Saul Alinsky:The Evil Genius Behind Obama (3 page)

Still, even today, when Obama tells audiences his community organizing experience “taught me a lot about listening to people as opposed to coming in with a premeditated agenda,”
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he is reciting pure Alinsky dogma. As noted earlier, “listening,” in the Alinsky lexicon, is just a tactic. and Obama listens because he has been taught the only way to intensify discontent is to use the language of the community itself. The goal is to rub raw economic discontent and fan the flames of class conflict. The plan remains to make the “have-nots” resent the “haves.” In practice, the Alinsky political methodology remains elitist in nature. Always, the community organizer knows best. It is the community that must be led, even if the only way to lead appears passive, by listening first. Becoming a politician, Obama was not planning to stop being a Saul Alinsky community organizer. Running for re-election in 2012, Obama is every bit as much the Saul Alinsky community organizer as he was a quarter-century ago, when he first moved to Chicago to work with Jerry Kellman.

Obama Preaches Class Warfare

Predictably, Obama has chosen to predicate his 2012 campaign to be re-elected president on themes of class warfare. In his 2012 State of the Union speech,
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Obama used the phrase “fair share” four times:

   • “We can neither settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their
fair share
and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

   • “Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its
fair share
of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas.”

   • “But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our
fair share
of taxes.”

   • “We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my
fair share
of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get a tax break I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income, or a student trying to get through school, or a family trying to make ends meet.”

Sitting with first lady Michelle Obama in the gallery of the House of Representatives to be on view during the nationally televised broadcast of the 2012 State of the Union speech was billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek. The secretary had become an issue in Obama’s “fair share” rhetoric after Buffett went public with the complaint that it was unfair he paid a lower percent of his income in taxes than did his secretary. On the day of Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Speech, Paul Roderick Gregory pointed out in Forbes that Bosanek earns between $200,000 and $500,000 a year, dramatically reducing her value as a sob story.
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Moreover, Gregory pointed out that Buffett’s earnings primarily come from investment earnings that are taxed at 15 percent. Still, with the television cameras watching, Obama proclaimed in the address that, “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.”

Next, Obama proclaimed what he called the “Buffett Rule,” namely that anyone earning more than $1 million a year should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. Never has Obama referenced what the
New York Post
revealed: that Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has owed the IRS as much as a $1 billion in unpaid taxes going back a decade, as long ago as 2002. “If Buffet really thinks he and his ‘mega-rich friends’ should pay higher taxes, why doesn’t his firm folk over what it already owes under
current
rates,” the
New York Post
asked. “Likely answer: He cares more about shilling for President Obama – who’s practically made socking ‘millionaires and billionaires’ his re-election them song – than about kicking in more himself.”
³⁵

Truthfully, the income tax schedule in the United States was never meant to be “fair.” A “fair tax” is typically a flat tax applied to consumable goods or services, such that every consumer, regardless how rich or poor, pays the same identical tax when purchasing the same identical goods or services. The income tax code in the United States is and has always been a progressive tax, designed such that the wealthier a person or family is, the higher the income tax percentage that must be paid. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the highest quintile of American taxpayers are the largest sources of federal revenues – including income taxes, social security payroll taxes, corporate income taxes and excise taxes – paying an average rate of 25 percent of their household income for the four taxes combined. By comparison, the second quintile pays only about 10 percent of their household income for the four taxes combined and the bottom quintile, less than 5 percent.
³⁶

Nearly half of all taxpayers end up paying no federal income tax whatsoever. In 2009, roughly 47 percent of all U.S. households, roughly 71 million households, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a percentage the Tax Policy Center measured at 46 percent in 2011.
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While not all the taxpayers paying no federal income tax are poor, only 1.5 percent of those making over $1 million in 2009 paid no income tax, while 69.5 percent of those making under $50,000 a year paid no income tax. Given that those earning more than $1 million a year constitute a relatively small number of people, the vast majority of the households that pay no income tax, somewhere between 70-75 million households in the United States, fall into the category of making under $50,000 a year. Moreover, almost 20 percent of all U.S. households earn so little that they will get tax “refunds,” in the form of earned income tax credits, even though they have paid no income tax in the first place.

This first conclusion should now be clear: The rich are already paying more than their fair share of taxes.

Financial analyst Steve McCann, writing in the
American Thinker
, posed the question, “What would the United States gain if in fact the government did confiscate the wealth of so-called rich and taxed at 100 percent all the income above $200,000.00 per household per year?”
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To answer the question, McCann turned to IRS statistics that indicated in 2008, there were 6.9 million taxpayers that had adjusted gross income above $200,000. Taxing at 100 percent all income over $200,000 would have yielded in 2008 a gain to the IRS of $221 billion. But in the future, who would work long enough to gain more than $200,000 in a year if the government were going to tax 100 percent of everything earned above that level? McCann further pointed out that according to IRS figures there were 2.7 million adults with a net worth above $1.5 million. If the government were to seize all wealth above the $1.5 million threshold, Washington would earn a one-time windfall of $4 trillion – hardly enough when the national debt is approaching $16 trillion and the 2012 federal budget deficit could turn out to be as high as $4 trillion for that year alone.
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This second conclusion should now also be clear: Taxing the rich more, to the point of confiscating the earnings and wealth of the rich, would not solve the problem the Obama administration faces with a rapidly growing federal government debt that is estimated to approach $4 trillion in 2012 and a federal debt that will soon exceed $16 trillion.

Still, Obama apparently is calculating that fanning the flames of class warfare, a “community organizing” tactic he learned from Saul Alinsky, will mobilize enough economic resentment to carry him to re-election. With half of all Americans now receiving some form of government aid, ranging from food stamps to Medicare/Medicaid, to unemployment insurance and Social Security payments, some 48.5 percent of the U.S. population lives in a household receiving some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, a number that has been increasing since the current prolonged economic downturn began in 2008.
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The dark underbelly of class envy is fear. By flaming the resentment of the growing number of American “have-nots,” Obama can seek to subtly suggest that the election of a Republican president in 2012 would mean the reduction of entitlement programs and other forms of government benefits paid disproportionately to the poor and the unemployed in America today.

“Three years after the Hope and Change president took office, Hope turns out to mean high taxes and lots of regulations, and Change consists of celebrating the government’s takeover of General Motors and belittling technological progress that destroys some jobs even as it creates others,” wrote economics commentator and reporter in the
New York Post
the day after Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Speech. “The Great Uniter is all about class warfare.”
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Will Obama’s strategy work? “But America is not (yet) Europe,” Gasparino continued. “People here aspire to be rich more than they hate success, no matter how many times the media extols the virtues of Occupy Wall Street and its attacks on the 1 percent.” Gasparino also pointed out that Obama’s class warfare rhetoric alienates former supporters in the business community, including top Wall Street donors who helped Obama bankroll his 2008 presidential election victory.

“Would you rather keep … tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires or would you say let’s get teachers back in the classroom?” Obama asked voters in Ohio during a speech given there in October 2011. “Now, the Republicans … they said, ‘Well, this is class warfare.’ You know what? If asking a billionaire to pay their fair share of taxes, to pay the same tax rate is a plumber or teacher is class warfare, then you know what? I’m a warrior for the middle class. I’m happy to fight for the middle class.”
⁴²

Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer points out the shallowness of Obama’s Saul Alinsky class warfare when he notes that growing inequality is a problem throughout the Western world, “But Obama’s pretense that it is the root cause of this sick economy is ridiculous,” Krauthammer wrote, “As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.”
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No wonder White House press secretary Jay Carney ducks the question raised by Newt Gingrich. When asked whether Obama is deeply influenced by the radical Chicago community organizer, Jay Carney said the president’s time with Alinsky was “well documented,” adding “his experience is a broad-based one that includes a lot of other areas in his life. I’ll just leave it at that.”
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In the CNN Republican presidential debate held in Charleston, South Carolina, on January 19, 2012, New Gingrich pointed out that despite his class warfare rhetoric, Obama still plans to spend $1 billion running for re-election in 2012. “I believe the only way to create the momentum is to be able to overcome his [Obama’s] billion dollar campaign with a series of debates which decisively convince the American people that a Saul Alinsky radical who is incompetent cannot be re-elected.”
⁴⁵
Gingrich argued it was imperative that Republicans defeat Barack Obama in 2012. “This is, I believe, the most dangerous president of our lifetime, and if he is reelected, after the disaster he has been, the level of radicalism of his second term will be truly frightening.”

__________________________

¹
   “Transcript, The Situation Room,” aired January 23, 2012, CNN.com.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1201/23/sitroom.02.html
.

²
   See, for instance: Clarence Page, “Gingrich’s secret love affair with Saul Alinsky tactics,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 2012.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-02-01/news/ct-oped-0201-page-20120201_1_alinsky-model-alinsky-rule-newt-gingrich
.

³
   Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
, Chapter XV, “Of the Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, Are Praised or Blaimed,” in: Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince and the Discourses
(New York: The Modern Library, 1940), p. 56.

⁴
   Saul Alinsky,
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
(New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 33.

⁵
  
Ibid.
, p. 138.

⁶
   Ibid.

⁷
   Ibid., p. 3.

⁸
   Ibid., pp. 184-185.

⁹
   Ibid., pp. 116-117.

¹⁰
   This was a frequent Saul Alinsky quotation at speeches and lectures. For a textual basis for the comment, see: Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, page 113, where Alinsky wrote, “Power is the reason for being of organizations.”

¹¹
   Rules for Radicals, op.cit., pp. 117-118.

¹²
   Ibid., p. 118

¹³
   Ibid., p. 119

¹⁴
   Marshall Rosenthal, ”Bringing It All Back Home,” Rolling Stone, March 4, 1971, pp. 2-6, at p. 3