86 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyyears, Ford has spent some $200 million on what it now estimates to be 2000 CDCs. The
difference between today’s CDC and the community activism of the 1960s is small but critical:
participation is still the key word, but the emphasis is on substantive participation – community
involvement in a particular activity like rehabilitating local housing – rather than on
participation for participation’s sake. Success is hard to measure. Few of these “corporations”
could exist without outside support: yet to Ford and to the communities that host them, they
represent an important kind of “self-help.” And that, for the moment, is still the most urgent
priority – with the goal of integration still deferred indefinitely. (Tamar Jacoby)
This is the kind of thing Obama is talking about when he claims that he was trying to organize a
community to bring back jobs that had been lost when a steel mill shut down. The way to create
jobs is to organize politically and expand the New Deal policies which have been proven effective
in creating high technology jobs at union wages. Instead, Obama offered an exercise in futility
leading to no tangible gains and the burnout of most of his main cadre, which was the plan.
These community development corporations were also termed “collaboratives.” Once again, the
scale of organization is always minuscule, the dominant ideology localist in the extreme, and the
chances of any success asymptotically approaching zero. The collaboratives also include an attempt
to wipe out prevailing moral values in the target population, which reminds us of Obama’s
infamous San Francisco “Bittergate” tirade, in which he criticized rural populations facing high
unemployment for their devotion to religion, gun ownership, ethnic pride, and the resistance to
economic globalization. This is the mental world of the foundation-funded social engineer and
political manipulator in unalloyed form. One analyst notes that
The so-called “collaboratives” movement in community development is emblematic of the 30-
year-long foundation assault on the bourgeois virtues that once kept communities and families
intact. The idea behind this movement, which grows out of the failed community action programs of
the 1960s, is that a group of “community stakeholders,” assembled and funded by a foundation,
becomes a “collaborative” to develop and implement a plan for community revitalization. That plan
should be “comprehensive” and should “integrate” separate government services, favorite
foundation mantras. To the extent this means anything, it sounds innocuous enough, and sometimes
is. But as with the foundations’ choice of community groups in the 1960s, the rhetoric of
“community” and local empowerment is often profoundly hypocritical. (Heather Mac Donald)
This is the world of local, small-scale corporatism, with communitarian overtones – this is truly
Obama’s world.
“PATRONAGE TROUGHS FOR POLITICAL OPPORTUNISTS”
Here is another example of the same foundation social control strategy based on community
development corporations as it has been implemented over the past decades in Miami, Florida, in
the wake of a serious urban riot a quarter of a century ago. We quote it at length because it is
important for the reader to understand as clearly as possible what cynical manipulation lurks behind
the benevolent-sounding job description of “community organizer” in Obama’s constantly touted
resume:
If you haven’t had a couple of bloody, terrifying urban riots down the street from your
corporate headquarters, the experiences of Knight-Ridder’s CEO, James K. Batten, 53, can help
you capture the feeling, and lead you to one of our first “heroes.” After Miami’s lacerating
Liberty City riot of 1980, Batten helped mobilize the business community. Says he: “Suddenly