Saul Alinsky, the "Community Organizer" who taught Obama that the "Power for Change" is with the Middle Class

. . . That is why Obama is trying to portray himself as "the Champion of the Middle Class," whether it comes to tax breaks or health care. Notice that Obama does not stress that his real goal is to turn the society on its head--bring the low-income portion of the population into power.

To get that, Obama follows the maxim of Alinsky that you cannot get power solely by organizing the poor, but only through the Middle Class--the "white" middle class, to differentiate it from the "black" poor.

Kyle-Anne Shiver in the American Thinker article "Obama's Alinsky Jujitsu"
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/obamas_alinsky_jujitsu.html

calls Obama " . . . the master of bloodless socialist revolution . . . .

She gets to the heart of the Obama-Alinsky connection:

Obama's Alinsky Lessons

Barack Obama had just graduated from Columbia and was looking for a job. Some white leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago.

Obama answered a help-wanted ad for a position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to "rub raw the sores of discontent," in Alinsky's words.

One of Obama's early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who had this to say to an Ryan Lizza of The New Republic, about Obama:

"He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."

The agitator's job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the "realization" that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent "self-interest" in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

In these methods, euphemistically labeled "community organizing," Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere.

Obama Not Starry-Eyed Like His Followers

Alinsky considered himself a realist above all, the ultimate pragmatist. As a confirmed atheist, Alinsky believed that the here and now is all there is, and therefore had no qualms about assorted versions of morality in the pursuit of worldly power. He didn't coddle his radical acolytes or encourage their bourgeois distinctions between good and evil when it came to transferring power from the Haves to the Have Nots. Alinsky saw the already formed church communities as being the perfect springboards for agitation and creating bonds for demanding goods and services.

When Obama first undertook his agitating work in Chicago's South Side poor neighborhoods, he was un-churched. Yet his office was in a Church and most of the folks he needed to agitate and organize were Church people -- pastors and congregants -- who took their churches and their church-going very seriously. So, this became a problem for the young agnostic, who had been exposed to very little religion in his life. Again and again, he was asked by pastors and church ladies, "Where do you go to Church, young man?" It was a question he dodged for a while, but finally he relented and joined a church.

Not just any church, but a huge black nationalist church with a pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who unabashedly preaches a "black" gospel. Rolling Stone Magazine ran with a story on Obama and his church, entitled, "Destiny's Child," which included this excerpt from one of Rev. Wright's sermons:

"Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones.

"Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!"

"We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!"

The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S**T!"

This doesn't sound like any church in which I've ever worshipped, but perhaps I have led a sheltered life. Reverend Wright, whom Obama called his spiritual mentor and still claims is his sounding board, has taken trips abroad with none other than Louis Farrakhan. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan received the "Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright,Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer" Award at the 2007 Trumpet Gala at the the United Church of Christ. Wright was even reported to be a former Muslim. One might be led to wonder if this "church" isn't all it makes itself out to be.

Among some of the black nationalist signs hanging in this church are a list of admonishments to black solidarity, called the "Black Value System," and a sort of moral code calling for the "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness." I don't recall the Ten Commandments or anything at all in the Gospel about race, so this seems a bit strange.

But Obama isn't starry-eyed when it comes to protecting himself from the possibility of bad press regarding his church affiliation. When he was preparing to announce his campaign for the Presidency in February, he called his minister, Reverend Wright, the night before and disinvited him to stand on the podium in front of all the cameras. Rather than face questions, he simply eliminated the target, a perfect Alinsky action meant to forestall an enemy reaction.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/obamas_alinsky_jujitsu.html

Obama's "Ideological Touchstone"
excerpted from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152.html
a . . . young honor student was offered a job as an organizer in Chicago. By then, Alinsky had died, but a group of his disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate, to organize black residents on the South Side, while learning and applying Alinsky's philosophy of street-level democracy. The recruiter called the $13,000-a-year job "very romantic, until you do it
***
Community organizing, for Clinton principally an academic exercise, was more complex for Obama when he arrived in Chicago in 1985 to work with the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Alinsky network. His experience became an emotional and visceral exploration of the roots of urban African American decay and his own identity.

Times had changed. The '60s were over. Chicago had a black mayor, and Alinsky was gone, dead of a heart attack in 1972. But his work and the fundamentals of his philosophy survived on the far South Side.

Obama stepped into the Alinsky tradition after deciding "mainly on impulse," he has said, at age 21 to become a community organizer. His passion ran to romantic visions of the civil rights struggle.

"He wanted to make that kind of contribution and didn't know how to do it," said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama. "There's that side of him that's strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer, and this kind of work attracts that kind of person. It isn't just that we're going to change things, but we're going to change things from the grass roots."

Obama spent three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters.

"It was poverty on top of poverty. There were so many people who had given up. They just didn't care," said Loretta Augustine-Herron, who signed up to work with Obama. "I don't think he knew how bad it was until he came to our area. He had to have the tenacity and the patience to train us, and sometimes he had to be frustrated."

The Alinsky method, which Obama taught long afterward, is centered on one-on-one conversations. The organizer's task is to draw out people's stories, listening for their goals and ambitions -- "the stuff that makes them tick," one of his teachers told him. There he would find the self-interest that would spark activism.
***
Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote.

"He says things like, 'Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?' " said Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. "Everybody else just puts out an e-mail and says, 'Y'all come.' Barack doesn't do that."

In time, Obama helped build and guide a small network of grass-roots groups that agitated for better playgrounds, improvements in trash pickup and the removal of asbestos from public housing. The city opened a jobs office in the tumbledown community as the lights were going out in nearby factories.

It was in those neighborhoods, Obama said in announcing for president, "that I received the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith." But by the time Obama moved on, Kellman said, he had seen "the limits of what could be achieved."

Obama spent three years at Harvard Law School, then returned to Chicago, where he taught constitutional law, handled civil rights cases and worked with community groups. He continued to teach the Alinsky philosophy, although he told the New Republic recently that "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a friend of Obama's, sees another difference. "If you read Alinsky's teachings, there are times he's confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack. He's always looking for ways to connect."

But when Obama first ran for office in 1995, he echoed Alinsky's credo -- and Clinton's thesis -- in arguing that politicians should not see voters "as mere recipients or beneficiaries."

"It's time for politicians and other leaders to take the next step and to see voters, residents or citizens as producers of this change," Obama told Hank De Zutter of the Chicago Reporter. "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?"

What Obama and Clinton both learned, said Edelman, of the Children's Defense Fund, is that "community organizing is crucial but not enough."

Chicago organizer Gregory Galluzzo, Obama's former supervisor, who likes to describe himself as Alinsky's St. Paul, believes that Obama's exposure to the organizer's liturgy taught him that wisdom can emerge from the grass roots. "Hillary," he said, "leans toward the elites."

But Galluzzo believes that both candidates were influenced by their encounters with Alinsky and his methods. "By either one of them being in office," he said, "we're going to have a government that's more responsive to the ordinary people."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152_3.html

Saul Alinsky

"By the early '70s, Alinsky concluded that America's poor would have to ally themselves with the middle class, whom he was afraid would move to the right. "

Alinsky's radicals found a perfect vehicle for their destruction of the American system and more particularly for taking and maintaining power. That instrument was the Democratic Party.
--from Saul Alinsky and DNC Corruption
http://www.tysknews.com/Articles/dnc_corruption.htm

Alinsky's radicals found a perfect vehicle for their destruction of the American system and more particularly for taking and maintaining power. That instrument was the Democratic Party.

Alinsky asserted that he was more concerned with the acquisition of power than anything else: "My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it." This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, nor even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: "[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized ... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes."

Alinsky advises his followers that the poor have no power and that the real target is the middle class: "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority."

But that didn't stop Alinsky and his followers from using the middle class for their own purposes. They counted on the guilt and shame of the white middle class to get what they wanted. In order to take over institutions and get power, the middle class had to be convinced that they were somehow lucky winners in "life's lottery."

Transition and Transaction

The transition of the old Democratic Party to what exists today should not surprise or confound conservatives. Nor should Alinsky's tactics seem foreign. After all, for nearly 40 years, Republicans and the conservative agenda have been getting hammered by the left through the successful use of Alinsky tactics.

In that cause, radicals and the liberal-left gravitated toward the print and electronic media, toward the university professorate and the law. The left, consciously or unconsciously, adopted Alinsky's rules. The impact changed the nature of the Democratic Party and the direction of the United States. Increasingly, the left is succeeding in changing the nature of the Republican Party as well.

Suffice to say the greatest change has taken place in the relationship between the state and the individual. America is rapidly descending from a representative Constitutional Republic to a collectivist empire controlled by elites of one sort or another.

Alinsky's influence on the modern Democratic Party indicates that the ends do indeed justify the means. As Alinsky states in "Rules for Radicals" it was foolish to believe that means are just as important as the ends. He states that "to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles ... the practical revolutionary will understand ... [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind."

Sadly, not enough Republicans and conservatives learned Alinsky's rules until late in the game. A sign of hope is the fact that the new media, including talk radio and the Internet, are changing all that. One can hope it is not too late.

In any event, Alinsky's rules include:

"Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat."

"Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

"The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself."

"In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt."

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it." (Think Gingrich, Lott and the success of name-calling used by the likes of Bill Clinton, Paul Begala, James Carville, Maxine Waters and others against conservatives and Republicans. Think of how Clinton "enemies" like Paula Jones or Linda Tripp were treated.)

"One of the criteria for picking the target is the target's vulnerability ... the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract." (Trent Lott comes to mind. Meanwhile, a former Klansman by the name of Sen. Robert Byrd got away with saying "nigger" on Fox News at least three times, and he still maintains his Senate seat and power.)

"The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." For instance, Democrats imply conservatives are racists or that Republicans want to kill senior citizens by limiting the growth of the Medicare system, they imply Republicans want to deny kids lunch money without offering real proof. These red-herring tactics work. Of course, Republicans reaction to all this is to immediately go on the defensive. Seldom do they unleash their pit bull orators or strategists. Rather than use the immense amount of data available to prove the conservative case, Republicans tug their forelocks, say "yes sir," and hope the accusations and name calling will go away.

Why is it that Republicans consistently fail to point out the monumental failures of the new Democrats? Failures such as the massive disaster that is the "war on poverty." On that topic alone Republicans should be drilling the public in every media venue and at every opportunity. Then and only then should Republicans offer alternatives to the failed policies of the Democratic left.

Republicans should pound relentlessly on the fact that the Democratic Party was hijacked by leftist reactionaries way back in the early '70s. The reactionary left is the obstructionist left. They do nothing but defend and cling to the failures of the past. That fact makes them reactionaries rather than radicals or progressives.

Unfortunately, Republicans still pretend that nothing has changed regarding the basic philosophy of the political parties. They refuse to understand the horrendous notion that Democrats tell us the U.S. Constitution is flexible. That means the rule of law is flexible. If that is the case the law and the Constitution mean nothing. It means that the law and Constitution are twisted by the whims and fancies of the moment.

In fact, in the 2000 election Al Gore maintained the Constitution could and should be manipulated because it was "flexible." Whatever happened to the amendment process?
Bill Clinton used executive orders to circumvent Congress and the Constitution. He used the agencies of the federal government against his enemies. Clinton set an extremely dangerous precedent. Alinsky would have loved it. It is a perfect example of the use of the Rules for Radicals – ends justify the means.

Hillary and Bill Clinton and other powerful former '60s radicals learned from Saul Alinsky. It is about time that a few more Republicans and/or conservatives did as well.

Alinsky in South Dakota

Remember that Alinsky's advice was that the ends justify the means. Think of Florida in 2000 and the manipulation of military ballots. Think of Milwaukee and unattended polling places, which allowed leftist college students to take handfuls of ballots to check off. Think of a million immigrants in the 1996 election granted instant voting rights by the Clinton administration.

More importantly, think of South Dakota in November of 2002, or Nevada in 1998 or 2002.
In a brilliant bit of investigative reporting, National Review's Byron York gave us a grand overview of the corrupt and unpleasant outline of how Alinsky's rules work during election season. Republicans, once again asleep at the switch, live in the land of euphoria. They still believe that their Democratic counterparts are among the angels on God's right.

Considering that Alinsky expresses admiration for Lucifer, they are looking in the wrong place to find many modern Democrats. Republicans still assume that the modern Democratic Party, its media sycophants, its operatives during national or state elections, will play fair. It is hard to say which is worse, Republican naïveté' or Democratic cheating and law breaking.

When Democrats cheat, especially under Bill Clinton's and Terry McAuliffe's watch, they whine when they discover they didn't cheat enough to win. When they are caught in the big lies, they expect Republicans to ignore it and give them a pass. The last election in South Dakota is a case in point.

In the primaries and election of 2002, lawyers from Washington started showing up at polling places in the hinterlands of South Dakota. The Republican leadership and the establishment should have seen it coming but they didn't.

As Byron York relates in "Badlands, Bad Votes": "On Election Day, Noma Sazama knew something unusual was going on the moment she arrived at her polling place, the St. Thomas Parish Hall in Mission, South Dakota. Sazama, a member of the local election board, noticed several strangers in the room – an unusual sight in Mission, population 904, where most people know one another. It turned out the strangers were all lawyers, Democrats who had come to town to serve as poll watchers for the race between incumbent Democratic senator Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune. One was from Washington, D.C., another was from New York City, and a third was from California. 'There were no locals, and I've never seen that happen before,' says Sazama, who has lived in the area for 73 years."

Furthermore, York maintains, "The Democratic team of lawyers confiscated the Parish Hall kitchen only a few feet from the balloting tables."

Witnesses swore in affidavits that party hacks had rented dozens of vans and hired drivers to bring voters to the polls. Lawyers from elsewhere made the Parish Hall their headquarters. Seventy-three-year-old Ms. Sazama stated, "They had the names and time-of-pickup and whether someone voted on them, and from those he would contact the drivers."

Finally she understood that the influx of outside Democrats were going to use the polling place as their headquarters, an action which is against the laws of South Dakota.

The lawyers tied up the phones, which meant that the poll watchers and election officials could not make needed phone calls. York quotes the election supervisor: "They were on the phone using it to call I don't know where, and I needed to call because we had some new districting. They were always talking on it."

When Wanless, the election supervisor, protested, she got a chilly reaction from the out-of-towners. "I felt like they were trying to intimidate me," she recalls.

In fact, all this is against South Dakota law, which states: "No person may, in any polling place or within or on any building in which a polling place is located or within one hundred feet from any entrance leading into a polling place, maintain an office or communications center. ..."

There were no Republican lawyers or authorities around to inform election officials that it was against the law for the Democrats to be running their campaign from a polling place. That was bad enough, but ever since November Republicans have failed dismally to make it a BIG national issue.

There was also complete failure to understand Alinsky's second basic rule: "Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat." The DNC counted on the locals being intimidated by a gang of high-priced lawyers – and of course they were.

Another Alinsky rule used in the November elections in South Dakota: "In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt." In other words, what you do is count on the failure of will by your opponent to call a foul. The opponent usually believes it is easier to do nothing, it is always easier to do nothing, and so Republicans "move on."

That is the kind of apathy Hitler's forces counted on in the Weimar Republic. The end-justifies-the-means cabal figures that even good people find it easier to do nothing.

In South Dakota, lawyers from diverse places were part of a brigade that the DNC uses to "ensure voters' rights are protected." But as York relates, "According to the testimony of dozens of South Dakotans who worked at the polls, the out-of-state attorneys engaged in illegal electioneering, pressured poll workers to accept questionable ballots, and forced polling places in a heavily Democratic area to stay open for an hour past their previously-announced closing time.
In addition, the testimony contains evidence of people being allowed to vote with little or no identification, of incorrectly marked ballots being counted as Democratic votes, of absentee ballots being counted without proper signatures, and, most serious of all, of voters who were paid to cast their ballots for Sen. Johnson."

According to some witnesses, Democrats were also running car pools out of polling places on the Indian reservations, where investigators are discovering that the dead Indian vote had a major impact on the slim, last- minute, 524-vote Tim Johnson victory over John Thune.

Affidavits from South Dakotans also indicate that money probably changed hands in crucial areas in the boonies. It was not gas money for van drivers either, but paying per head per vote – shades of Tammany Hall and the elections in Boston wards. Nonetheless, Republicans have decided to "move on."

To get the entire story, including affidavits sworn to by South Dakota residents, read York's November article in National Review Online.

Alinsky Does Nevada

When I worked at Nevada Policy Institute in Nevada several years ago, the Post-election analysis of the 1998 election uncovered the fact that family pets received absentee ballots in crucial districts. Dead people were counted as well.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid's slim, 428-vote win against Republican John Ensign raised eyebrows and the juices of some who understand how the modern DNC and its phalanx of wheelers and dealers, lawyers and opportunists really work.

A part of the tactic includes breaking the law when you can and where you can get away with it. Remember, in the minds of the hijacked Democratic Party the ends do indeed justify the Luciferian means.

In Nevada on Dec. 24, 2002, the FBI seized ballots cast in primary and general elections. Said Daron Borst, FBI special agent in Las Vegas, "There is an ongoing investigation into election fraud, but I can't go into any details due to the nature of the investigation."

Ballots were taken after a complaint was lodged that 85 voters in tiny Eureka county did not live in that county or were long dead. The Eureka County probe marked the second time this year the FBI has become involved in a county election in Nevada.

As in South Dakota, it is much easier to get away with election fraud where people don't know the law or will not enforce the law or they are intimidated by the chutzpah and law breaking of crooks in Armani suits holding credentials from the Democratic National Committee.

Unfortunately, when Republicans don't pay attention to the corruption and allow themselves to get screwed time and again, they are also in league with the devil. By this failure of will, the sins of omission are as evil as sins of commission.

Voting fraud was rampant in 2000 and again in 2002 and it will be more so in 2004. Why aren't Republican lawmakers and the RNC making sure this does not happen again? In 2002, Terry McAuliffe told the world that Democratic lawyers would be out in the states keeping an eye on things. They did more than that and it was against the law.

The failure of Republicans to impose the rule of law on the cheaters, liars and manipulators allows those who use Alinsky's corrupt system to win. That fact tells us that the voting process means as little to our elites as does the Constitution.

Because of that fact, Republicans will lose future elections. More importantly, the people of the United States will lose.

The RNC and the GOP leadership just don't get it. Otherwise they would care enough to do something about it.

Diane Alden is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with degrees in political science, economics and history. Dubbed the "prairie pontificator," she also has grad work in international economics and international political movements, plus extensive work in the psychology of behavior in disordered children, women's issues in Third World countries, creative writing, and marketing. With a sideline in American Indian studies and independence and secession movements worldwide, she is also working on upcoming changes in Canadian politics and the flux in the political landscape of North America. See her full bio

TYSK Note: Learn more about the Alinsky Method, the Delphi Technique and "facilitators". If you work for a major corporation or a school district, you are sure to have come face-to-face with this method of group manipulation or, group mind control under the guise of using the "team" approach to problem solving. Click on this link for a short overview article. Once enlightened you are sure to want to know more. Do a Google search on either the Alinsky Method or the Delphi Technique. You will not only learn of its insidiousness, but also see how many groups proudly claim to use these methods to obtain results!

Excerpt from "Who was Saul Alinsky?"
by Jed Babbin
Human Events.com

Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909. Hillary Rodham’s thesis is very revealing of Alinsky’s view of American life. It says, “…after graduating from the University of Chicago, Alinsky received a fellowship in criminology with a first assignment to get a look at crime from the inside of gangs.

He attached himself to the Capone gang, attaining a perspective from which he viewed the gang as a huge quasi-public utility serving the people of Chicago.”Alinsky -- in that and other experiences -- became an academic-turned-radical, a personality type first found among the press covering the Russian revolution of 1917-18 and that became much more common five decades later, forming the basis of the Vietnam anti-war movement. He and others like him would find America’s adversaries -- within and outside the law -- more attractive than America itself.

Saul Alinsky’s radicalism was expressed in his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” In that book, Alinsky said, “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.” Alinsky never saw himself as the devil, but as some radical angel who could bedevil “the Establishment” and force it to change to assuage pressures from community organizations.

from article at
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=19735

and

From THE DEMOCRATIC PROMISE: SAUL ALINSKY AND HIS LEGACY

. . . Chicago was the birthplace of a powerful grassroots social movement that changed political activism in this country. "Community Organizing" was pioneered in Chicago's old stockyards neighborhood by the soberly realistic, unabashedly radical Saul Alinsky
***
He believed that widespread poverty left America open to the influence of demagogues and that the only antidote was active, widespread participation in the political process. Alinsky envisioned an "organization of organizations," comprised of all sectors of the community - youth committees, small businesses, labor unions and, most influential of all, the Catholic Church.
***
In 1959 Alinsky helped found The Woodlawn Organization on Chicago's south side, which brought the struggle for civil rights to the North and challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley's powerful Democratic machine. In the mid-'60s in Rochester, New York, the FIGHT organization took on Eastman Kodak over the issue of racial hiring, resulting in a series of impressive victories and a transformation of race relations in that city.
***
. . . two contemporary "people's organizations", both members of the Industrial Areas Foundation (a national network of community organizations [were] originally formed by Alinsky in 1940). These groups are employing the organizing techniques developed by Alinsky today. Organizing one of New York's most devastated neighborhoods to do battle with city administration, East Brooklyn Congregations are fulfilling their goal of building 1,200 new low-income housing units in their community. In Dallas, Texas, members of Dallas Area Interfaith are lobbying their state legislators to increase funding for an innovative public education program. The struggles and successes of both groups, as they take hold of their own destinies, reveal the power of Alinsky's pioneering work - still relevant for today.
***
By the 1950s, Alinsky had developed a clearly defined organizing philosophy and had won a reputation as champion of the disenfranchised. He began to organize in predominantly black communities, and in 1959, co-founded The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), which brought the struggle for civil rights to Chicago's South Side and challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley's powerful political machine through a radical voter registration drive. In 1965, Alinsky was invited to Rochester, NY to help the black community successfully take on Eastman Kodak over the issue of racial hiring.
***
A passionate believer that social justice could be achieved through American democracy, Saul Alinsky methodically showed the "have-nots" how to organize their communities, target the power brokers and politically out-maneuver them. The lessons he taught people about the nature of power, imparted dignity to the poor and helped create a backyard revolution in cities across America. His work influenced the struggle for civil rights and the farm workers movement, as well as the very nature of political protest. He was a mentor to several generations of organizers like Ed Chambers, Fred Ross and Cesar Chavez. Alinsky's still thriving Industrial Areas Foundation became the training ground for organizers who formed some of the most important social change and community groups in the country.

Alinsky was a larger-than-life figure, possessed of an extraordinary ego, boundless energy and an ability to captivate, entertain and outrage his listeners. As biographer Sanford Horwitt says, he had the gift "...of making everyone he came in contact with feel that the encounter with him had been a special, central one." At one time Saul Alinsky was a name known to millions: he cast a fearsome shadow across the land when invited by concerned liberals and ministers to "clean up the town" - organizing the disenfranchised to fight back against racism, poverty and isolation.
http://www.itvs.org/democraticpromise/alinsky.html

Saul Alinsky died in 1972. He was a Marxist grassroots organizer who spent much of his life organizing rent strikes and protesting conditions of the poor in Chicago in the 1930s. However, unlike Christian socialist and activist for the poor Dorothy Day, Alinsky's real claim to fame was as strategist for anti-establishment '60s radicals and revolutionaries.

Indeed, Alinsky wrote the rule book for '60s radicals like Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Miller and Nancy Pelosi. He considered Hillary Rodham to be one of his better students and asked her to join him in his efforts as an organizer of radical leftist causes. But Hillary had other fish to fry on her climb to national prominence.

Alinsky had a true genius for formulating tactical battle plans for the radical left. He wrote two books outlining his organizational principles and strategies: "Reveille for Radicals" (1946) and "Rules for Radicals" (1971).
http://www.tysknews.com/Articles/dnc_corruption.htm

Michelle Obama Convention Speech Borrowed From Saul Alinsky
from http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/08/michelle_obama_4.html

Even when doing her best to impersonate a Republican long enough to dupe voters into letting her into the White House, Michelle Obama can't help but betray the radical roots she shares with the Obamessiah. In her convention speech Monday she managed not to denounce America as "just downright mean" and not worth being proud of, but she did say this:

And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be."

Maybe she's mixing up Barack with fellow extremist Saul Alinsky, who wrote this in his pernicious guide to replacing freedom with socialism, Rules for Radicals:
The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

Or maybe Uhbama was borrowing again, like he did from fellow floundering post turtle Deval Patrick, and like his running mate is wont to do. It's also possible that as Gateway Pundit suggests, Michelle just happened to hear it in church:

(see http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/08/michelle_obama_4.html for the U-Tube of this.)