The candidate’s unparalleled fundraising success relies largely on the least-affluent residents of New York’s Chinatown — some of whom can’t be tracked down.

By Peter Nicholas and Tom Hamburger
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

October 19, 2007

NEW YORK — Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

At this point in the presidential campaign cycle, Clinton has raised more money than any candidate in history. Those dishwashers, waiters and street stall hawkers are part of the reason. And Clinton’s success in gathering money from Chinatown’s least-affluent residents stems from a two-pronged strategy: mutually beneficial alliances with powerful groups, and appeals to the hopes and dreams of people now consigned to the margins.

Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards.

Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give.

The other piece of the strategy involves holding out hope that, if Clinton becomes president, she will move quickly to reunite families and help illegal residents move toward citizenship. As New York’s junior senator, Clinton has expressed support for immigrants and greater family reunification. She is also benefiting from Chinese donors’ naive notions of what she could do in the White House.

Campaign concerns

As with other campaigns looking for dollars in unpromising places, the Clinton operation also has accepted what it later conceded were improper donations. At least one reported donor denies making a contribution. Another admitted to lacking the legal-resident status required for giving campaign money.

Clinton aides said they were concerned about some of the Chinatown contributions.

“We have hundreds of thousands of donors. We are proud to have support from across New York and the country from many different communities,” campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said. “In this instance, our own compliance process flagged a number of questionable donations and took the appropriate steps to be sure they were legally given. In cases where we couldn’t confirm that, the money was returned.”

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

Of 74 residents of New York’s Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.

Many said they gave to Clinton because they were instructed to do so by local association leaders. Some said they wanted help on immigration concerns. And several spoke of the pride they felt by being associated with a powerful figure such as Clinton.

New take, old game

Beyond what it reveals about present-day campaign fundraising, Chinatown’s newfound role in the 2008 election cycle marks another chapter in the centuries-old American saga of marginalized ethnic groups and newly arrived immigrants turning to politics to improve their lot.

In earlier times, New York politicians from William “Boss” Tweed to Fiorello LaGuardia gained power with the support of immigrants. So did politicians in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and other big cities.

Like many who traveled this path, most of the Chinese reported as contributing to Clinton’s campaign have never voted. Many speak little or no English. Some seem to lead such ephemeral lives that neighbors say they’ve never heard of them.

“This is a new game,” said Peter Kwong, a professor at Hunter College in New York who studies Chinatown communities across the country. Historically, Kwong said, “voting in Chinatown is so weak” that politicians did not go out of their way to court residents.

“Today it is all about money,” he said.

The effort is especially pronounced among groups in the Fujianese community. More than a decade ago, Fujianese cultural associations ran gambling operations and, more ominously, at least one was home to a gang that trafficked in illegal Fujian native immigrants.

The human-smuggling problem came to a head in 1993, when a cargo ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground off New York City. As shocked police and immigration officials looked on, hundreds of Fujian natives who had spent weeks below deck struggled to make it to shore. Several died in the attempt.

A crackdown by the FBI’s organized-crime task force led to the indictment of more than 20 Fujian native traffickers. Today, the problem has substantially dissipated, says Konrad Motyka of the FBI’s New York field office, who participated in the investigation of the Golden Venture.

Although Motyka is wary of the havoc wreaked in the past by Fujianese organized crime, he said: “I welcome signs that the community is participating in politics.”

High hopes

At his tiny restaurant in the south Bronx, which has one table and a takeout counter, Chang Jian Lin displays a prized memento: a photo of himself and Clinton. The picture was taken at a fundraising banquet in Chinatown this spring.

Lin and his wife, who also works in the restaurant, said through an interpreter that they believe Clinton, if elected president, will reunite their family. The Lins’ two teenage children remain in Fujian, a mountainous coastal province in southeastern China opposite Taiwan.

“If she gets to be the president, we want our children to come home,” Chang Jian Lin said.

Campaign officials point out that Clinton has sponsored legislation aimed at family reunification; the proposals failed. And immigration measures being discussed in Congress would assign a lower priority to family reunification, which tends to bring in poor people, and give preference to immigrants with more-lucrative job skills.

Moreover, the Lins appeared to have an exaggerated impression of a president’s ability to change such things as immigration laws single-handedly.

Kwong thinks Clinton may be “exploiting the vulnerabilities of recent immigrants.”

Nonetheless, Lin is planning to attend another Clinton fundraiser, a birthday bash next week. He said his support rested on more than his hope for reuniting his family. “Besides the immigration issue with my kids, the overall standard of living will improve for the Chinese people” living in the U.S., he said.

He has never before supported a U.S. politician and, not yet a citizen, he is barred from voting. But when Fujianese community leaders asked him to donate to Clinton, he said, he eagerly contributed $1,000. Immigrants who have permanent resident status can legally make campaign contributions.

Coming up with the money was hard, Lin acknowledged, adding: “The restaurant is really small.”

Missing persons

The tenement at 44 Henry St. was listed in Clinton’s campaign reports as the home of Shu Fang Li, who reportedly gave $1,000.

In a recent visit, a man, apparently drunk, was asleep near the entrance to the neighboring beauty parlor, the Nice Hair Salon.

A tenant living in the apartment listed as Li’s address said through a translator that she had not heard of him, although she had lived there for the last 10 years.

A man named Liang Zheng was listed as having contributed $1,000. The address given was a large apartment building on East 194th Street in the Bronx, but no one by that name could be located there.

Census figures for 2000 show the median family income for the area was less than $21,000. About 45% of the population was living below the poverty line, more than double the city average.

In the busy heart of East Broadway, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, is a building that is listed as the home of Sang Cheung Lee, also reported to have given $1,000. Trash was piled in the dimly lighted entrance hall. Neighbors said they knew of no one with Lee’s name there; they knocked on one another’s doors in a futile effort to find him.

Salespeople at a store on Canal Street were similarly baffled when asked about Shih Kan Chang, listed as working there and having given $1,000. The store sells purses, jewelry and novelty Buddha statues. Employees said they had not heard of Chang.

Another listed donor, Yi Min Liu, said he did not make the $1,000 contribution in April that was reported in his name. He said he attended a banquet for Clinton but did not give her money.

Clinton “has done a lot for the Chinese community,” he said.

One New York man who said he enthusiastically donated $2,500 to Clinton doesn’t appear to be eligible to do so under federal election law. He said he came to the United States from China about two years ago and didn’t have a green card.

Out of the periphery

A key figure helping to secure Asian support for Clinton is a woman named Chung Seto, who came to this country as a child from Canton province and has supported Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. She called Fujian natives’ support for Hillary Clinton the beginning of civic engagement for an immigrant group that had long been on the periphery.

She said she stationed translators at the entrance of one event to try to screen out improper contributions.

Qun Wu, a 37-year-old waiter at a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, saw a reference to a Clinton fundraiser in a Chinese-language newspaper. He took a day off from work to go. Though he only makes $500 a week, he considers his $1,000 donation to be money well-spent. He got his picture taken with Clinton, hung it prominently in his house, then had color reprints made and sent to family in China.

“Every day I go home and see it,” he said. “I see my picture with Hillary, and I feel encouraged. It’s a great honor.”

Many, on the other hand, said they gave for reasons having more to do with the Chinese community than with Clinton. He Duan Zheng, who gave $1,000, said of the Fujianese community: “They informed us to go, so I went.

“Everybody was making a donation, so I did too,” he said. “Otherwise I would lose face.”

peter.nicholas@latimes.com

tom.hamburger@latimes.com

Times staff writers Dan Morain in San Francisco and Walter F. Roche Jr. and Jordy Yager in Washington, and Times researchers Janet Lundblad, Vicki Gallay and John Jackson in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.

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James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
October 19, 2007

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that mankind is suspended between two infinities – the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And so it is with two figures in the news: Al Gore wishes to speak for the planet, while Bill Cosby wishes to speak to the human heart.

And it’s revealing, given the liberal biases of our culture, that one man receives so much attention and the other man, so little.

Gore, former vice president-turned-pundit-movie star, has chosen, as his topic, the infinitely big. And he has been rewarded hugely: He just won the Nobel Peace Prize, on top of many other awards showered down on him by the elite culture, including an Oscar and an Emmy. So Gore will ascend into the jet stream of world renown – the same left-tilting empyrean occupied by such globetrotters as Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates.

In the meantime, closer to the ground, the comedian-turned-reformer Bill Cosby has joined with Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School to write a book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” which argues that many of the problems within the black community are self-inflicted, the result of a counterproductive culture of violence and victimhood.

Cosby has been making this point for years – and has been attacked by the left for years. Michael Eric Dyson, speaking for the liberal street-activism left over from the ’60s, wrote an entire book attacking Cosby’s “poisonous” view of black culture.

But Cosby and Poussaint have the cold terrible facts on their side: “In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today that number is less than two out of six.” Yes, white racism exists, but it was worse a half-century ago. Something bad is happening within black culture, and Cosby and Poussaint are not shy about naming it: the celebration of violence and ignorance emblemized in the “gangsta” lifestyle.

The unyielding truth is that any group climbs into the middle class only by embracing middle-class values. This is a “conservative” fact of life that was once equally embraced by liberals, before they “progressed” on to “liberation” as a new goal.

But after decades of disaster, black thinkers such as Cosby and Poussaint – and before them, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and, yes, Clarence Thomas – are leading a moral renaissance among African Americans, which surely counts as the most hopeful social trend in our national life today. And yet with the remarkable exception of NBC’s Tim Russert, who bravely devoted the entire hour of Sunday’s “Meet the Press” to Cosby and Poussaint, the mainstream media seem little interested in this black renaissance.

Why is that? Perhaps because the liberal-leaning elites realize that they are losing the debate over poverty and uplift – the winners being those who speak for hard work, abstinence and delayed gratification.

No wonder the chattering classes, fleeing from their horror of such a “bourgeois” existence, have moved on to new, greener pastures.

But there’s a problem looming ahead for Gore and his many fans: how to radically reduce “greenhouse gases.” The environmentalists have their answer: some sort of global authority to restrict factories and cars – which would, not coincidentally, authorize them to rule the world. But maybe China won’t cooperate. Maybe the Chinese will watch as we shut down our factories – and they keep theirs open. And then who will win the next war? Not a war of polar bears and the Prius, but a real war of ships and airplanes.

If Gore wants to be constructive, he will figure out to how to reduce pollution – while still preserving American industry. If he could do that, he would truly earn the respect and admiration of all Americans.

But in the meantime, Cosby and Poussaint have taken on a challenge that we can win, because the struggle will take place within our own hearts.

Robert Scheer
Creator’s Syndicate
October 19, 2007

When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George W. Bush photo-op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains’ turn to speak out.

In “The War as We Saw It,” an eloquent op-ed article published in the New York Times in August, seven Army sergeants summarized the futility of their 15 months fighting in Iraq: “To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.” After penning that cri de coeur, two of the soldiers died in Iraq, and a third was severely wounded.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post printed, “The Real Iraq We Knew,” by 12 Army captains, all of whom served in Iraq, which begins: “Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

“As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we’ve seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it’s like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it’s time to get out.”

How come those brave veterans know it’s time to get out, but leading Democrats, who voted for the war to be authorized, are still pussyfooting about quickly removing the troops from this ever-deepening quagmire? They’re jockeying for political advantage, knowing that drawing out the war hurts the Republicans.

It is a deeply cynical ploy that works only because, with our all-volunteer military, most Americans don’t have to face the choice of sacrificing themselves or their loved ones in a futile and losing war.

Yes, it costs the taxpayers, but so do the “Halo 3″ video games Americans are purchasing in record numbers, and for most, Iraq is a make-believe war. Even the cost seems unreal, as Bush is the first president in U.S. history to cut taxes in a time of war, with the result that more than a trillion dollars in long-term obligations will not come due while his administration has to foot the bills.

If there were a military draft, people would be in the streets demanding an end to this carnage, which now threatens to go on for decades. That is precisely why the neoconservative ideologues who got us into this mess built their fantasies on a volunteer force, supplemented by hundreds of thousands of contractors (including 50,000 mercenary troops like those from Blackwater) and the purchase of largely irrelevant but highly profitable high-tech weaponry – although they forgot about simple armor for the troops.

The most fraudulent neocon claim was that pro-Western, even pro-Israel, Iraqis, such as their favorite, the now totally discredited Ahmed Chalabi, would police the country as surrogates for the United States, and that Iraqi oil sales would pay for it all.

The 12 captains, who worked with the local Iraqi residents, are very clear as to the forlorn outcome of that plan. “And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction,” they wrote.

As for that other ongoing illusion – that we are turning over power to Iraqi forces we have trained – the captains write: “Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we’re gone.”

Building an empire on the cheap and by proxy doesn’t work. If you want one, and of course most of us shouldn’t because only a few fat cats benefit from such imperial adventures, you need a vast conscript army. As the captains put it: “There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.” Enough said.