Saul Alinsky

It is now obvious that the President of the United States is actively involved in encouraging civil unrest in Wisconsin. While some want to believe that he is just a lefty politician pursuing lefty goals, his actions in meddling in the internal politics of one of the several States, as he also did in Arizona, shows that he is nothing more than a rabble-rousing community organizer like his hero Saul Alinsky.  Mr. Obama has demonstrated what many of us already knew:  he has no respect for federalism or the rights of states to govern themselves as they see fit. He acts more like a third world dictator than the President of the United States.

Writing over at The Right Sphere, RB hits the nail on the head with this observation:

Close your eyes and imagine what the media and the Lefty blogosphere would be saying today if we had learned that a Republican President’s re-election campaign was involved in organizing disruptive protests against a State Government. It’s hard to imagine because it would never happen. But it is currently happening in Wisconsin under our current Democrat President.

In fact, even the Washington Post speaks the truth about what President Barack Alinsky is doing:

Obama accused Scott Walker, the state’s new Republican governor, of unleashing an “assault” on unions in pushing emergency legislation that would change future collective-bargaining agreements that affect most public employees, including teachers.

The president’s political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to get thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.

Their efforts began to spread, as thousands of labor supporters turned out for a hearing in Columbus, Ohio, to protest a measure from Gov. John Kasich (R) that would cut collective-bargaining rights.

By the end of the day, Democratic Party officials were organizing additional demonstrations in Ohio and Indiana, where an effort is underway to trim benefits for public workers. Some union activists predicted similar protests in Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Even Speaker Boehner (who finally acquired some guts thanks to the Tea Party), does an excellent job of calling out the President for what he is doing:

“The President of the United States has a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead this nation. President Obama has acknowledged the challenges we face, but – thus far – he has done nothing to offer solutions. Now, worse, his political organization is colluding with special-interest allies across the country to demagogue reform-minded governors who are making the tough choices that the President is avoiding.

“This is not the way to begin an ‘adult conversation’ about solutions to the big challenges facing our country. Rather than inciting protests against those who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the President and his advisers should lead.

“When the American people watched the people of Greece take to the streets to protest cuts to unsustainable government programs, they worried it might foreshadow events in our nation’s distant future – but today, we see the same sort of protests on the streets of Madison, fueled by President Obama’s own political machine.

Finally, the always spot-on John Hayward warns us that this is only the beginning in a short piece over at Human Events:

You’re next, Ohio!  President Obama’s “Organizing for America” is ramping up its efforts to protect public union privileges from the objections of tax serfs.  A few thousand public union troops descended on Columbus Thursday, angry at Republican Governor John Kasich’s initiative to weaken their collective bargaining powers.  A chipper article in the Huffington Post reassures us that organizing efforts are now only “a week behind” Wisconsin.  And look how well that’s going!

If you’re an Ohio parent, you should probably start stockpiling educational materials, so you can teach your kids after the union teachers abandon them to join protests at the state house.  Ohio Democrats had better fire up Expedia and find themselves hotel accommodations in Pennsylvania.  You want to lock in the best possible price for your spider hole when you abandon your duties and flee the state to avoid tough votes.  Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans should negotiate for group rates on personal security.

After Ohio, the War On Taxpayers moves to Indiana, where the state Senate wants to limit the collective bargaining privileges of teacher unions.  A Bloomberg News article informs us one of the concessions unions have already won is that “certain teachers with 5 years of experience are not subject to evaluation in Indianapolis public schools.”  Now that’s what I call accountability!  I can’t understand why so many parents want to switch to a privatized education system where every teacher would be subject to evaluation.  They’re pretty much above criticism once they’ve been on the job for five years, right?

This radical community organizer is finally showing us something that he is good at: stirring up unrest. We should look for more and more of this from our empty suit President now that the American people neutered him in the last elections.

There is one good thing that can come out of this. People are seeing what the Bolshevik labor unions are all about, and they will not like it. Just like the illegal aliens who marched on May Day with their sea of Mexican Flags, these union thugs are doing real damage to their cause. It couldn’t happen to more deserving entitlement-attitude thugs.

Click here to see some of the signs carried by protesters, images that would have the media frothing if they were at a Tea Party rally.

Wallis is a political operative who wraps himself up in religion in order to gain some legitimacy so that he can then trash every conservative religious person for not being liberal.  Writing an article in the Huffington Post , Wallis demonstrates his mastery of dishonest sleight of hand.  Wallis first equates the Tea Party Movement with libertarianism and then immediately makes the jump to Rand Paul so that he can find some positions to use to make the Tea Party look bad.  He must have received the email from the Democrats on that one; it is a consistent talking point approach lately.

The basic gist of his article is an attempt to make the case that because he is an alleged reverend he is therefore qualified to pass judgment on “how Christian” the Tea Party movement is.  In fact, his incredibly weak arguments fall well short of convincing any intelligent person of the merits of his position and simply made me want to find out who this clown was.  It seemed clear that this guy was an Alinksy type, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Little did I know how true that was, but I will get to that later.

Wallis starts out by demonstrating his complete misunderstanding of compassion:

Loving your neighbor is a better Christian response than telling your neighbor to leave you alone. Both compassion and social justice are fundamental Christian commitments, and while the Christian community is responsible for living out both, government is also held accountable to the requirements of justice and mercy. Both Christians on the Right and the Left have raised questions about Libertarian abandonment of the most vulnerable — whether that means unborn lives or the poor.

Par for the course for those who revere government because they are utterly terrified of freedom, Wallis is not intellectually honest enough to understand the difference between individuals helping their fellow man when he truly needs it and the government seizing vast amounts of wealth to redistribute to those who have learned to game the system.  It is very important to note that it is never compassion when you are spending someone else’s money and that one can love one’s neighbor without feeling any requirement to pay his bills.

Because Wallis claims to be religious, I have to point out that millions of faithful Christians tithe ten percent of their money to their church.  But that sort of chump change is not enough for people like Wallis, whose agenda requires not only what he could raise under the ruse of religion but also necessitates confiscating the property of even non-Christians.  That is mighty Christian of you, Reverend Jim.

In fact, libertarians know that most poor people are poor not because they have encountered some misfortune in life but simply because they have made a series of stupid, short-sighted decisions.  Libertarians are not opposed to individuals helping individuals but are opposed to the government perennially transferring wealth from those who earned it to those who simply know how to harness poverty pimps like Jim Wallis.  Libertarians believe – with good reason – that people who do not suffer from the stupidity of their actions will continue to do stupid things.  Clearly Mr. Wallis thinks that one of the appropriate roles of government is to protect people from the consequences of their actions, but only if they are societal parasites.  That plants him firmly in the camp of the Nanny State Left.

Finally, to hear a member of the laughingly oxymoronic “religious left” criticize libertarians because many (though far from all) support abortion rights is a new level of hypocrisy.  As a member of the alleged religious left, Mr. Wallis is a card carrying stockholder in the abortion industry.  Sure, he may claim to be anti-abortion in front of certain groups, but the Democrat party has perversely elevated their vision of abortion rights to the level of a “canary in the gold mine” bellwether of individual rights.  As such, supporting the agenda of the Democrat party while claiming to be anti-abortion is like being a KKK member in the 1920s while claiming to be anti-lynching – you cannot be a part of the group without implicitly supporting one of its main agenda items.

For what it’s worth, this libertarian believes that the official Libertarian Party’s position on abortion is dead wrong.  That unborn human has just as many rights as the parent who wants to treat the child like an inconvenient mole, but uppercase-L libertarians are so caught up in wanting to be purists that they cannot see that they are just as wrong and selfish as the left is on this subject.  Furthermore, more libertarians should realize how unconstitutional Roe v. Wade is – under our system the judicial branch does not write laws, as Harry Blackmun did in his horrible decision.

Wallis also tries to make the contorted argument that simply because the bible happens to mention government, being anti-government therefore “just isn’t biblical”.  Statists like Wallis must pine for the days when government and religion were intertwined and even went so far as to prevent open inquiry in the sciences.

Then Wallis spews this tripe:

The Libertarians’ supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin. The exclusive focus on government as the central problem ignores the problems of other social sectors, and in particular, the market. When government regulation is the enemy, the market is set free to pursue its own self-interest without regard for public safety, the common good, and the protection of the environment — which Christians regard as God’s creation. Libertarians seem to believe in the myth of the sinless market and that the self-interest of business owners or corporations will serve the interests of society; and if they don’t, it’s not government’s role to correct it.

This is laughable.  The truth is that the left’s supreme confidence in big government is not consistent with the reality of human nature and corruption.  Their exclusive focus on wealth redistribution as the central goal ignores the real problem, which is that these people would not need to live off of the rest of us if the government had not created the lifestyle-subsidy welfare programs.  As an analogy, if you put out food for stray cats those cats will get used to it and will be there every morning.  Like our parasitic class in America, they will even get angry if the free food stops.  That entitlement mentality is at the core of those 47% of Americans who pay no taxes and are therefore living off of the rest of us.  Shockingly, liberals seem to believe in the myth of the blameless societal parasite and that giving someone else’s property to them will actually help rather than harm them.

Further, and I give credit to my brilliant wife for this angle, if Mr. Wallis actually took a clear look at the biblical view of human nature and sin he would realize that it in fact makes the best argument possible for limited government.  We simply cannot trust human beings with that level of control over their fellows.  They are too flawed to handle it without descending into power grabs and corruption and almost every shred of human history is a testament to that undeniable fact. This self-evident truth of government corruption was a main reason that the founding fathers realized that government should be limited to the role of umpire as opposed to the left’s desired role of mommy.  George Washington certainly understood this fundamental truth and put it as clearly as anyone ever has:

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.  – George Washington

Showing the complete lack of logical thought that so uniformly characterizes the American left, Wallis continues:

But such theorizing ignores the practical issues that the public sector has to solve. Should big oil companies like BP simply be allowed to spew oil into the ocean? And is regulating them really un-American? Do we really want nobody to inspect our meat, make sure our kids’ toys are safe, or police the polluters to keep our air clean? Do we really want owners of restaurants and hotels to be able to decide whom they will or won’t serve, or should liquor store owners also be able to sell alcohol to our kids?

After seeing such flagrant use of the false dichotomy logical fallacy, it’s getting easy to understand how this clown is a democrat.  But to be fair, being a leftist Mr. Wallis is unaccustomed to dealing with people who possess a command of logical thought, so we cannot blame him for attempting to foist tripe on us that works consistently with his normal bevy of parasitic myrmidons.

Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not. But is an undercurrent of white resentment part of the Tea Party ethos, and would there even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren’t the first black man to occupy that office? It’s time we had some honest answers to that question. And as far as I can tell, Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism — overt, implied, or even subtle — is not a Christian virtue.

Claims of racism are the last refuge of the scoundrel, the trump card played by someone who is losing the debate.  Apparently Mr. Wallis had no problem with every black American voting for Barack Obama simply because of the color of his skin.  They certainly were not voting for the [bankrupt] content of his character!  Mr. Wallis proves that he is a full-fledged race-hustling poverty pimp with this clumsy attempt to play the race card.

Yes, Mr. Obama is a huge part of the rise of the Tea Party Movement, but even Mr. Wallis knows that it has nothing to do with his brown skin and everything to do with his red politics.  Mr. Obama is a Marxist and patriotic Americans would oppose him no matter how much melanin was contained in his skin.

Finally, though there is plenty to criticize in Wallis’ “The Bible Loves Tyranny” screed, one need only read this gem to see the true nature of this leftist propagandist:

But a power-hungry government is clearly an aberration and violation of the proper role of government in protecting its citizens and upholding the demands of fairness and justice. To disparage government per se — to see government as the central problem in society — is simply not a biblical position.

Mr. Wallis has the typically weak leftist knowledge of history and his world view clearly demonstrates that.  Anyone who can make the statement that “power hungry government is clearly an aberration” simply cannot be taken seriously in any context.  When the rubber hits the road, Mr. Wallis is simply dishonestly attempting to use religion to sell tyranny.  As always, that tyranny is disguised as false compassion and false security.

After writing this I wondered if I had been too hard on Reverend Jim Wallis, so I did some more digging in order to ensure that I was not just going off on an unfair rant.  I quickly found what I was looking for in the very place that I should have looked first: David Horowitz’ incredible site, Discover The Networks.

Wallis expressed his hope that “more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes.”

In short, Jim Wallis is a long term left wing radical.  His basic shtick is to attempt to use his status as an alleged religious leader to bash conservatives and push his own agenda.  The entry on Wallis at Discover The Networks contains the following interesting items:

• His magazine, now called Sojourners’, was originally an anti-capitalist publication called Post-American.
• He is a lifelong champion of communism and an apologist for atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese.
• In a 1979 interview, Wallis expressed his hope that “more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes.”
• In a January 13, 2006 radio interview with Interfaith Voices, Wallis was asked, “Are you then calling for the redistribution of wealth in society?” He replied, “Absolutely, without any hesitation. That’s what the gospel is all about.”
• In 1995 Wallis founded Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups united in the purpose of advocating, in religious terms, for leftist economic agendas such as tax hikes and wealth redistribution to promote “social justice.” 

The final quote from Discover The Networks lays bare the obvious truth of his screed in HuffPo, which is that Wallis simply wrote a hit piece on the Tea Party because he is a foot soldier in the progressive movement, a hard core Marxist who seeks more government control over the lives of Americans.

More than a mere religious leader, Wallis, a registered Democrat, is also an adroit political operative, publicly portraying himself as a politically neutral religious figure whose overriding allegiance is to God. Always with the disclaimer that neither major political party can claim to authoritatively represent the values of religious faith, Wallis passionately contends that Republican policies tend to be immoral and godless. — Discover The Networks

Jim Wallis is right to fear the Tea Party Movement.  We are taking our country back from freedom loathing charlatans like him and his intellectual soul mate in the White House.  We will once again attempt to toss Marxism back where it belongs, “on the ash heap of history” as a great President once said.

Named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, the general idea behind the strategy is to intentionally overload the government system so much that it causes a crisis and collapses with a subsequent loss of confidence that Cloward and Piven hoped would “hasten the fall of capitalism.”  I am reminded that my late father, a conservative, had a good but incredibly liberal friend who would bluntly argue that the cost of avoiding violent class warfare in America is the network of welfare programs that keep the poor complacent.  As much as the idea disgusts me I have always thought that he was at least partly right.  The article at DiscoverTheNetworks points out that the basic idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is to break the system in order to make the poor miserable enough to rebel.  Not surprisingly to those of us watching the tactics being employed by the current ruling party, the author also mentions their connections to the radical Saul Alinsky, whose ideas apparently so inspired President Obama:

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 “the 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 “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make 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 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.

Saul Alinsky

The author points out that the approach called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.”  In fact, Cloward and Piven recruited an organizer named George Wiley to do just that.  His group, the National Welfare Rights Organization, enjoyed such successes in New York that they did cause the desired collapse:

Regarding Wiley’s 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 Wiley’s 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 city’s private economy.”As 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.

These are precisely the same tactics employed by groups like ACORN to intimidate elected officials into acquiescing to their demands, such as forcing lending institutions to make loans to people with bad credit.  The author argues that this approach requires surprise and that “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.”  In fact, he points out that followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy successfully shifted their focus to our electoral system, with sinister results:

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 America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation’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.  Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros‘s Open Society Institute and his “Shadow Party,” through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left’s most ambitious campaigns.

In an article at the Washington Times subtitled Using the poor to tear down capitalism, Col. Robert Chandler points this out and shows that it not only was proven viable when the approach successfully bankrupted New York City in the 70s but that our sub-prime financial crisis was engineered with these very tactics:

The socialist test case for using society’s poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

The 2008 financial crisis has all of the earmarks of a Cloward-Piven strategy assault against the capitalist system. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently explained that “community organizers” (1) “intimidate banks into making high risk loans to customers with poor credit,” (2) “occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes,” and, through these thuggish tactics, (3) compel “financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.” “In other words,” Mr. Kurtz explained during a presentation at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, “community organizers help to undermine America’s economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.”

We have seen the results of the Cloward-Piven strategy, from the sub-prime crisis to [always left-wing] voter fraud in any swing state, these people are playing for keeps.  Working in the trenches with these very people, attempting to destroy the system from within so that he could remake it, was our community organizer president.  Saul Alinksy would be so proud.

We need to stop underestimating our opponents and the depths to which they will sink to force their statist ideology on Americans.