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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Saul Alinsky, Patron Saint of Occupy Wall Street

Magellanic Penguins at Peninsula Valdes, Argentina - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman
fliesinyoureyes.com

Every movement must have a handbook to guide its adherents and sustain it through the times. The Christians have the Bible, the Muslims the Koran, the Nazis Mein Kampf, and the Maoist The Red Book, and the Occupy Wall Streeters Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals.

Hiding in plain sight is an apt way to describe Saul Alinsky’s “pragmatic primer for realistic radicals,” Rules for Radicals. Born in 1909, and until his death in 1972, he spent the majority of his life leading his own revolution against capitalism and the American way of life. Due to Alinsky’s career as a community organizer in Chicago and his far left political agenda, he is reputed to be Barrack Obama’s philosophical mentor, although this contention is controversial. A more definite and clear connection can be made between Alinsky and the Occupy Movement, a group of anarchists, communists, and wanna-bees whose actions and aims are in total accord with the Alinsky protocol. The President’s tacit praise and lack of criticism of the Occupiers casts suspicion that there may be more to the purported Alinsky connection than he cares to admit.

The Rules for Radicals can be divided into three parts: a mission statement, rules governing ethics and tactics which community organizers should use to achieve their goals, and an indictment of the middle class without whose support the “revolution” will not succeed.

Alinsky describes a world of the “Haves” and “Have-Nots,” and in the first portion of the book bluntly states his goal of wealth redistribution. The organizer he states, “does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing.”

“This is a major reason for my attempt to provide a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics. My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and use it. I will argue that the failure to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution.”

With this motive in mind, consider the thirteen demands of the Occupy Wall Street Manifesto which fit neatly into the Alinsky model.


Demand 1: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hour.

Demand 2: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to Wall Street.investors.

Demand 3: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand 4: Free college education.

Demand 5: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand 6: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand 7: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand 8: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand 9: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand 10: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand 11: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand 12: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand 13: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

If only these hopelessly naive demands were met, a Workers’ Paradise would descend upon the planet. A few minor technicalities would persist such as: Who will do the work? and Can election standards in the United States achieve the levels of honesty and transparency as those in Iran or Chad? Yet despite these concerns, Democratic Party stalwarts quickly allied themselves with the revolutionary fervor and embraced the humanity of the manifesto’s Thirteen Commandments.

Three of Alinsky’s rules of ethics are particularly germane in regard to public statements made by leaders of the Left. When listening to Pelosi, Reid, or Obama, it becomes evident they have taken the Alinsky 101 course more than once:

...in war the end justifies almost any means. Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times. ...you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

Goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness,”...

During a press conference, when is the last time Pelosi, Reid, or Obama answered a question directly without referring to some preprepared Alinsky talking point? Over the last three years every query from foreign affairs to domestic policy receives the standard “It’s all about jobs” response. There is no concern affecting the country that does not revolve around jobs, even though the government is willing to spend ten dollars for every dollar it receives in job creation.

Of the thirteen rules Alinsky offers in tactics, three are used continuously by the main stream media to marginalize conservatives. There is no reason to vary the attack. They are highly effective, and the public never tires of them:

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. “It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.”

Rule 11: “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow land above the belt.”

Alinsky reserved the last portion of the book to lambast the middle class. He knew his revolution would never succeed unless he could convince us that our lives were hopelessly empty and our happiness a ruse. His grand scheme would never materialize with support only from the lower class; he needed to mobilize the energy and talent of the “silent majority” of the nation to rise up and rebel against the ruling class.

“With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle class society. All rebels must attack the power states in their society. Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class.”

And finally...

“The middle classes are numb, bewildered, scared into silence. They don’t know what, if anything, they can do. This is the job of the radical - to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight.”

Not particularly subtle, is it?

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