Posts Tagged ‘Saul Alinksy’

John Berlau

The Corker-Dodd-Alinsky Bill? : Center-Right Coalition Letter Warns about ‘Proxy Access’

by John Berlau

Capitol Confidential and Jim Hoft have done an excellent job laying out concerns with the potential “compromise” bill that comes out of Sen. Bob Corker’s negotiations with Chris Dodd.  But when it comes to the destructive provisions that could come out of a Dodd-Corker deal, they may have just scratched the surface.

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In addition to the troubling new powers for a new nanny-state consumer agency and possibly the Federal Reserve added to the prospect of billions more in bailouts for reckless financial firm, the bill may also contain the sneaky  “proxy access” power grab for unions, radical environmentalists, and other groups on the Left. This rule, inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is contained in Dodd’s “discussion draft” bill from late last year.

As I detailed in BigGovernment last week, “proxy access would federalize and override decades of state law governing the structure of corporations and force publicly-traded companies to put shareholders’ nominees for a board of directors on a company’s proxy ballot along with the firm’s own nominees for those positions.” Many shareholder groups that are pushing this are union pension funds, the radical Tides Foundation, and other progressive groups — from animal rights to anti-Israel — who place their own political agenda items at the expense of ordinary shareholders.

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John Berlau

Proxy Access: The Obama-Dodd-Alinsky Shareholder Jujitsu

by John Berlau

What would Saul Alinksy do?

In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.

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Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots, Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.”  One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”

And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.

Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.

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SusanAnne Hiller

A White House Power Grab that Congress and America Doesn’t See

by SusanAnne Hiller

To achieve the goal of a universal, single-payer health system, the White House must secure the power it needs by amending the Social Security Act to transfer pivotal controls from Congress to the executive branch.  This transfer of power would ultimately give the President and the majority party, in this case the radical left Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid led progressive Democrats, the authority to frame and manipulate new policy, coverage options, and reimbursements, ultimately reshaping the future US health care system into a something unrecognizable in this country.

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The deliberate setup for the White House power grab is built into the each of the health care bills and, if they fail, little-known twin bills called “MedPAC Reform of 2009” are waiting in the wings.  The bills, S.B. 1110 and H.R. 2718, craftily amend the Social Security Act and transfer the Medicare guideline and rule setting processes, from the legislative branch to the executive branch.  These bills offer cover to one another in case one doesn’t pass the House or Senate, respectively.  Remember, Democrats need to gain executive branch authority by amending the Social Security Act over Medicare regulations and physician fee schedules to transform the health care system in a single-payer, socialized system.

More importantly, Medicare’s regulations and physician fee schedules are the keystone to developing payer systems and reimbursement models across the entire health care industry.  And where Medicare goes, insurers follow.

To underscore the far-reaching power, a bulk of the states already reference or utilize the Medicare guidelines and fee schedules in determining policy, coverage, and payment, which impacts certain state-specific plans, including, but not limited to, self-funded plans, automobile insurance payers, and state workers’ compensation funds and plans – affecting even Big Labor.   For the executive branch to have such authority over Medicare regulations with little oversight is alarming.  This raises further issues of the powerful impact these federal mandates could potentially have on the states in stripping them of their own management of their respective insurance industries.

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Publius

ACORN Oklahoma Document Dump: ACORN’s Doorknocking Basics

by Publius

Give credit where its due, ACORN builds its organization from the ground up, with old-school hard work and shoe leather. Its organizers are instructed to spend at least three hours a day going door-to-door in neighborhoods, recruiting members and–importantly member dues. ACORN even provides its organizers with a very illuminating and well-though-out manual on “doorknocking basics.” The document is below


DOORKNOCKING BASICS

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