How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

By Stanley Kurtz
8/13/2012



Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites. From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest? The answer emphatically is no.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor. Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities. It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election. But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives. Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors. Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs. Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals. These are, of course, code words. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid. In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states. Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir,Dreams from My Father. Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill.” Dreams actually begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being that the city is the moral choice.

Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy version of the American dream. Lolo got a job with an American oil company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at the company club. Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to disdain them as well. From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired upward mobility had broken his new family in two.

Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his grandparents as strangers. The realization dawned as they drove him along a sprawl-filled highway. Obama then threw in his lot with an African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists. Rejecting assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish his racial credentials.

Dreams from My Father describes Davis’s efforts to pass this stance on to Obama. At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of their skin.” This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other unconventional types. Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart of a true city.”

After leaving New York for Chicago, Obama met up with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. This relationship, too, reflected Obama’s ideological disdain for the suburbs. Obama was distressed, for example, to learn that one of Wright’s assistants planned to move to a suburb for her son’s safety. After confronting Wright with concerns that his congregation was “too upwardly mobile,” Obama was mollified to discover the congregation’s official “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” The years with Rev. Wright helped Obama solidify the solution to his identity crisis that Frank Marshall Davis had taught him long before: reject the lure of the middle-class suburbia and identify instead with the urban poor.

Simultaneously, Obama joined up with a clutch of leftist community organizers who attributed the troubles of Chicago’s inner cities to the very existence of suburbs. Among this early group of mentors, Obama was personally closest to Mike Kruglik. Kruglik and his fellow organizers noticed that even when their groups succeeded in forcing some local politician to increase government spending, neighborhood conditions failed to improve. Instead of drawing the lesson that big government doesn’t work, Kruglik and his fellow organizers seized upon a different explanation. They discovered the work of Myron Orfield and David Rusk, national leaders of the fight against suburban “sprawl” — and sponsors of a bold plan to redistribute suburban tax money to the cities.

Orfield and Rusk attributed urban decline to taxpayer “flight” to the suburbs. In their eyes, compulsory redistribution of suburban tax money to cities was the only lasting solution to urban decay. Kruglik and Obama’s other community organizing mentors embraced these ideas and have crusaded for them ever since. From his position on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama supported his mentors’ anti-suburban activism for years. Likewise, from the time he entered the Illinois State Senate right through to his service in the U.S. Senate, Obama continued to work closely with Kruglik on his anti-suburban crusade.

To this day, Obama quietly coordinates his administration’s policies on urban/suburban issues with Kruglik, Orfield, and Rusk. Kruglik’s anti-suburban battle is set to become one of the defining themes of Obama’s second term.

Although calls for “regional tax-base sharing” will strike the public as something entirely new, the program is the fulfillment of the president’s lifetime ambition. Still trying to avoid being mistaken for a middle-class, suburban “sellout,” Obama has hit upon the ultimate solution: a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to America’s cities.

That would not be in the interests of America’s suburbanites or, ultimately, anyone else. Redistribution kills the growth that benefits everyone. Once voters realize that there has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy, they should know what to do – especially all those suburbanites on whose judgment the election itself will turn.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of the new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Citie



FROM THE BUILDING ONE AMERICA SITE.

Read the Mission Statement, this is an exerpt, reading the rest will make a person that is not a socialist gag.

This is the answer to "White Flight" , it allows city governments that have, through mismanagement and poor protection of ALL citizens, run off their WORKING tax base to take the tax revenue from the suburbs and starve them back into the cities. The Soviets did this and had multiple families living in high rise "apartment" buildings while the politically elite lived in the country. This is what is in store in Obama's Second term. JMO

It takes the taxes from the suburbs and directs them back to the cities to insure "diversity" JMO

Quote:

---

SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE (SCI)
The Sustainable Communities Initiative is an exciting new program introduced by the
Obama administration and spearheaded by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD). It calls for a collaborative and integrated approach between federal
agencies – particularly HUD, DOT and EPA – to promote more equitable, livable and
sustainable neighborhoods and communities throughout our metropolitan regions. It has
tremendous potential to create model, test-case regions of smart growth, racial justice and
economic prosperity that can both inform policy and blaze the political trail for broader
and more comprehensive federal reforms. However, there is a growing concern that the
Sustainable Communities Initiative has avoided the more controversial and thus most
transformative aspects of the President’s goals. It is focused on efforts that are positive but
do not sufficiently challenge destructive economic and social disparities within regions and
do not address the role regional reform can play in promoting economic growth and
competitiveness.

To make the Sustainable Communities Initiative a truly innovative and transformative
program, it needs to ensure that the following principles are applied when determining
qualifying communities, monitoring their progress and expanding the program:

SCI must apply to the entire metropolitan region

Sprawl, segregation, poverty and economic growth cannot be addressed locally. No city or
town in a region can compete alone with China or India. Mayors of older suburbs and cities
have tried every possible strategy to retain jobs, revitalize aging neighborhoods, support
schools and maintain infrastructure. Unless the Sustainable Communities Initiative is
applied to entire metropolitan regions, including the first suburbs (and not individual
neighborhoods, cities or towns), it will not have any real impact on the major challenges
the President is hoping it will address.

SCI must require a strong focus on social and racial justice goals.

Sustainable Communities Initiative must mean Sustainable and “Inclusive” Communities.
Reducing concentrated poverty and economic segregation needs to have as much weight in
the design of this program and the designation of eligibility requirements as does the
reduction of sprawl and other important environmental goals tied to climate change.
SCI must be about economic growth, job creation and global competitiveness.

Sustainable Communities Initiative must mean sustainable and prosperous communities.
SCI regions must demonstrate how regional planning and cooperation will promote
regional economic development to support job creation strategies, labor market access,
research and development and the coordinated movement of goods and services, and
investments in the future economic infrastructure of the region.

SCI must be based on a clear analysis of the regional “Geography of Opportunity.”
A condition of any SCI planning grant is that the grantee must conduct regional opportunity
mapping that will analyze relative job opportunity, educational opportunity, public services
quality, and socioeconomic environment on a community-by-community basis and clearly
identify those that are high opportunity, medium opportunity, and low opportunity. The
SCI grant should then explicitly support programs and policies to advance racial and
economic diversity in high opportunity communities while stabilizing and strengthening
medium and low opportunity communities.

SCI must have a public engagement component.

Past efforts at metropolitan planning and policy reforms have failed or been constrained by
the lack of public input and support for those initiatives. SCI must require that recipient
regions employ a comprehensive approach that will engage the public and elected
representatives of the entire region in any planning process including the older suburbs.


http://buildingoneamerica.org/sites/...olicy_2012.pdf

---

MICHELLE OBAMA’S “SHHHH” MOMENT, AND HER HUSBAND’S PLANS TO SPREAD THE WEALTH

In his book The Promise, left-wing writer Jonathan Alter recounts the following incident from President Obama’s first year in office:

A congressman approached the first lady at a White House reception after the [stimulus] bill’s passage and told her the stimulus was the best anti-poverty bill in a generation. Her reaction was “Shhhh!” The White House didn’t want the public thinking that Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under the guise of merely stimulating the economy, even though that’s exactly what had happened.

Stanley Kurtz picks up on this theme in his brilliant, must-read book Spreading The Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For the Cites. Kurtz shows that spreading the wealth is the central organizing principle of Obama’s ideology, and his deepest aspiration as president.
So far, Obama has worked toward his wealth-spreading agenda very cautiously, as Michelle Obama’s “Shhhh” moment suggests. However, the stimulus bill was redistributionist, as the congressman referred to by Alter said. Obamacare is highly redistributionist, as well.
But the centerpiece of Obama’s agenda — the redistribution of money from the suburbs to the cities — is still mostly in the plotting stages. Thus, a more accurate title for Kurtz’s book might have been “How Obama Plans To Rob The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities In A Second Term.”
How can Obama “rob the suburbs”? In brief, and to oversimplify, he hopes to accomplish this by conditioning federal grant money on the creation and/or use of “regional” bodies, as opposed to standard governmental units like cities, towns, and counties. The regional bodies would be controlled by a coalition of cities and poorer “inner ring” suburbs and aided by regulations and additional conditions imposed by Washington to the disadvantage of the suburbs. This alliance of Washington and “regional” politicians would push for regional “revenue sharing,” consolidation of school districts, and other measures designed to halt the expansion of suburbs and eventually push people back into the cities.
To get the details, you’ll have to read the book. If you do, and you should, you will learn how Obama has set the stage for this power grab through the work of his “Sustainable Communities” initiative, which is dominated by key figures from the community organizing movement, including Obama’s former community organizing trainer and boss.
But why would Obama risk the eventual alienation of a key portion of his current coalition by “robbing” the suburbs for the benefit of cities? At one level, the answer is straightforward – that’s where the money is. If he wants to redistribute money, suburbs are where to find it. Obama is not willing to alienate suburbanites in his first term, but why not go for it in his second?
But Kurtz shows that something more is at work. Taking another look at Obama’s autobiography, Kurtz finds that the future president’s contempt for the suburbs is a major subtext of Dreams From My Father.
Many of us of a certain age expressed contempt for “the burbs” when we were young (I don’t think any of my other radical views upset my mother, who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement, as much). Most of us outgrew this contempt. But Obama apparently has not. Perhaps that’s because his contempt is tied more to left-wing ideology (the suburbs are to blame for the woes of cities) than to aesthetics. Or maybe his contempt is really directed at the folks who populate the suburbs (we know he looks down on country folk who cling to their guns, etc).
In any event, Kurtz makes a strong case for what I initially thought was a questionable thesis about where Obama intends to go in his second term.
Reading Spreading The Wealth, I came away thinking that the radical left, so naïve and self-destructive when I was part of it 40 plus years ago, has emerged from the wilderness as far more clever than the rest of us. Fortunately, the contemporary left is not more clever than Stanley Kurtz, who has sounded an alarm the rest of us would do well to heed.
Michelle Obama’s “Shhhh” Moment, and her husband’s plans to spread the wealth | Power Line

bama robbing ‘burbs to pay for cities

10/08/12 at 4:52pm by Letters Editor7 Comments





One thing that needs to be considered this election is that President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities.

According to Forbes article “How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities,” he advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off ‘inner-ring’ suburbs. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with ‘regional equity’ and ‘smart growth’ as goals. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.”

Obama’s redistribution will kill the growth that benefits everyone. There has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy. These policies would be particularly bad for Ohio. For example if Obama had his way Barbasol’s new shaving-cream plant would now be in New York instead of Ashland, Ohio.

Paul Hovey

Obama robbing ‘burbs to pay for cities | Letters to the Editor

Obama vs. Suburbs: In Ohio! By Stanley Kurtz October 8, 2012 10:12 A.M. If suburban swing voters in the ultimate swing-state of Ohio knew what Obama had in store for them in a second term, they’d swing to Romney in a heartbeat. I spell it all out today in a piece called “Obama’s Plan for Ohio.” Here’s the gist. The very left-leaning “regional equity movement” (“regionalism” for short) is extraordinarily strong in Ohio. The goal of Ohio’s left-regionalists is to force “tax-base sharing” on the suburbs. In other words, regionalists want to bail out Ohio’s cities by forcibly diverting suburban tax receipts to urban treasuries. Ohio’s regionalists also hope to block further highway construction and commercial development in the suburbs. Regionalists blame the troubles of Ohio’s cities on taxpayer flight. By blocking suburban highway construction and commercial development, they want to prevent more city-dwellers from moving to suburbs, and also hope to press suburbanites back to the cities. Unfortunately, development bans would be job-killers as well as tax-killers for Ohio’s suburbs. Based in Cleveland and other urban centers of Northeast Ohio, the state’s regionalists came surprisingly close to enacting this decidedly anti-suburban agenda back when the Democrats controlled Columbus in 2009–2010. The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and a major corruption scandal in Cleveland-centric Cuyahoga County dashed these plans. The idea of forcing suburban taxpayers to bail out a blatantly corrupt and mismanaged Cuyahoga County government in an election year was a non-starter. Ohio’s regionalist agenda hasn’t disappeared, however. A major grant to Northeast Ohio under President Obama’s little-known but potentially revolutionary Sustainable Communities Initiative has given the state’s regionalists a second shot. A longtime supporter of the left-regionalist agenda, Obama has been on board, not only with federal recognition and financial support for Ohio’s regionalists, but with pro-regionalist lobbying of local politicians coordinated from the White House. In fact, White House lobbying for the full left-regionalist agenda in Ohio has been channeled through the very same Alinskyite community organizers who trained and worked with Obama in Chicago. Should Obama be re-elected, he could very well place aid leverage behind the recommendations of the now-federally-recognized regionalist planners in Northeast Ohio. Between the strings Obama could put on federal aid and continued White House lobbying of local politicos, the full regionalist agenda could well be enacted in Columbus in 2013. Should Obama sit in the White House as a Democrat retook the Ohio Governor’s mansion in 2014, passage of the full regionalist agenda in the state would have to be reckoned more likely than not. I explore these themes in my new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, but today for the first time I show how the regionalist agenda could easily sweep over the ultimate battleground state of Ohio in a second Obama term. That would gore the ox of the very suburban Ohio swing-voters who hold the outcome of this election in their hands. Will they learn what’s in store for them before it’s too late? When Obama said in that newly released 2007 video, “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” it was no passing remark. It was part of Obama’s deep and longstanding commitment to the heavily redistributionist regionalist agenda, and it applies very directly to the president’s second-term plans for the suburban swing voters of Ohio. For the play-by-play, see “Obama’s Plan for Ohio.” Obama vs. Suburbs: In Ohio! - By Stanley Kurtz - The Corner - National Review Online