Posted on 09/30/2008 4:59:40 AM PDT by Schnucki
Presidential candidate Barack Obama has extensive experience in community organizing. In the 1980s, Obama was lead organizer for a campaign funded by the Catholic Church in Chicago that was formed on the principles of radical Saul Alinsky.
Senator Barack Obama’s political ambitions stirred Jackie Kendall, executive director of the Midwest Academy, a Chicago-based training center for community organizers, to crow, “He’s given community organizing a good name.”
This remark was sparked by the fact that Obama entered politics through community organizing. In 1995, one analyst wrote, “He says he is drawn to politics, despite its superficialities, as a means to advance his real passion and calling: community organization….What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer.”
Obama has had extensive experience as a community organizer. In the 80s, he was the lead organizer of the Developing Communities Project, a campaign funded by Chicago’s south-side Catholic churches and formed on the organizing principles of Saul Alinsky. He spent another four years building an organization in Roseland and the nearby Altgeld Gardens public housing complex.
ACORN is another community-organizing network with Alinskyian roots. Before going off to law school in the early 90s, Obama directed ACORN’s partner organization, Project Vote. Meeting with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of this, saying, “I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.” ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, considers itself the nation’s largest community organization. Its Political Action Committee, ACORN Votes, announced its endorsement of Senator Obama’s run for the US presidency in February 2008.
The Problems with Alinskyian Organizing
The community organizing embraced by Senator Obama is an inheritance from Saul Alinsky who founded the Industrial Areas Foundation and wrote about his organizing principles in two books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. Today’s major organizing networks – ACORN, PICO, DART, Gamaliel and, of course, Alinsky’s own Industrial Areas Foundation – owe their structures and their methodologies to Alinsky. The old time organizers who founded these networks were either trained through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) or by IAF organizers.
Alinsky’s principles are deeply unethical, however. He teaches, for example, that in politics, the ends justify the means. Specifically, he teaches organizers to seek political power by any means that accomplishes that end. Local agendas are used to serve a larger, organizational agenda that is sometimes diametrically opposed to the values of its membership. Faith-based institutions are evangelized into liberationist theory through a variety of mechanisms. These are serious problems for the religious bodies who have become institutional members of the Alinskyian networks.
These Alinskyian principles are manifested in myriad, cynical ways. Obama unabashedly explained how he became “churched” in a 2007 speech: It's around that time [while working as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago] that some pastors I was working with came around and asked if I was a member of a church. "If you're organizing churches," they said, "it might be helpful if you went to a church once in a while. And I thought, "I guess that makes sense."
Did Obama secure bad loans from inner city people? Loans they had no chance of paying back? ( Well, unless there’s a BIG bailout and “forgiveness” program...
A more important influence of Alinsky was TWO - The Woodlawn Organization - it was a few blocks from University of Chicago... and it's ideas permeated the neighborhood.
BACKDOOR REPARATIONS
Millions of gullible fools have been taken in by this man, who is the most diabolically dangerous and evil American politician I have ever seen.
“He’s given community organizing a good name.”
I had to ponder that for a moment. So...if Barry Soetoro is a GOOD example of a ‘community organizer’, just think how BAD the worst of them might be.
Don’t forget another disciple of Alinsky’s, temporarily laying low in the wings, who also believes that the ends justify the means and ethics be damned. She based her college thesis on his work. Thank God for Obama; his smooth lies and amoral deceptions are all that has kept she-who-must-not-be-named from winning the nomination and she would have been a much tougher opponent to expose.
Obama’s candidacy has exposed Alinsky’s work to the electorate. None who follow him are suitable for public office.
Obama has had extensive experience as a community organizer. In the 80s, he was the lead organizer of the Developing Communities Project, a campaign funded by Chicago’s south-side Catholic churchesWrong. There isn't ONE Catholic Church involved with the Developing Communities Project.
This Stephanie Block lacks credibility. And she should learn to use Google.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.