II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 63was nil. The more common outcome was that the local organizers became demoralized by a long
series of defeats, and drifted off into boredom, despair, and de-politicization. This is in fact the
outcome that appears to have crowned the career of Barack Obama as a community organizer in
Chicago in the 1990s; after three years of futility, Obama was canny enough to depart the scene in
favor of the Harvard Law School, another stepping stone in his glittering political career.
Obama went to Chicago in 1985. He worked as a community organizer among low-income
residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development
on the city’s South Side. The Developing Communities Project (DCP) counter-insurgency effort
was funded by the Gamaliel Foundation, which was heavily funded by the flagship Ford
Foundation. DCP purported to offer job training and college prep on Chicago’s South Side. The real
problems of blacks on the South Side of Chicago were the soaring unemployment and
imprisonment among the area’s mostly black workers – issues that Obama never addressed.
The Gamaliel Foundation’s own website informs the public that “the Gamaliel Foundation
receives grants from the Bauman Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open
Society Institute, and others.” (www.gamaliel.org) Obama has thus been a Ford Foundation-Soros
asset going back more than twenty years. The Developing Communities Project (DCP) was
associated with the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Both the
CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid
organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” as Alinsky put it. The element of
manipulation is clear enough, even in the abstract theory. One of Obama’s early mentors in the
Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, presumably the Marty Kaufman (or part of that composite
character) that Obama writes about in Dreams. Kruglik later told the New Republic that Obama
“was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting
targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their
own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing,
sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their
egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”
Alinsky had told his agitators to bring people to the “realization” that they are indeed miserable,
that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations. (This is already
absurd, since it is the economic breakdown crisis itself that radicalizes those who experience it. The
task of an organizer is to develop strategy and programs to allow a popular movement to challenge
the financier elite at the highest level – state power, not petty community control or local control,
where defeat is always guaranteed.) The task of the agitator is then to help them to bond together to
demand what they deserve, and to agitate so energetically that governments and corporations will
see “self-interest” in granting the demands of the local agitators. Obama had a four-year education
in these crude Alinsky methods, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere –
in profiling and manipulation, since these are the essence of the Alinsky divide-and-conquer method
of counterinsurgency.
PREVARICATION IN THE HOOD
Obama paints a moderately flattering picture of himself as a community organizer in Dreams.
But even here, he has faced charges of embroidering and embellishing his record to make himself
look good. The criticism comes from the long-time local activist Hazel Johnson, who has disputed
the account of events at Altgeld Gardens that Obama put into his book, and which he has repeated at