Ron Radosh reviews the forthcoming book from Stanley Kurtz, Spreading the Wealth:

What Stanley Kurtz has accomplished in his new book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, to be published on August 2, is nothing less than the complete exposure of President Barack Obama’s secret plans for his second term in office — plans that in reality amount to an assault on the values, well-being ,and quality of life of the very middle-class voters he claims to represent.

[…]

They amount to an entire gamut of initiatives, some well underway, to redistribute wealth not from the fabled 1% — who really do not have enough to save us from fiscal Armageddon even if the government took 80% of their profits — but from the average, middle-class, hardworking citizens who sought better lives and realized the American dream by moving to the suburbs, where the air is cleaner, the schools are decent, and life is peaceful and integrated.

These citizens are the very swing voters Obama is now courting; his many TV commercials about helping the middle class target them. What Kurtz reveals in chilling detail is that the group of radicals surrounding the president — names most of us (including me) are not familiar with — are nevertheless as dangerous and extreme in their goals as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. While those three are persona non grata in the White House, these unknown radicals are just as important, and they are planning social policy with Obama’s approval.

Here are their names, and when Kurtz’s book is published, they will hopefully become household names and what they advocate will be there for anyone to see. They are: Mike Kruglik, Obama’s boss and his trainer when Obama was a community organizer in the 1980s; Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor; John Powell, a law professor at Ohio State University who believes America suffers from structural racism; David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque, NM, who favors annexation of the suburbs by the cities; and Linda Darling-Hammond, a proponent of a politicized curriculum for schools, a close associate of Ayers, and a leader in the administration’s effort to create new national standards and tests for our schools.

If someone was to say that these people want nothing less than to destroy suburbs in America, you might think that this sounds too crazy to be any kind of real possibility. Yet this is their goal and their hope, motivated by the belief that the growth of the suburbs was not a result of the desire to spread out and lead a good life by people who wanted to realize the American dream, but instead was fueled by racism, greed, and a desire to benefit from exploiting poor minorities. Those making such arguments occupy what is called a “regionalist” movement, and they hope to attain their goal through programs like regional tax base sharing in which money previously held by suburban communities for the benefit of those who live in them will be taken and redistributed to nearby cities and poorer suburbs.

[…]

All of these measures were discussed in a major White House conference held on July 18, 2011, at an event not covered by the press and never given any publicity. Featuring Obama’s old mentor Kruglik, the movement to destroy the suburbs as the way to transform America by redistributing tax monies to the cities was the very topic of discussion. It is part of programs such as the Sustainable Communities Initiative, and to be run through the group set up by Kruglik, Building One America.

By showing what this group proposes and how Kruglik hopes to implement its plans, Kurtz ties together Obama’s past radicalism with his present-day actions. He has brought into the White House a group of radicals who are as extreme as Ayers and Dohrn, but who don’t have their negative name recognition. The essence of all the programs, described in detail by Kurtz, is to distribute money from the wealthy suburbs to the urban poor, a fulfillment of his long dream to destroy the suburbs, areas he thought of as a bastion of racism and individualism.

Obama, Kurtz shows, is running an active Alinskyite program in the present, not simply in the 1980s. It is a radicalism of a hidden, regionalist agenda, carefully kept below the radar, something that its exponents actually brag about. The programs waiting to be implemented actually are “nothing less,” Kurtz writes, “than a direct attack on large sections of his own middle-class supporters.” Building One America (an Orwellian name if there ever was one) is actually a movement to create forced equality of income, with the end result that everyone’s standard of living will fall. But it will promote “social justice,” of course, and real equality. It is, in essence, the dream of a left-wing social democracy in America, a new variant of the cradle-to-grave welfare state so adoringly favored by the inner group of Obama’s activist advisors.

In a masterful chapter on Saul Alinsky and his heritage, Kurtz has written what is perhaps the best account of what Alinsky’s tactics actually mean for Obama. As Kurtz writes: “Alinsky’s ideological reticence, his pragmatic gradualism in the service of hard-left goals, and his intentionally polarizing confrontation tactics have profoundly shaped both President Obama and the regionalist crusade he supports.” All of his original Alinsky mentors from the ’80s include people still with Obama today, such as Jerry Kellman, Mike Kruglik, and Greg Galluzzo — who worked first through the Gamaliel Foundation and today through One America — make up “the grassroots muscle behind the regionalist crusade.” […]

Obama, in true Alinskyite fashion, moves slowly from the ground up, to build redistributionist programs in a slow fashion, in order to prevent public opposition. Finally, in a brilliant chapter Kurtz titles “A Suburb of the Mind,” he shows how even in Obama’s own memoir, Dreams from My Father, the future president gave us much indication of his hostility to a middle-class lifestyle and suburbia, and his preference to make policy exclusively on behalf  of the urban poor. When Obama funded projects through the Woods Fund in Chicago, he gave economic support to his old community-organizer buddies and their new regionalist projects whose purpose, Kurtz writes, “was to run a class warfare campaign of agitation designed to expose the suburban American dream as a product of racism and greed.” Then through tax redistribution, new urban growth boundaries, and low-income housing quotas, the suburbs would in reality cease to exist.

By exposing Obama’s hidden radical programs, carried out under the radar and developed by hard-left ideologues, Kurtz has in fact given serious analysts of his programs the evidence needed to reveal that the goal is forced income equality. America, in other words, could become the First World’s very first model of a backwards looking Third World nation, such as Communist Cuba. By uncovering the reality of the White House’s secret program to destroy the suburbs — as crazy as that sounds — Kurtz has written a book that will throw a virtual monkey-wrench into Obama’s plans. The nation stands in his gratitude.

I believe I noted the other day that Obama was working hard to destroy the middle class — and a certain RoboTroll scoffed and asked for some proof.  Think he’ll buy the book?

Quick question before we Hobbits adjourn to discuss all this: is Stanley Kurtz now considered a Visigoth?  And Radosh a quasi-Visigoth for taking such Kurtzian Visigothery seriously?

Because I have to say, many of the “thinking right” — you know, those who denied Obama was anything other than an ordinary Democrat, many of them even willing to defend his centrist pragmatism (and were rewarded with editorships at prestigious conservative websites, in this, the end of the era of Reagan) — will find the kinds of crazy fringe allegations being made here very very very unhelpful. 

Or is it okay now to believe these kinds of things, and I just missed that tipping point?  I can never really gauge where it is I’m supposed to stand.

Sometimes I wish somebody would send out memos.

(thanks to geoff B)