The Scam of "Community Organizing": Obama's Rent-Seeking World

Steve Malanga has a great article in The New York Post:

The roots of community organizing stretch back to the 1930s and the efforts of organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of "Rules for Radicals," to organize people in low-income areas into a political force to combat the political machine that ran Chicago.

Alinsky won many admirers on the Left, but it took President Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty to supercharge community organizing by directing billions of federal dollars to neighborhood groups with the naive and ambiguous goal of "empowering" communities.

The federal cash, eventually supplemented by state and local tax funds, helped create a universe of government-funded groups headed by local activists running everything from job-training efforts to recreation programs to voter-registration drives - far beyond anything Alinsky could've imagined.

Thousands of groups - eventually, 3,000 in New York City alone - arose to snatch government money. One startling sign of the growth: Today, New York now has more jobs at social-service agencies, most funded with government money, than on Wall Street.

You'll want to read the whole article.You'll get an education from reading this one.