Title: Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union' (youtube) Source:
http://www.youtube.com URL Source:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU Published:Mar 18, 2008 Author:Barack Obama Post Date:2008-03-18 13:41:02 by robin Keywords:None Views:658 Comments:54
Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union' (~37 minutes)
Barack Obama speaks in Philadelphia, PA at Constitution Center, on matters not just of race and recent remarks but of the fundamental path by which America can work together to pursue a better future.
I made it about five minutes into this. The world is on fire and he has time to all this time to talk about being black. Sorry, but it's not good enough.
I have long been disgusted by his church, so I haven't looked at the "firestorms" as an issue. I'm actually more critical of his association with Saul Alinsky.
I'm actually more critical of his association with Saul Alinsky.
Of note, Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961. Saul Alinsky died June 12, 1972 while Obama was only 10 years old. The link between Hillary Clinton and Alinsky appears stronger than what has been shown about Obama.
If you like Alinsky, you will love Hillary D. Rodham's 92-page thesis about him. The text concludes with:
If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared - just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.
Let's face it. If you don't love that, you must be anti-democracy and reject the faith of democracy -- you must be a heretic to the Clinton faith. arrrrgh.
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky says: "Here I propose to present an arrangement of certain facts and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution." He builds on the tactical principles of Machiavelli: "The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-nots on how to take it away."
Rules for Radicals is concerned with the acquisition of power: "my aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it." This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, nor even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: "...[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes."
Alinsky advises the organizer to target the middle class, rather than the poor: "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is."
Alinsky is interested in the middle class solely for its usefulness: "Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority."
The article is thin on providing any significant link between Obama and Alinsky. Examples:
Community organizing, for Clinton principally an academic exercise, was more complex for Obama when he arrived in Chicago in 1985 to work with the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Alinsky network. His experience became an emotional and visceral exploration of the roots of urban African American decay and his own identity.
In time, Obama helped build and guide a small network of grass-roots groups that agitated for better playgrounds, improvements in trash pickup and the removal of asbestos from public housing. The city opened a jobs office in the tumbledown community as the lights were going out in nearby factories. ...
He continued to teach the Alinsky philosophy, although he told the New Republic recently that "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a friend of Obama's, sees another difference. "If you read Alinsky's teachings, there are times he's confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack. He's always looking for ways to connect."
A 1995 article identifies the "Developing Communities Project" as a campaign funded by Catholic churches. It does not sound like Obama was up to anything very radical.
Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn't need another career. But he's entering politics to get back to his true passion--community organization.
By Hank De Zutter December 8, 1995
[excerpt]
Here in Chicago, Obama worked as lead organizer for the Developing Communities Project, a campaign funded by south-side Catholic churches to counteract the dislocation and massive unemployment caused by the closing and downsizing of southeast Chicago steel plants.
From 1984 to '88 Obama built an organization in Roseland and the nearby Altgeld Gardens public housing complex that mobilized hundreds of citizens. Obama says the campaign experienced "modest successes" in winning residents a place at the table where a job-training facility was launched, asbestos and lead paint were negotiated out of the local schools, and community interests were guarded in the development of the area's landfills.
Of note, Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961. Saul Alinsky died June 12, 1972 while Obama was only 10 years old. The link between Hillary Clinton and Alinsky appears stronger than what has been shown about Obama.
Thanks, it's always good to have a source and the correct facts. There has been a lot of deliberately erroneous/false info used against him.
And most often, when a correction is made, it is never acknowledged.