For Obama, All Roads Lead to ACORN and Saul Alinsky

By Brad O’Leary

Following the DNC Convention, Saul Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky, wrote a letter to the Boston Globe. “Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing his effectiveness,” the son wrote.  “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008.  It’s a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.”

The great community organizing Obama did was through the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).  ACORN is notoriously known for its radical, and often illegal, practices and adherence to the radical philosophy of Saul Alinsky.  According to the Washington Post, Alinsky’s “disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate to organize black residents on the Southside, while learning and applying Alinsky’s philosophy of street level democracy.”

Recently the Obama campaign has sought to distance the Senator from the radical organization, claiming Obama merely represented ACORN in a lawsuit enforcing the Illinois “Motor Voter” law.  Apparently the Obama campaign does not want Obama’s ties to an organization that has a “decade long history of voter fraud, embezzlement and misuses of taxpayer funds” that Consumer Rights League Chief Public Advocate, James Terry testified about last month to the House Judiciary.  Alinsky wrote: “An organizer works for change…does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing.”

Obama trained ACORN activists.  A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated “Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons.” Obama also ran Project Vote, known for widespread voter fraud, which Time magazine called “a non-partisan arm” of ACORN. In a speech to ACORN in 2007, cited by Newsmax, Obama gushed “I have been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.  Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois. ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it and we appreciate your work.”

ACORN follows Saul Alinsky’s teachings to a tee.  In Rules for Radicals (which was dedicated to Lucifer), Alinsky wrote “the morality of means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.”   ACORN voter registration fraud is just shy of becoming epidemic.   ACORN employees are facing investigation, indictment or prison time for voter fraud in at least a dozen states.  During the Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000.

Like Alinsky, who wrote “multiple issues mean constant action and life”, ACORN, through its “affiliates”, has its hands in numerous socialist projects in addition to voter fraud.  ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) was beyond knee-deep in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures which have riveted our economy.  Promoting an ACORN housing development in Texas on its website in 2006, ACORN  boasted “in addition to providing access to AHP grants, ACORN’s lending partners provide low cost, easier to qualify for mortgage loans.”

ACORN is also in the healthcare industry.  According to their website, “ACORN’s campaign to win healthcare access for low and moderate income families continued in 2006 with a successful effort to pass an ordinance providing healthcare for every resident of San Francisco.”

Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants is also championed by ACORN.  In 2000, ACORN and Grassroots Collaborative organized “a 10,000-person march in Chicago to demand amnesty for undocumented workers.”  In 2005, ACORN in Palm Beach, FL organized a rally to stop “unfair deportations.”

While ACORN is against the privatization of public schools, ACORN has established or helped run several schools in the United States.  According to their website “ACORN parents won victories in New York, creating the Rockaways New School and PS 245, and in Chicago, where they established the Nicholson and Mason 21 schools.”  ACORN also established the ACORN High School for Social Justice in New York which website touts “the school offers an opportunity to engage in a comprehensive academic program and to participate in citywide campaigns dealing with issues on social injustice which affect Bushwick community and the larger Brooklyn community.”  The school has a four year graduation rate of 41.9 percent.

Alinsky wrote “the disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization.  All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.”  For Obama and ACORN, disrupting our institutions, free markets, and the rule of law is the first step toward the socialist society that Alinsky sought.  Alinsky surely would be proud of Obama and the vehicle (ACORN) that has helped propel his cause.  Something in Obama clearly clicked while studying Alinsky, particularly Alinsky’s comment: “The organizer is in a true sense the highest level for which man can reach – to create, to be a ‘great creator’, to play God.”  Obama wanted to be the one.