FGF E-Package
A Voice from Fly-Over Country
October 8, 2013
Governed by a Community Organizer
by Robert L. Hale
fitzgerald griffin foundation
MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA —President Obama's life experiences have been as a community organizer, academic lecturer, and government employee. The consequences of these skills in a person entrusted with an executive role have become abundantly clear.
Not one of his experiences provides the knowledge or skill to run or manage anything. A community organizer's sole function is to force the unsuspecting productive members of society, through manipulated elected officials, to fund the desires of those unable or unwilling to provide for themselves.
A community organizer's tools are rhetoric, intimidation, and manipulation. These are not the skills needed to lead a dynamic nation of free people.
A community organizer's tools are rhetoric, intimidation, and manipulation. These are not the skills needed to lead a dynamic nation of free people. Obama's deficits are increasingly obvious. With him as America's Chief Executive Officer, the nation has become less dynamic, less free, and more dependent.
Leadership is not achieved through spouting rhetoric, indulging in wishful thinking, and creating divisions. Leadership is not achieved by imposing rules, regulations, laws, and mandates. Unfortunately, distracting rhetoric, wishful thinking, divisive tactics, and selective mandate imposition are the only tools a community organizer understands.
A community organizer's business is creating divisions among people. Any division is acceptable. Favorite wedges are race, gender, economic status, or social status. It makes no difference what the wedge is, as long as it motivates one group to see another as a foe. The purpose is not to improve anything, not to lift up anyone, but rather to force others to accommodate the demands of the organizer. Rarely, if ever, has a community organizer improved anyone's well-being. Rather, success is measured by the degree of strife, dissension, and money that can be exacted.
Applying a community organizer's particular skill set to governance produces strife, debt, reduced productivity, and increased hostility. Community organizing skills inappropriately redirect public funds and build stifling regulatory machinery. They do not facilitate voluntary efforts, foster unity, or build a cohesive and productive society.
With him as America's Chief Executive Officer, the nation has become less dynamic, less free, and more dependent.
The fruits of Obama's five years of "leadership" are all too evident in daily news reports. We see few indications of job growth, new business formation, new innovations, or a growing and robust middle class; indeed, we see precisely the opposite.
• The United States has experienced the slowest economic growth and the highest unemployment in its history.
• The President has doubled the national debt.
• His answer to slow job creation and high unemployment is to claim the economy would be much better off if we had more federal, state, and local government workers.
• The President tells us we must give amnesty to illegal aliens because they are needed to fill jobs and pay taxes. At the same time he pushes gay marriage and promotes abortion and birth control. So we need immigrants because of low birth rates? And we need to promote abortion and birth control because we need more taxpayers? Obama must believe Americans are so poorly educated that they buy his contradictory rhetoric. And he may be right.
• Federal, state, and local governments are piling up massive debt, including unfunded future liabilities. The unfunded future liabilities are primarily retirement benefits. The size of these liabilities is due to unjustifiably generous, negotiated retirement packages for union members. The Office of Personnel Management tells us that in 2011 alone, taxpayers funded more than 3.4 million hours of federal union activities, unrelated to government duties but directly related to increased taxpayer burdens.
America is confronted with historically high unemployment and taxation, as well as anemic economic growth. Our police forces are being militarized, government spying and data collection on millions of innocent American citizens are unchecked, and thousands of new laws are passed each year. The invasion of millions of illegal aliens and a shrinking middle class are ignored.
The fruits of Obama's five years of "leadership" are all too evident in daily news reports. We see few indications of job growth, new business formation, new innovations, or a growing and robust middle class; indeed, we see precisely the opposite.
These conditions are exactly what a community organizer seeks. Such conditions make people desperate and give the community organizer the fuel to push people to accept growing government when it carries promises of relief from despair. Of course, relief never comes. If it did, the community organizer would no longer be needed.
Possibly the final nail in America's coffin and the guarantor of the perpetual election of community organizer-based governments will be the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare). Obamacare's costs and regulatory mandates will, in less than five years, double America's health care costs and significantly reduce care quality and availability. Obamacare mandates are driving doctors out of the profession. With fewer doctors and a proven inability of government to effectively or efficiently manage anything, Americans will see their renowned health care system devolve to a rationed, second-class system.
Everyone will suffer. Suffering will bring about demands for relief. Community organizers will step forward placing blame and offering resolution. May God help and bless America.
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A Voice from Fly-Over Country is copyright © 2013 by Robert L. Hale and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. All rights reserved.
Robert L. Hale received his J.D. in law from Gonzaga University Law School in Spokane, Washington. He is founder and director of a non-profit public interest law firm. For more than three decades he has been involved in drafting proposed laws and counseling elected officials in ways to remove burdensome and unnecessary rules and regulations.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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