I’ve been getting quite a few e-mails from an elderly couple who has reservations about President Barack Obama — and not the healthy kind of reservations either.
Okay, I understand. Barack Obama’s handling of the financial situation is questionable, I get it, but to say he’s using “socialist strategies” to “manufacture the crisis” is a bit far-fetched.
Here is a point-counterpoint analysis of the article written by Andrea Lafferty, or I’d like to refer to her as the lady with the shiny tin-foil hat.
The radical left (which President Obama was part of as a community organizer in Chicago), devised a strategy back in 1966 to bring about orchestrated crises to be used to socialize our nation.
In the mid-80s, Barack Obama worked as a director for the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization from the south side of Chicago. According to other conservative blogs, the “radical left” socialist agenda tie-in supposedly comes from a man named Jerry Kellman, who supposedly was the one who called Barack Obama to recruit him to this group. Kellman was rumored on the conservative blog circuit to be a protege of Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky. Therefore, it had to be true! Barack Obama is a follower of Maxism and socialism!
Wrong. The “guilt by association” arguments are often weak and provide no proof like this argument.
In 1966, two socialist professors at Columbia University named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published an article in The Nation that outlined how to manufacturer crises for socialist objectives.Cloward and Piven were inspired by Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky, who used community organizing in Chicago to bring about social change. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was mentored by Alinsky and learned political tactics from him. Barack Hussein Obama worked for Alinsky-created groups in Chicago. He also learned Alinsky tactics.
To manufacture a crises is to create a crisis that did not exist before. On January 20th, Barack Obama undoubtedly inherited this financial crisis from the Bush administration. None of his own personal policies or initiatives created the crisis that we are all familiar with now. Again, it goes back to the whole “guilt by association” argument, which has become a more twisted form of Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees of Separation.
The author of the article brought up Saul Alinsky. The article presumes that:
- Saul Alinsky has been a part of (or played a big role in) community organizing in Chicago. The author does not cite any specific groups other than ACORN. There is no way of knowing if ACORN applied “socialist techniques.” These are only unverified claims. There is no connection to Alinsky and ACORN.
- Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published an article on how to manufacture a crisis to promote “socialist objectives.” This was called the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which is actually real. To establish a guaranteed national income, the Democrats would have to use a financial crisis as a means of pushing through federal relief to help the poor. The strategy was limited to that of welfare reform, but Barack Obama has yet to reform the welfare system. Instead, Obama cut taxes for 95% of middle-class families and increasing taxes to individuals and couples making more than $200,000 a year, thus effectively reverting tax cuts to those from the Clinton administration. He did not and has not guaranteed income.
- Cloward and Piven were influenced by Alinsky so therefore Barack Obama, being a member of a community organized “founded” by Alinsky principles, is actively applying the Cloward-Piven Strategy as a means of advancing the socialist agenda. Really? Should I even bother responding to this?
Then the article goes downhill, revealing a laundry list of claims ranging from Obama’s mother being an athiest who “embraced” Marxist ideology and his mentor in high school being a “black Marxist.” The list goes on and on. And, oh yeah, Reverend Jeremiah Wright is also part of the Black Liberation and Barack Obama is completely in on it. Please.
I find it disheartening that people exploit the Internet for being such a vast resource to distribute unsubstantiated propaganda. There are claims piled on top of other claims. I’ve seen people on FactCheck.org read the claims line by line, trying to refute what’s essentially personal opinion, but the web of deception is so complex, that it would take a lifetime to untangle it all. People need to realize that there will always be information that is not accessible and it’s called motive. People tend to isolate motive as a statement of fact. “He or she knew about this so then that happened.” “Barack Obama was a community organizer who belonged to a group that practiced Alinsky’s beliefs, therefore he’s using Cloward-Piven strategy to advance the socialist agenda.” You lost me.
But people read this and because they don’t have the time of day to sit down and dissect the information, they conveniently start to believe it. It’s really not their fault, though. The opinion is so complex, that it overloads the mind. The complexity is too difficult to analyze, but it’s too easy to accept it.
Conservatives and right wing fanatics are very good at playing these mind games. I’ve never seen anything like it. Just reading the article for the first time made my head spin. I’m sure the leftists are also very skilled, but to see so much fear presiding over reality is dangerous. In our society, people are having a harder time separating fact from fiction and as some of us get older, some of us become more receptive to baseless opinion. The rise of the blogging movement have given some people some uncanny power to wield baseless opinion as a weapon to mobilize the fearful masses.
So please stop sending me these e-mails about how Obama is going to turn us into a socialist nation. I don’t want to make any more blog articles like this one out of exasperation.
