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2008-09-04 Home Front: Politix
Community Organizers Fight Back!
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Posted by Swamp Blondie in the Cornfields 2008-09-04 14:55|| || Front Page|| [10 views ]  Top

#1 Nope. I think it's serious...

“I have ‘actual responsibilities,’” said Jacqueline del Valle, a community organizer in the Bronx. “If Mayor Giuliani and President Bush cared more about non working people instead of just people who can hire high-powered lobbyists, maybe I wouldn’t have so much responsibility. Maybe non working people would have an easier time in America today. But that’s not our reality, and they don’t have to mock us while we’re trying to clean up their mess.”

I fixed it. Actual "working people" have little need for these folks. They're too busy working. Probably to pay these "community activists" salaries.
Posted by tu3031 2008-09-04 15:31||   2008-09-04 15:31|| Front Page Top

#2 there are lots of people who work and live in places like the South Bronx.
Posted by liberalhawk 2008-09-04 15:32||   2008-09-04 15:32|| Front Page Top

#3 and lots of people who don't.
Posted by tu3031 2008-09-04 15:35||   2008-09-04 15:35|| Front Page Top

#4 lots of people who dont live in the south bronx? Well considering its got a pop of what, a few hundred thousand, and the USA has a pop of 300 million plus, sure.

I dont know why a community organizer in the bronx is supposed to help folks in alabama or dallas or chicago though.
Posted by liberalhawk 2008-09-04 15:47||   2008-09-04 15:47|| Front Page Top

#5 or do you mean lots of people who work dont live in slums? yeah. Depends on how much someone makes, how many kids, if their spouse works, if they have a spouse, if they have health insurance, what their health is like, what there other problems are like. Life is complicated, and while its great that lots of people have enough to live well, and to build their communities on their own, or live in the kinds of communities that dont need to be organized cause no one would ever build a polluting facility there, cause the land is too costly, or would wipe it out for a highway, or would need to fight city hall to get basic services, theres some places where, well, its different.

Posted by liberalhawk 2008-09-04 15:51||   2008-09-04 15:51|| Front Page Top

#6 there was a time, you know, not taht long ago, when conservatives seemed to acknowledge that was the case - they thought compassion was needed, and that our main failing was excluding faith based solutions.

Are you guys now running to the right of W on poverty? Its beginning to seem that way.
Posted by liberalhawk 2008-09-04 15:52||   2008-09-04 15:52|| Front Page Top

#7 Just what the hell does a "community organizer" actually do? What do they produce? I have a job. I have to produce at that job. It can be measured. No one owes me a damn thing except the payment for labor already done.

Just guessing, but I suspect their main job is "suck at the government teat and persuade others to do the same, knowing full well that the government's money actually comes out of the pockets of people who work and PRODUCE something. And thinking they're owed other people's hard-earned money."
Posted by Barbara Skolaut">Barbara Skolaut  2008-09-04 15:54|| http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/]">[http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/]  2008-09-04 15:54|| Front Page Top

#8 What is a community organizer?
Posted by tipper 2008-09-04 15:55||   2008-09-04 15:55|| Front Page Top

#9 “The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed."

Let's see, we need Community Organizers because Republicans go into the communities and cause failure.

They write graffiti on the walls, vandalize the infrastructure, throw trash in the streets and burn unoccupied buildings.

Then they set up crack houses and force children to quit school. Finally they get more that 50% our the community's young women pregnant and then abandon them to raise the children as single mothers.

That covers some of evil the Republicans do in communities. They need Community Organizers to protect the communities. It's sort of like the Sons of Iraq (Awakening Councils). Maybe they should set up checkpoints to keep the Republicans out.
Posted by GolfBravoUSMC 2008-09-04 16:03||   2008-09-04 16:03|| Front Page Top

#10 Are you guys now running to the right of W on poverty? Its beginning to seem that way.

Maybe we're sick of paying for it when we're barely getting by ourselves. Maybe we're sick of standing in line at the grocery store and watching the food stamp card come out and then watching mom and the kids load it all up in the Land Cruiser or the Lexus. Oh, yeah, I have seen it. Maybe we're sick of being called mean spirited right wing bigots that aren't doing enough or don't have enough compassion by people like you.
Posted by tu3031 2008-09-04 16:12||   2008-09-04 16:12|| Front Page Top

#11 Did Obama work for ACORN specifically? Just curious.
Posted by Grenter, Protector of the Geats 2008-09-04 16:18||   2008-09-04 16:18|| Front Page Top

#12 'Hawk, a lot of us conservatives participate in the relief of poverty through St. Vincent de Paul and Habitat and similar organizations--contributing and volunteering--or just by helping deserving people one on one. A family down the street from us lost their home and father and what amounts to all their worldly goods in a fire. People in our town raised tens of thousands of dollars to help them replace furniture and clothes and replace the lost income while the mom fights with the insurance companies. All of this was ad hoc, spontaneously organized; we didn't need no Harvard-educated community organizers.

The objection to "community organizer" is not that we're against the relief of poverty, it's a bunch of other things:
-- Sen. Obama claims his experience as a "community organizer" prepares him to be president, but Gov. Palin's experience as a mayor and, you know, governor is not as valuable.
-- Sen. Obama has never adequately explained what a community organizer does, or what he accomplished when he was one.
-- A lot of us suspect a community organizer is someone who more often than not runs around collecting grant money but never quite produces tangible results--despite the best of intentions. (See, also, e.g., "Social Worker.")
-- Social services agencies tend to care about budget size and "units of service delivered," but not about actually solving people's problems. (I'm involved wth a nonprofit that's trying to promote a results-oriented model, and you'd be amazed at the resistance we get from the social services industry. E-mail me and I'll direct you to the organization's website so you can learn more.)
Posted by Mike">Mike  2008-09-04 16:29||   2008-09-04 16:29|| Front Page Top

#13 "running to the right of W on poverty?"
Maybe we're just getting a little tired of having people with Ivy League educations, million dollar homes, $165,000 senate salaries, and congressional health care telling us that we need to share the wealth.
Posted by Darrell 2008-09-04 16:30||   2008-09-04 16:30|| Front Page Top

#14 -- Sen. Obama has never adequately explained what a community organizer does, or what he accomplished when he was one.
-- A lot of us suspect a community organizer is someone who more often than not runs around collecting grant money but never quite produces tangible results--despite the best of intentions. (See, also, e.g., "Social Worker.")

Steve Graham over at Hog on Ice offered another possibility: it's just a fancy name for "ward heeler."
Posted by Abdominal Snowman 2008-09-04 16:35||   2008-09-04 16:35|| Front Page Top

#15 Is a "community organizer" a rabble rouser? Or a trouble maker? Or an apologist for rioters and looters?
Posted by JohnQC 2008-09-04 16:57||   2008-09-04 16:57|| Front Page Top

#16 Oh Darrelll, dontcha know? What is our is theirs and what is theirs is none of our biz.

LH, that was truly inane. Not sure where to start, but please understand that social workers/community organizers are not interested in fighting poverty, that is a feel-good cover, their purpose is to create dependency. They need poverty, else they would be out of job.
Posted by Spike Uniter 2008-09-04 16:58||   2008-09-04 16:58|| Front Page Top

#17 The essentials of fighting poverty are rather simple.
Give the man a fish the first day and teach him how to fish the next day. Problem solved.
Posted by Spike Uniter 2008-09-04 17:02||   2008-09-04 17:02|| Front Page Top

#18 Spike, of course, the man has to want to fish. If he'd rather get the fish for free, and people continue to give it to him ..
And of course there is that old joke about "Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat all day and drink beer."
Posted by Rambler in California">Rambler in California  2008-09-04 17:10||   2008-09-04 17:10|| Front Page Top

#19 LH, I've done charity work for the poor and worked in "the community" my entire adult life, while having at least one and sometimes two jobs.

However, during the course of my volunteer work, I've had the distinct displeasure to encounter several of these professional "community organizers".

I'll tell you who the bulk of these "community organizers" are. They're the type of arrogant, conceited, group victim ideology, devoid of humility scum who believe that they are God on Earth, and that working in the for-profit private sector would soil their very existence. They don't actually get their hands dirty dealing with the needy directly, but instead pontificate about what others should do, and more specifically, how much money they should fork over. The truth is, that almost to a person, they lack the intelligence and work ethic to succeed in the real private sector, and resent anyone who succeeds there.

I can guarantee that my effort over decades of volunteer work has had more of a positive, transformative effect on the needy than any ten professional "community organizers" combined.
Posted by no mo uro 2008-09-04 17:35||   2008-09-04 17:35|| Front Page Top

#20 I welcome any and all sunshine to bath the community organizers here in Chicago.
Most of us have known Sarah Palin for about 7 days now, and I have a working understanding of what she has spent her time in public service doing... I know what a mayor is, and what a governor does.
Yet Barak only wants to block access to any understanding of what he did when he burned through $110 million on a couple hundred Chicago public schools.
Posted by Capsu 78 2008-09-04 18:10||   2008-09-04 18:10|| Front Page Top

#21 So...a community organizer is a type of hustler?
Posted by swksvolFF 2008-09-04 18:41||   2008-09-04 18:41|| Front Page Top

#22 “The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed."


Let's be clear: Chicago is and has been a Democratic fiefdom since Hizzoner Da Mayor, Daley the Elder, Richard J., won in 1957. Repooblicans didn't destroy the south and west sides of da city.



And Barack Obama didn't rebuild any of it. The public 'Section 8' housing he worked on was a scam that enriched the developers and left the housing units worse off than before. The Annenberg Challenge for the Chicago public schools was, in the review by the Annenberg Foundation itself, ineffective (except for spreading money around to Bill Ayers' friends). 



You can't point to a single thing that Barack Obama rebuilt. You really can't point to much that any community organizer has rebuilt on the south side.
Posted by Steve White 2008-09-04 19:42||   2008-09-04 19:42|| Front Page Top

#23 And one more point: if we ever subjected the non-profit 'community' organizations to the same financial and fiduciary scrutiny we subjected the average Fortune 2000 business, the prisons wouldn't be big enough to hold all the malefactors.
Posted by Steve White 2008-09-04 19:46||   2008-09-04 19:46|| Front Page Top

#24 Knowledge question? What exactly is a "community organizer"? Would "social worker" be another word for it?
Posted by European Conservative 2008-09-04 19:47||   2008-09-04 19:47|| Front Page Top

#25 It's a term first heard here in the US in leftwing activism from the 1960s tied to organizing for political pressure or protest.
Posted by lotp 2008-09-04 19:56||   2008-09-04 19:56|| Front Page Top

#26 17 The essentials of fighting poverty are rather simple.
Give the man a fish the first day and teach him how to fish the next day. Problem solved.

---------

Get a HS education

don't get married before age 20

don't have kids before your married.

study about 30 years ago, updated a couple of years ago - that's the base........
Posted by anonymous2u 2008-09-04 19:56||   2008-09-04 19:56|| Front Page Top

#27 So...a community organizer is a type of hustler?

Jesse Jackson Sr.
Posted by anonymous2u 2008-09-04 19:57||   2008-09-04 19:57|| Front Page Top

#28  Knowledge question? What exactly is a "community organizer"? Would "social worker" be another word for it?
Not quiet a social worker. More like a community agitator.
This from wiki
1940 to 1960

The emergence of the distinctive approach of Saul Alinsky spurred new thought and new blood into community movements. Those influenced by Alinsky were (and still are) concerned with social justice as their primary framework. Alinsky promoted greater awareness of community organizing in academic circles, and those affiliated with Alinsky trained a generation of organizers.

1960 to present

The American Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movements, the Chicano movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement all influenced and were influenced by ideas of neighborhood organizing. Experience with federal anti-poverty programs and the upheavals in the cities produced a thoughtful response among activists and theorists in the early 1970s that has informed activities, organizations, strategies and movements through the end of the century. Less dramatically, civic associations and neighborhood block clubs were formed all across the country to foster community spirit and civic duty, as well as provide a social outlet.

Many of the most notable leaders in community organizing today emerged from the National Welfare Rights Organization. John Calkins of DART, Ernesto Cortes of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Wade Rathke of ACORN, John Dodds of Philadelphia Unemployment Project and Mark Splain of the AFL-CIO, among others.

Other famous community organizers include: Jane Addams, César Chávez, Samuel Gompers, Martin Luther King, Jr., John L. Lewis, Ralph Nader, Barack Obama, Pat Robertson, and Paul Wellstone.
Posted by tipper 2008-09-04 20:03||   2008-09-04 20:03|| Front Page Top

#29 some might even argue - not me, of course - komissar.
Posted by anonymous2u 2008-09-04 20:40||   2008-09-04 20:40|| Front Page Top

#30 Knowledge question? What exactly is a "community organizer"? Would "social worker" be another word for it?

European Conservative, social workers are local government employees whose brief is to protect the widow and the orphan from rampaging fate. My maternal grandmother was the first woman in Germany to hold that job: in her town she introduced and enforced the idea that fathers could not abuse their children to the point of beating them to death, if I understand family tales correctly.

Community organizers are political animals whose job it is to get the poor neighborhood to protest the chosen cause until the local government acknowledges the protest. Possibly something will be done after, but the key goal is the televised meeting with the city mayor.
Posted by trailing wife ">trailing wife  2008-09-04 21:00||   2008-09-04 21:00|| Front Page Top

#31 "but the key goal is the televised meeting with the city mayor"

*snort*

You owe me a new monitor, tw. ;-p
Posted by Barbara Skolaut">Barbara Skolaut  2008-09-04 21:08|| http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/]">[http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/]  2008-09-04 21:08|| Front Page Top

#32 The Club has them on quantity discount, Barb. See the bartender for our current inventory list. ;-)
Posted by lotp 2008-09-04 21:09||   2008-09-04 21:09|| Front Page Top

#33 Keyboards have been a bigger problem.
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2008-09-04 21:14||   2008-09-04 21:14|| Front Page Top

#34 Got a couple cartons of those in the back room too. ;-)
Posted by lotp 2008-09-04 21:16||   2008-09-04 21:16|| Front Page Top

#35 From a 1972 Playboy article"

PLAYBOY: The assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of the middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?

ALINSKY: Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can and will go either of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming terminal.

They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.

The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2008-09-04 21:22||   2008-09-04 21:22|| Front Page Top

#36 1972? Those were the good years. Pictures?
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2008-09-04 21:26||   2008-09-04 21:26|| Front Page Top

#37 Thanks trailing wife

I couldn't find a German translation.
Which is probably a good thing.
Posted by European Conservative 2008-09-04 21:51||   2008-09-04 21:51|| Front Page Top

#38 I've found Sozialwerker and Betreuer doing an on-line search, European Conservative. I'll check my Duden later, and post the result in the O Club -- look in the yellow box in the right margin for the link. I'll ask AutoBartender to set aside a good Belgian beer for you on my tab. (I don't drink the stuff myself, but I'm told it's quite good.)
Posted by trailing wife">trailing wife  2008-09-04 23:11||   2008-09-04 23:11|| Front Page Top

#39 
Posted by General Comment 2008-09-04 23:16||   2008-09-04 23:16|| Front Page Top

#40 "or do you mean lots of people who work dont live in slums? yeah. Depends on how much someone makes, how many kids, if their spouse works, if they have a spouse, if they have health insurance, what their health is like, what there other problems are like. Life is complicated,"

-it sure is, it gets infinitely more complicated when some people make the same stupid fucking choices over and over and over again. I am sick of paying for others poor life decisions.

I usually give to children's charities or anything to do w/disabled vets.

How many kids one has or if they're married is a choice on their part. If you decide to have kids before college and then think the gov't (i.e. we the tax paying people) owes you a college education - you are seriously wrong. If you want to have a bunch of kids but are too stupid to do a simple budget and will go into the spin cycle - your problem not mine. Poverty is a number. If you have a plasma t.v. you are not poor. If you have a.c. you are not poor. If you have a car less than 4 yrs old you are not fucking poor.
Posted by Broadhead6 2008-09-04 23:57||   2008-09-04 23:57|| Front Page Top

23:57 Broadhead6
23:54 Swamp Blondie in the Cornfields
23:50 ed
23:49 rjschwarz
23:49 rjschwarz
23:47 rjschwarz
23:47 ed
23:46 General Comment
23:46 rjschwarz
23:39 Swamp Blondie in the Cornfields
23:39 JosephMendiola
23:37 Broadhead6
23:34 Barbara Skolaut
23:32 Barbara Skolaut
23:31 Swamp Blondie in the Cornfields
23:31 Redneck Jim
23:29 Redneck Jim
23:27 JosephMendiola
23:27 Redneck Jim
23:26 ed
23:20 Broadhead6
23:16 General Comment
23:12 Barbara Skolaut
23:12 General Comment









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