162 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographySpelman Fund of New York, a relatively new entity created to disburse Rockefeller dollars.
Brownlow pressed his case for a public administration clearing house, Ruml enthusiastically
embraced the idea and, in 1937 the [Rockefeller-controlled] Spelman Fund disbursed $1 million to
the University of Chicago to underwrite the construction of what became 1313.” (Mr. Ruml also
helped organize the fascist psychiatry enterprise known as the Josiah Macy Foundation.) Don Rose
recommended young Axelrod for an intern’s job at the Chicago Tribune daily newspaper, where the
intensely plugged-in Axelrod eventually rose to become political editor. Don Rose later told
Chicago magazine, “Axelrod was the first political reporter at the Trib who was really associated
with the liberal reform movement. He was sympathetic to the movement ... and he developed a lot
of contacts. One of the reasons he looked good was because the people he developed associations
with were on the ascendancy....” In 1984, Axelrod quit the Tribune to manage Paul Simon’s senate
race, followed later by jobs with Stevenson, Harold Washington, and others. Throughout, Axelrod
has been identified with the movement for political “reforms” — such as privatization, budget cuts,
etc. — representing the oligarchs at the University of Chicago and their financier sponsors. David
Axelrod is the Obama campaign’s overall director; Axelrod’s partner (in the firm AKP Media),
David Plouffe, is Obama’s official campaign manager; and Axelrod’s other partner, John Del
Cecato, is a strategist for the campaign.’ (larouchepac.com, April 24, 2008)
Stevenson formed the Solidarity Party and ran with Jane Spirgel as the Secretary of State
nominee and Mike Howlett for Lieutenant Governor. Hart achieved 15% of the vote, with Spirgel
taking 17%. Hart and Spirgel’s opponent, Republican incumbent Jim Edgar, won the election by the
largest margin in any state-wide election in Illinois history (until Barky’s 2004 defeat of the
carpetbagging buffoon Allan Keyes), with 1.574 million votes (67%). Fairchild was defeated, and
Republican Big Jim Thompson took the governorship over the hapless Stevenson.
THE 1987 CHICAGO TEACHERS’ STRIKE
As we have seen, one of the targets of any foundation-funded school reform is automatically to
weaken or bust the teachers’ union. In September 1987, the Chicago teachers’ union went on strike
for 19 days. This was the ninth strike in two decades. Secretary of Education William Bennett, in an
attempt to encourage the busting of the union after the 1987 school strike, declared the city’s
schools the “worst in America.” Under the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago had deliberately
maintained a highly segregated system. ‘As whites fled to the suburbs and many remaining white
families sent children to the large Catholic school system, citizen support for the public schools
diminished. Daley tried to buy labor peace with the unions through financial sleight-of-hand that,
after his death, resulted in full-scale crisis in 1979. In response to the crescendo of discontent which
was also orchestrated by foundation operatives, Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first black
mayor, convened an “education summit” in 1986 to persuade businesses to guarantee jobs to public
school graduates if they met performance standards.” The LSC ploy also succeeded in splitting the
black community, with Jesse Jackson lobbying forcefully against reform, fighting implementation,
and battling, for example, to save the job of his old protégé, Manford Byrd, the superintendent of
schools who was forced out. The black middle class, many of whom were school employees, was
the political and financial base for Jackson’s Operation PUSH, despite his vocal advocacy of the
disenfranchised poor. When PUSH came to the shove of disgruntled black parents, Jackson’s
organization sided with the black administrators, above all, and the teachers.’ About 550 positions
have been cut out of a central bureaucracy of about 4,100, while top administrators have done
everything they could to save themselves. Veronica Anderson, writing in the March 2008 issue of
Catalyst Chicago, described the local control institutions as generally moribund, observing that