account “sounds odd” and that Paul did not recall the conversation.
At the time, Paul’s investment letter was languishing. According to the person involved with his businesses, Paul and others hit upon a solution: to “morph” the content to capitalize on a growing fear among some on the political right about the nation’s changing demographics and threats to economic liberty.
The investment letter became the Ron Paul Survival Report — a name designed to intrigue readers, the company secretary said. It cost subscribers about $100 a year. The tone of that and other Paul publications changed, becoming increasingly controversial. In 1992, for example, the Ron Paul Political Report defended chess champion Bobby Fischer, who had become known as an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, for his stance on “Jewish questions.’’
Paul has said he wrote portions of the economic sections. The people familiar with his business said there was no indication that he wrote the controversial material.
Rockwell was the main writer of the racial passages, according to two people with direct knowledge of the business and a third close to Paul’s presidential campaign. Rockwell, founder of a libertarian think tank in Alabama, did not respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment. In 2008, he denied in an interview with the New Republic that he was Paul’s ghostwriter.
Paul “had to walk a very fine line,’’ said Eric Dondero Rittberg, a former longtime Paul aide who says Paul allowed the controversial material in his newsletter as a way to make money. Dondero Rittberg said he witnessed Paul proofing, editing and signing off on his newsletters in the mid-1990s.
“The real big money came from some of that racially tinged stuff, but he also had to keep his libertarian supporters, and they weren’t at all comfortable with that,’’ he said.
Dondero Rittberg is no longer a Paul supporter, and officials with Paul’s presidential campaign have said he was fired. Dondero Rittberg disputed that, saying he resigned in 2003 because he opposed Paul’s views on Iraq.
The July 15, 1994, issue of Survival Report exemplified how the newsletters merged material about race with a pitch for business. It contained a passage criticizing the rate of black-on-white crime when “blacks are only 12 percent of the population.’’ That was accompanied by two pages of ads from Ron Paul Precious Metals & Rare Coins, a business Paul used to sell gold and silver coins.
“The explosion you hear may not be the Fourth of July fireworks but the price of silver shooting up,’’ said one of the ads.
Hathway, the former Ron Paul & Associates secretary, said: “We had tons of subscribers, from all over the world. . . . I never had one complaint’’ about the content.
Paul a ‘hands-on boss’
Hathway described Paul as a “hands-on boss” who would come in to the company’s Houston office, about 50 miles from his home, about once a week. And he would call frequently. “He’d ask, ‘How are you doing? Do you need any more money in the account?’ ” she said.
The company also had an office in Clute, Tex., near Paul’s home, which it shared with Paul’s foundation and his campaigns at various points, Hathway and Dondero Rittberg said.
In 1996, as Paul ran for Congress again, his business success turned into a potential political liability when his newsletters surfaced in the Texas news media. Paul was quoted in the Dallas Morning News that year as defending a newsletter line from 1992 that said 95 percent of black men in the District are “semi-criminal or entirely criminal” and that black teenagers can be “unbelievably fleet of foot.”
“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” the newspaper quoted Paul as saying.
Paul won reelection, then dissolved Ron Paul & Associates in 2001. His nonprofit foundation is still in operation.
By: Jerry Markon and Alice Crites; Contribution by Lucy Shackelford, The Washington Post, January 27, 2012
A “Historian” By Any Other Name: Freddie Mac Hired Newt Gingrich As It Reshaped Strategy
Within months after taking over as chief lobbyist at mortgage lender Freddie Mac in 1999, Mitchell Delk hired a prominent Washington insider to advise him on how to build support among conservatives on Capitol Hill: Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.
A key part of Delk’s strategy, as outlined in Federal Election Commission records, was to build goodwill in Congress by holding fundraising events for influential members of House and Senate committees that had oversight of Freddie Mac.
Gingrich had experience in such matters as an architect of GOPAC, one of the Republican Party’s most important political action committees.
Gingrich’s activity at Freddie Mac has been under scrutiny during his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, as rivals have accused him of lobbying for Freddie Mac.
The former speaker has rejected such allegations, and his first $300,000-a-year contract with Freddie Mac, released this week by his campaign, states that he would not “engage in lobbying services of any kind.”
But the contract, together with the FEC records describing Delk’s revamping of Freddie Mac’s lobbying shop, sheds light on how Gingrich could avoid the lobbyist label and still be valuable to the mortgage lender as a strategist.
Gingrich’s contract says the former House speaker would work with Delk and other Freddie Mac officials on “strategic planning and public policy.”
And, it calls on Gingrich to contribute to the lender’s “corporate planning and business goals.”
“He was a consultant for us, and … not a lobbyist,” Freddie Mac spokesman Doug Duvall said, declining to comment further on the lender’s arrangement with Gingrich.
Gingrich’s campaign has offered few specifics about his work for Freddie Mac, for which he earned as much as $1.8 million during two contract periods. It said late last year that part of his job was to help Freddie Mac build bridges to conservatives.
He has called himself a “historian” who advised the mortgage lender on issues such as its lending policies.
Gingrich joined Delk’s government affairs shop at a time when the former Freddie Mac senior vice president was hiring several former members of Congress and congressional aides for his lobbying team.
At the time, conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill were seeking regulations to rein in the profits of government-sponsored lenders such as Freddie Mac.
Delk, who did not respond to phone calls seeking comment, successfully fought back against such legislation by hiring dozens of outside consultants and spending as much on lobbying as many major corporations.
FEC INVESTIGATION
However, his lobbying team came under investigation by the FEC in 2003.
The FEC probe found that under Delk’s guidance, Freddie Mac improperly used corporate resources to put on 85 fundraising events that raised about $1.7 million for federal candidates.
The majority of the events were for Republicans, the FEC found.
FEC investigators concluded that at least one major contribution to a Republican entity came directly from Freddie Mac funds and that some fundraisers were held in Freddie Mac’s offices – both violations of FEC rules.
In 2006, Freddie Mac agreed to a $3.8 million settlement for violating federal election rules, the largest civil fine the FEC had ever levied.
Delk, who resigned from Freddie Mac in 2004, was not charged in the case. Delk’s lawyer in the case, Ken Gross, said Gingrich’s name “never came up in connection with (the FEC) case.”
Vin Weber, a former Republican representative from Minnesota who also was hired as a Freddie Mac consultant, said he never worked directly with Gingrich on Freddie Mac matters.
He said the mortgage lender did not want congressional arm-twisting but hoped to “create a positive buzz for Freddie Mac.”
Weber said someone like Gingrich could provide an important service without lobbying.
“I wouldn’t ask him to pick up the phone (to call a member of Congress), because that is really not necessary. He is circulating all the time with members of Congress,” said Weber, who is supporting Mitt Romney in this year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Former New York Representative Susan Molinari, another Romney supporter, also was hired by Freddie Mac during Delk’s tenure. She did not return phone calls or emails.
Republican Michael Oxley, who was House Financial Services Committee chairman and attended at least 19 Delk fundraisers, said that at the time he did not know Gingrich worked for Freddie Mac.
Oxley “may have seen him from time to time at a social thing,” said Peggy Peterson, a spokeswoman for Oxley.
Gingrich signed a second contract with Freddie Mac in 2006. The lender ended its relationship with outside consultants in 2008, when the U.S. Treasury placed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in conservatorship.
Republicans have blamed the government-sponsored lenders, which sustained $14.9 billion in losses when the U.S. housing market crashed, for a major role in the subprime lending crisis.
By: Marilyn Thompson and Samuel Jacobs, Reuters, January 28, 2012
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