Obama's "Empowered" America

Community organizing and neighborhood activism is not about helping people...

It's about harvesting their votes.  Despite billions spent and decades of activism, every dysfunction of poor communities is on the increase:  dependency, violence, school drop outs, drug use, unwed pregnancies.

Beat down by life, America's poor are coddled by community activists who stoke angry grievances against "the system," "the man," the "rich and powerful," whatever gets you through your miserable life.  Every now and then, a mischievous liberal will dangle a bauble or two in front of them just for kicks...

DETROIT -- Detroit's homeless and low-income residents have another opportunity for a chance at millions of stimulus dollars.  The money is available to help low-income residents from becoming homeless and homeless residents to find housing.

Thousands of people lined up Tuesday. Some people in line falsely believed they were registering for $3,000 stimulus checks from the Obama Administration.

This betrays a pathology in certain pockets of America, where people, despite the blows of reality, still believe in free money and the fairy tales their progressive keepers tell them.  They need to believe in themselves...

Here's what embattled ACORN boss Bertha Lewis had to say about empowerment as she railed against the forces assailing her corrupt organization:

"We've seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you."

Real Power? 

All those poor people standing in line for free stuff don't look empowered to me.  Ask them if it felt like real power being rousted out of their tenement blocks, plied with booze and smokes, and bussed off to go pull the lever for the latest slate of corrupt Democrat politicians. 

Who has the real power?

Liberal Democrats like President Obama, who harvest the votes of the inner city poor by promising them hope while distributing some meager goodies through corrupt community organizers. 

So how does an ordinary American, even an impoverished American, get real power? 

Three letters: J - O - B.   

And if you can't find one, it's time to M - O - V -E.

I am the king of my humble, 40 year old castle, standing on my deck, beer in hand, surveying my postage stamp yard over the lid of my BBQ grill.  I'll never dine at Cannes with the rich and beautiful, but as George Straight sings, "I ain't rich, but Lord I'm free."  And it's all because I have a job. 

And I might still be unemployed had I not escaped the rust belt at the tender age of 17.  What else did I do right? 

I followed Dr. Walter E. Williams' Rules to Avoid Poverty:

* Graduate high school
* Get married before you have children
* If you get married, stay married
* Get a job, any job. A minimum wage job is a stepping stone
* Avoid engaging in criminal behavior

I am not highly educated and I did not come from privilege.  One set of grandparents were Eastern Europeans who were dragged off to forced labor in Nazi Germany.  The other side of my family were itinerant dirt farmers.

If community organizers were sincere about giving the poor "real power" they would teach them the power of self-sufficiency contained in Dr. Williams' rules.  But then, that's no way to build a liberal political movement...   

ClickonDetroit
WaPo - Milbank

Divide and Conquer

Elect a community organizer president and he will try to become a national organizer.

What President Obama and his activist-followers are engaged in is not community organizing. It is community dividing, creating chaos that splits neighborhoods, towns, cities, and eventually, a nation.

Bussing in rent-a-screamers constitutes an invasion that disrupts a community. Hot Air Pundit has a good example. HT to Can We Keep Our Republic?

Either way, it's not good. But what did we expect from the community organizer model?

Community organizing is not about reducing poverty and helping people. It is about milking more tax money in exchange for herding the underprivileged to the voting booth and protest rallies. Angry city dwellers are the foot soldiers in this liberal activist army. The last thing the poverty hustlers want is to thin their ranks by making productive, tax-paying citizens of these people.

To keep everybody on the Democratic plantation, people with useless college degrees legitimize societal dysfunction by calling it culture and refuse to be judgmental. They stoke historic grievances to keep everybody in that cage of despair.

So what's the alternative?
Defund acorn, americorps and all the other professional troublemakers. If their model is so good they should be able to get private funding for their activities.

Bring in extra cops and enforce a zero-tolerance policy. It worked for New York City under Mayor Giuliani.

Next, make every minor and every unemployed person go to school. Once they finish school make them get a job. We could facilitate this by enforcing immigration policy so entry-level jobs are no longer the exclusive domain of illegal aliens.

How do you motivate people to get a job? By cutting off food stamps and welfare. You don't work, you don't eat. A little piece of natural law that has worked since the dawn of time.

Jesus Was a Carpenter

"Jesus was a community organizer, Pilate was a governor."

This bit of wisdom comes from the same liberals who excoriate President Bush's prayers, denigrate Sarah Palin for living her religion, and routinely ridicule "right-wing Christians." I won't even mention their casual antisemitism cloaked in criticism of Zionism and "Neocons."

All I can say is, welcome to the club. Now, what would Our Lord and Savior say about your unqualified support for abortions, including leaving babies who survive them to die?

This near-blasphemous nonsense is the work of desperate Obamaniacs caught in the grip of Piddle in the Pants Palin Panic (known as P4 for short). The Bible calls Jesus many things: Christ, Lord, Messiah (sorry O-Man, Jesus was there first), but community organizer is never mentioned. Not even The Almighty escapes this crowd's desperate, grubby misappropriations.

What is a community organizer? Depends on who you talk to. Near as I can tell, they spend government grant money in pursuit of... More government grant money! Here's Michelle Malkin's take:

With benefactors like Obama in office, ACORN (a left-wing community organizing bastion) has milked nearly four decades of government subsidies to prop up chapters that promote the welfare state and undermine the free market, as well as some that have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and voter fraud.

The Chicago Sun Times has a more charitible view:

Community organizers come into poor neighborhoods and try to get people knocked down by life back up on their feet.

They tell them where to find jobs, where to send their kids for day care, where to get drug counseling.

They show residents how they can organize to protest poor housing conditions, low pay and other inner-city woes.

Are there really people so helpless that they need someone to tell them where to find a job or a babysitter? There comes a point when training wheels do more harm than good.

I can tell someone how to protest crummy housing, poor neighborhoods and no jobs: Move!

Think I'm being callous? I've been there. The factories were shutting down when I graduated high school. No future in my hometown, so I moved on (with a push from papa Silverfiddle).

Liberalism doesn't provide that push. Instead it encourages the oppressed and downtrodden to wallow in their misfortune (and vote Democrat) instead of just getting up and moving on. This situation does provide employment opportunities though... for more community organizers!

It's called a self-licking ice cream cone...