Showing posts with label Galluzo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Galluzo. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Activist Who Taught Obama To Be Community Organizer Is Retiring
June 3, 2013 6:57 AM
Related tags Community Organizer, Gamaliel Foundation, Greg Galluzzo, President Barack Obama, Retiring, United Neighborhood Organization
CHICAGO (STMW) – The man who taught a young Barack Obama how to be a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago recalls his ability to talk to anyone, from the very poor to the very rich.
At 69, Greg Galluzzo is weeks from retiring — or at least not getting paid — from the Gamaliel Foundation, the training and consulting organization he has directed since 1986. Galluzzo, also the creator of the United Neighborhood Organization, managed to stay behind the scenes during his 41-year community-organizing career, which he says is the sign of a good organizer.
“We’re not supposed to be in the spotlight,” he said, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re suppposed to create the scenario so the indigenous people of the community are our leaders.”
But there are those in the community-organizing world who take a different and very public path. Galluzo met Obama in 1985, and remembers him at age 21 as “a hardworking man, very willing to learn, a man with incredible integrity and a man who was comfortable no matter who he was talking to.”
“He really embraced the community, and the community embraced him,” Galluzzo said. “I think it was one of the more formative moments in his life where he became proud of his own ancestry because the people made him proud.”
Galluzzo met with Obama weekly for a year, teaching him how to raise money for his community organization and how to design community strategies.
“He’s very young, very articulate, but he’s well-educated and so he’s not intimidated talking to anybody,” Galluzzo said. “And yet at the same time, I saw him on many occasions just talk to very low-income people and they would feel wonderful talking to him. They never felt put down. They felt affirmed.”
From his early organizing days in the ’70s until today, Galluzzo has seen the effects of community organizing, based on who is leading the city. He describes Mayor Richard M. Daley as a man who listened to the community, his base, and says the day Mayor Harold Washington died was the saddest day of his life. Washington, he says, “was a hero to this city.”
Galluzzo travels around the world, organizing and inviting people into the political process. But the beginning of his career focused largely on rebuilding schools in Pilsen, a community he calls home. The first thing he accomplished as an organizer was kicking out a “bad principal,” he says, which took 9 months. Since then, he has led community efforts that have helped build nine new grade schools, a high school and a community college.
In the mid 1970s, Galluzzo was front and center when the Pilsen community called on owners of factories near Cermak and Ashland to shut their doors in order for Benito Juarez Community Academy to be built. But it wasn’t an easy fight.
Galluzzo and his organization, the Pilsen Neighborhood Community Council, forced a meeting with Mayor Richard J. Daley, but left angry after Daley told the crowd the decision was out of his control, in the hands of an eminent-domain judge and the Board of Education.
Days later, a judge walked into a Pilsen community group office and asked for details on the fight against the factory owners: “He says, ‘Maybe I can be helfpul,’ ” Galluzzo said. “Two days later, there’s inspectors crawling all over those buildings.”
Building owners were hauled into court and “harassed by city government.”
During the eminent-domain hearing, the judge who had visited Pilsen welcomed about 50 community members into his courtroom. Minutes later, he came out of chambers with owners of the buildings and lawyers and said, “‘A wonderful thing has happened. The owners have agreed to sell,’” Galluzzo recalled.
“That’s the way Daley worked,” Galluzzo said. “He was in some ways a great community organizer. His hands were not on any one thing. His hands were on everything.”
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2013. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
Activist who taught Obama to be community organizer is retiring
BY TINA SFONDELES Staff Reporter/tsfondeles@suntimes.com June 2, 2013 8:54PM
Greg Galluzzo is retiring after a lifetime as a Chicago community activist. He mentored Barack Obama during his days as a young community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He also started the Fiesta del Sol festival in Pilsen. | Sun-Times Media
ARTICLE EXTRAS
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Updated: June 3, 2013 2:13AM
The man who taught a young Barack Obama how to be a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago recalls his ability to talk to anyone, from the very poor to the very rich.
At 69, Greg Galluzzo is weeks from retiring — or at least not getting paid — from the Gamaliel Foundation, the training and consulting organization he has directed since 1986. Galluzzo, also the creator of the United Neighborhood Organization, managed to stay behind the scenes during his 41-year community-organizing career, which he says is the sign of a good organizer.
“We’re not supposed to be in the spotlight,” he said. “We’re suppposed to create the scenario so the indigenous people of the community are our leaders.”
But there are those in the community-organizing world who take a different and very public path. Galluzo met Obama in 1985, and remembers him at age 21 as “a hardworking man, very willing to learn, a man with incredible integrity and a man who was comfortable no matter who he was talking to.”
“He really embraced the community, and the community embraced him,” Galluzzo said. “I think it was one of the more formative moments in his life where he became proud of his own ancestry because the people made him proud.”
Galluzzo met with Obama weekly for a year, teaching him how to raise money for his community organization and how to design community strategies.
Updated: June 3, 2013 2:13AM
The man who taught a young Barack Obama how to be a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago recalls his ability to talk to anyone, from the very poor to the very rich.
At 69, Greg Galluzzo is weeks from retiring — or at least not getting paid — from the Gamaliel Foundation, the training and consulting organization he has directed since 1986. Galluzzo, also the creator of the United Neighborhood Organization, managed to stay behind the scenes during his 41-year community-organizing career, which he says is the sign of a good organizer.
“We’re not supposed to be in the spotlight,” he said. “We’re suppposed to create the scenario so the indigenous people of the community are our leaders.”
But there are those in the community-organizing world who take a different and very public path. Galluzo met Obama in 1985, and remembers him at age 21 as “a hardworking man, very willing to learn, a man with incredible integrity and a man who was comfortable no matter who he was talking to.”
“He really embraced the community, and the community embraced him,” Galluzzo said. “I think it was one of the more formative moments in his life where he became proud of his own ancestry because the people made him proud.”
Galluzzo met with Obama weekly for a year, teaching him how to raise money for his community organization and how to design community strategies.
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P.S.
According to the words above G. Galluzzo met Obama in 1985, and Barack was 21. Obama supposedly was born in 1961; So in 1985, Obama would have been 23 or 24 years old, not 21.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Gamaliel and the Barack Obama Connection
Barack Obama and the Gamaliel Foundation (Community Action utilizing Faith…..and Saul Alinsky Training)
First this:
From the Gamaliel Foundation:
Gamaliel and the Barack Obama Connection
by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
Then ADD THIS:
From Discover the Networks:
Network of grassroots organizations working to bring about social change
Models its tactics after those of the radical Sixties activist Saul Alinsky
The stated mission of the Gamaliel Foundation (GF) is “to be a powerful network of grassroots, interfaith, interracial, multi-issue organizations working together to create a more just and more democratic society.” Predicated on the notion that America is a land rife with injustice, GF agitates for social change by supporting the efforts of a network of organizations (the Gamaliel Network) whose goal is to allow for individuals to “effectively participate” in the political, environmental, social and economic arenas. GF offers, for its network affiliates, programs to teach techniques and methodologies for bringing about social change; ongoing consultations; and organizer recruitment campaigns.
The Gamaliel Foundation derives its name from the biblical figure who, according to the New Testament, chastised the Jewish Sanhedrin (rabbinical court) for wanting to give the death penalty to Jesus’s apostles. Says GF, “We work in the hope and the confidence that this work is of God.” GF was established in 1968 to support the Contract Buyers League, an African American organization fighting to protect homeowners on Chicago’s West Side who had been discriminated against by banks and lending institutions.
The Gamaliel Network receives much of its funding from the leftist group Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Yet according to the Roman Catholic Faithful website, GF’s “goals and philosophies are at fundamental odds with Church teaching.” GF endorses “scriptural relativism“and “encourage[s] a wide range of scriptural interpretations.”
The Gamaliel Foundation models itself after the activism of the 1960s radical Saul Alinsky, who authored the books Reveille for Radicals (1946), The Professional Radical (1970), and Rules for Radicals (1971). Alinsky’s prescription for effective organizing consisted of the following elements: (a) Develop a “trade union in the social factory” to serve as a vehicle by which people in the neighborhood can bargain, strike, and struggle to advance their agendas; (b) create a power-oriented community organization willing to use militant, confrontational tactics; and (c) promote a democratic organization where organizers do not themselves lead, but rather develop local leaders so as to create the veneer of self-determination and grassroots democracy.
GF likens its own mission to that of the biblical apostle Paul. “In Corinthians,” explains GF, “Paul states, ‘I am Paul, a disciple of Gamaliel.’ Saul Alinsky made all of his organizers read the letters of Paul because he regarded his namesake to be one of the greatest organizers of all time.”
The Gamaliel Foundation takes a strong stand against current homeland security measures and immigration restrictions. In September of 2003, for example, Ana Garcia-Ashley, GF’s Director of Civil Rights for Immigrants, described the Patriot Actas an “attack on immigrants.” Moreover, GF seeks to persuade the U.S. government to “legalize and provide rights to tax-paying [illegal] immigrants in this country.” ”We support any immigration legislation,” adds GF, “that secures the civil rights of all immigrants; leads to the legalization of undocumented persons; provides for full labor protection and labor rights of immigrants; ends the inhumane detention and warehousing of asylum seekers; ends deportation for minor offenses; encourages family unity; provides security of our borders; includes humane border enforcement policies; [and] protects the civil liberties of all people.”
The Gamaliel Foundation is a sponsoring organization of theImmigrant Workers Freedom Ride Coalition, which seeks to secure ever-expanding rights and civil liberties protections for illegal immigrants, and policy reforms that diminish or eliminate restrictions on immigration.
At its 2003 National Leadership Assembly in Milwaukee, GF assembled a large number of leftist religious leaders to launch a voter drive against the incumbent Bush administration. At the event, featured speaker Rev. Tommie Pierson of Metropolitan Congregations United stated that he looked forward to the sound “of furniture being moved out of the White House.” Also attending the event were Democratic Senator Russ Feingold and Democratic Presidential candidate and Progressive Caucusmember Dennis Kucinich.
Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest, is the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation. In 1980 Galluzzo co-founded, along with his wife Mary Gonzalez, a Chicago Latino activist organization called the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). Today, Ms. Gonzalez is the Gamaliel Foundation’s Director of Western Territory. UNO, also modeled after Alinsky’s methods, is known for using aggressive organizing and confrontational tactics to push for change.
The President of the Board of the Gamaliel Foundation is Ann Smith, who in 1985 became the first black female to win a statewide election in Illinois when she was voted onto the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
The Gamaliel Foundation receives grants from theBauman Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, theW.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, George Soros‘s Open Society Institute, and others.
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Friday, July 27, 2012
Gamaliel and the Barack Obama Connection
Photo (Courtesy) http://goodjesuitbadjesuit.blogspot.com/2009/10/young-barack-obama-former-jesuit-named.html
by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
...
Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest, is the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation. In 1980 Galluzzo co-founded, along with his wife Mary Gonzalez, a Chicago Latino activist organization called the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). Today, Ms. Gonzalez is the Gamaliel Foundation’s Director of Western Territory. UNO, also modeled after Alinsky’s methods, is known for using aggressive organizing and confrontational tactics to push for change.
.
Source
by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
...
Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest, is the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation. In 1980 Galluzzo co-founded, along with his wife Mary Gonzalez, a Chicago Latino activist organization called the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). Today, Ms. Gonzalez is the Gamaliel Foundation’s Director of Western Territory. UNO, also modeled after Alinsky’s methods, is known for using aggressive organizing and confrontational tactics to push for change.
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Source
Previously posted here on:
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26, 2011
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Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Gamaliel and the Barack Obama Connection
Photo (Courtesy) http://goodjesuitbadjesuit.blogspot.com/2009/10/young-barack-obama-former-jesuit-named.html
by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
...
Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest, is the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation. In 1980 Galluzzo co-founded, along with his wife Mary Gonzalez, a Chicago Latino activist organization called the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). Today, Ms. Gonzalez is the Gamaliel Foundation’s Director of Western Territory. UNO, also modeled after Alinsky’s methods, is known for using aggressive organizing and confrontational tactics to push for change.
.
Source
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by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
...
Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest, is the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation. In 1980 Galluzzo co-founded, along with his wife Mary Gonzalez, a Chicago Latino activist organization called the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). Today, Ms. Gonzalez is the Gamaliel Foundation’s Director of Western Territory. UNO, also modeled after Alinsky’s methods, is known for using aggressive organizing and confrontational tactics to push for change.
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Source
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Thursday, October 07, 2010
Did the JESUITS Play Their WILD CARD & the JOKE(R) is on us???...
“Obama’s Chicago mentor” is “Gregory Galluzzo – a ‘former’ Jesuit priest….” [Jesuit Temporal Coadjutor and featured writer for the Pope's American neo-fascist Executive Intelligence Review, Webster Tarpley, mentions Galluzzo in his book, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography.]
“Obama’s Chief Speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Senior Military and Foreign Policy Advisor, Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Deputy Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, was Jesuit-trained.”
How many other Jesuit agents Mr. Obama has on his team we may never know, for as American historian J. Wayne Laurens writes: “They [the Jesuits] are not merely priests, or of one religious creed; they are merchants [Wall Street Bankers] … and editors, and men of any profession, having no outward badge by which to be recognized…. “
Read more
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“Obama’s Chief Speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Senior Military and Foreign Policy Advisor, Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Deputy Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, was Jesuit-trained.”
How many other Jesuit agents Mr. Obama has on his team we may never know, for as American historian J. Wayne Laurens writes: “They [the Jesuits] are not merely priests, or of one religious creed; they are merchants [Wall Street Bankers] … and editors, and men of any profession, having no outward badge by which to be recognized…. “
Read more
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Friday, August 27, 2010
New World Order – Jesuit Priests – Illuminati – Clip
According to a most eye-opening and incredibly compelling book Codeword Barbelon http://www.luxverbi.org.uk/arch/Codeword_Barb%C3%AAl%C3%B4n_Foreword_ISBN_0-954359666_and_ISBN_9780954359669.htm , by author P.D. Stuart, Obama is under the control of the Jesuits and has been for many years.
We also discovered that even the Pope Benedict XVI gave Obama his blessings after his election victory in November. As far as I am aware this is the first time a Pope has blessed the Presidency so openly. See the attached pdf news report on p. 16A from the National Post titled: “Pope Blesses Obama”!!
But first, here is a little Obama history.
Many years ago, Obama’s wife to be, Michelle Robinson, a promising associate at the same Chicago Loop law firm, Sidley Austin, became a good friend and mentor to a young paralegal looking for career advice, Mike Strautmanis; as did her future husband, Barack H. Obama.
Strautmanis, who is now 39 and a senior legal counsel to Obama presidential team, attended a very special school: the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius College Prep, one of Chicago’s influential Catholic schools.
You may think this is a mere coincidence, but Strautmanis is not Mr. Obama’s only or even his most important Jesuit confidant!
It’s around that time [while Obama was working as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago] that Mr. Obama developed long-lasting ties with the Catholic Church and her most wily agents–the Jesuits.
So much so that Obama can’t seem to avoid apointing Jesuits to his inner circle of advisers and managers. These Jesuits are all men of amphibologia [i.e. double sensed words] and the most wonderful obstinacy whose sole objective, according to one of their former pupils, is to secure “to the highest office of state men who they have poisoned with their maxims.” (See, Jean Lacouture, Jesuits: A Multibiography, p. 340. Note: Jean Lacouture is himself an ancien élève of the Jesuits—i.e. a former pupil).
No wonder Edmund Burke wrote that the Jesuits are “an infectious ‘plague’ requiring ‘the precautions of the most severe quarantine.’ “
Even Pope Gregory IX had to admit: “The Jesuit foxes have various faces, but they all hang together by their tails.”
Enough of that.. Lets see what the author of Codeword Barbelon
http://www.luxverbi.org.uk/arch/Codeword_Barb%C3%AAl%C3%B4n_Foreword_ISBN_0-954359666_and_ISBN_9780954359669.htm reveals about Obama’s Jesuit foxes:
“Obama’s Chicago mentor” is “Gregory Galluzzo – a ‘former’ Jesuit priest….” [Jesuit Temporal Coadjutor and featured writer for the Pope's American neo-fascist Executive Intelligence Review, Webster Tarpley, mentions Galluzzo in his book, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography.]
“Obama’s Chief Speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Senior Military and Foreign Policy Advisor, Maj. Gen. J. Scott
Gration, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Deputy Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, was Jesuit-trained.”
How many other Jesuit agents Mr. Obama has on his team we may never know, for as American historian J. Wayne Laurens writes: “They [the Jesuits] are not merely priests, or of one religious creed; they are merchants [Wall Street Bankers] … and editors, and men of any profession, having no outward badge by which to be recognized…. “
[J. Wayne Laurens, The Crisis in America : or the Enemies of America Unmasked (Philadelphia: G. D. Miller, 1855), p. 265; cited in Codeword Barbelon].
Note too, that Obama’s Global Poverty Act, passed in 2007, was launched at a conference in San Francisco to lobby for the bill. The conference was held at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit Catholic Institution [seventy miles south of the Order's Bohemian Grove] with a “global perspective,” under the auspices of the Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought.
In all of the above we have clues as to his agenda and who backed him: he was trained and mentored by Jesuits [no doubt, connectted to the Order through the Ford Foundation for which his atheist, White mother worked; the Ford Foundation oversaw the faith-mixing, race-mixing, culture-mixing Gamaliel Foundation for which Barry Davis Obama worked alongside co-founder Jesuit priest Greg Galluzo now an "ex-Jesuit" and the Foundation's Executive Director], he worked for the Catholic Church for most of his life, and he has even chosen a Jesuit-controlled Roman Catholic, Joe Biden, as his vice-president. What does that tell you? Do you think all this Catholic connection is mere coincidence and stands for nothing? One can draw the conclusion that Obama’s relationship with the Jesuits is much more important to his success in this election and even more extensive than many think. Incidentally, Joe Biden lectures at the Jesuit University in Scranton [a major recruiting station for the Black Pope's Central Intelligence Agency] and his son, according to an official Federal finance document, was paid over $80,000.00 last year by the Jesuits to lobby for them in the White House!!
Joe Biden’s son was Jesuit-trained at Georgetown University and is paid to lobby for the Jesuit University of Scranton. Joe Biden was also given an honorary degree from the Jesuit University of Scranton (1979) and from the Jesuit Order’s St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia (1981).
We also discovered that even the Pope Benedict XVI gave Obama his blessings after his election victory in November. As far as I am aware this is the first time a Pope has blessed the Presidency so openly. See the attached pdf news report on p. 16A from the National Post titled: “Pope Blesses Obama”!!
But first, here is a little Obama history.
Many years ago, Obama’s wife to be, Michelle Robinson, a promising associate at the same Chicago Loop law firm, Sidley Austin, became a good friend and mentor to a young paralegal looking for career advice, Mike Strautmanis; as did her future husband, Barack H. Obama.
Strautmanis, who is now 39 and a senior legal counsel to Obama presidential team, attended a very special school: the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius College Prep, one of Chicago’s influential Catholic schools.
You may think this is a mere coincidence, but Strautmanis is not Mr. Obama’s only or even his most important Jesuit confidant!
It’s around that time [while Obama was working as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago] that Mr. Obama developed long-lasting ties with the Catholic Church and her most wily agents–the Jesuits.
So much so that Obama can’t seem to avoid apointing Jesuits to his inner circle of advisers and managers. These Jesuits are all men of amphibologia [i.e. double sensed words] and the most wonderful obstinacy whose sole objective, according to one of their former pupils, is to secure “to the highest office of state men who they have poisoned with their maxims.” (See, Jean Lacouture, Jesuits: A Multibiography, p. 340. Note: Jean Lacouture is himself an ancien élève of the Jesuits—i.e. a former pupil).
No wonder Edmund Burke wrote that the Jesuits are “an infectious ‘plague’ requiring ‘the precautions of the most severe quarantine.’ “
Even Pope Gregory IX had to admit: “The Jesuit foxes have various faces, but they all hang together by their tails.”
Enough of that.. Lets see what the author of Codeword Barbelon
http://www.luxverbi.org.uk/arch/Codeword_Barb%C3%AAl%C3%B4n_Foreword_ISBN_0-954359666_and_ISBN_9780954359669.htm reveals about Obama’s Jesuit foxes:
“Obama’s Chicago mentor” is “Gregory Galluzzo – a ‘former’ Jesuit priest….” [Jesuit Temporal Coadjutor and featured writer for the Pope's American neo-fascist Executive Intelligence Review, Webster Tarpley, mentions Galluzzo in his book, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography.]
“Obama’s Chief Speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Senior Military and Foreign Policy Advisor, Maj. Gen. J. Scott
Gration, was Jesuit-trained.”
“Obama’s Deputy Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, was Jesuit-trained.”
How many other Jesuit agents Mr. Obama has on his team we may never know, for as American historian J. Wayne Laurens writes: “They [the Jesuits] are not merely priests, or of one religious creed; they are merchants [Wall Street Bankers] … and editors, and men of any profession, having no outward badge by which to be recognized…. “
[J. Wayne Laurens, The Crisis in America : or the Enemies of America Unmasked (Philadelphia: G. D. Miller, 1855), p. 265; cited in Codeword Barbelon].
Note too, that Obama’s Global Poverty Act, passed in 2007, was launched at a conference in San Francisco to lobby for the bill. The conference was held at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit Catholic Institution [seventy miles south of the Order's Bohemian Grove] with a “global perspective,” under the auspices of the Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought.
In all of the above we have clues as to his agenda and who backed him: he was trained and mentored by Jesuits [no doubt, connectted to the Order through the Ford Foundation for which his atheist, White mother worked; the Ford Foundation oversaw the faith-mixing, race-mixing, culture-mixing Gamaliel Foundation for which Barry Davis Obama worked alongside co-founder Jesuit priest Greg Galluzo now an "ex-Jesuit" and the Foundation's Executive Director], he worked for the Catholic Church for most of his life, and he has even chosen a Jesuit-controlled Roman Catholic, Joe Biden, as his vice-president. What does that tell you? Do you think all this Catholic connection is mere coincidence and stands for nothing? One can draw the conclusion that Obama’s relationship with the Jesuits is much more important to his success in this election and even more extensive than many think. Incidentally, Joe Biden lectures at the Jesuit University in Scranton [a major recruiting station for the Black Pope's Central Intelligence Agency] and his son, according to an official Federal finance document, was paid over $80,000.00 last year by the Jesuits to lobby for them in the White House!!
Joe Biden’s son was Jesuit-trained at Georgetown University and is paid to lobby for the Jesuit University of Scranton. Joe Biden was also given an honorary degree from the Jesuit University of Scranton (1979) and from the Jesuit Order’s St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia (1981).
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Here is an except of a quote from the Introduction to Codeword Barbêlôn
http://www.luxverbi.org.uk/arch/Codeword_Barb%C3%AAl%C3%B4n_Foreword_ISBN_0-954359666_and_ISBN_9780954359669.htm as found in a recent press release and on the publisher’s website: http://www.arcticbeacon.com/greg/?p=197
http://www.luxverbi.org.uk/arch/Codeword_Barb%C3%AAl%C3%B4n_Foreword_ISBN_0-954359666_and_ISBN_9780954359669.htm as found in a recent press release and on the publisher’s website: http://www.arcticbeacon.com/greg/?p=197
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Rerum Novarum – The REAL N.W.O. Must see 10 min Video…
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Community Organizers Who Discovered Obama
Cynthia Gordy
Washington Correspondent, Essence magazine
Posted: March 17, 2010 10:13 AM
Throughout his political career, President Barack Obama has frequently referred to his years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. During this time, as a means of achieving social justice, he learned how to develop leadership potential and respond to the needs of the people. The organization in which he got his start, the Gamaliel Foundation, is a faith-based group that helps create grassroots change around jobs, housing, health care and other issues. I talked to Gamaliel's President, Ann Smith, about President Obama back when he was just starting out, and the impact he's had on a new generation of young organizers.
CYNTHIA: You must have so many stories about President Obama, from back when he started community organizing. Can you share some?
Washington Correspondent, Essence magazine
Posted: March 17, 2010 10:13 AM
Throughout his political career, President Barack Obama has frequently referred to his years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. During this time, as a means of achieving social justice, he learned how to develop leadership potential and respond to the needs of the people. The organization in which he got his start, the Gamaliel Foundation, is a faith-based group that helps create grassroots change around jobs, housing, health care and other issues. I talked to Gamaliel's President, Ann Smith, about President Obama back when he was just starting out, and the impact he's had on a new generation of young organizers.
CYNTHIA: You must have so many stories about President Obama, from back when he started community organizing. Can you share some?
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ANN SMITH: Greg Galluzzo [Gamaliel Foundation co-founder and executive director] always says that when he met Barack, he never thought of him as having the potential to become President. When Barack went off to Harvard Law and came back to get people registered to vote, he led a training event for us. After he finished training, someone in the audience said to Greg, "You know, I think he's going to be the President of the United States one day." When he was an organizer, he was extremely disciplined and wrote wonderful weekly reports for all of the three-plus years he was there. Of course, at some point Greg threw them all away. (laughs) There's not a single one left. But at the time, people didn't see him for what he was going to be. They just saw him as being extremely intelligent and someone who could take advantage of opportunities, which he did.
CYNTHIA: Now that he's one of the most famous former organizers in the world, how has his prominence affected your foundation?
ANN SMITH: Greg Galluzzo [Gamaliel Foundation co-founder and executive director] always says that when he met Barack, he never thought of him as having the potential to become President. When Barack went off to Harvard Law and came back to get people registered to vote, he led a training event for us. After he finished training, someone in the audience said to Greg, "You know, I think he's going to be the President of the United States one day." When he was an organizer, he was extremely disciplined and wrote wonderful weekly reports for all of the three-plus years he was there. Of course, at some point Greg threw them all away. (laughs) There's not a single one left. But at the time, people didn't see him for what he was going to be. They just saw him as being extremely intelligent and someone who could take advantage of opportunities, which he did.
CYNTHIA: Now that he's one of the most famous former organizers in the world, how has his prominence affected your foundation?
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SMITH: When I came to the Gamaliel Foundation almost seven years ago, the idea was that my job would be to connect with foundations, the media and other organizations to tell them what we do. It used to be difficult to tell people what a community organizer is. As soon as Barack said he was a community organizer during the campaign, it became very clear, and I don't have to explain to people what it is that we do anymore. They already know.
CYNTHIA: Have you seen a spike in people wanting to become organizers?
SMITH: When I came to the Gamaliel Foundation almost seven years ago, the idea was that my job would be to connect with foundations, the media and other organizations to tell them what we do. It used to be difficult to tell people what a community organizer is. As soon as Barack said he was a community organizer during the campaign, it became very clear, and I don't have to explain to people what it is that we do anymore. They already know.
CYNTHIA: Have you seen a spike in people wanting to become organizers?
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SMITH: Oh yes, there have particularly been more young people going into training, and that was certainly sparked by the election season. During the election, people who were organizing for Barack in various places around the country actually came and went through the Gamaliel training because they wanted to do what he had done. We've seen many examples of that. My own cousin is an attorney, and she went through our training because, as she said, "I want to do exactly what Barack did."
SMITH: Oh yes, there have particularly been more young people going into training, and that was certainly sparked by the election season. During the election, people who were organizing for Barack in various places around the country actually came and went through the Gamaliel training because they wanted to do what he had done. We've seen many examples of that. My own cousin is an attorney, and she went through our training because, as she said, "I want to do exactly what Barack did."
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Ex-Con Counts on “Faith Community” to Pass Health Care
AIM Column By Cliff Kincaid November 29, 2009
Creamer, who went to prison for ripping off non-profit entities, emphasized using “the faith community” to mobilize support for universal health care…
The media furor over the White House state dinner crashers ignores the convicted felon who was invited to attend with the approval of Obama's inner circle. The ex-convict, Robert B. Creamer, is a friend of White House adviser David Axelrod and the husband of Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. A major Democratic Party political strategist, he is the author of a 628-page book that describes how the Democrats can become the permanent majority party by passing a national health care bill and giving amnesty to illegal immigrants.
With the support of major elements of the "faith community," the first part of Creamer's plan is on track.
Creamer's Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win," is the book "penned in the pen," as one observer described it. "I did much of the preliminary work on this book while spending five months on a forced sabbatical at the Federal Prison Camp at Terra Haute Indiana," Creamer says. Creamer emerged from federal prison in November 2006 after serving five months for financial crimes. His prosecutor was the famous Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who also nailed disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
But this didn't stop Creamer from being invited to the White House for the first state dinner. Indeed, it makes complete sense in view of the fact that Creamer's book is full of praise for Obama and even reprints Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address.
The acknowledgements section of Creamer's book describes how he, like Obama, was influenced by Saul Alinsky, described as "the legendary community organizer." Book endorsements are featured from David Axelrod; Greg Galluzo of the Gamaliel Foundation, which originally sponsored Barack Obama's work as a community organizer in Chicago; and Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Creamer notes in his book that Bush aide Karl Rove had predicted in 2004 a "permanent majority" in Congress for the Republican Party. That prediction fell apart just two years later, in 2006, when the Democrats picked up 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats. Nevertheless, Rove subsequently landed a job as a Fox News political analyst.
Creamer's predictions have turned out to be more accurate. Released in 2007, Creamer's book said that a successful campaign "to reshape the structure of one-sixth of the American economy," the health care sector, would depend on getting 60 Democratic votes in the Senate and the election of a "progressive Democrat" in the White House. Today, of course, the Democrats have that significant advantage.
Creamer can take some credit for these developments. His firm, Strategic Consulting Group, still boasts an impressive client list that includes ACORN, SEIU, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and dozens of other "progressive" or Democratic Party state organizations.
Creamer, who went to prison for ripping off non-profit entities, emphasized using "the faith community" to mobilize support for universal health care by highlighting the morality of providing medical care to people in need.
It has not worked out as planned, but it has worked out. As we saw in the House, when the bill was in trouble, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to a demand from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was in Rome, to hold a vote on an anti-abortion amendment introduced by Rep. Bart Stupak, a Catholic pro-life Democrat. At the same time, Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), told House Republican Leader John Boehner, a faithful Catholic, not to undermine the amendment. Boehner complied. As a result, the amendment passed, 240-194, with 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans in favor. This provided conservative Democrats enough cover to ignore the other objectionable aspects and vote for the final bill.
Washington Times religion reporter Julia Duin confirmed all of this, but noted in a story filed from the recent USCCB meeting in Baltimore that "Cardinal McCarrick walked away when I approached him about his call from the Vatican..."
Pelosi and many "progressives" acquiesced in the anti-abortion ploy, realizing that the provision could eventually be nullified through subsequent legislation.
Nevertheless, the Bishops are pursuing the same strategy in the Senate. Their chosen vehicle for anti-abortion language in this version of the bill appears to be Democratic Senator Robert Casey, a so-called "conservative" and "pro-life" Catholic Democrat from Pennsylvania. Casey says, however, that if his effort to water down the pro-abortion tone of the legislation fails, he may still vote for the bill.
It looks probable, therefore, that the Senate health care bill will pass. Then, the two versions will be combined in a congressional conference and the compromise will come before Congress for a final vote.
If passed, as Creamer understands, this will hook millions of Americans on another federal program, and they will depend on--and vote for--Democrats to grant them more benefits.
It is important to note that the Bishops, who have a reputation among some commentators as being politically "conservative," have not been objecting to the "public option" in the Senate plan. Indeed, they have long favored a government-guaranteed "right" to health care and federal funding to make that a reality.
The latest USCCB statement on the health care legislation urges Senators to "improve the Senate health care bill in the key areas of affordability, immigration, federal funding and coverage of abortion and conscience rights." Translated into common-sense language, this means coverage for illegal aliens and more federal funding, in addition to the pro-life language that will enable some "conservative" Democrats and possibly some Republicans to vote for it.
Creamer himself spoke in his book of a "public plan," which is supposed to guarantee that "right" to health care and which eventually became the "public option" in the actual legislation. In a speech captured on YouTube, Creamer's wife, Rep. Schakowsky, candidly said that a public option is a Trojan Horse for a complete federal takeover.
Next is the immigration battle. Creamer explains that this "will have an enormous impact on the battle for power between the progressive and conservative forces in American society." He explains that "If the Democrats continue to stand firmly for immigrant rights, the issue will define immigrants' voting loyalties for a generation. If we are successful, a gigantic block of progressive votes will enter the electorate over the next 15 years--a block that could be decisive in the battle for the future."
As we can already see, however, there is an overlap into the health care debate. And again, the "faith community" is playing a major role. In fact, the Catholic Bishops are not only vigorously lobbying for giving illegal immigrants access to a national health care plan but favor amnesty for them. In his recent testimony before the Senate, Cardinal McCarrick called it "legalization for the undocumented."
It looks bleak for Republicans if the Bishops have their way and continue to play Creamer's tune. GOP agreement with the Bishops on a pro-life provision in the bill should not distract attention from how this part of the "faith community" has become a major component of the "progressive" base that elects Democrats and keeps them in power. The facts show that most Catholics voted for Obama, and half or more of the Bishops, according to Catholic TV host Raymond Arroyo, voted for him, too. The USCCB staff is known to be overwhelmingly left-wing.
This is why some conservative Catholics think that the Catholic hierarchy is pursuing a strategy on health care that pays lip service to the pro-life cause but plays directly into Obama's (and Creamer's) hands.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org
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Monday, May 18, 2009
Gamaliel and the Barack Obama Connection
Barack H. Obama, former GAMALIEL ORGANIZER is the 44th President of the United States!Mr. President, THANK YOU for ORGANIZING HOPE for America and the World!
by Gregory A. Galluzzo
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
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Senator Stealth
How to advance radical causes when no one's looking
By Stanley Kurtz
Posted: Tuesday, September 2, 2008
By Stanley Kurtz
Posted: Tuesday, September 2, 2008
ARTICLE
National Review Vol. LX, No. 16
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
After hearing about Barack Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked -- through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support -- with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based "community organizers."
The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama's pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama's Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is "quietly." Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago's supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It's high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.
The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel's co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama's mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.
The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of Obama's mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his days as a community organizer -- a profession with proudly radical roots in the teachings of Chicago's Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic, common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques. Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama's secret?
FROM REVELATION TO REVOLUTION
Before outlining Gamaliel's techniques of political stealth, we need to identify the views that they are camouflaging. These can be found in Dennis Jacobsen's book Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing. Jacobsen is the pastor of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Milwaukee and director of the Gamaliel National Clergy Caucus. Jacobsen's book, which is part of the first-year reading list for new Gamaliel organizers, lays out the underlying theology of Gamaliel's activities. While Jacobsen's book was published in 2001, it is based on presentations Jacobsen has been making at Gamaliel's clergy-training center since 1992 and clearly has Galluzzo's endorsement. So while we cannot be sure that Obama has read or taught Doing Justice, the book certainly embodies a political perspective to which Obama's more than 20 years of friendship with Galluzzo, and his stint as a Gamaliel instructor, would surely have exposed him.
In Jacobsen's conception, America is a sinful and fallen nation whose pervasive classism, racism, and militarism authentic Christians must constantly resist. Drawing on the Book of Revelation, Jacobsen exhorts, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! . . . Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins." The United States, Jacobsen maintains, employs nationalism, propaganda, racism, bogus "civil religion," and class enmity to bolster its entrenched and oppressive corporate system. Authentic Christians forced to live in such a nation can "come out of Babylon," says Jacobsen, only by entering into "a perpetual state of internal exile."
Of course, many believers do feel at home in the United States, but according to Jacobsen, these inauthentic and misguided Christians have been lulled into the false belief that the United States is somehow different from other countries -- that it stands as a genuine defender of freedom and democracy. According to Jacobsen, the desire of most Americans to create a safe, secure life for themselves and their families constitutes an unacceptable emotional distancing from the sufferings of the urban poor. Jacobsen says that whenever he feels himself seduced by the American dream of personal security -- this "unconscionable removal from the lives of those who suffer" -- he rejects its pull as the deplorable "encroachment of America on my soul." To "feel at home in the United States," maintains Jacobsen, is not only to fall victim to a scarcely disguised form of political despotism; it is to betray Christianity itself.
Although Jacobsen acknowledges that the sufferings of the poor in America do not quite rise to the level of the Nazi Holocaust, he nonetheless finds a similarity: "The accommodation and silence of the church amidst Nazi atrocities are paralleled by the accommodation and silence of the church in this country amidst a calculated war against the poor." He recounts being present at the Pentagon "to fast and vigil with a group of religious resisters against the madness of nuclear build-up and militarism generated in that place" and is horrified when he sees that many in the American military actually think of themselves as Christians. For Jacobsen, this means that the church has "aligned itself with oppressive forces and crucified its Lord anew."
Jacobsen has a low opinion of the food pantries, homeless shelters, and walk-a-thons that make up so much religious charitable activity in the United States. All that charity, says Jacobsen, tends to suppress the truth that the system itself is designed to benefit the prosperous and keep the poor down. He complains: "The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those living in poverty." "Most churches do not operate on the basis of healthy agitation," he says, but instead "on the basis of manipulation, authoritarianism, or guilt-tripping."
The solution, says Jacobsen, is community organizing: "Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society." "Militant mass action . . . fueled by righteous anger," he maintains, offers authentic community, and therefore "the possibility of fulfillment in a vacuous society." He continues: "If the pain and human degradation all around us doesn't stir up within us sufficient anger to want to shake the foundations of this society, then it's probably best for us to go back to playing church."
Other than the sense of community that is generated by militant struggle, what does Jacobsen offer as the cure for America's ills? He is short on detail here, but there are tantalizing hints. Jacobsen invokes the communal property and absence of private ownership that prevailed among early Christians as a possible model. Despite his initial skepticism regarding such selflessness, says Jacobsen, he has seen this sort of "radical sharing of limited resources" on a trip to a poor African church in Tanzania. Unfortunately, says Jacobsen, "the church in the United States lacks community. The American church by and large is privatistic, insular, and individualistic. It reflects American culture."
These, then, are the beliefs at the spiritual heart of the Gamaliel Foundation's community-organizing efforts. They show clear echoes of Jeremiah Wright's and James Cone's black-liberation theology, and it's evident that Obama has an affinity for organizations that embody this point of view. But a question arises. Gamaliel's goal is to build church-based coalitions capable of wielding power on behalf of the poor. These congregation-based organizations are supposed to counterbalance and undercut America's oppressive power structures. Yet if most American Christians are deluded servants of a sinful and oppressive system, how can they be molded into a majority coalition for change? Given the privatistic, insular, and individualistic character of American culture, theological frankness might backfire and drive away potential allies, exactly as happened with Reverend Wright. Thus arises the need for stealth.
FAKE RIGHT, GO LEFT
It might have been all but impossible to penetrate the strategic thinking of Obama's cohorts if not for the fortuitous 2008 publication of Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, by Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts. This is the first book-length study of the organizing tactics and political ideologies of Gamaliel and ACORN, the two groups to which Obama's community-organizing ties are closest. Swarts's study focuses on Gamaliel and ACORN in St. Louis, but given the degree of national coordination by both groups, the carry-over of her findings to Chicago is bound to be substantial. Because Swarts is highly sympathetic to the community-organizing groups she studies, she was granted an unusual degree of access to strategic discussions during her period of fieldwork.
Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel "invisible actors," hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts, because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest, for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the Gamaliel network. "Though often hidden from view," says Swarts, "leaders have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear to well up and erupt from below."
Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a "post-Alinsky" era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns.
While ACORN's membership is fairly homogeneous, consisting chiefly of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, congregation-based community organizations like the Gamaliel Foundation tend to have more racially, culturally, and politically mixed constituencies. The need to overcome these divisions and gather a broad coalition behind its hard-Left agenda has pushed Gamaliel to develop what Swarts calls an "innovative cultural strategy." Because of the suspicions that blue-collar members might harbor toward its elite, liberal leaders, Gamaliel's main "ideological tactic," says Swarts, is to present its organizers as the opposite of radical, elite, or ideological. As Swarts explains, they deliberately refrain from using leftist jargon like "racism," "sexism," "classism," "homophobia," "oppression," or "multiple oppressions" in front of ordinary members -- even though, amongst themselves, Gamaliel's organizers toss around this sort of lingo with abandon, just as Jacobsen does in his book.
Swarts supplies a chart listing "common working-class perceptions of liberal social movements" on one side, while displaying on the other side Gamaliel organizers' tricky tactics for getting around them. To avoid seeming like radicals or "hippies left over from the sixties," Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at "racism," "sexism," and "oppressive corporate systems," but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as "common sense solutions for working families."
Although the Gamaliel agenda is deeply collectivist and redistributionist, organizers are schooled to frame their program in traditional American, individualist terms. As Swarts puts it:
What makes [Gamaliel's] ideology liberal rather than conservative is that it advocates not private or voluntary solutions but collective public programs. They seek action from the state: social welfare programs, redistribution, or regulation. . . . But publicly [Gamaliel and other congregation-based groups] usually emphasize individual responsibility on the part of authorities.
What Gamaliel really wants, in other words, is for the public as a whole to fork over funds to the government, but they're careful to frame this demand as a call for "personal responsibility" by particular government officials.
The relative homogeneity of ACORN's membership allows it to display its radicalism more openly. According to Swarts, ACORN members think of themselves as "oppositional outlaws" and "militants unafraid to confront the powers that be." Yet even ACORN has a deeper, hidden ideological dimension. "Long-term ACORN organizers . . . tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists," says Swarts, while ordinary members rarely think in these overtly ideological terms; for them, it's more about attacking specific problems. In general, ACORN avoids programmatic statements. During a 1980 effort to purge conservatives from its ranks, however, the organization did release a detailed political platform -- which Swarts calls "a veritable laundry list of progressive positions."
Although ACORN's radicalism is somewhat more frank than Gamaliel's, ACORN has an "innovative cultural strategy" of its own. ACORN's radicalism is incremental; it's happy to work toward ambitious long-term goals through a series of baby steps. For example, although ACORN has fought for "living wage" laws in several American cities, these affect only the small fraction of the workforce employed directly by city governments. The real purpose of ACORN's urban living-wage campaigns, says Swarts, is not economic but political. ACORN's long-term goal is an across-the-board minimum-wage increase at the state and federal levels. The public debate spurred by local campaigns is meant to prepare the political ground for ACORN's more ambitious political goals, and to build up membership in the meantime.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Throughout his career, Obama has drawn on all of these strategies. In Illinois's Republican-controlled state senate, Obama specialized in incremental legislation, often drawn up in collaboration with groups like Gamaliel and ACORN. His tiny, targeted expansions of government-financed health care, for example, were designed to build political momentum for universal health care. And his claim to be a "common-sense pragmatist," rather than a leftist ideologue, comes straight out of the Gamaliel playbook.
New evidence now ties Obama still more closely to both organizations. Not only was Obama a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN, he appears to have used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups -- arguably stretching the bounds of propriety in the process.
In 2005, the year after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Community Change released a report titled "Promising Practices in Revenue Generation for Community Organizing." One of the report's authors was Jean Rudd, Obama's friend and the president of the Woods Fund during Obama's years on that foundation's board. Buried deep within the report lies the story of Obama's role in expanding the Woods Fund's financial support for groups like Gamaliel and ACORN.
Since the start of his organizing career, Obama was recognized by the Woods Fund as "a great analyst and interpreter of organizing," according to the 2005 report. Initially an adviser, Obama became a Woods Fund board member, and finally board chairman, serving as a key advocate of increased funding for organizing during that period. In 1995, the Woods Fund commissioned a special evaluation of its funding for community organizing -- a report that eventually recommended a major expansion of financial support. Obama chaired a committee of organizers that advised the Woods Fund on this important shift.
The committee's report, "Evaluation of the Fund's Community Organizing Grant Program," is based on interviews with all the big names in Obama's personal organizer network. Greg Galluzzo and other Gamaliel Foundation officials were consulted, as were several ACORN organizers, including Madeline Talbott, Obama's key ACORN contact. Talbott, an expert on ACORN's tactics of confrontation and disruption, is quoted more often than any other organizer in the report, sometimes with additional comments from Obama himself. The report holds up Gamaliel and ACORN as models for other groups and supports Talbott's call for "‘a massive infusion of resources' to make organizing a truly mass-based movement."
Support from the Woods Fund had importance for these groups that went way beyond the money itself. Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and "civil disobedience" in the service of their political goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them without risking public criticism. As the report puts it: "Some funders . . . are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates." The Woods Fund is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other foundations interested in funding the hard Left. Obama apparently sought to capitalize on this effect, not only by expanding the Woods Fund's involvement in organizing, but by distributing the Woods report to a national network of potential funders.
Formally, the Woods Fund claims to be "non-ideological." According to the report: "This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments,' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship." Yet ACORN received substantial funding from Woods, apparently aided by Obama's internal advocacy, and we now know that ACORN members have played key roles as volunteer ground troops in Obama's various political campaigns. That would seem to raise the specter of partisanship.
A 2004 article in Social Policy by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes, titled "Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama Campaign," explains that, given Obama's long and close relationship to ACORN, "it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers" in Obama's campaigns. Perhaps ACORN volunteers observed the technical legalities and helped Obama merely in their capacity as private citizens. Even so, it seems at least possible that Obama used his position at a supposedly nonpartisan foundation to direct money to an allegedly nonpartisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly partisan ends.
Given Obama's political aspirations, it's notable that the focus of his Woods Fund report is its call for "improving the tie between organizing and policy making" and shifting organizing's focus from local battles to "citywide or statewide coalitions." The report boldly criticizes Saul Alinsky himself for being excessively focused on local issues, complaining that "he did not seek to fundamentally upset the distribution of power in the wider society."
The ultimate goal of all these efforts -- fundamental disruption of America's power structure, and economic redistribution along race, poverty, and gender lines -- is entirely compatible with the program outlined by Dennis Jacobsen in Doing Justice. Obama could hardly have been unfamiliar with the general drift of Gamaliel ideology, especially given his reputation as an analyst of community organizing and his supervision of a comprehensive review of the field.
Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the Gamaliel Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, "it is almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago." Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel's core ideology, given Obama's close association with Gamaliel's co-founder, Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama's role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer, and given Obama's outsized role in channeling allegedly "nonpartisan" funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his knowledge of Gamaliel's guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in fact a stealth radical.
-- Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
After hearing about Barack Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked -- through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support -- with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based "community organizers."
The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama's pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama's Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is "quietly." Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago's supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It's high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.
The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel's co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama's mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.
The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of Obama's mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his days as a community organizer -- a profession with proudly radical roots in the teachings of Chicago's Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic, common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques. Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama's secret?
FROM REVELATION TO REVOLUTION
Before outlining Gamaliel's techniques of political stealth, we need to identify the views that they are camouflaging. These can be found in Dennis Jacobsen's book Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing. Jacobsen is the pastor of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Milwaukee and director of the Gamaliel National Clergy Caucus. Jacobsen's book, which is part of the first-year reading list for new Gamaliel organizers, lays out the underlying theology of Gamaliel's activities. While Jacobsen's book was published in 2001, it is based on presentations Jacobsen has been making at Gamaliel's clergy-training center since 1992 and clearly has Galluzzo's endorsement. So while we cannot be sure that Obama has read or taught Doing Justice, the book certainly embodies a political perspective to which Obama's more than 20 years of friendship with Galluzzo, and his stint as a Gamaliel instructor, would surely have exposed him.
In Jacobsen's conception, America is a sinful and fallen nation whose pervasive classism, racism, and militarism authentic Christians must constantly resist. Drawing on the Book of Revelation, Jacobsen exhorts, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! . . . Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins." The United States, Jacobsen maintains, employs nationalism, propaganda, racism, bogus "civil religion," and class enmity to bolster its entrenched and oppressive corporate system. Authentic Christians forced to live in such a nation can "come out of Babylon," says Jacobsen, only by entering into "a perpetual state of internal exile."
Of course, many believers do feel at home in the United States, but according to Jacobsen, these inauthentic and misguided Christians have been lulled into the false belief that the United States is somehow different from other countries -- that it stands as a genuine defender of freedom and democracy. According to Jacobsen, the desire of most Americans to create a safe, secure life for themselves and their families constitutes an unacceptable emotional distancing from the sufferings of the urban poor. Jacobsen says that whenever he feels himself seduced by the American dream of personal security -- this "unconscionable removal from the lives of those who suffer" -- he rejects its pull as the deplorable "encroachment of America on my soul." To "feel at home in the United States," maintains Jacobsen, is not only to fall victim to a scarcely disguised form of political despotism; it is to betray Christianity itself.
Although Jacobsen acknowledges that the sufferings of the poor in America do not quite rise to the level of the Nazi Holocaust, he nonetheless finds a similarity: "The accommodation and silence of the church amidst Nazi atrocities are paralleled by the accommodation and silence of the church in this country amidst a calculated war against the poor." He recounts being present at the Pentagon "to fast and vigil with a group of religious resisters against the madness of nuclear build-up and militarism generated in that place" and is horrified when he sees that many in the American military actually think of themselves as Christians. For Jacobsen, this means that the church has "aligned itself with oppressive forces and crucified its Lord anew."
Jacobsen has a low opinion of the food pantries, homeless shelters, and walk-a-thons that make up so much religious charitable activity in the United States. All that charity, says Jacobsen, tends to suppress the truth that the system itself is designed to benefit the prosperous and keep the poor down. He complains: "The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those living in poverty." "Most churches do not operate on the basis of healthy agitation," he says, but instead "on the basis of manipulation, authoritarianism, or guilt-tripping."
The solution, says Jacobsen, is community organizing: "Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society." "Militant mass action . . . fueled by righteous anger," he maintains, offers authentic community, and therefore "the possibility of fulfillment in a vacuous society." He continues: "If the pain and human degradation all around us doesn't stir up within us sufficient anger to want to shake the foundations of this society, then it's probably best for us to go back to playing church."
Other than the sense of community that is generated by militant struggle, what does Jacobsen offer as the cure for America's ills? He is short on detail here, but there are tantalizing hints. Jacobsen invokes the communal property and absence of private ownership that prevailed among early Christians as a possible model. Despite his initial skepticism regarding such selflessness, says Jacobsen, he has seen this sort of "radical sharing of limited resources" on a trip to a poor African church in Tanzania. Unfortunately, says Jacobsen, "the church in the United States lacks community. The American church by and large is privatistic, insular, and individualistic. It reflects American culture."
These, then, are the beliefs at the spiritual heart of the Gamaliel Foundation's community-organizing efforts. They show clear echoes of Jeremiah Wright's and James Cone's black-liberation theology, and it's evident that Obama has an affinity for organizations that embody this point of view. But a question arises. Gamaliel's goal is to build church-based coalitions capable of wielding power on behalf of the poor. These congregation-based organizations are supposed to counterbalance and undercut America's oppressive power structures. Yet if most American Christians are deluded servants of a sinful and oppressive system, how can they be molded into a majority coalition for change? Given the privatistic, insular, and individualistic character of American culture, theological frankness might backfire and drive away potential allies, exactly as happened with Reverend Wright. Thus arises the need for stealth.
FAKE RIGHT, GO LEFT
It might have been all but impossible to penetrate the strategic thinking of Obama's cohorts if not for the fortuitous 2008 publication of Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, by Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts. This is the first book-length study of the organizing tactics and political ideologies of Gamaliel and ACORN, the two groups to which Obama's community-organizing ties are closest. Swarts's study focuses on Gamaliel and ACORN in St. Louis, but given the degree of national coordination by both groups, the carry-over of her findings to Chicago is bound to be substantial. Because Swarts is highly sympathetic to the community-organizing groups she studies, she was granted an unusual degree of access to strategic discussions during her period of fieldwork.
Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel "invisible actors," hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts, because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest, for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the Gamaliel network. "Though often hidden from view," says Swarts, "leaders have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear to well up and erupt from below."
Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a "post-Alinsky" era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns.
While ACORN's membership is fairly homogeneous, consisting chiefly of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, congregation-based community organizations like the Gamaliel Foundation tend to have more racially, culturally, and politically mixed constituencies. The need to overcome these divisions and gather a broad coalition behind its hard-Left agenda has pushed Gamaliel to develop what Swarts calls an "innovative cultural strategy." Because of the suspicions that blue-collar members might harbor toward its elite, liberal leaders, Gamaliel's main "ideological tactic," says Swarts, is to present its organizers as the opposite of radical, elite, or ideological. As Swarts explains, they deliberately refrain from using leftist jargon like "racism," "sexism," "classism," "homophobia," "oppression," or "multiple oppressions" in front of ordinary members -- even though, amongst themselves, Gamaliel's organizers toss around this sort of lingo with abandon, just as Jacobsen does in his book.
Swarts supplies a chart listing "common working-class perceptions of liberal social movements" on one side, while displaying on the other side Gamaliel organizers' tricky tactics for getting around them. To avoid seeming like radicals or "hippies left over from the sixties," Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at "racism," "sexism," and "oppressive corporate systems," but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as "common sense solutions for working families."
Although the Gamaliel agenda is deeply collectivist and redistributionist, organizers are schooled to frame their program in traditional American, individualist terms. As Swarts puts it:
What makes [Gamaliel's] ideology liberal rather than conservative is that it advocates not private or voluntary solutions but collective public programs. They seek action from the state: social welfare programs, redistribution, or regulation. . . . But publicly [Gamaliel and other congregation-based groups] usually emphasize individual responsibility on the part of authorities.
What Gamaliel really wants, in other words, is for the public as a whole to fork over funds to the government, but they're careful to frame this demand as a call for "personal responsibility" by particular government officials.
The relative homogeneity of ACORN's membership allows it to display its radicalism more openly. According to Swarts, ACORN members think of themselves as "oppositional outlaws" and "militants unafraid to confront the powers that be." Yet even ACORN has a deeper, hidden ideological dimension. "Long-term ACORN organizers . . . tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists," says Swarts, while ordinary members rarely think in these overtly ideological terms; for them, it's more about attacking specific problems. In general, ACORN avoids programmatic statements. During a 1980 effort to purge conservatives from its ranks, however, the organization did release a detailed political platform -- which Swarts calls "a veritable laundry list of progressive positions."
Although ACORN's radicalism is somewhat more frank than Gamaliel's, ACORN has an "innovative cultural strategy" of its own. ACORN's radicalism is incremental; it's happy to work toward ambitious long-term goals through a series of baby steps. For example, although ACORN has fought for "living wage" laws in several American cities, these affect only the small fraction of the workforce employed directly by city governments. The real purpose of ACORN's urban living-wage campaigns, says Swarts, is not economic but political. ACORN's long-term goal is an across-the-board minimum-wage increase at the state and federal levels. The public debate spurred by local campaigns is meant to prepare the political ground for ACORN's more ambitious political goals, and to build up membership in the meantime.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Throughout his career, Obama has drawn on all of these strategies. In Illinois's Republican-controlled state senate, Obama specialized in incremental legislation, often drawn up in collaboration with groups like Gamaliel and ACORN. His tiny, targeted expansions of government-financed health care, for example, were designed to build political momentum for universal health care. And his claim to be a "common-sense pragmatist," rather than a leftist ideologue, comes straight out of the Gamaliel playbook.
New evidence now ties Obama still more closely to both organizations. Not only was Obama a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN, he appears to have used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups -- arguably stretching the bounds of propriety in the process.
In 2005, the year after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Community Change released a report titled "Promising Practices in Revenue Generation for Community Organizing." One of the report's authors was Jean Rudd, Obama's friend and the president of the Woods Fund during Obama's years on that foundation's board. Buried deep within the report lies the story of Obama's role in expanding the Woods Fund's financial support for groups like Gamaliel and ACORN.
Since the start of his organizing career, Obama was recognized by the Woods Fund as "a great analyst and interpreter of organizing," according to the 2005 report. Initially an adviser, Obama became a Woods Fund board member, and finally board chairman, serving as a key advocate of increased funding for organizing during that period. In 1995, the Woods Fund commissioned a special evaluation of its funding for community organizing -- a report that eventually recommended a major expansion of financial support. Obama chaired a committee of organizers that advised the Woods Fund on this important shift.
The committee's report, "Evaluation of the Fund's Community Organizing Grant Program," is based on interviews with all the big names in Obama's personal organizer network. Greg Galluzzo and other Gamaliel Foundation officials were consulted, as were several ACORN organizers, including Madeline Talbott, Obama's key ACORN contact. Talbott, an expert on ACORN's tactics of confrontation and disruption, is quoted more often than any other organizer in the report, sometimes with additional comments from Obama himself. The report holds up Gamaliel and ACORN as models for other groups and supports Talbott's call for "‘a massive infusion of resources' to make organizing a truly mass-based movement."
Support from the Woods Fund had importance for these groups that went way beyond the money itself. Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and "civil disobedience" in the service of their political goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them without risking public criticism. As the report puts it: "Some funders . . . are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates." The Woods Fund is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other foundations interested in funding the hard Left. Obama apparently sought to capitalize on this effect, not only by expanding the Woods Fund's involvement in organizing, but by distributing the Woods report to a national network of potential funders.
Formally, the Woods Fund claims to be "non-ideological." According to the report: "This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments,' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship." Yet ACORN received substantial funding from Woods, apparently aided by Obama's internal advocacy, and we now know that ACORN members have played key roles as volunteer ground troops in Obama's various political campaigns. That would seem to raise the specter of partisanship.
A 2004 article in Social Policy by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes, titled "Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama Campaign," explains that, given Obama's long and close relationship to ACORN, "it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers" in Obama's campaigns. Perhaps ACORN volunteers observed the technical legalities and helped Obama merely in their capacity as private citizens. Even so, it seems at least possible that Obama used his position at a supposedly nonpartisan foundation to direct money to an allegedly nonpartisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly partisan ends.
Given Obama's political aspirations, it's notable that the focus of his Woods Fund report is its call for "improving the tie between organizing and policy making" and shifting organizing's focus from local battles to "citywide or statewide coalitions." The report boldly criticizes Saul Alinsky himself for being excessively focused on local issues, complaining that "he did not seek to fundamentally upset the distribution of power in the wider society."
The ultimate goal of all these efforts -- fundamental disruption of America's power structure, and economic redistribution along race, poverty, and gender lines -- is entirely compatible with the program outlined by Dennis Jacobsen in Doing Justice. Obama could hardly have been unfamiliar with the general drift of Gamaliel ideology, especially given his reputation as an analyst of community organizing and his supervision of a comprehensive review of the field.
Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the Gamaliel Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, "it is almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago." Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel's core ideology, given Obama's close association with Gamaliel's co-founder, Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama's role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer, and given Obama's outsized role in channeling allegedly "nonpartisan" funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his knowledge of Gamaliel's guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in fact a stealth radical.
-- Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
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