by P. G. Abeles
Chapter Forty-Six
New York, New York
THE ARTICLE WAS PRINTED in the June 1968 issue of a left-leaning political magazine. It became so popular, and so iconic, that eventually tens of thousands of reprints were requested. It was the work of two PhDs, then teaching at Columbia. And, in some ways, it might have seemed a strange choice of subject matter for academics. But, the times were strange. Both were unabashed socialists. They believed in complete redistribution of wealth in America. They were preaching nothing less than revolution and anarchy.
The article took as its working hypothesis that the economic elite used welfare as a mechanism of social control. By providing a safety net, they argued, the elite lulled the economically disenfranchised into complacency. Therefore, they posited, society would never change until the social nets were destroyed, and the poor were forced by necessity to rebel against their economic overlords. To help the poor, they needed to sabotage the very systems on which the poor had come to rely. Only when the system was destroyed, they argued, could a new, more equitable system emerge.
Their plan was brilliantly simple. The authors pointed out that the eight million people currently receiving welfare were seriously fewer (perhaps by as much as half) than the number of people legally entitled to receive it. If they signed up those additional people, they reasoned, the system could not sustain the level of payments. The system would, they argued, catastrophically, and inevitably, crash. The article posited that “cadres of aggressive organizers” could organize violent demonstrations to bring the political establishment to its knees. Sympathetic, well-placed journalists would then start to publicly suggest “a federal program of income re-distribution”—that would share out the spoils evenly—both to those who could work, and those who could not.
As their manifesto made clear, the strategists never pretended that the poor who would be manipulated into turning up at their demonstrations were anything but tools. The poor must be led to believe they were protesting about their specific concerns, concerns that were irrelevant to the academics. The academics didn’t care about affordable housing, better and cleaner mass transit, or even universal healthcare—those were throwaways. They needed chaos, disorder, dislocation. They needed people to bleed. Better yet, and more specifically, they needed poor people to bleed. On television.
They got it. Pippen and Clothard founded Welfare Now! and by 1969 claimed 25,000 active members. At their behest, members staged mass demonstrations, sit-ins, and boycotts. They stormed welfare offices where they shattered glass doors, overturned furniture, filing cabinets, and desks. They smashed electronics and ripped phones from the walls, disabling for weeks the social services offices they attacked. They weren’t choosy, they didn’t need to be. The intention was to create chaos. Protestors disrupted meetings of everyone from congressional committees to city and town councils, and threw rocks and tear gas at police—all the while demanding money to which they claimed to be entitled.
For the academics, it all worked beyond their wildest expectations. Clothard was quoted in the New York newspapers as saying “The prospects for the poor will only improve when the rest of society is afraid of them.” In 1970, the Supreme Court considered the case of Goldberg v. Kelly, where twenty individuals suspected of welfare fraud had been denied benefits by their New York City caseworkers. The court ruled that, henceforth, no welfare recipient could be denied benefits without an evidentiary hearing. Perhaps predictably, the welfare rolls swelled. In ten years, the number of people receiving assistance from the federal government more than doubled. By 1975, the city of New York declared bankruptcy. In the ‘city that never sleeps’, there was one person on welfare for every two people who were working.
Denied federal bailout money, but buoyed by a loan from the teacher’s pension fund, almost inexplicably, New York City—being New York City— inverted itself and was saved. There were no riots, no calls for a socialist state. In fact, rather to the contrary, there was a backlash against a system that was obviously no longer working the way it was intended.
Disappointed, the academics moved on. There would be other ways, other opportunities, to overwhelm the social system, they reminded their followers. By 1982, Ford Rauschenberg who had worked for the academics on Welfare Now!, refocused his energies on their voting rights initiative called Power Vote (Rauschenberg would later become famous as the founder of SEED). Perhaps cynically, they found themselves a militant African American to be its spokesperson. Years later, before he ran for the state senate, Okono would run Power Vote’s Chicago subsidiary. Clothard, Pippen, and Rauschenberg lobbied energetically for what came to be known as the “motor-voter” system, whereby people could register to vote when they received their licenses from the Division of Motor Vehicles, or signed up for social services. On its face, there was nothing sinister about the legislation—far from it—a democracy has the obligation to make sure its citizens can freely and fairly cast their vote. But critics alleged that the organization was always intended as a front…for bigger things.
Critics categorized the academics’ plan as “a Trojan horse movement.” The ostensible reason for most of the community organizations they founded was to provide greater access to social services for the poor, a laudable goal. But, critics charged, their manifesto revealed that their actual intention was to dismantle those services, so the poor would revolt and create a socialist state. As one critic noted: “…their real objective is to lure the poor into service as revolutionary foot soldiers, to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock and bring the whole system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown—providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns would float the idea of ‘a federal program of income redistribution’ in the form of a guaranteed living income for all—working and non-working people alike.”
In time, the plan came to be known as the Clothard-Pippen strategy, with their names listed alphabetically, his first. But Pippen was the real brains behind the operation. Born in Canada, she grew up in the Bronx, the only child of Russian immigrants who never fully acclimated to their new country. At fifteen, she left home to attend the University of Chicago and immediately established her bona fides as an intellectual heavyweight.
Brilliant, reserved, intentional, Pippen combined a tireless belligerence and steely-eyed pragmatism. She only cared about results. She became an accomplished writer and a powerful, compelling public speaker. If some of her colleagues kept their distance—wary of her advocacy and involvement in engineered confrontation, controversy, and chaos, her graduate students huddled around her in Socratic fashion, adoringly eating Chinese take-out at her feet. Her trim figure, large eyes, and pixie-like hairstyle were a source of admiration, as well. She carefully maintained her Main Street appeal.
She learned to tailor her arguments to the audience. She sucked in the perennially naïve feminists to whom she argued that the “poorest of the poor” were women. To already defensive African Americans, she argued that the current economic system was merely a new form of slavery. With each interest group, she fine-tuned her arguments with an entirely cynical calculation as to what would win them over; like a barber honing the blade of his razor on a strop.
Of course, voter registration efforts could change the political system, but it couldn’t cause the sort of social and financial breakdown Clothard and Pippen were seeking. They needed a new issue behind which to mobilize the poor—an issue that could—by engineered massive public participation—cause economic collapse.
It may have seemed curious to some Washington insiders that the voter registration groups, like Power Vote and SEED, began to lobby Congress and multiple administrations for less- restrictive lending requirements for would-be homeowners with poor credit. But their change in focus went unchallenged, if not unnoticed. After all, wer
en’t members of both parties always touting home ownership as the surest way to create a responsible and stable citizenry? The Republicans were as enthusiastic as the Democrats. After forty years of spectacular successes and devastating reverses, Pippen had finally found the means to an end, the perfect Trojan horse. It would be worth the wait.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chicago, Illinois
WITHOUT MUCH HOPE OF FINDING ANYTHING, but annoyed at the prospect of simply giving in to his superior’s now pressing demands that he move on, Harrison had obtained a search warrant for Kevin DuShane’s apartment. Black and whites had already been through the entire complex asking the residents if anyone had seen Kevin DuShane. They all heard the same story—DuShane was on a vacation paid for by the Jehovah Ministry Church. The apartment was Harrison’s last hope.
When Johnson found out where Harrison was headed, he insisted on accompanying him to the South Side apartment complex.
“Have you ever been to Orchard Park?” Johnson asked Harrison—eyeing him curiously as they walked.
“Not sure,” said Harrison. Johnson stopped walking abruptly.
“If you’d been to Orchard Park, you’d remember,” he said, shaking his head.
Immediately, Johnson was on his cell phone, asking someone on the other end if they could meet there. Harrison was not sure why they needed a guide, but said nothing. He’d learned to respect Johnson’s instincts. Johnson’s ties to the local communities were unparalleled, and had helped crack more than one case in the past. Johnson snapped his phone shut.
“Got a guy meeting us there, let’s go.”
The name Chicago comes from the Potawatomois word “skikaakwa” meaning ‘skunk’—a reference, it has long been assumed, to the acrid, pungent-smelling skunk grass that grew along the river. By the late 1770s, the first non-Indian settlers were calling it “Eschikago.” One of the first was a Haitian, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, officially named in 1968 as the city’s founder.
Du Sable had a fascinating story. The son of a Caribbean slave and French pirate, he had studied at a Catholic school in France. When he immigrated to America, to ensure his freedom, he’d traveled north and west, finally establishing himself on the swampy western shore of Lake Michigan. The mosquito-plagued marsh might not have seemed to have much to recommend it to other settlers, particularly those looking for arable land. But du Sable quickly realized the one commodity the adjacent old-growth forest did have in munificent supply—animals. More specifically, small, furry animals whose sheer numbers made them easy to catch. He established the first trading post in the area and became rich trading fur.
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for his commercial success was the area’s remarkable access. Eschikago possessed a unique geography on the continental divide. The so-called “Chicago Portage” connects two of the most important waterways in the world. On one side of the divide, the water drains from Lake Michigan to the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic. On the other side, water drains from the Des Plaines, Kankakee, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Chicago sits like a colossus, straddling the two.
The city had grown immensely from its humble beginnings. Present day Chicago was divided into four main sections. The Loop was the nexus of most of Chicago’s commercial, civic, and financial activities, and was named for the circuit of cable cars that originally surrounded what came to be considered downtown like an embrace. The North Side, with its beaches and parks along Lake Michigan, was the most densely populated, famous for its art galleries and trendy eateries. The demolition of the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project in 2003, had paved the way for upscale townhouses and general revitalization of the area. Lakeview, Andersonville, and Boystown were known for their large and sophisticated yuppie and gay populations. The West Side was dominated by Garfield Park Conservatory, the South Side by the University of Chicago.
All four quadrants of the city were unusually mixed. Multi-million dollar condos in converted warehouses stood check-by- jowl with impoverished neighborhoods of ‘unimproved’ buildings. If real estate in the North Side was generally considered the most attractive, there were plenty of poor—and expensive— neighborhoods scattered throughout the city. But the South Side was an exception. With only a small oasis around the university, the rest of the area looked like a war-zone.
Orchard Park was one example. It stood close by an affluent neighborhood of mansions and manicured lawns populated by professionals —including members of the University of Chicago faculty. But if the geography was contiguous, Orchard Park shared little else with its glamorous neighbors up the street.
As they drove up to the development, Johnson answered his phone. As Harrison pulled into the first available parking space, Johnson waved out the car window, and spoke into the phone,
“Okay. I see you.” They got out of the car. Waiting for them was an African American man in his mid-thirties. He carried a clipboard. Harrison made a quick survey of his attire: crisp, plaid, button down, short-sleeved shirt, creased khakis, pocket protector. Harrison’s quick guess was high school math teacher or exterminator.
Johnson was introducing them. They shook hands.
“John Williams,” the man said simply.
“Reverend John is a pastor at my church,” Johnson said by way of explanation. Johnson attended his neighborhood church in a nice, working class suburb on the North Side. Harrison thought to himself, Well, I read that wrong.
“Part-time pastor. I’m still studying,” Williams said somewhat sheepishly.
Johnson was never put off by false modesty:
“Reverend John’s an expert on most of the projects around here. He’s spear-headed a lot of the church outreach efforts.”
Harrison was impressed.
“And, if I may ask…?”
Williams laughed and finished his thought.
“What was the connection?”
“Right.”
“I used to do pest control for the city.”
Harrison smiled to himself, pleased. He still had it. They all looked somberly at a nearby trashcan, overflowing with detritus, swarming with cockroaches. As they stood in the project’s main entry, rats skittered across the pathways.
“Reverend John spent a lot of time here,” Johnson said, thoughtfully.
Reverend John gave them a quick overview. In 1990, Orchard Park had opened as a redevelopment, run by a non-profit group called Forestlawn. Federal money paid for the property’s complete renovation as part of one of the earliest public-private partnerships sponsored by the city’s mayor and Okono.
The development had 504 apartments. By Reverend John’s estimate, a hundred or more were now vacant, their doors and windows covered with grafitti’d plywood boards. The tenants who remained had nowhere else to go. The living conditions should have been unimaginable: sewage that backed up into sinks, rat and cockroach infestations so intense that pets and children were at risk, rotted garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes. And basic utilities: water, electricity, heat— that constantly malfunctioned, Reverend John said. Harrison noticed the unmistakable stench of urine in the hallways, the broken electrical fixtures, the collapsed walls, and the black scar of fire damage on many of the units. Reverend John told them federal inspectors had recently rated the development an 11—on a 100-point scale. The development now faced demolition.
“The city basically outsourced public housing to a few chosen private developers,” said Reverend John. On Reverend John’s list, in addition to Joey Ali, Harrison noticed some of Okono’s biggest supporters and members of his inner circle. “They received hundreds of millions of dollars in city, state, and federal subsidies. But because these units are subsidized housing—they’re rent controlled. So the developer who got all his money up-front had no financial incentive to maintain the property—with the inevitable result.” Reverend John shook his head.
“Many of these loans are only available to owners who qualify as minority-owned or disadv
antaged. They’re meant to help the community,” Reverend John continued.
“Then guys like Joey Ali find people willing to front for them for a percentage of the booty…and they screw their own people.”
Harrison kicked some of the debris out of the way with his foot.
“I take it you’re not a fan of Okono’s?”
Reverend John gave him a level look.
“When Okono ran for the Congress, a group of residents here held a protest against him. In the statehouse and Congress he was always lobbying for tax credits and federal subsidies for his developer buddies. Ali alone collected almost $87 million to renovate 30 buildings, and there was no maintenance. Problems with electricity, heat, you name it. I mean, most of these walls aren’t even insulated.”
Johnson shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“There are at least eleven of these projects in Okono’s own district that I know of,” Reverend John added. “And I forgot to mention one more thing…” Both Harrison and Johnson looked at Reverend John.
“Yeah?” Johnson asked
Reverend John continued. “In the middle of winter…it was maybe two degrees… the residents of this development finally got the city to sue ForestLawn to turn on the heat…so that people wouldn’t die.”
Johnson nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Guess who represented them?” Reverend John asked.
“Okono?” Harrison guessed. Reverend John nodded.
“The residents? asked Johnson.
“Well, that’s good, right? People can’t live without heat in Chicago.”
Reverend John looked at him sympathetically.
“Okono didn’t represent the residents. He represented the developers. His buddies. Okono was the attorney for Forest-Lawn.”