Alinsky's view of the government's war on poverty

I am doing something tonight that is most likely unique among my fellow Republicans. I am reading Hillary Clinton's 94 page college thesis on Saul Alinsky. Do you know how Alinsky viewed the federal government's War on Poverty? He called it a

"prize piece of political pornography...a huge political pork barrel, and a feeding trough for the welfare industry, surrounded by sanctimonious, hypocritical, phony, moralistic------."

...Alinsky observed that most city halls, acting through committees composed of the party faithful, controlled the local antipoverty funds.18 Poverty funds were frequently used to stifle independent action in the name of "community consensus" or if programs did bypass city hall the officials would disown them in order to take themselves "off the hook."19 Another aspect of the poverty war which Alinsky criticized was its "vast network of sergeants drawing general's pay."20 He illustrated the "startling contrast" between many salaries before and after assuming positions with OEO.

It seems as though "nowhere in this great land of ours is the opportunity
more promising than in the Office of Economic Opportunity."

..."The anti-poverty program may well be regarded as history's greatest relief
program for the benefit of the welfare industry."

Saul’s daughter has it all figured out.

I was delighted to find an article by Jen Kuznicki in Conservative Review. As you may know, Hillary Clinton wrote her college thesis about Saul Alinsky, a man I met in the late 1960s. The thesis has long been off limits, but now is available here. I plan to read it.

Kuznicki writes,

Hillary noted that, “Alinsky's lessons in organizing and mobilizing community action independent of extra-community strings appear to have been lost in the face of the lure of OEO money.” Pointing out that the power of the government took away the work of the “local organizer.” It is here that we see her light bulb illuminate. With this reasoning, the better approach would be to be the government who had the power to force social change. - See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/alinskys-daughter-here-is-the-truth-about-hillary-the-media-will-not-tell-you#sthash.Snyam4I5.dpuf

At the time I met Alinsky, I was working as Director of the Northeast Neighborhood Counseling Center in Kansas City, Kansas. The funding came from OEO, Lyndon Johnson's Office of economic Opportunity!

Kuznicki concludes,

For 75 years, inner city blacks have been poor, labor unions have worked to put their members out of a job, and everyday there is some new group claiming it doesn’t have equality. All of these groups have been targeted by these so-called organizational geniuses. No matter what happens, either by the power/conflict ideals of Alinsky and Obama or by power grabs/money laundering of the Clintons, the lives of the people get worse. It is not whether Saul or Hillary are right about how to “achieve democratic equality,” or whose tactics are more effective, but of the failure of the philosophy behind it.

David Brock, in his 1996 biography, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," called Hillary "Alinsky's daughter." That is an apt label. Where Alinsky tactics are used now on both sides to confuse and agitate, Hillary is poised to become the supreme leader with all the power and tools of our monstrous government at her fingertips.

Saul’s daughter has it all figured out.

Read more here.

Would we dare use Alinsky tactics against the left?

Steve McCann writes at American Thinker,

The Left, by faithfully executing the strategy as laid out by Saul Alinsky, are now the dominant political and social force in The United States. However, the one factor that none of the icons of the American Progressive movement bothered to consider was: what are they going to do with a nation the size and population of a continent, with a long history of independence and free enterprise, once they vanquished an increasingly spineless opposition? They do not know how to be or what to do as the new governing class. They are incapable of governance as they can only oppose, topple and demagogue. Thus, they are destined to fail. Unfortunately, with that failure will come additional suffering, chaos and displacement for the American people.

In order to accelerate the Left’s demise and minimize the damage, there must be viable opposition and it must rise up from the grass roots including the conservative media -- as the Left owns the Democratic Party and has thoroughly infiltrated as well as browbeaten the Republican Party hierarchy into submission.

The first step, for those who identify as conservatives or independents with conservative leanings, is to admit that the Left is in charge. They have won the battle, but not the war. They are the “Establishment,” as overused as that word may be. As such, they are the enemy, and as the enemy any and all non-violent tactics must be fair game. This change in thinking is crucial. By doing so the primary characteristics of conservatives and right-leaning moderates the Left has exploited over the decades -- timidity and equanimity -- will be eliminated.

The second step is to use the same strategy successfully utilized by the Left against us. Regardless of what one may think of Saul Alinsky his seminal work: Rules for Radicals is a masterpiece in strategic thinking ,insofar as a laying out a methodology and means of defeating one’s political opponents. The 12 rules for radicals are a must read in order to understand the tactics of the Left.

While all 12 rules are applicable, the following are the Alinsky tenets most relevant to the defeat of the Left:

Rule 5: “Ridicule is a man’s most potent weapon.” While using every opportunity to point out on a consistent and constant basis the failures of the Left, mock them unmercifully for their inane comments and theories lacking in common sense and perspective, such as transgenderism and bathroom access, rape as a by-product of global warming and safe spaces on college campuses. This must be done unapologetically on the floor of Congress, the state houses and any available public or media venue.

Rule 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Remind the public incessantly, to the point of boredom, that the Left is in charge. What is happening in society and the economy today is solely their doing. This will require demonstrations, sit-ins and massive gatherings to reinforce the message.
Rule 11: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never fail to relentlessly contrast the overwhelming economic and social success of the past, which are the end-product of conservative policies and principles, with the failures and chaos today. Reinforce the thinking that these same principles will accomplish great things again.

Rule 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” Unabashedly, and without remorse, attack the leaders of the Left, their foibles and machinations as well as the institutions that support and underwrite them.

The Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system.

Scott Powell writes at The American Thinker,

If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party.

...The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.

...Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

...The New Left did not simply fade away when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky’s counsel to clean up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist groups.

...By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.

...By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.

....Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.

...The problem today is threefold: the Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and reconciliation all but impossible.

...In the end, what is important for Americans to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary’s election would effectively constitute an Obama third term.

...Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian, published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end: first, an overwhelming love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the rich and the poor; third, an obsession with sports and a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality; fourth, a decline in morals, increase in divorce and decline in the institution of the family; fifth, economic deterioration resulting from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation; and sixth, an increased desire by the citizenry to live off the state.

One might hope that awareness of factors associated with Rome’s fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels. Many feel atomized and helpless.

Read more here.

It's not the easy way, but it is the effective way to better your lot in life

Scott Ott has a wonderful piece at PJ Media about Booker T. Washington.

These United States of America were built by men like Booker T. Washington — at first by their muscles, under compulsion, then later by their minds and hearts, freely given.

He quotes from Washington's book Up From Slavery:
"I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him..."

“I have learned,” he said, “that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.”

Read more here.

Yesterday I wrote a post defending Saul Alinsky. I wrote the post to counter some of the negative things I read about him by conservative pundits. It is guilt by association: because Obama and Hillary use some of Alinsky's tactics to promote their own rise to power, when the truth is that Alinsky was trying to empower people who were exploited and discriminated against.

Booker T. Washington had a better approach: teaching people to read, to take individual responsibility for their lives, and not to wallow in victimhood.
Update: Here is the moving video of Scott telling us about Booker T. Washington: