Saul Alinsky - Community Organizer - #2of 2

Saul Alinsky – Community Organizer - # 2 of 2
In pursuit of the truth – cinops be gone – Saturday, March 21, 2009

Your Brief Two-Page Lesson Plan Discussion:
On Becoming a Community Organizer by Prostituting the Members of the Community for
Personal and Class Power via a Marxist Mentality

(The Phyllis Schlafly Report: Vol. 42, No. 7 – Feb. 2009 – “How a C.O. Became President”)

5.) In the Beginning: The organizer’s “biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something.” The organizer’s job is “to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win victories, each of which will build confidence.” The organizer will learn that “Change comes from power, and power comes from organization.”
“The organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems,” and “organizations must be based on many issues.” The organizer “must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversies and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned to act …. An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.” He can provoke class resentment by painting Wall Street as villains. {Today’s examples of AIG bonuses etc.}
The organizer “begins his ‘trouble making’ by stirring up these angers, frustrations, and resentments, and highlighting specific issues or grievances that heighten controversy.” “Organizations need action as individuals need oxygen. The cessation of action brings death to the organization.
At the same time, “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” Alinsky reminds his organizers that “To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced.”
Alinsky’s book is full of examples of issues and organizational victories from the decade of the 1960s (such as the Vietnam War, civil rights litigation, urban renewal, and campus riots) which are not meaningful to younger Americans today.

6.) Tactics: Alinsky reminds his trainees that power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” “Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions.” “Multiple issues mean constant action and life.” “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” “A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating.” “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules and regulations.”

Alinsky describes some of his successful mass demonstrations.
1) Tying up all the restrooms at O’Hare Airport by having his demonstrators lock themselves in the toilet booths equipped with a book to read, and staying there all day. 2) Dropping wads of chewing gum all over the walks on a college campus.

7.) The Way Ahead: Alinsky laid out his plan to go after “America’s white middle class. That is where the power is.” They are the “Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” Alinksy boasts that, “With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society…. Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class.”

Commentary:
It may take a couple of days to digest in our minds this two-page lesson plan discussion. A.C.O.R.N. may receive 4 billion dollars from the government stimulus plan to be used in the 2010 election. It would be wise to start and think what needs to be done.
George H. Kubeck,