What IS a community organizer??

[96Qowner]

We've heard the term tossed around, and supposedly it's some sort of noble calling or something, but the stuff I read makes me think it's a political organizer, whose job it is to make sure people vote for the right people and drive them to the polls to be sure they do. Apparently, a Community Organizer also helps people get grants from the government. Here's a snippet about Barry's glorious times as a Community Organizer:

Obama, only 24, struck board members as "awesome" and "extremely impressive," and they quickly hired him, at $13,000 a year, plus $2,000 for a car--a beat-up blue Honda Civic, which Obama drove for the next three years organizing more than twenty congregations to change their neighborhoods.

Despite some meaningful victories, the work of Obama--and hundreds of other organizers--did not transform the South Side or restore lost industries. But it did change the young man who became the junior senator from Illinois in 2004, and it provides clues to his worldview as he bids for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"I can't say we didn't make mistakes, that I knew what I was doing," Obama recalled three years ago to a boisterous convention of the still-active DCP. "Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up. Sometimes preachers said, 'Why should I listen to you?' Sometimes we tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn't show up. I couldn't tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070416/moberg

It sure doesn't look like Obama was even particularly effective at the job. But that's where he met the Rev Wright and was introduced to Black Liberation Theology, so at least he accomplished something.

What's so exaulted about working as a political organizer and helping people suck off the government?

[Jimefam]

I'll be honest with you, it is gonna be impossible for you to understand this concept properly because of where you live. You have a much different point of view than somebody in the south side of chicago or the slum areas of any major city. These are places that are completely ignored by government because the citizens for the most part are to ignorant to make a fuss. The role of a community organizer in these places is to try and unite the community to contact their leaders and try and force action. For example, many of the slums in the so-called "Rust belt" of our country were originally middle class. The closing of heavy industries as the jobs have been outsourced has left entire areas in a depressed economic state. For example here in atlanta two major car plants recently closed which employed tens of thousands of workers. As a result thousands in that community are unemployed, you drive by and see nothing but empty business that have closed because there are no more workers coming to eat lunch or spend their checks on things. The local housing markets crash as every cash strapped worker looks to sell their homes before foreclosure. In the next two years what was a DECENT(not great before but decent) community will turn to S**t. These community organizers come in and try to have local or federal governments help out by maybe funding a public works project or maybe a military base anything that might create jobs in that area. No he wasn't very effective, the truth is none of them are because very few people outside that situation give a damn. It speaks on his character that after graduating from an ivy league school with a law degree he chose to earn 13k and a pos car as opposed to the starting salary he could have commanded from a firm. Does this experience prepare him to be POTUS? Of course not, nothing does but perhaps it was then as a community organizer that he realized he would have to be much more to really help people.
Modified by Jimefam at 10:53 AM 9/6/2008

[96Qowner]

You're right, I don't have any cultural basis for understanding what a Community Organizer is. Around here, it's the Salvation Army and United Way who helps people in need, along with area churches. Am I right that a Community Organizer is a political position? Who would have paid him the $13,000 for instance?

[Jimefam]

You're right, I don't have any cultural basis for understanding what a Community Organizer is. Around here, it's the Salvation Army and United Way who helps people in need, along with area churches. Am I right that a Community Organizer is a political position? Who would have paid him the $13,000 for instance?

I dont know in Obamas case who paid him. I'm sure that would be pretty simple to find out though just dont have time to look online. They can be paid by local community activist or a political party or even some of the larger churches. How is that relevant though?

[srellim234]

MSNBC mentioned the other night during the RNC that Obama's c.o. was faith-based and paid for by churches but they didn't cite their source. You can bet someone's looking into it trying to get a political edge from whatever they find.

[audtatious]

In a quick check, this was the first hit I came up with:

"Much has been on Newsvine today about Obama the "community organizer". It is something being held up as a symbol of Obama's experience to lead.

Well what does a community Organizer do? Well in Obama's case he worked for an organization known as ACORN

In Chicago, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and its associated Midwest Academy, both founded in the 1970s, continue to train and mobilize activists throughout the country, often using them to manipulate public opinion through direct action.

Prior to law school, Obama worked as an organizer for their affiliates in New York and Chicago. He always has been an ACORN person , meeting and working with them to advance their causes. Through his membership on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago and his friendship with Teresa Heinz Kerry, Obama has helped ensure that they remain funded well.

Since he graduated from law school, Obama's work with ACORN and the Midwest Academy ranged from training and fundraising, to legal representation and promoting their work.

So What is ACORN you ask?

Acorn is left-wing Organization who recieves 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers..It has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud.

ACORN is at the center of a scandal involving a $1 million embezzlement by Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. ACORN discovered the embezzlement in 2000 but did not alert law enforcement officials.

The Wall Street Journal reported: In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters and dead voters.

Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, by flipping through phone books for names to use on the forms. Three ACORN workers have pleaded guilty to submitting phony voter registration forms in Washington.

Eight ACORN employees pleaded guilty to federal election fraud in Missouri.

In March, Philadelphia elections officials accused the nonprofit advocacy group of filing fraudulent voter registrations in advance of the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary. The charges were forwarded to the city district attorney's office.

ACORN Housing Corporation has worked to obtain mortgages for illegal aliens in partnership with Citibank. Relying on undocumented income, and "under the table" money,not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Moreover, the group's "financial justice" operations attack lenders for "exotic" loans, while recommending 10-year interest-only loans (which deny equity to the buyer) and risky reverse mortgages

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the ACORN called Citizens Services Inc.Citizens Services Inc. is headquartered at the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans

According to FEC records, the Obama campaign paid Citizens Services Inc. $832,598.29, from Feb. 25 to May 17.Obama paid CSI for services that stood out as unusual. For example, CSI received payments of $63,000 and $75,000 for advance work. Excluding the large payments to CSI, the average amount the Obama campaign spent with other organizations was $558.82 per check on more than 1,200 entries classified as advance work.

According to Jim Terry, chief public advocate for Consumers Rights League, a Washington, D.C., advocacy outfit with a libertarian outlook., 'All of this just seems like an awful lot of money and time spent on political campaigning for an organization that purports to exist to help low income consumers,'

ACORN's political action committee has warmly endorsed Obama's presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd stated that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about"."

Then we have Wiki:

"After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago and worked as a community organizer. "What really inspired me," Obama told Ryan Lizza, a writer for The New Republic in 2007, "was the civil rights movement. And if you asked me who my role model was at that time, it would probably be Bob Moses, the famous SNCC [ Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ] organizer. … Those were the folks I was really inspired by—the John Lewises, the Bob Moseses, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Ella Bakers."[28]

Before Obama came, the organization was made up of three white men (two of them Jewish), which was only working with Catholic parishes up to that point. Yet the black pastors looked on them with suspicion and sometimes disdain as outsiders. The organization wanted a young black man to help the group ally with black churches in the South Side. He worked for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side.[26][29][28]

The job focused on helping poor blacks agitate with the city government to get benefits for their communities such as job banks and asbestos removal. The small organization taught him a style of organizing developed by Saul Alinsky, a radical, University of Chicago-trained social scientist. Alinsky method centers on the idea of "agitation" — encouraging people to get angry enough about the horrible state of their lives in order to get them to take action. Alinsky had described the organizer's role as an effort "rub raw the sores of discontent." According to Mike Kruglik, a fellow organizer at that time, Obama was the best student he had ever had in his 10 years of training organizers. In 2007, Ryan Lizza, a journalist writing for The New Republic, described Kruglik's assessment of Obama: "He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. […] [H]e could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."[28]

Obama came to believe that although Alinsky's concentration on self-interest as a motivating factor is a "critical" insight, he told Lizza, "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."[28]

During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[30] Obama was modest about the accomplishment of these years. "[F]or the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful," Obama said in a 2007 interview. "The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."[31]

Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[32] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks then Kenya for five weeks where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.[33]"

[audtatious]

Sorry for the wall of text, trying to present both views of his Community Organizer days.

[telcoman]

You're right, I don't have any cultural basis for understanding what a Community Organizer is. Around here, it's the Salvation Army and United Way who helps people in need, along with area churches. Am I right that a Community Organizer is a political position? Who would have paid him the $13,000 for instance?

96Qowner

Katrina hitting New Orleans has been all over the news since 2005 and is a good example of government failure. Had the poor residents in the lower 9th ward been registered voters they would have received much better government services. Those in ND and other states without a diverse population will have difficulty understanding problems of the inner city.Read up on Newark, Paterson, Trenton, and Camden, New Jersey.

All have similar problems.

An example of registered voters.

I live in a town of 50k and when they wanted to eliminate school buses for students living less than a mile voters turned out in droves and the idea was quickly scrapped.

Did Obama make some mistakes along the way in trying to help poor residents of Chicago? Of course he did.

Many young people make mistakes along the way. Many learn from them and I believe Obama did.

GWB and John McCain have not. Sarah Palin from what we know so far has made plenty.

Telcoman


Modified by telcoman at 11:33 AM 9/6/2008

[96Qowner]

So Obama got paid $13,000 working for a leftist political organization and didn't accomplish much, according to his own words.

Swell. Just what we need for President - an unaccomplished radical leftie.

[96Qowner]

Those in ND and other states without a diverse population will have difficulty understanding problems of the inner city.Read up on Newark, Paterson, Trenton, and Camden, New Jersey.

All have similar problems.

Yeah, I know about those "problems". Read up on the Grand Forks flood and the Northwood tornado. Somehow, these people were able to recover without community organizers to bargain for their votes, and without waiting around, shouting and shooting at helicopters that were suppose to save them from their own incompetent aszes.

[rn79870]

So Obama got paid $13,000 working for a leftist political organization and didn't accomplish much, according to his own words.

Swell. Just what we need for President - an unaccomplished radical leftie.

Do you have a cite on the "unaccomplished radical leftie" comment you've made? If so, please provide it. Thanks.

[96Qowner]

People may find this interesting, for instance. Feel free, Bob to search the web for information that we might find illuminating and useful.

So along with the reservoir of political support that came to Obama through his close ties with Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and other Chicago black churches, Chicago Acorn appears to have played a major role in Obama’s political advance. Sure enough, a bit of digging into Obama’s years in the Illinois State Senate indicates strong concern with Acorn’s signature issues, as well as meetings with Acorn and the introduction by Obama of Acorn-friendly legislation on the living wage and banking practices. You begin to wonder whether, in his Springfield days, Obama might have best been characterized as “the Senator from Acorn.”

http://article.nationalreview....E0ODI=

According to the New York Times, Obama’s memberships on those foundation boards, “allowed him to help direct tens of millions of dollars in grants” to various liberal organizations, including Chicago Acorn, “whose endorsement Obama sought and won in his State Senate race.” As best as I can tell (and this needs to be checked out more fully), Acorn maintains both political and “non-partisan” arms. Obama not only sought and received the endorsement of Acorn’s political arm in his local campaigns, he recently accepted Acorn’s endorsement for the presidency, in pursuit of which he reminded Acorn officials of his long-standing ties to the group.

That covers the radical leftie part I think. And I still haven't seen what Obama accomplished during his time with ACORN, other than building his own political support. In the previous article I cited, Obama himself said that he hadn't been very effective as a community organizer, before SOMEONE paid for his Harvard Law degree. We'd actually know who, except the Obama camp won't reveal it.

[96Qowner]

Here's another article, entitled "Obama's Radical-Left Ties Broad And Deep":

Having now left Trinity United Church of Christ, can Barack Obama escape responsibility for his decades-long ties to Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright? No, he cannot. Obama’s connections to the radical-left politics espoused by Pfleger and Wright are broad and deep. The real reason Obama bound himself to Wright and Pfleger in the first place is that he largely approved of their political-theological outlooks.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories...shtml

You really didn't know all this about your guy, Bob?

Here's another article:

http://rightwingnuthouse.com/a...ances/

So, what exactly does a Chicago community organizer do? Obama said his activism was inspired by a guy named Saul Alinsky, remember?

The far-left Alinsky had no time for liberalism or liberals, declaring that "a liberal is (someone) who puts his foot down firmly on thin air." He wanted nothing less than transformational radicalism. "America was begun by its radicals," he wrote. "America was built by its radicals. The hope and future of America lies with its radicals." And so, "This is the job for today's radical — to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight. To say, '. . . let us change it together!' "

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/I...73142

Let me know if you need to learn more. I'm pretty good at typing key words like "Obama radical" into Google. (I know it sounds difficult, but it's really pretty easy.)

[rn79870]

That covers the radical leftie part I think. And I still haven't seen what Obama accomplished during his time with ACORN, other than building his own political support. In the previous article I cited, Obama himself said that he hadn't been very effective as a community organizer, before SOMEONE paid for his Harvard Law degree. We'd actually know who, except the Obama camp won't reveal it.

You said he was an "unaccomplished radical leftie." I'm still waiting for a cite that says HE is an unaccomplished radical leftie, not merely one or two that says he knew a few radical lefties. Big difference.

[smockers83]

Being from a rural area, there are community organizers as well. They're always associated with politics, pushing views upon others (usually leftist ideas and environmental BS), among other things. Usually unwelcome in rural America unless there's an actual topic worth debating or fighting for.

[rn79870]

Being from a rural area, there are community organizers as well. They're always associated with politics, pushing views upon others (usually leftist ideas and environmental BS), among other things. Usually unwelcome in rural America unless there's an actual topic worth debating or fighting for.

What other parts of rural America have you lived in where community organizers pushed their views that were unwelcome? How long did you live there? What were the views?

[audtatious]

What other parts of rural America have you lived in where community organizers pushed their views that were unwelcome? How long did you live there? What were the views?

Are you initiating discussion with the questions or just avoiding diving into the work Obama did as a community organizer (and for the group afterward)? You seem to be focusing on one statement that a member made about Obama and not discussing the topic at hand.

Just curious.

[rn79870]

A little of both. I'm questioning claims that stretch the truth as well as answering questions.

I suppose you didn't catch Larry King tonight. The question about Obama's community organization skills and accomplishments were discussed with very favorable results. It seems that Obama was one of the top grads from Harvard and President of their Law Review. Typically that student is offered a job as a clerk for SCOTUS or with a top New York law firm. Obama turned both offers down to go serve the community for a pittance of what he would have received at the other jobs. That's character like I've never seen.

[audtatious]

No I have not at this time. I'll look for it on youtube as I'm interested in his comments although I highly doubt he was point-blank asked the tough questions about it and his association with ACORN after he accepted his Senate seat.

[AZhitman]

I headed up a Neighborhood Watch in north Phoenix. Vote 4 Me.

Kinda like herding cats, except the cats were mostly not interested in preventing crime, and some were even involved in petty criminal ventures.

[audtatious]

I was a Committee chair of a Cub Scout pack for free. I helped organize them so does that mean I now have enough experience to run for Prezzie?

[Jesda]

So a community organizer's job is to gather up all the uneducated retards to help them mooch off government services.

Awesome. Sounds like the DNC platform.

[smockers83]

What other parts of rural America have you lived in where community organizers pushed their views that were unwelcome? How long did you live there? What were the views?

What truth was I stretching? Are you trying to discredit my experiences?

I lived there for 10 years. I've seen community organizations about the environment trying to push the very little economy we have down the drain for the sake of a few fish and a tree. I've seen community organizations formed to get ridiculous ideas out there for neighborhoods or something of special interest that hardly anyone would benefit from. I'm currently seeing a community organization stage protests and community events against a newly proposed mine in the area even though our state has the strictest mining regulations in the US while at the same time one of the iron ore mines has been given a decade or less to live. Most of their ideas and work have been laughed at by most residents and even if they do succeed in accomplishing their goal, whatever it is is hardly used and you drive by it and just wonder what the point was for it all.

But what I have seen is a community pull itself up after a huge natural disaster that was ignored by the federal government without some sort of community organizer/organization. We just helped each other out.

[AZhitman]

So a community organizer's job is to gather up all the uneducated retards to help them mooch off government services.

Awesome. Sounds like the DNC platform.

[audtatious]

So a community organizer's job is to gather up all the uneducated retards to help them mooch off government services.

Awesome. Sounds like the DNC platform.

Oh No, the Jez found the Politics Forum

Your boy gonna announce himself for a 3rd-party run?