The College Years

Posted by PP~ on Saturday, November 23, 2013

Saul Alinsky And the Obama-SEIUÂ Ideology

By Michael Eden

This is worth a read:

Alinsky citing reveals SEIU-Obama ideology

U.S. purposefully mismanaged by President Andy Stern

The 2008 election was aimed, as Barack Obama said, â€œto fundamentally change America.â€ The American people did not do their homework. They thought he believed in the original paradigm. They were intentionally misled, but this could have been prevented.

Ask the leaders of the Democratic party who Saul Alinsky is and you will likely get obfuscation. They will tell you Barack Obama spent three years teaching Alinskys philosophy and methods but he likely will not answer questions about Alinsky. Hillary Clinton wrote her college dissertation on Alinsky but you wont likely get a peep out of her.

Bluntly put, Alinsky is opposed to freedom. He is an elitist. He believed in communism and atheism. The fundamental values, as stated at the beginning of this column, are seen by Alinsky as horrors that have created mass inequities and careless behavior. What makes Alinsky dangerous is that he is insidious.

Alinskys primary approach to politics is deceit. The ends justify the means. He would create a communist Utopia dominated by his friends but not through open and honest debate. Therefore, they disguise themselves as believers in the republic and democracy. Gaining control is objective No. 1. This was the beginning of their revolution. The goal, then, for Alinsky was â€œto take from the haves and give to the have-nots.

Obama taught this. He €œcommunity organized under this philosophy. He has surrounded himself with people of like mind. John Holdren, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Valerie Jarrett, and Van Jones are just a few of the core conspirators.

Alinsky knew the core beliefs of the American people. He knew they had to be deceived and manipulated. His opinion was they were too selfish to give up the America that was constructed by the founding fathers. His followers have taken over the Democratic Party although many Republicans also are participating in the movement under the guise of progressivism.

The change they want will fundamentally eliminate freedom, representative government, democracy, free enterprise, private ownership, individual responsibility and religious faith. I have no problem with them telling you that and putting it up for debate but they will not because they would be thrown out of office.

This strategy has been known since the late 1960s. Since they cannot challenge those positions successfully, the next best thing is to get into the current system through deceit. Tell people you are something you are not. Then destroy peopleâ€™s belief in the system by destroying it from within. This is the strategy employed by the disciples of Alinsky.

Alinsky said, â€œAny revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.â€

(from news-herald.com)

Related video: Saul Alinsky takes the White House

One of the fundamental â€œdisappointmentsâ€ that independents who have massively abandoned Obama and his agenda have is that Obama misrepresented himself (i.e., he lied) about who he was and what he would be about if he were elected president.

Too many people did not see Obamas anti-free market agenda (Obamas demagoguery of banks, of car companies, of insurance companies, of the Chamber of Commerce, of Fox News, etc.) coming. They should have seen it, and they would have had they paid better attention, or had the mainstream media attempted to do its constitutionally-appointed duty. But now they are left fearful. Now they and the businesses they work for are being inundated with fundamentally hostile attacks against business. And as a result we are forced to live through a period in which fully 77% of investors view their president as anti-business.

People didnt vote for that. They were lied to.

At the same time, Obama has surrounded himself with openly Marxist advisers (see also here), which brings out the crystal-clear-in-hindsight fact that Obamas long association with Marxist radicals such as Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers.

An American Thinker piece ties Obamas relationship with the pedophile communist Frank Marshall Davis to an early indoctrination in the philosophy of Saul Alinsky.

You reveal yourself in whom you choose as friends. And Obama revealed himself:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

To cite Dr. Raymond Stantz from Ghostbusters, I wouldnt have touched these people with a ten meter cattle prod. And few Americans would have.

SEIU union president Andy Stern, who has visited the White House more than anyone else since Obama was elected, offers this view of the world:

–Because workers of the world unite, itâ€™s not just a slogan anymore.

– We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesnt work, we try the persuasion of power.

That is a radical agenda from a clearly Marxist worldview. And how does Obama respond to this vision?

Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate. Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.

We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.

In a frightening way.

And so people who understood Obama werent at all surprised that he would pick a manufacturing czar such as Ron Bloom who said:

Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, cause theyre convinced that there is a free lunch.

We know this is largely about power, that its an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.

If this agenda doesnt terrify you, it is because you are ignorant. Just take a look at the giant black hole that Illinois state union employees and their unsustainable benefit schemes have put the taxpayers in.Â And that same black hole is probably in your state, too.

Unions whether public or private sector are breaking the back of this country. They are breaking down our society. They are fundamentally destroying our American way of life.

And they now have someone who is helping them do it in the White House.

You start throwing out radical names of dangerous people that Obama has been associated with and a pattern emerges:Â the aforementioned Davis, Jeremiah Wright (see also here and here and here), Khalid al-Mansour (more here), Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers. And you realize that Obama has been steeped in a profoundly Marxist worldview. Obama isnâ€™t stupid; he knows that the American people dont want that ideology. But no one can conceal his worldview completely. Critical observers saw it clearly.

And they accurately understood what it would portend if he was elected president.

Obama underscores the self-concealment of his worldview in his book which bears its title in inspiration of a Jeremiah Wright sermon that described his view that white folksâ€™ greed runs a world in need (The Audacity of Hope):

I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

A politician who has Obamas ostensible verbal skills is, quite simply, not a blank screen unless he wants to be.

Obama did not want us to know who he was, because we would have rejected him as our leader if we knew.

The more we finally learn about who Obama really is and what he really wants to do, the less we are going to like it.

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.

Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the Peoples Organization. “The organizer,” Alinsky wrote, “is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach — to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who had this to say to an interviewer 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 dastardlyÂ 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.

For three years Barack Obama was the director of Developing Communities Project, an institutionally based community organization on Chicagos far south side. He has also been a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute working throughout the Midwest.

Gamaliel

The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel’s co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama’s mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.
After hearing about Barack Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep.But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked — through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support — with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based “community organizers.”The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama’s pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama’s Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is “quietly.” Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama’s legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors’ most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies — at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It’s high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.Read more — Stanley Kurtz

Obama is a summer intern at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago where he meets Michelle Robinson, his summer adviser — and Michelle’s friend and fellow staffer, the left-wing terrorist Bernadine Dohrn.

Obama moves back to Chicago where he takes a job with the civil rights law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland.

Judson Miner had been counsel to Chicago’s late black mayor, Harold Washington. Miner was also classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago law school in 1967 where they were both were involved in anti-war activity.

Obama is a member of the Illinois Bar. He was admitted on December 17, 1991. He is voluntarily inactive, with no record of discipline or pending proceedings. You can check the status of Illinois lawyers at www.iardc.org.

Obama lied twice on his application to the Illinois Bar by omission. He neglected to provide his “also know as” name of Barry Soetoro and information regarding his six years of abusing drugs.

People who knew Obama in the early 1990s said he made it clear that he aspired to run for public office. For that, the firm, now called Miner, Barnhill & Gallard, was a good place to start.

The firm has been a force in Chicago politics. Carol Moseley Braun, one of Obama’s predecessors in the U.S. Senate from Illinois, briefly worked there.

Miner was counsel to the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. Allison Davis, a co-founder of the firm who since has left, is a major Chicago developer.

Miner, Davis and other partners and clients have been a regular source of campaign money for Obama, giving him $100,000 over the years. Miner said he organized fundraisers for Obama’s first state Senate run, his 2000 congressional campaign and his 2004 U.S. Senate race.

Davis, who could not be reached for comment, has been a partner with other Chicago developers who also are clients of the firm and are Obama backers. One Davis partner was Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a major Obama patron who has now been convicted in a federal public corruption case.

Over the next several years, Obama represents victims of housing and employment discrimination. The law firm says Obama logged 3,723 billable hours during his tenure from 1993 to 2004, most of it during the first four years.

In 1995, the year his first book came out, Obama started his successful run for the Illinois state Senate, and stopped working full-time once he took office in 1997. He remained associated with the firm until he was elected to the U.S. Senate nearly eight years later.

Woods Fund

Barack Obama served on the board of directors of Woods Fund of Chicago from 1993 to 2001. During that time, the tax exempt foundation made some interesting grants, including one to Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Grants were also made to ACORN, a left wing voter registration group and to a partnership for constructing low income housing. The fund also used Northern Trust for financial services, which is the same company that provided Obama his 2005 mortgage.In 2001 the board of directors included Obama, William Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical terrorist, and serving as chairman was Howard J. Stanback who headed New Kenwood LLC, a limited liability company founded by now-convicted felon Tony Rezko and Allison Davis, Obama’s former boss at the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy (Alinsky, Obama, ACORN, Soros)

Just google Cloward-Piven strategy,and this should give you all the proof that you are seeking.For the safety of our country, do not let this usurper take the oath of office.It truly will be the end of the world as we know it. Nelvis Dean, Count Us Out Reader

DiscoverTheNetworks.org A Guide to the Political Left

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. â€œMake the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules, Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The systems failure to live up to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist rule book with a socialist one.George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Pivenâ€™s article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States often violently bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law entitled them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.President Clinton.In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new voting rights movement, which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new voting rights movement was led by veterans of George Wileys welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros Open Society Institute and his Shadow Party through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Lefts most ambitious campaigns.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedentedÂ 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called cisis strategy or Cloward-Piven Strategy, as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when â€œthe rest of society is afraid of them, Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would â€œthe rest of societyâ€ accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Pivens early promoters cited radical organizer

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare â€” about 8 million, at the time â€” probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls. Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be â€œa profound financial and political crisisâ€ that would unleash â€œpowerful forces â€¦ for major economic reform at the national level.â€

Their article called for cadres of aggressive organizers to use demonstrations to create a climate of militancy. Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of a federal program of income redistribution, in the form of a guaranteed living income for all working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act. This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown â€” providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named

Regarding Wileys tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27,1970, There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones These methods proved effective. The flooding succeeded beyond Wileys wildest dreams, writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the citys private economy a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New Yorks welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in the end of welfare as we know it the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements.Â Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. This wasnt an accident, Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. â€œIt wasnt an atmospheric thing, it wasnt supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

All three of these organizations ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with dead wood invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people — thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new voting rights coalition combines mass voter registration drives — typically featuring high levels of fraud — with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of racism and disenfranchisement, and direct action (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped Americaâ€™s welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nationâ€™s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.

Major columnist legitimizes theory of Obama plot to destroy U.S.

October 10, 2:51 PMColumbia Conservative ExaminerAnthony G. Martin

orks.org/groupProfile

From the very start of Barack Obama’s rather odd,Â meteoric rise to prominence in American politics, many of us on the conservative side voiced our suspicions that something subversive was under way.

Too many strange coincidences, too many troublesome alliances, too much hype in too short a period of time all pointed to some hidden, concerted, coordinated effort to get this man into the White House in short order.

We alerted you to the views of Obama’s admitted mentors–such as Saul Alinsky, the 1960s radical who worked to destroy capitalism and America’s form of government, and William Ayers, whose underground movement in the late 60s and 70s bombed federal buildings and vowed to murder those who staunchly defended the American way of life.

Both of these strong influences on Obama adhered to the Cloward-Piven strategy, developed by 2 radical university professors in the 60s, which advocated deliberately overloading the U.S. social and economic system so that the entire thing would crash under the weight. By deliberately causing such a crash, a new order could be built in America based upon pure Marxism.

Then, once in office, low and behold Obama begins to load up his administration with self-avowed Communists, Marxists, and other radicals who not only adhere to the views espoused by Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven strategy but who believe that Communist dictators such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela make good role models for what should happen in America.

We have discussed this at lengthÂ in previous columns on Vann Jones, Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, Valerie Jarrett, and many other ‘czars’ and political advisers with whom Obama has surrounded himself.

All of this, of course, has been summarily dismissed by those in the mainstream as ‘fear-mongering,’ ‘the ranting of right-wing nutcases,’ or ‘paranoia.’

Such knee-jerk reactions to reasonable observations based on factual evidence may be aboutÂ to change.

National syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who has never been regarded as a true conservative but as a ‘neo-con’ as the liberals like to call it, now says that such suspicions concerning Obama’s true motives may be right.

To be sure, Krauthammer has never been one to engage in speculative conspiracy-theory mongering. His columns appear in ‘mainstream’ newspapers all across America. And on the night that Barack Obama won the White House, he commented on Fox News that perhaps given the choices that we had, Obama was the best one for the job.

Circumstances have clearly changed, at least in Krauthammer’s view. The columnist now believes that Obama’s ultimate goal is to finally bring about the scenario envisioned by the Cloward-Piven strategy–a complete collapse of the American economic system at which time the ‘ruling elites’ can start over and rebuild America based upon a radical agenda as envisioned by his mentors such as Saul Alinsky.

The method by which Obama would bring this about is gradually coming into sharp focus.

An economic strategy has been launched that will ultimately bring stagnation to the U.S. economy, similar to that from which European countries have suffered for decades, leading to a devaluing of the dollar. This, in fact, is already happening. The dollar is now practically worthless, and other nations are calling for a different world-currency to replace the dollar.

Once the dollar is devalued and the economy is stagnant, America can no longer be THE world power that it is today, forcing us to essentially withdraw as the major voice for liberty in the world and drastically scale back our military forces and weapons arsenals.

It is then that the radical Marxists will have the money to implement European-styled Socialism, or worse. This, of course, would involve spending mind-boggling amounts of money to build a cradle-to-the-grave nanny-state, along with all of the various restrictions and limitations on human behavior that such a system entails.

No longer would the U.S. Constitution be viewed as the final authority on matters of law and rights but as merely a foundational document which is no longer relevant. Instead of adhering to a rule of law that places severe restrictions on government, we would then develop a ‘declaration of human rights’ of sorts, that includes such things as ‘the right to healthcare,’ which naturally means that government is required to confiscate funds from citizens in order to provide.

Anytime another citizen is forced by government to pay for some supposed ‘right’ that somebody else claims they have, then it immediately ceases to be a right. It is then a mandate, and we are at that point nothing more than slaves to government.

And lest you view this as the paranoid musings of a rightwing nutjob, remember that Obama’s closest friends, allies, and supporters all admit that this is their ultimate vision for America.

Be sure to read all of Krauthammer’s article. It is an eye-opener.

And keep in mind that the more of this stuff the citizens find out, the more we are determined to fight for our liberties and to oustÂ the charlatans from office.

Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe writes:

Charles Krauthammer had an article in the Weekly Standard it says what should be obvious, and shoud be read in its entirety by every American.

Krauthammer’s point is simple and unassailable. There is, he argues, an intimate connection between the foreign policy being pursued by the Obama administration and its domestic policy. The work undertaken in the domestic sphere by what I have called “Obama’s wrecking crew” will, he points out, put a stop to the pattern of dynamic economic growth that made it possible for the United States to defeat Japan, contribute decisively to the defeat of Nazi Germany, contain communism, and ultimately defeat and prepare the way for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

It will produce economic stagnation of the sort that the Europeans have suffered from for decades, and it will eventuate in a collapse of the American dollar

This, as Krauthammer shows, Obama and his minions understand, and this they want — the elimination of the foundations for American hegemony and the crippling of this country. They regard the role that we have thus far played in the world as shameful; they are intent on dismembering the alliances that gave us our heft in the world; and they are not only appeasing our sworn enemies but openly, publicly embracing them and their agenda.

This explains the praise showered on President Obama by Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro. This is the meaning of our attempt to install a dictator in the Honduras on the model of Castro and Chavez; it is the meaning of our recent betrayal of Poland — on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that country.

It explains why Obama initially responded to the open theft of an election in Iran by professing his confidence in the Iranian government and why the State Department recently cut off funds for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven, Connecticut, which was collecting information on the imprisonment, torture, and murder of those in Iran who protested against the theft of that election (for the details see this post).

It explains the deliberate insults offered Gordon Brown of Great Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, . And, of course, this explains the speeches given abroad again and again by President Obama, apologizing for American behavior in the past. and signaling a radical shift in American policy.

It is for this change of posture that our President has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And if you think that the United States is the principal source of evil in the world, you should vigorously applaud. My bet is that in his acceptance speech Obama will confirm Charles Krauthammer’s worst fears and my own.

Decline Is a Choice

The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.

BY Charles Krauthammer

October 19, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 05

Monday, January 26, 2009

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, Part II
Article of the Year, 2008

As originally posted in American Thinker, 9/28/2008 (updated in Whistleblower Magazine, 1/2009) this expose’ flashed a floodlight upon the corruptors of the American republic, behind the form of Barack Obama. It may have also begun to explain the “mortgage meltdown,” an economic crisis which propelled this spurious candidate into the presidential and constitutional crisis which we now suffer.by Jim Simpson
America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors — Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation mgazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their “rights.” According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls… for every two working in the city’s private economy.”

According to another City Journal article titled “Compassion Gone Mad“:

The movement’s impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay’s first two years; spending doubled… The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO’s Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals’ threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.

The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven’s thrill that “…the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.”

ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear

In 1970, one of George Wiley’s pros, Wade Rathke — like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn’t accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke’s group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income “rights.” Shortly thereafter they changed “Arkansas” to “Association of” and ACORN went nationwide.

Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN’s website: “ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country,” It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.

Voting

On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.

ACORN’s voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:

Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.

In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.

ACORN’s website brags: “Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote.” Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.

Barack Obama ran ACORN’s Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven’s aspirations for ACORN’s voter registration efforts:

By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation’s wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.

Illegal Immigration

As I have written elsewhere, the Radical Left’s offensive to promote illegal immigration is “Cloward-Piven on steroids.” ACORN is at the forefront of this movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.

The burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels. The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little border control, terrorists can also filter in.

Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.

His fears were warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: “After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote…”

ACORN’s dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.

Mortgage Crisis

And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter’s answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: “a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks.”

ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining”-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

As a New York Post article describes it:

A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with “100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don’t report it on your tax returns.” Credit counseling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor’s Business Daily added:

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit.”

And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN’s negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an “Affordable Housing Trust Fund,” granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.

Even now, unbelievably — on the brink of national disaster — Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!

This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN’s efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.

Enter Barack Obama

In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama’s Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who’s who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.

Saul Alinsky

Â Most people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in “community organizing” from Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as that of a radical activist. One really needs go no further. But we have.

Bill Ayers

Obama objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is being smeared with “guilt by association.” But they worked together at the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama’s work over five years with SDS bomber Bill Ayers on the board of a non-profit, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states:

“…the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.”

Also included in the mix is Theresa Heinz Kerry’s favorite charity, the Tides Foundation. A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU, ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies (KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically every other radical group there is. ACORN’s Wade Rathke runs a Tides subsidiary, the Tides Center.

Carl Davidson and the New Party

We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago’s New Party, a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party’s endorsement, and they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: “Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate.”

George Soros

The chart also suggests the reason for George Soros’ fervent support of Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier, founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh Neier would have heard from his former colleagues of the promising new politician. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain back their favored candidate, Barack Obama.

ACORN

Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz’s excellent National Review article, “Inside Obama’s Acorn.” also describes Obama’s ACORN connection in detail. But I can’t improve on Obama’s own words:

I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. – Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)

In another excellent article on Obama’s ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:

It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?

As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN’s Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN’s successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN’s representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns — both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN’s true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.

On the other side of this debate are a few–notably Josef Joffe in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs–who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. They note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China (and perhaps India) are just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-FranÃ§ois Revel’s How Democracies Perish.

The anti-declinists point out, for example, that the fear of China is overblown. It’s based on the implausible assumption of indefinite, uninterrupted growth; ignores accumulating externalities like pollution (which can be ignored when growth starts from a very low baseline, but ends up making growth increasingly, chokingly difficult); and overlooks the unavoidable consequences of the one-child policy, which guarantees that China will get old before it gets rich.

And just as the rise of China is a straight-line projection of current economic trends, American decline is a straight-line projection of the fearful, pessimistic mood of a country war-weary and in the grip of a severe recession.

Among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands.

Not that decline is always a choice. Britain’s decline after World War II was foretold, as indeed was that of Europe, which had been the dominant global force of the preceding centuries. The civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion, made continued dominance impossible and decline inevitable.

The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We–whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”–did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world’s co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon–and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.

Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.

The current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. It begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance. In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.

Indeed, as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional–exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for GuantÃ¡namo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

Quite an indictment, the fundamental consequence of which is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership. According to the new dispensation, having forfeited the mandate of heaven–if it ever had one–a newly humbled America now seeks a more modest place among the nations, not above them.

But that leads to the question: How does this new world govern itself? How is the international system to function?

Henry Kissinger once said that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power. Well, hegemony is out. As Obama said in his General Assembly address, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” (The “can” in that declaration is priceless.) And if hegemony is out, so is balance of power: “No balance of power among nations will hold.”

The president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others–which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20, and the Western alliance. And just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” as making “no sense in an interconnected world.” What does that say about NATO? Of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? Or even of the European Union?

This is nonsense. But it is not harmless nonsense. It’s nonsense with a point. It reflects a fundamental view that the only legitimate authority in the international system is that which emanates from “the community of nations” as a whole. Which means, I suppose, acting through its most universal organs such as, again I suppose, the U.N. and its various agencies. Which is why when Obama said that those who doubt “the character and cause” of his own country should see what this new America–the America of the liberal ascendancy–had done in the last nine months, he listed among these restorative and re-legitimizingÂ initiatives paying up U.N. dues, renewing actions on various wholly vacuous universalist declarations and agreements, and joining such Orwellian U.N. bodies as the Human Rights Council.

These gestures have not gone unnoticed abroad. The Nobel Committee effused about Obama’s radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. Its citation awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize lauded him for having “created a new climate” in international relations in which “multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other institutions can play.”

Of course, the idea of the “international community” acting through the U.N.–a fiction and a farce respectively–to enforce norms and maintain stability is absurd. So absurd that I suspect it’s really just a metaphor for a world run by a kind of multipolar arrangement not of nation-states but of groups of states acting through multilateral bodies, whether institutional (like the International Atomic Energy Agency) or ad hoc (like the P5+1 Iran negotiators).

But whatever bizarre form of multilateral or universal structures is envisioned for keeping world order, certainly hegemony–and specifically American hegemony–is to be retired.

This renunciation of primacy is not entirely new. Liberal internationalism as practiced by the center-left Clinton administrations of the 1990s–the beginning of the unipolar era–was somewhat ambivalent about American hegemony, although it did allow America to be characterized as “the indispensable nation,” to use Madeleine Albright’s phrase. Clintonian center-left liberal internationalism did seek to restrain American power by tying Gulliver down with a myriad of treaties and agreements and international conventions. That conscious constraining of America within international bureaucratic and normative structures was rooted in the notion that power corrupts and that external restraints would curb arrogance and overreaching and break a willful America to the role of good international citizen.

But the liberal internationalism of today is different. It is not center-left, but left-liberal. And the new left-liberal internationalism goes far beyond its earlier Clintonian incarnation in its distrust of and distaste for American dominance. For what might be called the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power–the old Clintonian view–but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.

For the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. It is that America itself is corrupt–in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. An imperfect union, the theme of Obama’s famous Philadelphia race speech, has been carried to and amplified in his every major foreign-policy address, particularly those delivered on foreign soil. (Not surprisingly, since it earns greater applause over there.)

And because we remain so imperfect a nation, we are in no position to dictate our professed values to others around the world. Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue because, he says openly, of our own alleged transgressions towards Iran (presumably involvement in the 1953 coup). Our shortcomings are so grave, and our offenses both domestic and international so serious, that we lack the moral ground on which to justify hegemony.

These fundamental tenets of the New Liberalism are not just theory. They have strategic consequences. If we have been illegitimately playing the role of world hegemon, then for us to regain a legitimate place in the international system we must regain our moral authority. And recovering moral space means renouncing ill-gotten or ill-conceived strategic space.

Operationally, this manifests itself in various kinds of strategic retreat, most particularly in reversing policies stained by even the hint of American unilateralism or exceptionalism. Thus, for example, there is no more “Global War on Terror.” It’s not just that the term has been abolished or that the secretary of homeland security refers to terrorism as “man-caused disasters.” It is that the very idea of our nation and civilization being engaged in a global mortal struggle with jihadism has been retired as well.

The operational consequences of that new view are already manifest. In our reversion to pre-9/11 normalcy–the pretense of pre-9/11 normalcy–anti-terrorism has reverted from war fighting to law enforcement. High-level al Qaeda prisoners, for example, will henceforth be interrogated not by the CIA but by the FBI, just as our response to the attack on the USS Cole pre-9/11–an act of war–was to send FBI agents to Yemen.

The operational consequences of voluntary contraction are already evident:

* Unilateral abrogation of our missile-defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic–a retreat being felt all through Eastern Europe to Ukraine and Georgia as a signal of U.S. concession of strategic space to Russia in its old sphere of influence.

* Indecision on Afghanistan–a widely expressed ambivalence about the mission and a serious contemplation of minimalist strategies that our commanders on the ground have reported to the president have no chance of success. In short, a serious contemplation of strategic retreat in Afghanistan (only two months ago it was declared by the president to be a “war of necessity”) with possibly catastrophic consequences for Pakistan.

* In Iraq, a determination to end the war according to rigid timetables, with almost no interest in garnering the fruits of a very costly and very bloody success–namely, using our Strategic Framework Agreement to turn the new Iraq into a strategic partner and anchor for U.S. influence in the most volatile area of the world. Iraq is a prize–we can debate endlessly whether it was worth the cost–of great strategic significance that the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting in its determination to execute a full and final exit.

* In Honduras, where again because of our allegedly sinful imperial history, we back a Cvista caudillo seeking illegal extension of his presidency who was removed from power by the legitimate organs of state–from the supreme court to the national congress–for grave constitutional violations.

The New Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the United States on the assumption that the reason we have not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism, and dismissiveness. And therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately–try to make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad–we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes.

Well, being a strategic argument, the hypothesis is testable. Let’s tally up the empirical evidence of what nine months of self-abasement has brought.

With all the bowing and scraping and apologizing and renouncing, we couldn’t even sway the International Olympic Committee. Given the humiliation incurred there in pursuit of a trinket, it is no surprise how little our new international posture has yielded in the coin of real strategic goods. Unilateral American concessions and offers of unconditional engagement have moved neither Iran nor Russia nor North Korea to accommodate us. Nor have the Arab states–or even the powerless Palestinian Authority–offered so much as a gesture of accommodation in response to heavy and gratuitous American pressure on Israel. Nor have even our European allies responded: They have anted up essentially nothing in response to our pleas for more assistance in Afghanistan.

The very expectation that these concessions would yield results is puzzling. Thus, for example, the president is proposing radical reductions in nuclear weapons and presided over a Security Council meeting passing a resolution whose goal is universal nuclear disarmament, on the theory that unless the existing nuclear powers reduce their weaponry, they can never have the moral standing to demand that other states not go nuclear.

But whatever the merits of unilateral or even bilateral U.S.-Russian disarmament, the notion that it will lead to reciprocal gestures from the likes of Iran and North Korea is simply childish. They are seeking the bomb for reasons of power, prestige, intimidation, blackmail, and regime preservation. They don’t give a whit about the level of nuclear arms among the great powers. Indeed, both Iran and North Korea launched their nuclear weapons ambitions in the 1980s and the 1990s–precisely when the United States and Russia were radically reducing their arsenals.

This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naÃ¯ve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory–as policy–has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. But that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.

In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline–to make America essentially one nation among many. And for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complementary.

Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. There’s much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. But it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction, less overall economic growth.

This affects the ability to project power. Growth provides the sinews of dominance–the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth. The Europeans, rich and developed, have almost no such capacity. They made the choice long ago to devote their resources to a vast welfare state. Their expenditures on defense are minimal, as are their consequent military capacities. They rely on the U.S. Navy for open seas and on the U.S. Air Force for airlift. It’s the U.S. Marines who go ashore, not just in battle, but for such global social services as tsunami relief. The United States can do all of this because we spend infinitely more on defense–more than the next nine countries combined.

Those are the conditions today. But they are not static or permanent. They require constant renewal. The express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services–massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care, and education–that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.

This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. At a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. Almost every other department is expanding, and the Defense Department is singled out for making “hard choices”–forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s looming threats.

Take, for example, missile defense, in which the United States has a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. Missile defense is actually being cut. The number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced, and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost-phase anti-ballistic missile) has been cut back–at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100 percent in one year.

This preference for social goods over security needs is not just evident in budgetary allocations and priorities. It is seen, for example, in the liberal preference for environmental goods. By prohibiting the drilling of offshore and Arctic deposits, the United States is voluntarily denying itself access to vast amounts of oil that would relieve dependency on–and help curb the wealth and power of–various petro-dollar challengers, from Iran to Venezuela to Russia. Again, we can argue whether the environment versus security trade-off is warranted. But there is no denying that there is a trade-off.

Nor are these the only trade-offs. Primacy in space–a galvanizing symbol of American greatness, so deeply understood and openly championed by John Kennedy–is gradually being relinquished. In the current reconsideration of all things Bush, the idea of returning to the moon in the next decade is being jettisoned. After next September, the space shuttle will never fly again, and its replacement is being reconsidered and delayed. That will leave the United States totally incapable of returning even to near-Earth orbit, let alone to the moon. Instead, for years to come, we shall be entirely dependent on the Russians, or perhaps eventually even the Chinese.

Of symbolic but also more concrete importance is the status of the dollar. The social democratic vision necessarily involves huge increases in domestic expenditures, most immediately for expanded health care. The plans currently under consideration will cost in the range of $1 trillion. And once the budget gimmicks are discounted (such as promises of $500 billion cuts in Medicare which will never eventuate), that means hundreds of billions of dollars added to the monstrous budgetary deficits that the Congressional Budget Office projects conservatively at $7 trillion over the next decade.

The effect on the dollar is already being felt and could ultimately lead to a catastrophic collapse and/or hyperinflation. Having control of the world’s reserve currency is an irreplaceable national asset. Yet with every new and growing estimate of the explosion of the national debt, there are more voices calling for replacement of the dollar as the world currency–not just adversaries like Russia and China, Iran and Venezuela, which one would expect, but just last month the head of the World Bank.

There is no free lunch. Social democracy and its attendant goods may be highly desirable, but they have their price–a price that will be exacted on the dollar, on our primacy in space, on missile defense, on energy security, and on our military capacities and future power projection.

But, of course, if one’s foreign policy is to reject the very notion of international primacy in the first place, a domestic agenda that takes away the resources to maintain such primacy is perfectly complementary. Indeed, the two are synergistic. Renunciation of primacy abroad provides the added resources for more social goods at home. To put it in the language of the 1990s, the expanded domestic agenda is fed by a peace dividend–except that in the absence of peace, it is a retreat dividend.

And there’s the rub. For the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide the peace. They can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the United States.

So why not us as well? Because what for Europe is decadence–decline, in both comfort and relative safety–is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink, and be merry for America protects her. But for America it’s different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?

The temptation to abdicate has always been strong in America. Our interventionist tradition is recent. Our isolationist tradition goes far deeper. Nor is it restricted to the American left. Historically, of course, it was championed by the American right until the Vandenberg conversion. And it remains a bipartisan instinct.

When the era of maximum dominance began 20 years ago–when to general surprise a unipolar world emerged rather than a post-Cold War multipolar one–there was hesitation about accepting the mantle. And it wasn’t just among liberals. In the fall of 1990, Jeane Kirkpatrick, -heroine in the struggle to defeat the Soviet Union, argued that, after a half-century of exertion fighting fascism, Nazism, and communism, “it is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status,” time to give up the “unusual burdens” of the past and “return to ‘normal’ times.” No more balancing power in Europe or in Asia. We should aspire instead to be “a normal country in a normal time.”

That call to retreat was rejected by most of American conservatism (as Pat Buchanan has amply demonstrated by his very marginality). But it did find some resonance in mainstream liberalism. At first, however, only some resonance. As noted earlier, the liberal internationalism of the 1990s, the center-left Clintonian version, was reluctant to fully embrace American hegemony and did try to rein it in by creating external restraints. Nonetheless, in practice, it did boldly intervene in the Balkan wars (without the sanction of the Security Council, mind you) and openly accepted a kind of intermediate status as “the indispensable nation.”

Not today. The ascendant New Liberalism goes much further, actively seeking to subsume America within the international community–inter pares, not even primus–and to enact a domestic social agenda to suit.

So why not? Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw, and concede?

Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. They will fill the vacuum. Inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.

Do we really want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse, under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? This is sometimes passed off as “realism.” In fact, it is the worst of utopianisms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. Indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyper-proliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.

Heavy are the burdens of the hegemon. After the blood and treasure expended in the post-9/11 wars, America is quite ready to ease its burden with a gentle descent into abdication and decline.

Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.

And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.

So, resistance to decline begins with moral self-confidence and will. But maintaining dominance is a matter not just of will but of wallet. We are not inherently in economic decline. We have the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced economy in the world. We enjoy the highest productivity. It is true that in the natural and often painful global division of labor wrought by globalization, less skilled endeavors like factory work migrate abroad, but America more than compensates by pioneering the newer technologies and industries of the information age.

There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. We have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.

Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad.

There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? “I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don’t do what you are doing now.”

Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist and contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. This essay is adapted from his 2009 Wriston Lecture delivered for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York on October

Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus “our family” and “the conscience of Fannie Mae.”

Â In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.

Â In his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the $165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?

Â His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.

Â Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama’s V.P. search after this gem came out:

Â An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report^[1] from September 2004 found that, during Johnson’s tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses in 1998.^[2] A 2006 OFHEO report^[3] found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson’s compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually received approximately $21 million.

Â Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of “Obama’s political circle.” Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books.

Â Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama’s presidential campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn’t seem to have come out of it too badly.

Â As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.

Â Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did.

Â Barack Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself, has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!

God grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.

Â The problem of Barack Obamaâ€™s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb â€” designed to kill army officers in New Jersey â€” accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place â€œmakes me want to puke.â€ Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayersâ€™s and Dohrnâ€™s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just â€œa guy who lives in my neighborhood,â€ and â€œnot somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.â€ For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.

How To Defeat Alinksy Rules- Part 2

As I previously wrote,

What are Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals? Why are they important? How can they be countered? Liberals, radicals and progressives use these rules against conservatives and mainstream America on a daily basis, without people being aware of how they are being manipulated by it. The left has a co-ordinated approach to political activism. By simply conforming to these rules, intentionally for many, subconsciously by others, liberals and socialists are working from a game plan that is effective simply because of its relentlessness. A ceaseless unresting effort that works by wearing down resistance and winning the little battles of attrition.

I also wrote ideas for countering each of these rules. This continues that thread, picking up at Alinsky’s Rule 7.

One overarching point to consider, is that while the left has several advantages over conservatives, we still have one important advantage. The left has to move people from an inert position to a position of change on any given issue. Tradition, cultural norms and morals are spread across time for a reason – they work. The truth of reality is on our side. But so is the fact that people’s comfort level is typically with tradition. Our job is easier – it is to convince people not to move rather than to move. That sounds like complacency but it is not. What it means is that we have to work hard to convince people that traditional values are still our best bet, we simply have the proof of history on our side.

Name one society that allowed homosexual marriage throughout history and reached what could be considered a dynasty. There’s…well…none. Res ipsa loquitor. Rome declined steadily as what built the empire was forgotten. We simply need to remind people that this was the case and we risk the same fate here and now, and every day we don’t remember the lessons of history.

Continuing in the battle for hearts and minds with Alinsky’s rules.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time….

This is quite true. Alinsky, while being a radical socialist, did have some accurate insights. And this was one of them. People don’t want the drudgery of ceaseless, redundant effort. The left has the entertainment industry – movies, concerts, comedians. Those are inherently interesting and fun. What does the right have? NASCAR, country music…not much else in terms of entertainment. Entertainment is important.

While NASCAR and country music are something, they aren’t categories that generate the same number of new converts, particularly among the youth. Winning hearts and minds is a big deal. Keeping up enthusiasm among the hearts and minds requires constant effort. People get bored easily, and particularly so in today’s fast-paced entertainment and media environment. The right needs new tactics. Sports in general is an untapped area of fun and crowds for example.

Of course the left has education and the news media all but sewn up. Those need to be countered too. Particularly the education aspect – events related to education and tactics related to educational influence are highly important touch points.

What else is needed is a parallel industry for music, for movies, for television. Not just Fox. And without it, you risk having any message being drowned out not only by sheer volume from the left, but also by the glitz and inherent entertainment appeal.

The entertainment industry provides an opportunity to tie a message to fun. Directly, and yet often surreptitiously. The right cannot afford to leave that advantage solely to the left.

Nonsensible’s Counter – The interesting thing about this rule is that Alinsky recommends changing tactics to keep the fight interesting. Obviously the counter to that would be to force the liberals to keep the tactic the same so that the momentum dies a natural death. But how do you keep an opponent’s tactic from changing? Tricky. Firstly you have to recognize the change in tactics for what it is. What looks like something that’s moved on could be something that has the same root goal as the original tactic but has not yet been identified as such.

Alternatively, instead of changing tactics, the militants could change people, by attracting a new set of people and engaging them in a tried and true tactic, it looks like a fresh tactic, or a tactic that continually works. So the counter to the changing tactic has to be twofold; (1) force the radicals back to the original tactic and (2) prevent them from attracting new recruits to support the tactic as the original cast dissipates from natural attrition.

Recognize a tactic change. Prevent the new tactic from succeeding as early as possible by marginalizing it. The left does this constantly – look how they under-reported and marginalized the Tea Parties. Outwork your opponent when there’s a tactic change – a change in tactics is an opportunity to take advantage of because it means a tactic isn’t working. If you can push them back to an older tactic you can paint the radicals as using the same old tired approach and they don’t have any new ideas.

Conversely, another approach would be to change your own tactics more frequently than your opponent. This will keep them off guard, and on the defensive. A reactive combatant is less prone to make progress than a pro-active combatant.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose.

This rule is critical, perhaps most critical. It ties all of the other rules together into one fundamental concept of battle. More simply put – stay on the offensive and never let up. It’s a variation of a theme espoused in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

In this case it’s get busy winning, or get busy losing.

Nonsensible’s Counter – Keep the pressure on. Get busy attacking or get busy defending. You can be proactive or reactive. Which do you think is better? Conservatives are more likely to be imbued with entrepreneurial spirit. We should have a higher aptitude to be proactive. The battle between left and right is part of a war that can only be won through attrition if you are on the offensive. If you aren’t attacking, you are losing. So attack. Do this through volume of attacks and talking points and through specific laser-like guided missile attacks that knee-cap an opponent’s main argument points.

Keep finding the issues that can drive your message. If there are no issues of the day that are relevant, create them. Create them by using your ideas for the country to be highlighted as issues.

Lastly, tie up all the events possible – every event from a garage sale, to a bake sale to a town hall meeting is an event. Own as many events as possible. Every event is a medium for your message.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of Oâ€™Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the cityâ€™s reputation.

Nonsensible’s Counter – Boycotts, threats, falsely exaggerated protests are all not as bad as they sound. This is a psychological ploy. Or psychological warfare. Do boycotts really work? Do disruptions really work? I urge you to follow the logic of a tried and true principle;

We don’t negotiate with terrorists.

So, don’t cave. Be prepared to weather every storm. A boycott, as Alinsky’s rule #7 itself indicates, will pass. Be prepared to counter the claims, but be steeled enough to ignore them.

Rule 10: “If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside… every positive has its negative.”

In other words, if you push the other side far enough to create a negative (e.g. violent reaction), you will score points with public sympathy.

Nonsensible’s Counter – Fight fire with water. Douse the argument with a cold splash of facts. Cite credible sources and avoid the histrionics the other side is using and hoping for you to respond with. Their histrionics are contrived, yours is apt to be emotional and blunderous. But remember, all politics is theater. So one important thing to remember though, by being rationale and calm, you don’t want to come across as cold. You want to come across as personable and someone to whom the audience can relate.

John Stossel does this very well.

Point their argument out for what it is – melodramatic tripe. If they cite facts ask them to provide references for the facts. Don’t allow them to side-step the question with a dismissal. Make them answer it. But be empathetic not confrontational.

Rule 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because youâ€™re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If youâ€™re not part of the solution, youâ€™re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)

Nonsensible’s Counter – Three easy points.

(1) Have a solution to the issue being discussed.

(2) Know and be able to refute the opponent’s solution.

(3) Be able to sell your own ideas as the right solution, with relatable, tangible facts.

This denies the radical credibility and wins the issue for you. Essentially many of these come down to simple debating class principles. You want to win on points. Switching to a boxing metaphor, a knockout would be nice, but an effective counter-punching technique will give you the chance to find that knockout opportunity. In fact, you might not even need the knockout.

Rule 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

By doing this the radical attempts to marginalize key figures in the opposition by isolating these figures and making them unpalatable, thereby separating leadership from the conservative base. This either wins converts or at least neutralizes the ability to mobilize around a countering viewpoint.

NEXT UP: Part 7 The Information Keeps ComingÂ

In the series, Â Politics, A Disgustingly Dirty Game Filled With Unbelievably Vile Things

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Welcome to Passionate Pachyderms

Welcome to the herd, we're glad you're here.

The College Years

Saul Alinsky And the Obama-SEIUÂ Ideology

Alinsky citing reveals SEIU-Obama ideology

The Cloward-Piven Strategy (Alinsky, Obama, ACORN, Soros)

Decline Is a Choice

The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.

BY Charles Krauthammer

Monday, January 26, 2009

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, Part II
Article of the Year, 2008

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Welcome to Passionate Pachyderms

Welcome to the herd, we're glad you're here.

The College Years

Saul Alinsky And the Obama-SEIUÂ Ideology

Alinsky citing reveals SEIU-Obama ideology

The Cloward-Piven Strategy (Alinsky, Obama, ACORN, Soros)

Decline Is a Choice

The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.

BY Charles Krauthammer

Monday, January 26, 2009

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, Part II Article of the Year, 2008

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Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, Part II
Article of the Year, 2008