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The 10 most popular passages in Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’

noslave  posted Jan. 21, 2014 at 9:24am
"COMMUNISTS RAN AND HID LIKE COCKAROACHES DURING MC CARTHY ERA,THEN THEY CONNED EVERYBODY INTO SUBMISSION WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, NOW THEIR EMBOLDENED??,if each true american patriot,drags one of these people off to wareouses quietley?tortures, then deposits their carcass in a dumpster or??then we can begin to heal otherwise kepp watching the decline??ill its to late?look how far they’ve come with us being politically correct??"

Organizing for Action is one of those political phenomena that ranks right up there with fabricated hit pieces when it comes to deliberate deception.  The only honest word of the three is “for”.  The other two “Organizing” and “Action” aggressively misrepresent their meaning.  

What the Obama crowd is doing here has nothing to do with organizing.  What they call “organizing” is public relations, marketing.  What they call “action” is selling.  Linking organizing and action with marketing and selling is an attempt to mystify and in some fashion ennoble what is other wise mere advertising.  

This may not matter much given the low profile and relatively small amounts of money committed to “Organizing for Action” in an advertising mode, but it does point to a deeper duplicity in the Obama modus operandi worth considering.

Years ago, in a seminar in Texas, one of America’s leading African-American intellectuals, when asked about then candidate Obama’s much touted community organizing experience, dismissed it as “resume padding” - part of the construction of a misleading story for public consumption designed to advance a political career.  

Organizing for Action seems cast in the same mold. 

Obama Visits Soup Kitchen On Martin Luther King Day



To interpret the MLK Day photo op on behalf of the White House public relations team:   

"The Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr repeatedly risked his life and ultimately lost it to promote community service projects.  He was really a nice guy with a quaint but timely message that we all need to remember."

Thanks to you, White House pr types, for the warm and fuzzy story that will inspire my gift of a can of beans to my local food bank.  And here I thought Dr King was calling us to be the cutting edge of risky, conflict ridden political change.

…but give them a zone.

Who is the Obama crowd trying to kid with this Promise Zone thing?  Promise what?  To whom?

Just when you thought the world was safe from failed enterprise like Enterprise Zones and failed empowerment like Empowerment Zones here comes the New Promise Zones.  Oh boy, lets play gather the stakeholders again.

And I always thought recycling was a good thing. 

Downton Abbey recycles the story line of Upstairs/Downstairs. Downtown Promise recycles the storyline of Downtown Enterprise, aka, Downtown Empowerment, aka been there, done that.  

The saga of Saul Alinsky continues to unfold over forty years after his death.  He makes an appearance in places one would never expect.  Here he is in a business publication, depoliticized.  His principles are used to interpret behavior of a corporate leader in fierce competition with a slow-footed AT&T.  

I can only imagine the chuckle he would have gotten from all this post mortem attention.  After all, he craved the public eye and was way ahead of his time in using cutting edge media to advance his public image.  

At one point Alinsky wonders how organizations will be built without the aid of that establishment-bashing image he so successfully nurtured.  

The Industrial Areas Foundation has done pretty well in this regard by finding ways to engage communities, regions and states in organizing drives since Alinsky’s death.  A key reason is the strength of the leadership training protocols that Ed Chambers and Dick Harmon put in place in the late sixties/early seventies.  Without this infrastructure IAF expansion would likely have died on the vine.

It’s also worth noting that the Chambers/Harmon innovations were copied by others  aspiring to build organizational networks.