Rules for Radicals and OWS

[jgaffney]

In the Book Report section, I posted my opinion of Saul Alinsky's book, Rules for Radicals. You can get a paperback copy at Amazon for about ten bucks. It's only 200 pages, so it's an easy read.

Recently, I received a condensed version of the book in a 51-page pamphlet from David Horowitz of DiscoverTheNetworks.org. The pamphlet, Rules for Revolution, The Alinsky Model, is available here.

There's a section titled "Alinsky and Obama" that gives some background on Mr. Alinsky and the development of his theory. This particular paragraph, on page 10 of the pdf, jumped right out at me:

Unlike the Communists who identified their goal as a Soviet state - and thereby generated opposition to their schemes - Alinsky and his followers organize their power base without naming the end game, without declaring a specific feature they want to achieve - socialism, communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future, they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system. By refusing to commit to principles or identify their goal, they have been left to organize a coalition of all of the elements of the left who were previously divided by disagreements over means and ends.

Sounds a lot like the OWS crowd, doesn't it? Do those folks who are camped out on the slopes around Santa Rosa City Hall (Hint: you can't sleep in a tent pitched on a 20% slope) realized that they are being played for dupes by the professional organizers?

[subdjoe]

As I've mentioned before, the "Progressives" never mention towards what they are progressing.

[Mink]

JOBS.......that is what OWS wants. It's that simple, but some are lost in the revolt against big money selling our jobs overseas. Any questions?

[subdjoe]

And what drove jobs overseas? A government that keeps making it harder to do business in the US.

[jgaffney]

Mink, admit it. What drove jobs overseas was a combination of the American worker pricing himself out of the market, and the American consumer digging for lower and lower prices.

Remember when PCs first came out? You could buy a full-house IBM for about $3,000. Almost all of the machine was made in America. If you were lucky, it had 256k of RAM, a 20 meg hard drive, a 300-baud modem and a monochrome display. Not too many people bought them. Nowadays, you can walk into Best Buy and buy a machine that is ten times as fast, with a gigabite of RAM, a terabyte of hard drive, plus networking and an eye-popping color display for about $500. Which would you prefer? Which do you presently own?

Face it - America is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse it was in the post-war years. We emerged from WW2 relatively unscathed, so we enjoyed a period of dominance in the world markets while the other countries were busy rebuilding. Now that the world has caught up with us, American companies must ship their manufacturing offshore in order to stay competitive. Meanwhile, the American workers who have not bothered to update their skills are finding themselves left behind as the rest of the world moves on.

A graphic illustration of this is the fact that, since 1950, unionization in private industries has plummeted, offset only by the growth of unionization among government employees. The drop in private sector union membership can be attributed to the decline of workers in the traditional heavy industries, and also the realization among other workers that they don't need the unions any more. The unions have succeeded in getting many of their demands - the 40-hour week, safety standards, healthcare, etc. - written into law, so who needs unions any more? With the drop in union membership has also come a drop in automatic contributions to the Democrat Party, which has many progressives alarmed.

So, you see there's a lot more to the story than merely claiming that "big money" is sending "our jobs" overseas.

Your thoughts, please.