How Obama and ACORN are Sabotaging America

How Obama and ACORN are Sabotaging America
by Matthew Vadum
06/09/2011

It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to order the assassination of the world’s most infamous terrorist in Pakistan years after launching one’s political career in the living room of another infamous terrorist in Chicago.

But such nuances are nothing new for Barack Obama.

After all, he used to work for ACORN, America’s best known urban terrorist group, a radical socialist outfit that masquerades as a public-spirited service organization.

ACORN and Obama are a match made in Heaven.

America’s Community Organizer-in-Chief grew up surrounded by parents, grandparents, and mentors enamored of communism. Not surprisingly, Obama was drawn to the world of communist-sympathizing thug Saul Alinsky, a fiendishly brilliant man who devoted his life to destroying “the system.” Alinsky wanted to bring down American capitalism and democracy in order to drag the country kicking and screaming into a socialist nightmare.

Yet Obama doesn’t see a contradiction between fighting America’s terrorist enemies abroad even though in 1995 he raised funds for his first run for public office in the Hyde Park, Chicago living room of unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn.

Why would he? Broadly speaking, Ayers, a self described “small-c communist” and Obama have similar philosophies. They served on the same charitable boards and both directed funding to ACORN.

And if it wasn’t already obvious more than two years into President Obama’s term of office, radical left-wing community organizers (like Obama) want to destroy America as we know it.

And they’ve already succeeded in part.

America is now on the verge of a spectacular financial collapse partly because of the destructive actions of Obama’s former employer ACORN, its allies in the labor movement, a constellation of taxpayer-funded leftist pressure groups, and radical organizers nationwide.

For four decades Obama’s favorite activist group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been extremists’ preferred vehicle for wreaking havoc on society. Socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists have flocked to ACORN for good reason: it is unlike any other political strike force in U.S. history. And ACORN’s enemies consistently get steamrolled because they don’t take the group seriously enough, according to insider Marcel Reid, who used to be a member of ACORN’s national board.

“They don’t appreciate the prowess that ACORN operates with, that it’s mean and lean, that they keep their operating costs down, and they can strike a number of targets simultaneously with military precision.”

ACORN does whatever it takes to disrupt society and cause chaos. The group is all about massive voter fraud, home invasions, rent-a-mob services, intimidation, corporate shakedowns, and brutal Saul Alinsky-approved tactics.

ACORN’s anti-democratic, un-American activities are not legitimate political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. They cry out for prosecution under federal racketeering laws.

Such tactics are “a form of fascism,” former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R.-GA) told this writer in an interview.

“It’s the kind of thing that the Italian and German fascists and the Soviet Communists used routinely, and it’s the fundamental disruption of people’s rights.” He added, “I regard ACORN as an opportunistic collection of people who earn a living being disruptive and destructive and intimidating on behalf of their allies, many of whom are certainly socialists.”

Part pressure group, part urban terrorist network, part organized crime syndicate, ACORN claims only to want to help the poor. But it views the elimination of America’s free institutions as the only way to help the less fortunate.

ACORN follows a roadmap for Marxist revolution that relies on armies of angry activists. Alinsky’s paean to ruthlessness, Rules for Radicals, is the community organizer’s bible. It has inspired generations of hard-left activists to create pressure groups –like ACORN— to wage war against America’s free institutions.

Although Obama never met Alinsky, the future president embraced the late rabble rouser’s worldview. As a lecturer at the University of Chicago, Obama taught Alinsky’s ogrish organizing techniques, which involve intimidation, blackmail, and violence targeted at corporations and governments. Like the amoral political strategist Niccolo Machiavelli, Alinsky taught that the ends justify the means.

Alinsky even bragged that radical leftists like him were at their best when they were “breaking the necks of conservatives.” He acknowledged that violence is inevitable in the revolutionary struggle. “The radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks,” he said. “He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.”

In other words, the Alinskyite radical is like a mobster who tells his prey, “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business,” before slitting his throat.

What does all of this have to do with Obama? After all, Obama is a polished politician who studiously avoids the caustic rhetoric of Alinsky, preferring a softer approach to selling his ideas.

But it matters because nearly 40 years after his death, Alinsky’s values and hoodlum ways permeate the heavy-handed Obama administration, which hasn’t hesitated to nationalize entire industries, flaunt court orders and the rule of law, and habitually ignore the limits on government power provided in the Constitution.

Both Alinsky and Obama are openly contemptuous of the American system.

Alinsky claimed to love America but at the same time he condemned what he called America’s “racist, discriminatory culture.” Like Karl Marx, he seethed with contempt for the middle class, which he described as “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt.”

Of course it’s a depressingly common tactic among radical leftists to label their adversaries as ignorant, small-minded, hateful, xenophobic simpletons incapable of independent thought. Alinsky opined that members of “the lower middle class” harbor “bitterness” against society in part because they don’t get back in government services what they pay out in taxes.

These sentiments aren’t too far removed from Obama’s condescending faux pas from the 2008 campaign trail that revealed the candidate’s elitist, Marxist contempt for ordinary Americans. Obama said small-town Americans “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Alinsky railed against capitalism, saying it “places the highest premium on personal possessions and regards material poverty as failure.”

Obama is politically astute enough not to denounce capitalism directly, but he routinely preaches divisive class warfare. Since Obama was inaugurated how many times has he lectured Americans on the supposed virtue of redistributing wealth through confiscatory taxation?

Obama’s connections to ACORN continue to matter because the rumors of ACORN’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The group that became synonymous with sleaze and corruption when its employees were shown encouraging illegal behavior in the celebrated undercover “pimp and prostitute” videos of 2009 is alive and well – and planning to resurface before the critical 2012 elections, according to ACORN insiders. While ACORN declared bankruptcy in November, its state chapters were busy changing their names and shredding documents. ACORN’s still out there operating below the radar and reorganizing itself – because it never lets a good crisis go to waste.

But the real problem today isn’t just ACORN and the many ACORN wannabe groups it has spawned.

The real problem is that spendthrift ACORN supporters dominate the Obama administration and the Democratic Party’s organizing apparatus, bringing Alinsky-approved thuggery and intimidation to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.

Patrick Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and SEIU executive who was Obama’s White House political director, was recently transferred to the Democratic National Committee. As part of his new duties as DNC executive director, Gaspard oversees Organizing for America, a DNC project that aspires to bring Alinskyite techniques to the campaign trail in 2012.

Anyone who loves America’s democratic processes should be worried.
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To read about ACORN's history with Barack Obama, click here.