Obie's Experience: "Community Organizer"

My friend Alpahdog decided to do a little digging to find out exactly what Obie's job as "Community Organizer" really was. Here's what he discovered:

Being cursed with the occasionally inquiring mind, I struck out on
my own to discover just what in the hell a community organizer
actually does.

It boiled down to this ( from the "Founding of ACORN" [Obie's group
of choice]).

"This community organizing initiative in Arkansas eventually grew
into the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN), the largest organization of lower income and working
families in the United States, with 175,000 dues-paying families
spread across about eighty-two staffed offices in American cities.

The ACORN family of organizations includes radio stations (KNON and KABF), publications, housing development and ownership (ACORN Housing), and a variety of other supports for direct organizing and issue campaigns, such as Project Vote and the Living Wage Resource Center. ACORN International has recently opened staffed offices in Lima, Peru, and Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. Several Mexico offices are slated to open in 2005.

175,000 dues-paying families? WTF?

Community organizers of the ACORN caliber are not unlike the shills
and hucksters who once met arriving immigrants promising them food,
shelter and a job in exchange for their savings. Of course if they
delivered on their end, the food was bad, the shelter was worse and
the job was unendurable. What I'd really like to know is how many
of those 175,000 dues paying families are better off for having
paid their dues.

Tom Wolfe succinctly sums up the allure of being a community
organizer with this:

"Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you
wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself.
Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job
counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the "neighborhood
organizer." As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you
stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were
still your own man. Like if you were a "neighborhood organizer,"
all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of
people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the
poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were
still on the street, and you got paid for it."

So there it is. Obama has always been a fucking street hustler
promising people a better life in exchange for their money. Some
people have no shame.

Alphadog
.