Posted on 09/12/2008 2:47:21 PM PDT by vadum
Apoplectic journalists have spent more than a week now howling with indignation at GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's belittling of Barack Obama's so-called community organizing. To recap, she accepted the veep nod quipping, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." Neither Palin nor ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, who made similar comments, attacked the honorable American tradition of volunteerism, but the media reacted as if their comments were somehow un-American.
Pious liberal muckrakers ferociously attacked Palin and Giuliani, excoriating them for grinding one of their sacred cows into hamburger. Leading the chorus of indignation was Time magazine's Joe Klein, who described the GOP convention as an "extremely effective bilge festival." It was "infuriating" that Giuliani, who has "come to look like a villain in a Frank Capra movie" and Palin dared to question the value of community organizing whose goal is "to end poverty and promote social justice." Klein ranted: "To describe this service-the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other-as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme."
Of course, anyone who uses the phrase "social justice" with a straight face ought to be suspect, for behind that innocuous-sounding feel-good phrase is an agenda at odds with the history and spirit of America, but I digress.
Here are just a few examples of other journalists on the warpath over Palin's remarks:
ABC's George Stephanopoulos suggested during in an interview with Obama that criticism of community organizers contained a "subtle racial code."
Erin Neff of the Las Vegas Review-Journal echoed New York Gov. David Paterson when she wrote that said criticism of community organizers "injects race" into politics "in code." (The critiques of Neff and Gov. Paterson are also startlingly similar to the one found at SocialistWorker.org)
Ed Sills editorialized in the Houston Chronicle that the criticism of community organizers was "tone deaf" and "condescending."
Ann Fisher of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch defended community organizers in heroic terms, calling them "the fabric behind the fluff of politics, the woof to political warp."
The Boston Globe opined that Palin and Giuliani's "slaphappy" remarks "may have succeeded at exploiting the resentment some voters feel toward big cities, where community organizers do a lot of their work."
But what is this thing called community organizing? As Obama -a lawyer who carefully crafts his sentences- uses the term, it's not about church bake sales, picking up litter, little leagues, or parent-teacher associations. Obama-style community organizing is pure leftist, anti-capitalist agitation. Community organizers, among them the vote fraud specialists at the radical group ACORN, often fashion themselves professional revolutionaries. They believe something is terribly wrong with America and they are the ones anointed to fix it. It's about that nebulous Marxist concept of 'social justice.' It's about making people angry so they push for change.
As Melanie Phillips writes in the Spectator (UK), the "seditious role" of community organizers is to spread "revolutionary Marxism." The kind of change they seek is rarely good. It often artificially creates pressure for government spending on whatever project is fashionable in leftist circles that day. (Interestingly, one of the few honest commentators on this issue in the media, Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, more or less agrees that community organizing in this case "is synonymous with working for a liberal nonprofit organization.")
The father of community organizing was ultra-leftist Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), a Chicagoan who elevated local-level political agitation to an art form. Alinsky, a significant influence on Obama, believed in "rubbing raw the sores of discontent." In his classic book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky prescribed the tactics and defined the goals of community organizing. Among his "rules": "Keep the pressure on. Never let up" and "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
Alinsky taught his disciples to disguise their radical ideology. "Camouflage is key to Alinsky-style organizing. In organizing coalitions of black churches in Chicago, Obama caught flak for not attending church himself. He became an instant churchgoer," notes Richard Lawrence Poe. According to Alinsky, an effective radical activist "discards the rhetoric that always says ‘pig' " when describing police officers, and uses other linguistic tricks in order, "to radicalize parts of the middle class." Winning over the middle class is key, Alinsky argued, because "the power and the people are in the big middle-class majority."
Obama's would-be castrator Jesse Jackson is a master community organizer himself who now focuses his efforts on Wall Street. His Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has shaken corporations down for millions of dollars. As Shelby Steele writes, Jackson and his brethren in the civil rights establishment have "pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt." Those leaders "ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage," Steele writes.
Jackson's less financially savvy competition, megaphone enthusiast Al Sharpton and his National Action Network, have also enjoyed success in community organizing. NAN says "‘No Justice No Peace,' is its motto and its call to all who want to live in a more democratic and just society." Sharpton believes America is fundamentally flawed. On the "Tavis Smiley Show" in March, Sharpton pontificated about "the brutality and viciousness of Americans' racism and America's war on the poor."
The Greenlining Institute, founded by John Gamboa and Robert Gnaizda, is also involved in community organizing, and like Jackson and Sharpton, it has been successful. Greenlining activists have become experts at shaking down deep-pocketed institutions. Picketing banks is a favorite tactic. The group typically takes on financial institutions, pushing them to make more credit available to higher-risk, low-income homeowners and businesses. Timid bankers, terrified of bad press, often cave in to the group without much of a fight. Greenlining's efforts may very well have contributed to the nation's subprime mortgage meltdown.
Then there's the aforementioned vote fraud factory known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now or ACORN. ACORN describes itself as "the nation's largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities." ACORN, Sol Stern writes, "promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor."
Obama previously worked for ACORN, directing its voter mobilization arm, Project Vote, a successful voter registration campaign that helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the U.S. Senate by adding an estimated 125,000 voters to the rolls. Project Vote claims to conduct "non-partisan" voter registration drives, counsels potential voters on their rights, and litigates on behalf of the poor and "disenfranchised."
Its greatest legislative accomplishment is the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as Motor Voter. In his book Stealing Elections, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund argues that the law leads to voter fraud:
Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing' of fraud... than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act...Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘dead wood' - people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes - from their rolls. ... Since its implementation, Motor Voter has worked in one sense: it has fueled an explosion of phantom voters.In 1995, Obama sued on behalf of ACORN for the implementation of Motor Voter laws in Illinois and won. That secured Obama an invitation to train ACORN staff. Obama later returned the favor when, as a member of the Woods Fund board, he approved frequent grants to ACORN.
By the way, the president of scandal-plagued ACORN was indignant after Palin's speech. Maude Hurd huffed:
ACORN members, leaders and staff are extremely disappointed that Republican leaders would make such condescending attacks on the great work community organizers accomplish in cities throughout this country. The fact that they marginalize our success in empowering low- and moderate-income people to improve their communities further illustrates their lack of touch with ordinary people. Every great movement in the history of the world has community organizing.Hurd asserted that over the past decade ACORN "has helped more than 30 million American families through our various organizing campaigns: better schools, financial justice, living wages, community improvement, immigration, healthcare, predatory lending, voter engagement and utilities." She cited a 2006 report that quantified the monetary value of ACORN's "victories" at "$15 billion, an average of $1.5 billion per year going directly into low- and moderate-income communities to help strengthen working families."
Of course, Hurd neglects to mention how much of that money came from taxpayers.
And the list of radical community organizer-led groups goes on and on. There are pockets of agitators throughout America. They range from the small illegal immigrants' group Casa de Maryland (which is funded by Venezuela's Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez) to substantial radical funders such as the Gamaliel Foundation and the Needmor Fund.
McCain/Palin '08
It’s the beancounter in me. :)
Works for me! It certainly clears up a great many mis-conceptions I had about what sort of applicable experience for the Presidency being a welfare-pimp provided. Now I get it - four more years - of KLINTOON...
The only thing worse is that these "jobs" are paid for by Federal taxpayers, and that we have been much to wimpish to do anything about it.
Including Ronald Wilson Reagan.
We are working to build the world we want to live in. In our worldview, the dominant values of competition, greed and exploitation would be replaced with cooperation, autonomy and egalitarianism. We believe that all struggles against oppression and for self-determination are connected, and that it is important to construct viable alternatives while simultaneously fighting for social justice.
dealer’s choice - the race card used to be wild - we’re dealin’ now - it ain’t nuthin’ but a duece.
“It’s a bullsh*t job for young lefties looking to make their political mark before they make their coin in the system they allegedly despise. It absolutely deserves to be derided.”
Right on the money. Obama should be asked the following questions:
-The size of the budget he was personally responsible for.
-How many govt employees did he personally supervise.
-What were the five key things he successfully accomplished and quantiify, with statistics how they were deemed to be successful. ie: x number of people that earned GED’s; x percent got jobs, x percent got better housing, x percent got off welfare; the rate of out-of-wedlock births declined by x percent.
Piffle.
He wasn't even pretending to be a social worker. He was a get-out-the-vote-fraud artist. In Chicago, Illinois no less. The Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem of vote-fraud all rolled into one. Please Libs: this is a debate we'd love to keep open.
You Lefties don't seem to understand that a put-down in a major speech isn't some stupid throwaway line: it's bait. Thanks so much for rising to swallow it, hook, like, and especially, sinker. Obama's petulance over this wasn't just the fact that somebody dared to question The One; he knows perfectly well how dangerous a full-fledged exposé of his "community organizer" days is to his carefully forged credentials.
Obama absolutely needs to be beaten on with this.
Palin is noted for wading into a corrupt government and throwing bodies back out and draining the swamp.
Obama *embraced* the Daley Machine. The quintessential most epically corrupt local government in the country, if not the world. They loved him. He even worked for ACORN, which is THE classic example of gutter tactics in election fraud. They don’t even *pretend* to hide it. They’re PROUD of it.
We need to cut him off at the knees and beat him with the stumps. Absolutely.
Commmunity organizer is a person enlisted to make entitlement a real priority in people’s lives.
No about businesses opening, learning new skills, cleaning up neighborhoods...no. More welfare and programs...but racism was the cause, not individual responsibility.
These neighborhoods have been visited by community organizers for years...how are they doing? They are garbage, just like the nations the residents came from. It’s simple, third world roots, third world tendencies.
There are exceptions and clearly those have to be acknowledged, but the vast majority fall in the first category.
I said it, I am not apologizing.
"Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.
One of Ayer's descriptions for a course called 'Improving Learning Environments' says prospective K-12 teachers need to 'be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and ... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.
The Annenberg papers are quite extensive — 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama's relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.'..."
Article: Annenberg Papers: Putting On Ayers?
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845
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[Obama] is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
(article typo has Ayers instead of Obama)
In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and co. to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.
The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge’s operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60 million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public schools.
The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power of the Councils.
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"The Small Schools Workshop was founded in 1991 at the University of Illinois at Chicago to provide support for teachers who were trying to create new smaller learning environments. Its director is Michael Klonsky, a former professor of education at UIC."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Schools_Workshop
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Some background on Bill Ayers' SDS comrade, Michael Klonsky
(Chicago Annenberg Challenge-related)
"One of Bill Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s comrades in the late 60s Students for a Democratic Society was Mike Klonsky. When Dohrn and Ayers moved in one direction toward the violent tactics of the Weather Underground, Klonsky, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dropped the pro-Russian communist politics of his parents and became a committed Maoist. As leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1977 [not to be confused with Communist Party USA. CPML no longer exists, CPUSA formed decades earlier and is still around-ETL], he travelled to Beijing and was toasted by the senior Beijing leadership.
When the crazy left of the 70s died in the 80s, Klonsky went to graduate school in education in Florida and then moved to Chicago.
While driving a cab there he [Michael Klonsky] was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. It’s offices were in the Department of Education building at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus where Ayers taught.
In 1995 the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge headed by Ayers and Obama gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000.
The Annenberg Challenge also had its office space in the same building as Ayers Department and the Workshop, rent free courtesy of the University.
In 2008 Klonsky ran a blog on the official Obama campaign website on education policy and “social justice” teaching. When discussion of the Klonsky blog emerged in the blogosphere, it was promptly shut down by the campaign and all of the posts made by Klonsky were removed from the site."
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In 1977, the October League was reorganized as the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) [again, not Communist Party USA (CPUSA) -ETL] and former SDS activist Michael Klonsky became party chairman. Also in 1977, Klonsky traveled to China and the CPML was recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its official sister party in America.
(snip)
In January 1981, Michael Klonsky resigned as party chairman, and the CPML disbanded that same year.
The previous Red Encyclopedia description of the CPML was incorrectly combined with that of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist).
http://reds.linefeed.org/past.html
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"This is a guy [Bill Ayers] who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."
Source: ABC News - Transcript: Obama and Clinton Debate, April 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/Story?id=4670271&page=2
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Bill Ayers TODAY (April 6, 2008), from his own red communist star-headed website, begging to debate communism vs capitalism with Sean Hannity and STILL calling for revolution!
"Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good —must win.
We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary.
Source: Bill Ayers' own website:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/page/2/
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"a better world is both possible and necessary"?
Looks to me like Bill Ayers stole (or borrowed) this phrase from Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Both the Weather Underground and RCP have roots in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization.
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"The following is an excerpt from an historic talk by Chairman Bob Avakian, soon to be available on video and DVD from Three Q Productions-REVOLUTION: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About. This talk, delivered in 2003, followed by questions and answers, is a wide- ranging revolutionary journey, covering many topics."
http://rwor.org/a/1238/introbaspeech.htm
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Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
Revolution #63, October 1, 2006
Interview with Bill Ayers:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html
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Much more on the ObamaRat-commie connections at my FR Profile/Home page. Everything there is linked directly to its source. I've now added within-page links and a 'clickable' table of contents which makes it easy to hop around to the various sections:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl
ANYbody.
They came around to our City of Atlanta NPU looking for crooks to hire, and we sent them off with a flea in their ear.
Even all-volunteer, part time Neighborhood Planning Units know to keep the hell away from ACORN.
If Obama worked for ACORN, that is all I need to know about him.
right I have had enough of Obama . colmes playing victim on this
so why doesn’t the media go to this community and go and film the area
show us how Obama did his change there and that way we can have a template on what he means by change
what are the crime unemployment, drug, etc rates there?
I would like to know how Obama changed this area and what he did while he was there as not one person actually knows what he did
community organiser
please
let the media go there and tell us how everyone is doing great under his community organizing
no honestly lets see what the area looks like
Community organizing is like a machine that milks the govt cow more efficiently than you can do it by hand.
Another great analysis is from American Thinker at
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/putting_lipstick_on_the_commun.html
Well worth reading.
Take it from an ex-cop in a big city: “Community organizer” = s**t disturber. Stir up people while getting paid. Or did he get that Hyde Park mansion by eating beans?
Ah Ha! You nailed it, O was a bagman for Dems.
Palin is noted for wading into a corrupt government and throwing bodies back out and draining the swamp.
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We hve not begun to see the sheer power of this woman.
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