“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for‘
(Apropos of the hymn to Obama, ironically, Cornell West insisted Obama was no political Progressive at all. He served corporate interests only, West says, the status quo, especially the Military Techo-Industrial-Banking Complex with gusto. He only subscribed to Progressive values relative to moral issues)
“I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.” — Saul Alinsky
Horowitz: “My parents, who were card — carrying Communists, never referred to themselves as Communists but always as “progressives,” as did their friends and political comrades. The “Progressive Party” was created by the Communist Party to challenge Harry Truman in the 1948 election because he opposed the spread of Stalin’s empire. The Progressive Party was led by Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, and was the vehicle chosen by the Communists to lead their followers out of the Democratic Party, which they had joined during the “popular front” of the 1930s.
The progressives rejoined the Democrats during the McGovern campaign of 1972 and with the formation of a hundred — plus member Progressive Caucus in the congressional party and the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency have become its most important political force…”
…In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. 8 Rules for Radicals, p. 113
Former Radical David Horowitz continues,
“Three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained at the Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation,12 and for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.13 One of the three, Gregory Galluzo, shared with Ryan Lizza the actual manual for training new organizers, which he said was little different from the version he used to train Obama in the 1980s. According to Lizza, “It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: ‘power analysis,’ ‘elements of a power organization,’ ‘the path to power.’ Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists.
The Alinsky manual instructs them to get over these hangups. ‘We are not virtuous by not wanting power,’ it says. ‘We are really cowards for not wanting power,’ because ‘power is good’ and ‘powerlessness is evil.'”
Ryan Lizza, “The Agitator,” The New Republic. March 19, 2007.
According to Lizza, who interviewed both Galluzo and Obama, “the other fundamental lesson Obama was taught was Alinsky’s maxim that self interest is the only principle around which to organize people. (Galluzzo’s manual goes so far as to advise trainees in block letters: ‘Get rid of do — gooders in your church and your organization.’)
Obama was a fan of Alinsky’s realistic streak. ‘The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self interest was met,’ he told me, ‘and not just basing it on pie in the sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.'”
On Barack Obama’s presidential campaign website, one could see a photo (see here) of Obama in a classroom “teaching students Alinskyan methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written, ‘Power Analysis’ and ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,….'”15 15 Ibid.
Until he became a full time elected legislator in 1996, the focus of Obama’s political activities was the largest radical organization in the United States, Acorn, which was built on the Alinksy model of community organizing.
A summary of his Acorn activities was compiled by the Wall Street Journal: In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter — registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list).16 16 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574427041636360388.html#
After Obama became a U.S. Senator, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter
“Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Her husband commented: “I take that observation as a compliment.”17 17 Lizza, op., cit.
“…It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world “a better place” is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.”
—See also, Paulo Freire “the prophet of the Marxist Faith” in U.S. education today. And his connection to Liberation Theologies, Don Helder Camara, and the “liberation” of the convents and Catholic schools. The cynical inversion of real, traditional, education.— James Lindsay
—Guardian: America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. What a bloody end to Obama’s reign
— Alinsky and the Mob
— 2012, Joseph Morris on Alinsky. He would say
“Go ahead and lie if it advances the cause. It doesn’t matter if you lie…” (Alinsky)
“The issue is never the issue. It is the means to power” (Alinksky)
— Association with Subversive Organizations :
“The CPUSA newspaper, the Daily Worker named Alinsky as one of the sponsors of a dinner for Pearl Hart, a notorious communist fronter, arranged by the Midwest Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Alinsky was identified in the Daily Worker as chairman of the Public Housing Association of Chicago Illinois. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, with which the Midwest Committee was affiliated, was cited by the President Harry S. Truman’s Attorney General Thomas Clark as subversive and Communist. It was also cited by the Special Committee on Un-American Activities as one of the oldest auxiliaries of the Communist Party of the United States.” — Conservapedia
Speaking in an interview with Playboy Magazine, Alinsky explained the following:
PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?
ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did.
I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.
When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labeled, “This is the face of a warmonger.” But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well.
Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today.
But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depiession it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good.”
13 Rules of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
— In 1972 Buckley was asking what exactly is meant by political revolution?
“I personally would welcome violent revolution… Any device by which a person becomes an outlaw in his own country becomes a revolutionary, sexual promiscuity and deviancy, abortion, drugs…these are devices [of the Revolution]” — guest Dotson Rader
—- Progressives and Afro Americans
Catholic Critique 