Let’s Not Get Organized By Barack Obama

“Barack Obama and I share one thing in common: I am a community organizer and so was Obama. I imagine we’ve witnessed many of the same injustices, heard similar stories of people being beaten down and being taken advantage of, and have studied the same strategies and tactics for how to build power for the powerless.

So why did Obama stop community organizing? Does he believe that in the past eight years, power has dramatically shifted to the once powerless in order to bring about the radical changes required to put the stories he’d heard of poverty and hunger to rest? Did he think it was finally time for the community to take over, ready to exercise its power gained through decades of effective organizing, leadership development, and development of community-based institutions focused on human rights, social justice, and economic fairness?

Or is it that Obama never was a community organizer, but rather an organizer of the Democratic Party, building a base for himself within his party by going out to the community in order to build a winning narrative that starts with “when I was with the common folk” and ends with “and now that I am President”?

All I can do is watch what Obama does. First, I can see that he is a Democrat. He is now the leader of the same coalition that “ended welfare as we know it” in 1996, that largely supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and that recently bailed out Wall Street bankers. Obama, and the party he now leads, supports the expansion of government surveillance and of American forces in Central Asia, and has no plan or even a promise to de-privatize health care by creating a universal single payer system.”

Read the full article at Infoshop.org/news.