wonder how many of the groups named in thread below are connected to FerretCON or the Mexican drug cartels.????http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2913357/posts
Burn Down the Suburbs?
National Review Online ^ | August 1, 2012 | Stanley Kurtz
Posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2012 2:02:25 PM by neverdem
President Obama is not a fan of Americas suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administrations plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of regionalism, the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obamas plans to undercut the political and economic independence of Americas suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer flight to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obamas mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban sprawl. From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors anti-suburban activism.
The alliance endures. One of Obamas original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliels anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the anti-sprawl movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.
In July of 2011, Krugliks Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, theyve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.
One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial regional tax-base sharing scheme currently in place in the MinneapolisSt. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off inner-ring suburban, municipalities.
The Obama administration, stocked with regionalist appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against sprawl very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.
The centerpiece of the Obama administrations anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The regional planning grants funded under this initiative many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut Americas suburbs. Few have noticed this because the programs goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of sustainability, while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.
Obamas former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.
In light of Obamas unbroken history of collaboration with his organizing mentors on this anti-suburban project, and his proven willingness to impose ambitious policy agendas on the country through heavy-handed regulation, this project seems likely to advance.
A second and equally ambitious facet of Obamas anti-suburban blueprint involves the work of Krugliks Building One America. Traditionally, Alinskyite community organizers mobilize leftist church groups. Krugliks group goes a step further by organizing not only the religious left but politicians from relatively less-well-off inner-ring suburbs. The goal is to build coalitions between urban and inner-ring suburban state legislators, in a bid to force regional tax-base sharing on middle-class suburbanites. That is how the practice came to Minnesota.
The July 2011 White House conference, gathering inner-ring suburban politicians for presentations by Rusk and Orfield, was an effort to place the prestige of the Obama administration behind Krugliks organizing efforts. A multi-state battle over regional tax-base sharing, abetted by the president, would usher in divisive class warfare on a scale likely to dwarf the puny efforts of Occupy Wall Street.
Obamas little-known plans to undermine the political and economic autonomy of Americas suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar in ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or cap-and-trade. Obamas anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains his administrations overall policy architecture.
Since the failure of Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty and the collapse of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that. A campaign against suburban sprawl under the guise of environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base sharing are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is following this plan.
Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isnt just the pocketbooks of the 1 percent hes after; its yours.
Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.
fyi:
A photo of President Obama was suddenly pulled from the website of the group Building One America, whose goals were documented extensively in Stanley Kurtzs book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. The book, which was released ten days ago, reveals what Kurtz refers to as Obamas plan to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs. Kurtz connects current Obama administration policy with his personal history, and with groups like Building One America in particular.
Well this explains the monies being plowed into downtown Detroit. CBS did a piece on it last Sunday and visually showed the contrast between what used to be thriving suburbs and the now-downtown where investors are given huge tax breaks (and who knows what else) to relocate. The “man in charge” currently provides housing for his 10,000 employees.