« ABC News: Greek Tragedy (Dem: 'Obama temple', a disaster of mythical proportions...) | Main | If I were Biden, I'd sooner hide under a rock than throw stones at McCain (Updated) »
August 28, 2008
Obama wants Compelled Community Service for all Middle and High School Children
Topics: Political News and commentaries
I wonder how many Americans know of Barack Obama's proposals of bringing most charities under the federal umbrella in part by requiring all middle and high school children to do 50 hours of community service every year?
Jim Lindgren at Volokh calls this the most worrisome of Obama's proposals:
The details are on his campaign website and in his speeches calling Americans to service.Not only is Obama's proposal out of touch with "American traditions of individual volunteerism," as Jim points out in the above excerpt, but the fact that "our government is even capable of running a service program on a scale never before attempted is a matter of faith, not evidence," as Jim also notes. Yet as disturbing as these points are, even more disturbing is the fact that the proposal to force children to join his "cadres of community service workers" as part of his "civilian national security force," is eerily similar to the Barack Obama/William Ayers plan to turn Chicago schools into "re-education camps" to create "a generation of social revolutionaries." This, "my friends," is Marxism, and it stems from Obama's lifetime of 'self-allowed and perpetuated' indoctrination in socialist and communist views. I see no way to read this any other way than that the proposal is right out of Annenberg Challenge - Obama's and Ayer's - Chicago school reform project. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist that's had too much conspiracy theory Kool-Aid, it's got Obama's brand of community service all over it - community organization - after all, that's what Obama really is, a community organizer with a Marxist agenda.By requiring almost all public middle schoolers, starting at the age of 10 or 11, to join his new cadres of community service workers and become part of his "civilian national security force," Barack Obama shows himself to be out of touch with American traditions of individual volunteerism.
There is nothing wrong with a family allowing a child to volunteer at a young age: in the summer when I was 11, I spent several nights a week working for free at a concession stand in a little league baseball park. My parents were comfortable with this community service because at all times I was under the supervision of my mother's best friend. Parents then and parents today would like to choose whether their 11-year old child takes on even a part time job, and they would like to choose the job and judge for themselves whether the working conditions are suitable.
With his myriad proposals for new "Corps" and his proposal for universal service for all school children, Obama is trying to bring the charitable activities of 50 to 100 million people -- about half of them children -- under state control.
That Obama's proposal for compelled community service stems from his past is pointed out in Jims article as well, and he notes that Steven Malanga of City Journal has an article that deals with the Obama brand of community organizing:
[...] Community organizing's roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn't until President Lyndon Johnson's ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model--grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood--really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. The federal funds, eventually supplemented by state and local tax dollars, helped create a universe of government-funded community groups running everything from job-training programs to voter-registration drives--far beyond anything Alinsky could have imagined. Some 3,000 local social-services groups were soon receiving government funding in New York City alone. Many were new, but the money also helped turn traditional charities that had operated on private donations into government contractors.[...] Obama began his organizing life in the mid-1980s in a community group whose progress mirrored that of the rest of the industry: the Developing Communities Project, formed on Chicago's South Side as a "faith-based grassroots organization organizing and advocating for social change." Though founded with resources from a coalition of churches, over time the DCP evolved, like many left-leaning religious organizations, into a government contractor essentially subsisting on tax money--with nearly 80 percent of its revenues deriving from public contracts and grants.
[...] As a young college graduate immersed in the world of tax-bankrolled activism, Obama adopted the big-government ethos that prevailed among neighborhood organizers who viewed attempts to reform poverty programs as attacks on the poor. Speaking to an alternative weekly on the eve of his 1995 run for state senate, Obama said--in language that his wife, Michelle, would echo years later--that "these are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a 'lock 'em up, take no prisoners' mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress." He derided the "old individualistic bootstrap myth" of American achievement that conservatives were touting. Self-help strategies "have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda," he wrote in a chapter that he contributed to a 1990 book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. (He also depicted leftist community organizing as a harder task than similar efforts by the Christian Right, telling a reporter in 1995 that "it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness and false nostalgia.")"Both organizers and politicians would be wise to study them closely," indeed, as will every American voter if he and she value their freedom and the American way of life. Obama's plan for our children is not what Americans want - if they where aware of Obama's true history and agenda.[...] Obama's genius as a candidate, meanwhile, has not been lost on the community of activists from which he emerged. As a publication of the National Housing Institute, a social-justice group, has observed: "Barack Obama carries lessons he learned as a community organizer to the political arena. Both organizers and politicians would be wise to study them closely."
Offering children an opportunity to volunteer for community service, even requiring a certain number of public service, is one thing, requiring children to be part of a government-controlled and mandated program is quite another. Americans do not want "re-education camps" to create "a generation of social revolutionaries."
Am I missing something or is this not so alarming that the GOP should be making sure every American voter learns of it?
Posted by Richard at August 28, 2008 6:30 AM
Articles Related to Political News and commentaries:
