British Conservatives embrace Marxism 125
Shock? Horror? Or did some see it coming?
Under the leadership of David Cameron, who now emerges as extremely dangerous, or stunningly stupid and ignorant, or both, the BRITISH CONSERVATIVE PARTY has moved to the left of the Labour Party!
The Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has been won over by the revolutionary theories of Saul Alinsky, of whom Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are disciples [see our post The radicals who rule, March 31, 2010].
The Conservatives have totally abandoned their traditional adherence to the principle of individual freedom and embraced egalitarian collectivism.
This is from the Conservative Party’s website:
The new policies announced as part of the Big Society plan include:
“Neighbourhood army” of 5,000 full-time, professional community organisers who will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems. This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama.
This is from the speech in which David Cameron announced his big idea, to turn the whole of Britain over to what Americans will recognize as a government-sponsored version of ACORN:
In the United States the energy, enthusiasm and passion of community organisers has fired up whole neighbourhoods to take control of their destiny.
We want to see that right across the UK.
So we will use revenue from the Cabinet Office FutureBuilders programme, a programme the National Audit Office has criticised for its poor delivery, and redirect it to training thousands of new community organisers in the years ahead. …
To teach potential community organisers how to identify the doers and the go-getters in each neighbourhood and recruit them to their cause.
To teach them them how to bang heads together to get things done.
Indeed, Barack Obama trained as a community organiser in Chicago.
And I hope that in the years to come, a similar inspirational figure will emerge from community work in our inner cities – and go from the back streets of Bradford or Bolton or Birmingham all the way to Downing Street.
But I know the arguments that some people make – that this sort of community co-operation will only happen in the richest areas. (?! -JB]
In building the big society, I want to make sure that Britain’s poorest areas do not get left behind as they too often are today.
So again, we will take money from the Futurebuilders programme, and direct it to community organisers, social enterprises and neighbourhood groups in our most disadvantaged areas.
This is the big society made real – devolving power to the people while using the state to encourage social action and help the poorest.
And this is from Melanie Phillips’s comment in the Spectator:
Ye gods. Rub your eyes, folks. Saul Alinsky?? …
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.
Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors…
The British Conservative party has signed up to the revolutionary Marxist politics of Saul Alinsky and his seditious strategy of using ‘community organisers’ to turn the people against the state and against the bedrock moral and social values of their country – and it is almost certainly too ignorant, lazy or stupid to realise that this is what it means.
British voters might now decide to return the Labour Party to power after all, as the lesser of two leftist evils! But it’s more than probable that Gordon Brown, or whoever succeeds him, will also embrace the community organizing idea.
So expect the launching of the USK – the United Soviet Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
After which, the ESU – the European Soviet Union?
The name of the change 72
Obama is hellbent on shifting America permanently to the political left. The name of the change he promised is Socialism. He wants ‘health care reform’ not because he wants to reform health care but because he wants to reform the land of the free into the land of the organized. As Mark Steyn says:
For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” … The appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture …
Three stories bubbled up in the past week, although if you read The New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them: The resignation of Van Jones, former (?) communist and current 9/11 “truther,” from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar.” The reassignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions. And, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government Web site in which officials from ACORN … offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador…
What all these individuals share is a supersized view of the state, from a make-work gig coordinating the invention of phony-baloney “green jobs” to Soviet-style government-licensed art in support of heroic government programs to government-funded “community organizers” organizing government funding for jailbait bordellos… Van Jones, Yosi Sergant and ACORN are where Barack Obama’s chosen to live all his adult life…
My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.
Obama ‘organized’ ACORN 230
From Little Green Footballs:
Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.
ACORN and Obama the Communist activist 187
Burt Prelutski writes in Townhall about ACORN, the organization at the root of the subprime catastrophe:
It is those on the far left who have done everything in their power to corrupt the election process. One of their chief means of doing so has been through the activities of a group known as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). With approximately 175,000 dues-paying members, they own TV stations, businesses and periodicals, and have offices stretching from Canada to Peru, with over 80 offices in the U.S.
To give you some idea how all-encompassing the group is, they have schools where the children of leftists are trained in class-consciousness; they run boot camps for training street activists; and, like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, they extort money from banks and other businesses by threatening racial violence and trumped-up civil rights charges. One can almost imagine Marx, Lenin and Stalin, shaking their heads in admiration and hoisting their glasses in toast.
Apparently, the members of ACORN have gained control of the New York City government, resulting in a rollback of welfare reform; the appointment of a politicized Civilian Review Board, empowered to prosecute police officers and ban racial and ethnic profiling in the city that experienced 9/11 firsthand; raise corporate taxes; and is attempting to prevent any corporation from fleeing the city without obtaining an “exit visa.” Even before Berkeley got around to having its own foreign policy, New York’s City Council, by a 31-17 vote, passed a resolution condemning the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
For several years, the leadership covered up the fact that Dale Rathke, the brother of Wade Rathke, who co-founded ACORN, had embezzled nearly a million dollars from the organization. Once the theft finally came to light, the excuse given for not informing the authorities was that those of us on the right would use it as an excuse to attack the group. That of course is an obvious lie. Those of us on the right have far better reasons than financial skullduggery to attack ACORN. In fact, I, for one, regard Dale Rathke as something of a folk hero. I say it was far better that he squandered his ill-gotten gains on wine, women and song, than that the group got to spend it subverting the democratic process.
These people, self-proclaimed defenders of freedom, liberty and the working man – or, more often, non-working man – devote most of their energy and resources to making sure that they fix elections in much the same way that crooked gamblers fix fights. During the 2004 election cycle, ACORN ran a “voter mobilization drive” that resulted in countless allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging and vote-for-pay scams. One of their specialties was registering convicted felons. Attorney generals in many states filed charges against several members of the group, charges that included voter-intimidation, vandalism and the destruction of voter registration forms.
What I have not been able to figure out is why the leaders of the group have not been indicted under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) for taking part in an ongoing criminal organization. The only logical reason that the feds have backed off is because of ACORN’s close ties to organized labor. Tragically, in 2008 America, it’s not only individuals who are easily intimidated, but the government itself.
It’s no surprise that Barack Obama is ACORN’s choice for the White House. ACORN, after all, was created by those who subscribed to Saul Alinsky’s left-wing belief that class warfare is the only war worth fighting and that in order to win it, the ends always justify the means. And however much the left has recently attempted to pass off “community organizer” as a Christ-like vocation, everyone in his right mind knows that these days it’s code for Communist activist.
The roots of the sub-prime crisis 131
What do ‘community organizers’ do? What did Obama do as a ‘community organizer’? What is ACORN? How has it been funded?
Stanley Kurtz writes in a must-read article in the New York Post:
To understand the roots of the subprime-mortgage crisis, look to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.
Then you’ll truly know what community organizers do.