Obama's Alinsky-Style Power Analysis

New York Times columnist Jodi Kantor’s book, The Obamas, tries very, very hard to paint a sympathetic picture of her eponymous subject matter–she gets her digs in against the supposedly racist tea party everywhere she can–but every once and a while the truth cracks through. Take this interview at the Texas Book Festival for example:

The Obamas often don’t mingle freely – they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community organizing boss, and he’s so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, “I’m still organizing.” It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once – “The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.” How fully has this guy resolved himself to what he’s really doing? On the one hand, he’s passing these backroom deals to pass health care reform, but on the other he’s telling his old boss he’s still a community organizer. I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.

Jerry Kellman was Barack Obama’s former boss, a student of Saul Alinsky’s in the 1970s, and a permanent fixture of the progressive left in Chicago.

While some have downplayed Obama’s connections to Saul Alinsky, Kellman’s link is pretty easy to discern.

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Michelle Malkin reports today, based on the Obama administration’s latest document dump of visitor logs, that convicted fraudster and community organizer Robert Creamer has visited the White House sixty times since January 2009–five times in August 2011 alone.

As first reported at Big Government, Creamer is the apparent architect of the Democrats’ political strategy for imposing Obamacare on the nation, composing a “blueprint”–that was later endorsed by high-level Obama advisers–while he was in federal prison. Creamer also claims to have been “one of the major architects of the successful 2005 campaign to defeat the Bush plan to privatize of Social Security.” In 2010, Creamer led efforts to rally the Democratic base by demonizing Republicans and making wildly optimistic predictions of victory:

Big Government also reported in May that Creamer, who worked for the Obama campaign in 2008, has also set up a nationwide political consulting firm to provide field operations and propaganda for Obama and the Democrats in the 2012 elections.

The timing of the August 2011 efforts is particularly interesting, given Creamer’s efforts this fall to promote the Occupy Wall Street movement and to target Bank of America in particular. Creamer told the New York Times in October that he hoped the Occupy movement would “inspire the progressive base” and help President Obama frame the issues for his re-election campaign. (more…)

Occupy Wall Street recently came to south-central Pennsylvania by way of Occupy Harrisburg. Occupy Harrisburg began its occupation of the Capitol at 12:01 a.m. on October 15, 2011 and ran through the day. Various media outlets reported that the group would extend its occupation through October 16, 2011, although they would legally be required to move from the Capitol. This report offers a brief reference list of how local media covered Occupy Harrisburg and then provides my firsthand account of what happened along with analysis of the event.

How Local Media Covered Occupy Harrisburg:

Various south-central Pennsylvania media outlets reported on Occupy Harrisburg. Some of the stories are written by the local media outlets and others are AP feeds. I did not do an exhaustive search to see if the media outlets that ran AP feeds did stories of their own. Also, I did not check every single local media outlet, although I tried to choose some of the major ones. I’m linking to some of them so that the reader can compare and contrast how these media outlets reported on Occupy Harrisburg with how my report on it is.

The Patriot-News: Harrisburg, PA:

• October 5: “Occupy Harrisburg holds first organizational meeting, allied with Occupy Wall Street movement”
• October 15: “Occupy Harrisburg comes to Pennsylvania Capitol”
• October 16: “Occupy Harrisburg plans to continue protests against ‘Wall Street greed’ at Capitol”

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According to newly released internal White House emails, however bad things are now, they’re about to get worse.  The messages, which originated within the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2010, admits the train wreck of the Solyndra loan and indicates that “bad days are coming.”

“What’s terrifying,” the note reads, “is that looking at some of the ones that came next, this one [Solyndra] started to look better.”

It’s important to note that these emails were released by Democrats themselves so, in all likelihood, this is the version of the story that presents the best possible picture of the Obama administration’s future.  Depending on which poll you read, the President’s approval rating is either a point or two above or below 40% and his administration is mired in multiple, deepening, scandals.  This leads many conservatives to speculate that Obama will have no other choice but to bow out of a 2012 contest that he knows he can’t win. They’d better hope he doesn’t.  For the sake of the nation, Obama needs to run, and he needs to be defeated in an election.

Some on the right will argue that the chance of him winning a second term is too great and the United States would be better off if he just resigned.  The problem is, he won’t just disappear.  Ex-presidents may no longer enjoy the perks of the office, but they still command considerable attention both at home and abroad.  Barack Obama would present the left with the ultimate rock star of retired politicians, and he’d love to wield that kind of power.

If he simply quits, Obama will return to his community organizing roots. He’ll begin shouting about the nation that was too stupid, too trapped in its own past, to acknowledge the greatness of the future he tried to build.  He’ll blame Washington and evil corporations for standing in the way of his vision.  He’ll imply that we’re a racist land which couldn’t deal with a black president and, most importantly, he’ll declare that he was never beaten.

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At around 6:15 a.m. ET the owners of Zuccotti Park and the government of NYC gave into the union-supported, trashy homeless people living on private property. The police waited so late to respond and to clear out the protesters that it gave time for large numbers to gather far beyond what the police could control. Hoping to fight another day, the owners of the park capitulated to the community-organized demands (to allow them to stay in deteriorating living conditions). An analyst for “Russia Today” reported that union “workers” showed up to Zuccotti Park with signs reading “NYPD protects the rich.” She tweeted, “Entire #OWS crowd erups in deafening cheers + applause.” The cheers heard of the crowd over the live stream after it was announced the cleaning would be “postponed” sounded like that of a pro football game.

The Occupy Denver protesters were almost as lucky. It was equally awe-inspiring and scary how organized and coordinated these protesters were in tracking the Denver Police Department’s every move via twitter. User “OccupyIntel” as well as the official OccupyDenver twitter accounts were tweeting updates from a police scanner. Yes, the protesters were actually listening to the police scanners to see where and when the police were moving next. In some cases they were providing direct quotes of what law enforcement officials were saying.

From 4-5:30 a.m. CT I watched a live stream of the clearing of the Occupy Denver protest via News9-Denver . On live television I watched as, what the reporter described as “dozens”, officers dressed in full riot gear calmly walked through the streets and began tearing down tents. The reporter had been there since earlier in the evening and revealed some very interesting facts about how the protesters prepared for this early morning’s events:

• Protesters had multiple lawyers on site for days offering legal advice. Those lawyers were there and shown on camera documenting and monitoring police actions.
• Protesters dipped their bandanas, which they used to cover their face, in vinegar in order to negate the effects of tear gas.
• Protesters distributed a number to call in case of arrest. Several of the protesters sharpied the number on their arms and legs.

I’ll have to check my notes, but can someone remind me the last time a Tea Party protest required on-site lawyers and tear gas prevention?

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There are no coincidences in the Obama “Community Organizing” organized hard-left.

Last month in Illinois at the Right Nation event, bused-in SEIU hordes coordinated with social justice activist ministers and Obama’s vaunted Organizing for America (formerly Obama for America) waving American flags that had been distributed to them by their “Community Organizers.”  The well-trained mob chanted “Stop the Hate” and wielded uniform, hand-crafted placards defaming Glenn Beck as a “liar” and a “hater.” What we were able to discover in short order, and quite predictably, was this group was “astro-turf” and with the provocation of simple questions, such as: “What does your sign mean?”, “Why are you here?”, the “Stop the Hate” rally devolved into spitting and inflammatory name-calling.

Someone, somewhere has had a plan to dress the union thugs up as pious and deeply patriotic now that a progressive socialist is in the White House, and to frame non-progressives, non-socialists and critics of the Obama Administration as out-of-tune with Jesus’s “Social Justice” activism (history revisionism at its worst) and un-patriotic.

When I was standing outside the News Corp. building Monday evening before my appearance on “Red Eye,” I saw a lone protester who looked not-unlike Scooby-Doo’s sidekick, Shaggy.  His name is Matt Sky.  He and his girlfriend are relatively infamous for being the most photographed supporters of the Ground Zero Mosque due to their constant, ubiquitous protests in front of the Cordoba House site.

In reading about Matt Sky, ubiquitous Manhattan protester, he’s been referred to as a math tutor and web programmer.  In what type of economy does a math tutor and web programmer have this amount of free time to do so much protesting?  In another less politically correct time, a reporter would start asking him whether or not he is actually employed or whether he is another statistic of the staggering unemployment brought on by the horrendous Obama economy. (more…)

Remarks of President Obama at Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Dinner, as prepared by the White House:

Hello CBC! It is wonderful to be back with all of you. I know you’ve spent a good deal of time talking about what the future holds for the African American community, and the United States of America as a whole. I’ve been spending time thinking about that, too. And at this time of great challenge, one source of inspiration is the founding of the Congressional Black Caucus.

I want us all to take a moment and remember what was happening forty years ago when 13 black members of Congress decided to come together and form this caucus. It was 1969. More than a decade had passed since the Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education. It had been several years since Selma and Montgomery, since Dr. Martin Luther King told America of his dream, all culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

The founders of this caucus could look back and feel proud of the progress that had been made. They could feel confident that America was moving in the right direction. But they…. (more…)

On April 30th, Progressives marched on Wall Street to vilify Wall Street banks and bankers. Who organized that march? It was a group called National People’s Action (NPA), and their anti-capitalist campaign is ominously titled Showdown In America.

You might be thinking “Crap. Not another Alinsky community organizing group and its damn acronym!” – but this is one to which you need to pay very close attention. This group is at the very center of the real estate bubble-bust brought on by the dreaded CRA, and they are organizing an army of unions to march on Wall Street and blame the entirety of the economic disaster on the evil rich.

The first thing that you need to know about NPA is that their now-deceased leader, Gail Cioncotta, is credited in community organizing circles for authoring the Community Reinvestment Act. Her group is also credited with honing the tactic of storming into banks and occupying their lobbies.

Another thing you need to know is that in 2003, NPA’s sister organization, the National Training and Information Center (NTIC), was busted by the Justice Department for misappropriating millions of federal grant dollars from community development projects,  using the funds instead to train community organizers to lobby the government. On top of that, the Justice Department found that they committed fraud as they tried to cover up their actions.

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As ACORN pretends to “dissolve” around the country, internally, there appears to be a mad dash to get out ahead of prosecution. Not surprisingly, ACORN has a history of shutting offices down when an investigation gets too close. For example, in 2004 ACORN’s affiliate Project Vote abruptly closed its national office in Ohio and shipped boxes stuffed with un-cashed checks and paperwork to Washington, DC.

ACORN appears to have honed these tricks and has now decided to re-brand on a national scale. However, given its history, many are skeptical:

“If you want to see whether ACORN is really changing its ways, check to see whether the signatories to those local ACORN bank accounts are changing. When it comes to ACORN, the money is the organization, and the name is just the name.”

In order to operate effectively, ACORN requires little public scrutiny and a lot of lore and misdirection (think registering Mickey Mouse to vote). For 40 years ACORN’s organizing model has survived social revolutions and political upheavals and to understand ACORN a review of the 1970’s “manifesto” of ACORN founder Wade Rathke is essential.

Acorn Organizing Model
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Esquire has an interview with ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis:

I called ACORN to get a response from Bertha Lewis, the group’s CEO. “I don’t think the conservative right will ever be satisfied,” she told me. “They’re not going to stop because they’re raising money on us every day — we’re a nice, simple convenient bogeyman.”

Still, Lewis seemed almost shell-shocked: “We can’t understand this obsession, and the vehemence. They just make up something and keep repeating it over and over — yesterday, I’m cleaning my house and I get a call, someone from my office saying ‘This guy from Breitbart is going crazy saying you were in the White House!’ Apparently some woman named Bertha Lewis visited the White House in September, so automatically they assumed — but it wasn’t me.”

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AFT President Randi Weingarten may have inadvertantly put her finger on one of the major problems with public education today.

During an Oct. 28  forum at the Center for American Progress, Weingarten told the assembled panel that teachers unions, along with the general labor movement and the nation’s public schools, should be agents for social justice. She said “we have to do more than simply instruct children seven hours a day” and that “community schools should be the hub of the community.”

We suppose she means that our public schools, and the people who teach in them, should be actively engaged in political issues that have little or nothing to do with education –  like abortion, gay marriage and the sort.  That’s all fine and good, to a point. We live in a free society, where labor unions and their members can spout off about anything, just like the rest of us.

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Did you know the environmental movement is not just about being a good steward of your environment so that you may, to the best of your ability, pass on an inhabitable planet to future generations? Nope.

It turns out that’s just the sweet sugary frosting on top of the social justice pie.

For a glimpse into the social(ist) justice ideology motivating the Progressive Global Warming Climate Change movement, take a look at the video below, produced by a community organization called smartMeme.

The video promotes turning Copenhagen into a moment for “ecological justice.” Some highlights include:

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Yesterday, I finished the third part of my interview with Wade Rathke. I felt, correctly, or not that after spending several hours with Rathke, that I was starting to understand Rathke, his vision, and his goals. So, I tried to make these questions as pointed and interesting as possible.

1) What can the local, state, and federal government do right now to help the poor and middle class?

The answer that Rathke gave was both surprising and impressive. I expected him to rattle off several laws that could be implemented, maybe a moratorium on foreclosures, and other policy changes that he believed in. Instead, Rathke was practical and pithy.

He said that all government programs: unemployment insurance, welfare, etc. should be streamlined on the internet so that all citizens would be given access to electronic files. By doing this, the government would cut all sorts of red tape and save those in need all sorts of time and energy in receiving these benefits. For the money the government would spend in implementing these systems, the benefit to the people would come back ten fold.

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Last Tuesday, I had round two with former ACORN Chief Organizer and current head of Community Organizations International, Wade Rathke. This interview was a lot more sweeping. It ranged from Rathke’s philosophy, his philosophy on organizing, his views on the tea parties, to all sorts of issues surrounding ACORN.

1)What do you think of the tea parties?

It’s important to note that I wasn’t asking about political philosophy or personal preference, but rather as an organizing philosophy.

Rathke is impressed by their ability to organize. As an organizing phenomenon, the tea parties are effective and, as an organizer, Wade Rathke believes they took advantage of a vacuum, stepped in, and filled a void that the president never saw coming. Rathke once referred to the tea party movement as “tea baggers”. He did this only once. He never really took any pot shots at them besides this and so I don’t know that this was a deliberate dig.

Rathke did, however, also point out that often the tea parties fail basic organizing principles.

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I was driving to my local OSH hardware store in West L.A. yesterday to buy some tools for the house where I spotted an ACORN rally across the street at some FOX studio.  After buying some supplies, I went into my car to get the brand new hand-held HD video camera I had purchased just the night before for an upcoming vacation.  With camera in hand, I walked towards the protesters to gather some pictures and video footage of the rally.  I also called my friend Andrew Breitbart and suggested he come down. I had a feeling he’d be interested.

But before he could make it to the rally, an ACORN organizer had crossed the street and approached me with an ACORN flyer in her hand.  As she started to talk, I clicked the record button of the new camera I had bought on a whim, not knowing what it would capture or how it even worked, for that matter. I heard the same things you will now hear on this recording.  Three minutes later I walked away in shock.  I started to tremble from what she admitted to me with utter nonchalance.  I walked inside a nearby store and found a quiet place to play the tape for myself and realized that I had wintessed something maybe no one was ever supposed to hear:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Follow along with the transcript:

Have you seen this organizer?

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Today I received a phone call from my friend, Gary H., who said that ACORN was staging a protest outside the Fox News studios in West Los Angeles. I called someone at the Fox News bureau to find out that there were no protesters there, but quickly realized ACORN had gotten that wrong too. They were protesting in front of FOX Television Center, the home of local affiliate KTTV.

Since I woke up to the news that ACORN had sued the U.S. government to get its federal funding back, it struck me as obvious that ACORN is in the process of trying to get its mojo back absent any real investigations by the Holder Justice Department, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and the Jerry Brown sham investigation in California – not to mention the  so-called “internal investigation” whose chief investigator was picked by number one ACORN defender, John Podesta, and SEIU head Andy Stern, whose union is deeply aligned with the troubled “community organizing” group.

Despite all the evidence we have published that exposes ACORN as both corrupt and criminal, no other mainstream media organization has shown any signs of investigating ACORN despite countless angles and document trails.  So I knew I had to go down to the protest on Bundy Drive to ask ACORN protesters a few questions.

With very little time I got in the car with Big Government Associate Editor Alex Marlow to meet Gary H. down at the protest. When we arrived, the protesters were fifty or so strong, monitored by a few police units standing to the side. Given that the police made me feel safe, I walked straight toward the chanting protesters while accepting an ACORN full-color single page handout entitled, “ACORN MEMBERS — MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN  THEIR COMMUNITIES,” which sung the praises of the organization. (more…)

Earlier this month Don Loos wrote about SEIU and ACORN’s “corporate campaigns,” thinly veiled but apparently legal extortion attempts to get big companies to unionize. Wrote Loos:

SEIU, along with its partners… stage disruptive demonstrations, place derogatory ads, hand out offensive flyers, send defamatory letters, and pressure politicians…. All of these actions are designed to irritate everyone in the community and hopefully focus the unrest on the employer, not SEIU. And, in the end, it’s all about money – union dues extracted from workers….

I saw this firsthand in 2004, somewhat from the inside.

I became involved at that time with SEIU, which was trying to keep Advocate Health Care from building another Chicago area hospital in addition to the nine it already owned.

I as a pro-life activist opposed to Advocate’s expansion because it committed abortions; SEIU did because Advocate’s 25,000 employees weren’t unionized. SEIU recognized Advocate as “metropolitan Chicago’s leading private provider of health care and its third largest private employer,” according to an SEIU flyer – a very big fish. Advocate currently carries the distinction of “one of the top 10 health care systems in the United States.”

I met SEIU organizer Joseph Geevarghese at a public hearing held by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. I was picketing outside and he was packing the place with Advocate malcontents ready to hog the mic during public testimony. Soon, SEIU would be financially supporting our pro-life efforts.

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If one wonders or doubts Wade Rathke’s reach around the world, consider the following document found on a community organizing website in Asia and published on ACORNcracked.com.

It has been well-documented that last year Rathke “left” ACORN U.S. to head over to ACORN International and export ACORN’s brand of organizing and tactics.  He has since changed the group’s name to Community Organizations International.

ACORN Community Organizing Model is not the type of document ACORN would wish to have on the Internet.  For ACORN, is tantamount to Eisenhower’s plan for D-Day being printed on the front page of the Washington Post.  Not a good thing for the ultra-secretive group.

Consider this frank section of “SETTING UP THE ORGANIZING DRIVE:”

2.  Contacts:  The whole process of making contacts is built on a pyramid theory.  Make one that leads to others.  The purpose of contacts is to gather information and resources, and to build power.  There are three types:  hot, warm, cold.  The hot contacts are people we have met before at some point in the organization’s history.  Check the biographical file in the state office.  Warm contacts are those we have not met but know something about in order to build an edge, i.e. we have an opener or a handle for the conversation – something they did, someone they know who we know, some reason to believe we can hit the core.  The cold contacts are those people we must meet for some reason, yet we have no lead to them.  The only edge there is simply an organizer’s skill in prying information and setting up his/her ego in order to loosen her/his tongue in person or on the phone.  It’s a skill to be perfected, if you’re greasy, you are in the hole. 

Groups such as Leaders and Organizers of Community Organizations in Asia clearly didn’t nor don’t understand the pressure and scrutiny ACORN has faced over the last several months.  But their foolishness or naivete is the ACORN’s researcher’s gain.

For whatever reason, the LOCOA site doesn’t create a direct link to the individual page.  If you wish to see it for yourself on the LOCOA site, go here, then click on Program in the menu bar.  Then, go to the second page of documents and click on ACORN Community Organizing Model.  Or, to save yourself time (not to mention if and when the document disappears from the website), you can visit ACORNcracked.com for a PDF.

Over the last week, Big Hollywood and Big Government have been extensively covering the August 10 conference call between the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of artists – a call on which the artists were encouraged to support President Obama’s agenda, with the tacit promise that they would be handsomely rewarded with government grants.  The NEA representative on the call was then-Communications Director of the NEA Yosi Sergant.

Now we have new evidence that the White House itself has been using its sway to recruit artists – not just to support President Obama’s “volunteerism” initiatives, but to support basic planks of his political agenda, including health care.  In fact, the White House has been tapping its extragovernmental political allies to work with artists with the tacit promise that NEA funds will be in the offing for those who join the Obama Administration political program.

According to a briefing report from Arlene Goldbard, the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, on May 12, 2009, “more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.”  Each of the sponsors of the meeting was contacted by – yes, you guessed it – Yosi Sergant, who had just been promoted from the Office of Public Engagement to serve at the NEA. (more…)

There was one man who paved the way for ACORN, its agenda and its tactics, and he rose to prominence a good twenty years before Saul Alinsky. His name was Arthur Townley.

Please bear with me for a bit of history.  A.C., as he was more popularly known, was a member of the Socialist Party in North Dakota.  At the time, grain prices were manipulated, in his view, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  What put him over the edge was when he overextended himself in an attempt to reap a hefty profit on flax, only to have the price drop, along with a bad crop.  He lost a substantial amount of money.

As a socialist, he naturally blamed the out-of-state capitalists and sought to do something about it.  His solution: A state-controlled grain industry.  According to “Political Prairie Fire,” written by Robert L. Morlan in 1955, Townley had a multi-point list of demands, including “State ownership of terminal elevators, flour mills, packing houses, and cold-storage plants,” as well as “Rural credit banks operated at cost.”

When his Socialist Party wasn’t interested in his plan, Townley set out and created The Nonpartisan League in 1915, a mode for organizing farmers into a political constituency to be reckoned with.  See, Townley lacked one key ingredient: power.

His theory was that in order to enact his plan, he needed to create the sufficient pressure on elected officials in meet his demands or face the consequences.  His group also worked to elect candidates that agreed with its views.

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