Admit The Horse

by P. G. Abeles

  If it irked him that the western press persisted in claiming he served as a front for monied Saudi interests—perhaps for the House of al-Saud itself, or that the size of his investments could not be accounted for by the size and value of his holdings; it didn’t appear to trouble him. Prince Abdul claimed he was used to people underestimating him.

  If in some ways, the prince was a caricature of an oil-rich Arab, in others he was distinctly unique. He had frequently criticized Saudi traditionalism and urged the sand kingdom to embrace not just election reforms, but a platform for women’s rights. He was proud of the fact that he had hired the first female pilot in Saudi Arabia, and that more than 65% of the staff in his palace and investment company were women. To further her education, Abdul had made a very large donation to the University of New Haven, in exchange for having professors available to teach his wife in the palace.

  He had met Muhsin-al-Nasih (then Donald Cleaver of Detroit) when he was in college in California in the early 1970s. It wasn’t a particularly good college, but that hardly mattered. Prince Abdul was there to make friends. Donald Cleaver was a radical, a mentor and confidante to Black Panther leaders advocating revolution. Somewhat prosaically for the time, Cleaver claimed to be the reincarnation of a legendary African poet-warrior from the third century. Still, risible as it may have seemed to some, Prince Abdul was intrigued. The Saudis were interested in investing in Africa, and forming friendships with black nationalists in the U.S. would help the Saudis establish immediate bone fides.

  In 1977, Prince Abdul returned the favor by introducing Donald Cleaver (now styling himself Muhsin-al-Nasih) to the Saudi king. Notoriously decisive, the king decided then and there to make the newly-minted lawyer OPEC’s lead U.S. counsel. Many years had since passed, but Muhsin-al-Nasih had remained a close advisor and friend.

  But in spite of the high-priced public relations firms in London and New York recommended by al-Nasih, Prince Abdul remained controversial. Supporters pointed to his generous support of educational initiatives to support Islamic Studies—$20 million to Harvard; $20 million to Georgetown, $20 million to the Louvre (whose new wing would be dedicated to Islamic art). Critics (particularly supporters of Israel), claimed he’d given millions to controversial organizations like the Foundation for American Islamic Studies and the American Islamic Partnership. Organizations whose leaders had, they claimed, been indicted “on terrorism related charges in federal courts,” according to one news release.

  And it was true that not all Prince Abdul’s efforts were well received. His humanitarian contributions to one U.S. city devastated by a rogue tornado had been ignominiously refused after he made statements questioning the fairness of U.S. policy toward Palestine. So, when Archie Newton’s comments about his friend al-Nasih and fundraising to cover the cost of Okono’s Harvard’s law school tuition hit the airwaves, Prince Abdul expected to get some calls from reporters. Perhaps not the Americans, but surely the Brits or the Germans would cover the story? Nothing. Ah, well, all to the good.

  Prince Abdul had long since recognized that the key to acceptance was understanding, and the key to achieving understanding was providing the other guy with a financial incentive to keep an open mind. Muhsin al-Nasih had advised him well. As it turned out, Prince Abdul had some very open-minded friends in America, who understood him very well indeed.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Washington, DC

  ADELITA BOUCHARD ALWAYS MEANT to pay the money back. So much money flowed so freely through SEED’s national headquarters, with so little accountability, it hadn’t really seemed as if it would be a big deal to use her company debit card to give herself a loan. When they found out, of course, it turned out, it was kind of a big deal. She had been completely humiliated, but they’d been mostly pretty nice about it. The Washington D.C. metro area was an expensive city in which to live. As a single mother, it was not easy paying for day care and making ends meet on her modest salary. Most of the money had gone for basics for the baby, charges to CVS for formula and diapers. One month she couldn’t make rent. Another month, her sorority sisters from the University of Alabama had come to town and she’d been forced to act as hostess, in a way that, even at the time, she knew she couldn’t afford and would live to regret.

  After speaking with her boss, she’d gone for credit counseling, and they’d worked out a payment schedule to repay the money she’d borrowed using the company card, deducting the money automatically from her bank account. Everything seemed fine, everyone happy. At least until the point when she started asking questions about SEED’s extralegal relationship with the Okono campaign.

  Adelita Bouchard was an idealist. As a native of Alabama, her parents had experienced segregation and discrimination in a way African Americans in the north would never know. For generations, her people had been the victims of Jim Crow laws that kept them from voting, kept them from having a voice in the system, kept them from real property ownership. She wanted to change that.

  But for all its noble aspirations, it was hard not to become disillusioned with SEED. Adelita was good at her job: efficient, well organized, and smart. Within two years, she had moved up to become assistant to the director. But what had become apparent to her in those two years was that founder Ford Rauschenberg ran the organization as his personal fiefdom. And perhaps more disquieting, was her growing belief that SEED was less about advocacy, enfranchisement, and home ownership for the underprivileged, than it was a cold-blooded, soul-less super-corporation, whose sole purpose was to consolidate power and money. What few of its idealistic volunteers realized was that SEED now operated as a thoroughly corrupt multi-headed hydra—using the least privileged in society as a kind of human shield for their mercenary operations.

  Most disturbing to Adelita was the ‘Muscle for Money’ program used to extort money or extract concessions from corporations and political enemies. Successful campaigns had been waged against Sherwin Williams, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, and Money Mart among others. SEED was in the business of providing mercenaries —to anyone that could pay. Unions paid them to send three hundred people to protest and wave signs. Corporations paid them to stay home. One way or another, SEED got its money.

  At first, Adelita thought every successful campaign was a win for the little guy. But more and more, it came to look less like SEED holding corporations responsible to change unfair practices, than protection money paid to keep them quiet. The corporations, having paid, simply maintained the status quo. In other cases, there was no real grievance against a company—just a shrewd calculation that the company was sufficiently publicity averse and asset rich, to make the payoff worthwhile.

  Trade unions, like Service Workers International, paid SEED to intimidate those it perceived as hostile, or with whom they were engaged in negotiations. In one case, they’d hired SEED to send a crowd outfitted in union garb to harass the FairIsle Group and its CEO Davis Shubenstein. The mob—because that’s what they were—had broken up a banquet and staged an angry and noisy protest outside of Shubenstein’s house. If anyone had polled the crowd, few in the group even knew what the union acronym imprinted on their shirts stood for. Why would they? They weren’t members! In the end, the FairIsle Group paid. They all paid.

  Attorneys general in 15 states, both Republican and Democratic, were investigating SEED for voter registration fraud. The allegations were serious: election board supervisors in Franklin County, Ohio, had received more than 23,000 voter registrations from SEED—for people who didn’t exist. A Houston newspaper had investigated and found 40% of the 27,000 registrations submitted by SEED in Harris County were phony.

  Part of it, Adelita knew, could be explained by circumstances. SEED specifically and cynically targeted as recruiters people with little to lose: felons on work-release programs, the indigent, the homeless, addicts. These were people holding onto the bottom rung of desperation. For many, the few dollars a day SEED promised for new registrations meant the difference between eating or getti
ng their fix. New registrants were essentially bribed with pre-paid gas cards or fast food restaurant gift certificates. There was no downside for them. Why not register again? Who would know? Who would care? For SEED recruiters, there was no incentive to play it straight, either. In fact, the opposite was true; if the SEED recruiter didn’t make their quota, they were fired.

  Did SEED know what the recruiters were doing? Adelita had concluded they did. It was hard to imagine why else SEED would insist that recruiters sign an affidavit before they began recruiting, holding SEED harmless and stipulating that the recruiter alone was responsible for any of his or her actions. When they were caught, SEED had chosen their scapegoats well. “It wasn’t SEED!” its well-paid national directors protested. They would never countenance such a thing, they assured their Big-Foot friends in Congress. The recruiters were ‘bad apples,’ they said. Anyone who looked into his or her background would conclude as much.

  SEED’s defenders claimed that the media attention given to these incidents was a red herring used by Republicans to disenfranchise the poor and underprivileged. Certainly, they acknowledged, some of their workers may have been a little overzealous and under-scrupulous about securing new registrations (one man claimed he’d been registered 75 times by SEED—under different names). But these were largely administrative or bookkeeping issues, they argued. Multiple registrations did not prove multiple votes. In fact, they pointed out, there was no proof that any of the phony registrants had ever cast a vote.

  Of course, there was lots of anecdotal evidence that they had. Its critics alleged that SEED routinely hired buses to pick-up prospective voters and carry them from precinct to precinct on election day. These civic-minded citizens (on the theory that if one vote is good, more is better) were rewarded with the ubiquitous gift cards for their hard day’s work. There was also evidence that for as many registrations that were flagged as fraudulent, an unknowable number escaped scrutiny by overworked and under-staffed county election workers. SEED’s policy of holding thousands of registrations—sometimes for months—and then dumping them all at once on the registration deadline, compounded the difficulty of detection.

  Phony voter registrations made for easy headlines. Less attention, Adelita knew, was paid to some of SEED’s even more controversial practices. The Okono campaign had been caught by the FEC claiming an $800,000 payment to one of SEED’s subsidiaries during the Democratic primaries was for “event staging.” Adelita had to smile at the person who’d thought of that subtle euphemism. It was ‘staging’ all right: ‘staging’ a win for Okono in the caucuses in Texas and elsewhere. Eventually, the Okono campaign had been forced to concede the payment was for “volunteer recruitment” and similar services.

  Adelita even suspected, as did many Claire McCracken supporters, that the Okono campaign had hired agitators to heckle McCracken at her campaign events. Even McCracken fundraising events (with tables costing $5,000 a pop), were consistently disrupted by protestors. Wearing flip-flops and T-shirts—it seemed unlikely that these putative ‘protestors’ were paying their own way to the expensive events.

  What most of America didn’t realize about SEED was that, in many ways, it was as much of a conglomerate as any of the corporate giants it kept in its crosshairs. Headquarters in New York and Washington provided support and resources to more than 750 chapters in 53 cities. SEED ran its own housing corporation, law office, and at least two radio stations. SEED was fond of claiming to its partisans that its’ volunteers had registered more than one million low- and moderate-income citizens to vote—in 2004 alone.

  It wasn’t as if there wasn’t important work to do, Adelita thought. 12% of the United States population lived in poverty; in the cities the figure was even higher. As many as 25% of U.S. city residents were poor—figures that were among the highest in the world among industrialized nations. SEED paid lip service to their concern, but, Adelita thought, their objective was elsewhere.

  In July, she’d been contacted at home by Suzanne Saturnino of the Amsterdam Times. She never knew where Saturnino had gotten her name. The Okono campaign had finally been outed by the FEC on the $800,000 payment to the SEED subsidiary, and the Republicans were doing their best to make it an issue. Saturnino offered to tell SEED’s side of the story, and had promised her that anything she said would be considered background only. They met at La Madeleine—an upscale eatery in McLean catering to a heavy lunch crowd (proving that at least in northern Virginia—real men do eat quiche and crepes and tangy Caesar salad).

  She hadn’t meant to say anything incriminating. Adelita had long since become sanguine about most of what was going on. However, as she began answering Saturnino’s questions, she could tell by Saturnino’s reaction that much of what Adelita was telling her was a complete surprise. Later, when people asked her why she had even agreed to meet with the veteran reporter, she was never really sure. Possibly, Adelita conceded, looking back, she was lonely, feeling more and more disaffected with what was going on in the office.

  Although technically non-partisan, SEED had been an unofficial arm of the Democratic Party for years. By hiding behind multiple subsidiaries (something approaching 160 at last count), they had managed to shield most of their more controversial activities. However, taking the field for Okono, they either got reckless or careless. Reporters who noted with satisfaction that the Okono campaign didn’t appear to provide local politicians with ‘walking around money’ to sway constituents—a standard practice within both parties—missed the ‘volunteers’ for Okono canvassing in Philadelphia being handed $50 Target gift cards as they re-boarded the SEED bus.

  But, soon enough, another aspect of SEED’s operations seemed destined to attract scrutiny. At the beginning of September, the U.S. Treasury had announced it would bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As Government Sponsored Enterprises (or GSE’s), most of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s bank creditors had done business with them on the assumption that their investment was backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. With U.S. credit at stake, defaulting on the loans was unthinkable. But the sub-prime mortgage lending-spree was officially over, and the process by which it had inflicted so much damage on the U.S. economy was going to start to receive scrutiny. It was easy enough to blame everything on the greed of Wall Street bankers—on the first round—but sooner or later, people were going to start putting the numbers together, and the numbers told the story.

  SEED had become infamous for its tactics in extorting loans from banks for would-be homeowners with risky credit. Loans that were made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were then bundled into securities sold by Wall Street. And, Saturnino knew, the biggest beneficiary of Fannie Mae’s campaign largesse was Okono. Right then and there, Saturnino knew, even if she got nothing else, she had her story. But there was more.

  Republicans were starting to scream about the so-called “liar loans” or “no-doc” loans where lenders gave loans up to 95% of a home’s purchase price and required nothing more than the borrower’s name, address, date of birth, and social security number. No information about employment, income, or assets was required. And none of the information that was required was ever verified—hence the name.

  But Adelita completely rejected the notion that it was the so-called “greedy poor” who were at fault. A number of unscrupulous banks, Sunset West primary among them, lured unsophisticated mortgage applicants with artificially low ‘teaser’ rates. Once the interest rate adjusted, an index plus formula applied. If the rate was capped so the lender could only charge a certain incremental increase on the mortgage’s interest payments, under the terms of the loan, the additional interest in excess of the cap was deducted from the principal. The strange result: a borrower could be making all their payments and watch their debt increase. There was virtually no way for the borrower to avoid foreclosure or financial ruin. Sunset West didn’t care; they’d already sold the mortgages to someone else.

  SEED screamed about the predatory lendin
g practices of other banks—but said nothing about Sunset West, the most infamous of them all. To Adelita, this was no surprise. After all, Sunset West, it turned out, was one of SEED’s biggest customers. Why was this shocking? Because SEED received 40% of its annual income from the U.S. government to help poor people become homeowners. SEED was ensnaring the very people it was promising to help in Sunset West’s perfidious pyramid scheme, coolly receiving a percentage on every transaction—at taxpayer expense. It was so ballsy that it took Saturnino’s breath away.

  But there was more. Adelita told Suzanne Saturnino not only about SEED’s ‘Muscle for Money’ program, but also that the Okono campaign had illegally shared its list of maxed-out donors with SEED, so that they could approach them for more contributions. According to Adelita, the communication was direct and from the very top. The head of the Washington D.C. office claimed to be speaking directly to Okono.

  Of course, telling Saturnino wasn’t enough. With allegations like these—tying the presumptive Democratic nominee to an organization perpetrating fraud on a massive scale, there had to be proof. Saturnino knew it had to be ironclad before her bosses would risk running the story. She hated pushing it, knowing she was probably putting Bouchard in peril—at least of losing her job if nothing more—but she had to see documentation. Or Adelita had to give her enough information so that she could track down the documentation herself.

  If it were true, not only would Okono’s career be finished; he and some of his top lieutenants were probably looking at jail time. The breadth of the fraud was staggering. Adelita claimed to have proof that SEED had used underhanded tactics in all fourteen caucuses, thirteen of which were won by Okono. Bouchard, who never paid much attention to politics, didn’t seem to fully grasp the implications of these revelations, but Saturnino did. The caucuses represented the statistical difference in delegates that had decided the Democratic nomination.