Presidents who used Saul Alinsky’s style

Saul Alinsky is considered the "Father of Community Organizing;" he was the idol of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. One of Obama's jobs out of law school was as "community organizer" in Chicago. And yet one of Alinsky’s rules (added to the 1972 edition of Rules for Radicals) is "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." has been mastered by Donald Trump who is a businessman and capitalist, not a politician/Marxist and definitely not a community organizer.

• Make America Great Again.
• Fake news.
• Pencil-neck.
• Low IQ.
• Lock her up.
• Build that wall.
• Twitter. Troll.

He doesn't let up. He rarely picks a fight, but he surely doesn't pass up a challenge. And Democrats who have been stealing our country for 40 years using Alinsky, weep and moan and get moralistic. Alinsky was said to help the poor fight against power and privilege, and now Trump is helping the poor and middle class come into the economy and fight against the power and privilege of the Democrats who are increasingly being eaten alive by the Socialist wing of their party Obama helped build.

Irony.

To think we all laughed at “community organizer” in 2008

It’s not ACORN—it’s Surdna (Andrus spelled backwards after a very successful businessman who came up through poverty). “New York’s Surdna Foundation used to focus on the usual left-wing causes: environmentalism and so-called smart growth, community development, and the arts.  Sensing an opportunity when Barack Obama became U.S. president, the charity changed its mission to promote community organizing above all else. Its benefactor would not have approved of its old mission statement or the new mission statement.”

https://www.capitalresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/FW0114.pdf

Founded by a practical, hard-nosed,
free market-loving capitalist, over the
past century the Surdna Foundation
Inc. was transformed into a hotbed of revolutionary
radicalism. Created by legendary
industrialist John Emory Andrus, the New
York City-based foundation now adheres to
the Weltanschauung of extremist agitator Saul
Alinsky and Alinsky acolytes like Barack
Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Andrus
was no utopian, holier-than-thou dreamer or
activist. . . .

Surdna’s radical objective is to remake
America in the image of a European social
democracy and to minimize the traditional
forms of American self-governance. The
foundation prefers that freedom and individual
rights take a back seat to equality
and the sacred cow of coercive redistributionism
through the agency of the federal
government.

Community engagement--what is it?

At OSUToday I noticed a grant announcement for "community engagement."

Community Engagement RFA Deadline April 15

"Ohio State's Center for Clinical and Translational Science and the West Virginia Clinical Translational Science Institute Community Engagement and Research Program are jointly sponsoring a pilot research award designed to stimulate collaboration between the respective campuses as well as increase community engaged research, including community-based participatory research, in the Appalachian region."

So I started looking around--and what I found was a mountain of fuzzy definitions building in 2007 and 2008 which included words like "community concerns," "working collaboratively," "engage communities," "partnered and participatory research," and one definition even said "community engagement is not scholarship." On another site I found OSU's definition:

“Engagement is defined as a meaningful and mutually beneficial collaboration with partners in education, business, and public and social service. It involves using:

That aspect of teaching that enables learning beyond the campus walls;
That aspect of research that makes what we discover useful beyond the academic community; and
That aspect of service that directly benefits the public.”

So, based on OSU's definition, it's a way for faculty to complete teaching, research and service requirements without being in the classroom while receiving a federal or foundation grant, and also, if you Google "community engagement Alinsky" it's community organizing under another name (aka ACORN). Notice how Alinsky has been sanitized. It's a way to co-opt established groups that have had a long time mission to educate, feed, clothe and minister to people, and bring them into the government fold. Like churches, service organizations and non-profits.

Some definitions on the internet were so vague, even about the word "community," you really could use this grant money to research middle age Roman Catholic men who gather at Panera's for Bible study, or a condo association that wants the golf course to rip rap its side of the creek, or elementary students who want to play ball in the streets. The grants are quite toothsome.

You lie--again

Organizing for Obama has changed its name. It's now Organizing for America. Since it is an organization to re-elect the President, I don't understand the name change. This isn't for America; that's a lie. He launched his presidency going after socializing health care, cap and trade, and major butt and cheek kissing and bowing, instead of rolling up his sleeves and restoring the economy the only way that works--letting business get down to the business of America--capitalism. Instead, he grew the government. He's increased government jobs more in one year than Bush did in eight--and Bush was the all-time big spender on social programs until he turned the White House over to Obama.

"Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering communities across the country to bring about our agenda of change."

I'm sure children will be suckered into "volunteering" for America through this organization.

No one laughs at ACORN today

Last September was the first many of us had heard of “community organizer,” as an actual career. All we knew about ACORN was some voter fraud that rolled around each election. After the term was ridiculed by Rudy and Sarah, the pros at ACORN lit up like a dry torched Christmas tree. Matthew Vadum of Capital Research Center set us straight.

“But what exactly is community organizing? And is it “very valuable”?
There might be some form of community organizing somewhere in the nation that is “very valuable,” but in the highly specific sense that Obama –a lawyer who enjoys carefully crafting 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. It’s about that nebulous Marxist concept of ’social justice.’ It’s about making people angry so they push for change. 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. Filled with robust self-esteem, community organizers are typically professional revolutionaries who believe that something is terribly wrong with America and that they are the ones anointed to fix it.

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.” Read the rest here.

From Community Organizer to President of the World

An amazingly brief journey when you consider how little we know about the building blocks of Obama‘s political DNA. Consider this. Barack Obama:
A Radical Leftist’s Journey from Community Organizing to Politics

The better term for "community organizer" is community agitator working within a 501(c)(3) frame work* as a non-profit. These organizations are very powerful now within the frayed fringes of the federal and state government because of their non-profit status which allows them full use of government funding without any security clearance or oversite. Unless a group gets more than $500,000 a year, no one questions what is done, and records only need to be kept 3 years, so good luck in tracking their activities or even their names. They split, reorganize and morph into new organizations eligible for additional grants. They were able to be participants through the various housing and home grants to threaten banks which brought down our economy with the aid of the 2006 Democratic take-over of Congress, who with the exception of Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Dodd and Obama, seemed unaware of the tainted salad bowl on the buffet table of pork. However, the chef's help was there from the Bush administration which grew these programs to unheard of amounts from the Reagan era and combined them with private partnerships which fueled the building boom.** In this way, the eight years of George Bush directly built the frame work for the Obama take over.

And the Communist Party USA hack intones the party line and fills in the bridges to somewhere--Kansas, Hawaii, California, Africa, Chicago, to Washington DC:

“. . . an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if not a member – and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as "Frank" as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation – though you would never know it from reading so-called left journals of opinion. At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, "Living the Blues" and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside."
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*501(c)(3) exemptions apply to corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. Technically, they are not supposed to use government funding for political advocacy , but that is a joke considering they can use it for “educational” purposes. Also, other 501C groups can set up a 501c3 for more money for education.

**Read through this advertisement Rally for Home Ownership which promotes "gift" downpayments and their relationship to "private" lenders (under threat using CRA guidelines) and home builders.

How they destroyed our economy

Remember how we all chuckled at the "community organizer" jokes at the Republican Convention? Oh, how little we knew. Now, some did, because they'd been writing, and speaking and sounding the alarm for years, but we didn't listen. The media didn't notice, they were all ga-ga over o-ba-ma and neither did the talk shows. Just a few conservative and libertarian publications and think tanks.

Remember when we thought the community organization gig was ACORN and just some voter fraud--hadn't we seen that in both parties? Gosh, in Illinois, it doesn't matter if you vote at all "down state"--Chicago will take care of it and they have enough dead people and dogs to vote in your place. JFK might have lived a long life as a Massachusetts senator if his party hadn't stolen the Illinois vote in 1960 from Richard Nixon.

Turns out it was a much bigger cancer behind the subprime loans. Here's an article from 1995, describing guerilla warfare by the community groups which eventually brought down the wealthiest country and most powerful government in the world--without firing a shot.

After a raucous Senate Banking Committee hearing exploring Fleet Financial Group's record on lending to minority communities, the Federal Reserve Board governors agreed to consider taking action against the New England banking giant. Among the community activists present at that February 1993 meeting with the governors was Bruce Marks, Director of the Boston-based Union Neighborhood Assistance Corporation (UNAC) known for waging guerrilla warfare against banks that fail to meet fair lending standards. When Marks and company returned six weeks later, only to be informed that the governors had decided not to act on the matter, the group took action of their own by rushing the front steps of the Reserve and blocking the entrance.

As the group of roughly 60 stood at the front door, a limousine pulled up, and out stepped a man resembling Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The protesters naturally seized upon the opportunity to make their case with the head of the Fed. They ran over and surrounded the car, overwhelming the secret service agents and the Greenspan look-alike. The man turned out to be not Greenspan but Italy's minister of finance. Although the group would have preferred a face-to-face meeting with Greenspan, mistakenly accosting the Italian finance minister was only a minor embarrassment for Marks, who regularly uses high-pressure tactics in his crusade against redlining banks.

Marks had attended the Senate Banking Committee hearing with 400 angry residents from various states, many armed with tales of injustice wrought by Fleet. The protesters, who included gospel singers and Baptist ministers, sang and chanted as they paraded in wearing bright yellow T-shirts depicting a loan shark.

"It was like a gospel revival meeting," Marks said. "I don't know if ever there's been a committee meeting where 400 people just took it over." National Housing Institute

And then skip ahead to the Winter 2000 issue of City Journal, probably written in late 1999.

There is no more important player in the CRA-inspired mortgage industry than the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. Chief executive Bruce Marks has set out to become the Wal-Mart of home mortgages for lower-income households. Using churches and radio advertising to reach borrowers, he has made NACA a brand name nationwide, with offices in 21 states, and he plans to double that number within a year. With "delegated underwriting authority" from the banks, NACA itself—not the banks—determines whether a mortgage applicant is qualified, and it closes sales right in its own offices. It expects to close 5,000 mortgages next year, earning a $2,000 origination fee on each. Its annual budget exceeds $10 million.

Marks, a Scarsdale native, NYU MBA, and former Federal Reserve employee, unabashedly calls himself a "bank terrorist"—his public relations spokesman laughingly refers to him as "the shark, the predator," and the NACA newspaper is named the Avenger. They're not kidding: bankers so fear the tactically brilliant Marks for his ability to disrupt annual meetings and even target bank executives' homes that they often call him to make deals before they announce any plans that will put them in CRA's crosshairs. A $3 billion loan commitment by Nationsbank, for instance, well in advance of its announced merger with Bank of America, "was a preventive strike," says one NACA spokesman.

And here's Marks putting himself in a positive light at a "world citizenship, global humanist" blog. I wonder Mr. Marks, where are those poor and low income people you put in houses today? Do they have jobs? Do they have pensions? Where are the multitudes of employees sopping up government grants to the non-profits for paper pushers and fee takers, and hastily hammered together housing corporations to rebuild communities? Do you even care, or were they always just your route to destroy the United States economy?

Marks’ role as an aggressive crusader for reform of the powerful banking and lending industry has its representatives up in arms. On May 5, 1999 from the Senate floor, Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), head of the Senate Banking Committee, attempted to portray banks as victims of Bruce Marks. Gramm described Marks as, “… someone who graduates from college, goes to graduate school, and goes to work for the Federal Reserve in acquisitions and mergers, quits and goes into business, spends four years harassing banks and bank presidents, and finally the bank (Fleet Bank) caves and gives them $1.4 million, gives them $200,000 to set up their organization; they now have twenty offices, lending $3.5 billion…” Senator Gramm continued, “There is a CRA protester who calls himself an “urban terrorist” who used those charges against a bank, harassed them for four years, went to a speech of the president of the bank (Fleet Bank CEO Terrence Murray) at Harvard University, disrupted the speech, made this man’s life miserable for four long years.” Bruce Marks wears this personal attack as a badge of honor.

Under Marks’ leadership, NACA has garnered commitments of over $6.7 Billion for the best mortgage product in America. NACA now has 31 offices throughout the country and will double in size within the next 12 to 18 months. NACA has become the largest housing services organization in the United States.

Community Reinvestment Act Harmful legacy

For a lefty hissy fit on the conservatives waking up to the CRA's mistakes, see here, so don't say I don't provide an alternative view, which the left never does.

Alinskyian trained Catholic laity

“The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost: Obama, ACORN, and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development,” by Stephanie Block, The Wanderer editorial, via Illinois Review

"For nearly forty years, The Wanderer has followed the Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s funding of radical, left-wing political organizations, many of them carrying the brand of Saul Alinsky. The Wanderer also covered the first Call to Action conference – the months of “hearings” leading up to it, its orchestrated structure and contrived demands – and our reporters commented on the Alinskyian nature of it, not merely in its tactics but in its outcomes. In hindsight, we can see that organized dissent in the Church was a product of organized parishes, filled with Alinskyian-trained laity.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development is responsible for that. . .

. . . Even the politically naïve are fascinated by the pejorative dismissal of Obama as a “community organizer” and his campaign’s rebuttal that to disrespect community organizers is to disrespect Catholic Action. Obama isn’t Catholic. Catholic thought hasn’t subtly filtered into this ecumenical movement. Amoral [Saul Alinsky] thought, on the other hand, has clearly filtered into Catholic circles – to such a degree that some people confuse one for the other."

When I was a community organizer

I certainly wasn’t Jesus Christ. Although there are some nattering nabobs of punditry (that means chattering know nothings who think they are rich with words) who have tried to reframe what we did (Donna Brazile, Tom Brokow, Steven Cohen, etc. and other brilliant theologians) and who Jesus is.

Let’s be clear. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate who stepped into the world he created for a very specific purpose, and it wasn't political, social or cultural. I, however, in those days was a friendly, well-intentioned young adult from the middle-class and middle west going door-to-door taking surveys and feeling benevolent in a poor and working class neighborhood in California. Our surveys were probably worded so that no matter what the residents answered about their needs, we already had the answer. I don’t remember, but I know that’s how it is done. Saul Alinsky and the Communists didn’t invent this, the churches did--maybe that‘s why from a 50 year perspective a very ignorant, in-the-tank for Obama, MSM has picked up on this mantra. I was idealistic and had a vision that I could make a difference. I suspect most of the families and certainly the teenagers my own age that I met in that African-American community moved into the middle class through their own efforts. There were a few female-headed households, but not too many. There were married fathers in the homes of that community. The adults in that neighborhood were the off-spring of migrant workers who had arrived in California in the 1930s during the Depression, leaving behind the poverty and racism of the South. Although their lives weren’t materially as good as what I had enjoyed growing up in Illinois, they were light years ahead of their parents and grandparents.

Food pantries, clothes closets and job assistance came later, maybe the 70s. In the 1950s we offered play ground supervision, Bible school, canteen type activities for youth, a community garden, and maybe some tool sharing like lawn mowers--not sure about all the services. Whatever we did, I’m quite sure we made no long term difference in the community. You’re never any smarter than the era in which you live, and the reason it’s better to give than receive, is because no one wants to be anyone else’s charity project. When was the last time you had to accept help and felt good about it?

I had a great time, learned a lot, got much more than I gave, and would never, never even consider that it belonged on my resume.

From little ACORNS grow squirrelly fraud

Still seething at the idiots who called our Lord and Savior a "community organizer" at the level of these crooks.

Yid with a Lid writes “Well we finally know what a community organizer does, if that community organizer is ACORN what they do perpetuate Voter fraud. One quick google search will show all the times it has been sited for voter fraud. Now the Detroit Free Press reports that this group with ties to the Obama campaign is trying their dirty tricks in Michigan:”

Democrats pick up the "Jesus as Organizer" theme

In Virginia, labor leader Cecil Roberts, said,

“I used to be a community organizer and I’m in good company,” Roberts said as he introduced Barack Obama at a town hall event “Martin Luther King was a community organizer. Listen, Sarah, Moses was a community organizer and yes, Jesus was a community organizer.”

Wow. Obama is sure in good company. Then Donna Brazile, big Democrat, repeats this nonsense after it got repeated on Daily Kos that Biblical brain trust, and adds that Pontius Pilate was a governor. Well, Donna, back to the Gospels for you. Jesus wasn't on trial for organizing, he was on trial because he called himself GOD as in, I AM THE WAY, I AM THE TRUTH, I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE, I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, and so forth. I AM has deep meaning in scripture, and it doesn't mean IAMACOMMUNITYORGANIZER. He wasn't organizing anyone to do anything except repent, get baptized and serious about worship. I don't think that's what community organizers following the Saul Alinsky model do. Having 12 ordinary type guys leave their jobs and listen to your teaching while you cast out demons, give blind people sight and feed 5,000 with a few fish and loaves of bread is not "community organizing," it's called proving who you are. Nor is facing down Pharoah and demanding that he free the Hebrew slaves and then leading them to the gates of the promised land called community organizing. You guys are embarrassing Obama, and he's got a big enough ego without this!

Plus, Pilate said three times he couldn't find anything wrong with Jesus, and then listened to his wife who said she'd had a dream. Pilate disclaimed any responsibility for Jesus' death (which is how the Jews came to be blamed, instead of all of sinful mankind), and put a guard at the tomb.

According to Philo and Josephus, Pilate was a mean old dude who infuriated the Jews by desecrating the holy city of Jerusalem. There were mass protests and many Jews were killed by Pilate, and supposedly he committed suicide when called to Rome to answer to the Emperor.

If Palin isn't influencing any women who weren't on board in the first place, if she's just dumb trailer trash with librarian glasses, why in the world are you guys so terrified of her that you are not only rewriting history, but ripping out pages of the Gospel and rolling them for a smoke?

Another convert

He was a 60s war protester, a community organizer, a Jew, a New Yorker in the midwest and he hired Obama for his first job in Chicago. He's also a convert to Christianity and is now a Roman Catholic. Read the story of Jerry Kellerman here at Busted Halo. Watching the angry leftists attack Palin for her religion (Pentecostal, Bible based, pro-life), makes me think Christians are getting some payback for denying Obama's faith. Let's stop throwing stones at those the Lord has forgiven and welcomed into the Kingdom. Even if you (left and right) don't understand the concept.

Here's a REAL community organizer

No kidding. I wasn't even looking for him, but I recognized the description from the stunning resumes of other COs most recently in the news.

"Through his remarkable ability to master languages, media and ideas, his insights into the importance of organization and social sructures, and his intuitive grasp of the needs and possibilities of his era, he was able to forge an alliance between thought and action which made his name a wonder of its age."

No, it wasn't Obama in late 20th century, it was John Calvin in the 16th century. "A life of John Calvin," by Alister E. McGrath, Basil Blackwell, 1990, preface. But why go for reformer when you're already the Messiah?