NEA website recommends Saul Alinsky books and methods to teachers, says Tea Party is following Alinsky too

• 8/21/10, from NEA website, NEA.org,
  

"Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer,"

• A Resource for Every Organizer & Anyone Contemplating Action in Their Community

NEA recommends the following Saul Alinsky books to those members of our Association who are involved in grassroots organizing, especially Association Representatives (ARs) — also known as building reps or shop stewards — and leaders at local affiliates.

• Saul Alinsky is widely recognized as the father of, and pre-imminent expert in, grassroots organizing, which is why we recommend that ARs and local leaders become familiar with his theories & materials.

Alinsky’s writings have been called the “mother’s milk of the left,” however in an ironic homage, the conservative right has borrowed a page or two from the Alinsky playbook. Tea Party leader and self-described “conservative radical” Michael Patrick Leahy, for example, has authored a book based on Alinsky’s teachings: “Rules for Conservative Radicals.”

• We hope that ARs and local leaders of all political stripes will discern from Alinsky’s books grassroots organizing strategies that will best help us bring our members together around the common goal of improving public education.

• Reveille for Radicals

by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy It

• Rules for Radicals

by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy It

Saul Alinsky wrote the book on American radicalism - two books, in fact: a 1945 best-seller, "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals" in 1971. The "Reveille" title page quotes Thomas Paine... "Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul."

• Saul Alinsky, who was a labor and civil-rights activist from the 1910's until he died in 1972, has written here a guidebook for those who are out to change things. He sets down what the goal is: a society where people are free to live, and also aren't starving in the streets. A society where there is legal and economic justice. Then he sets out to say how to get there....

"Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives....

Alinsky devised and proved thirteen tactical rules for use against opponents vastly superior in power and wealth.

• 1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
• 2. "Never go outside the experience of your people.
• 3. "Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
• 4. "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
• 5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
• 6. "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
• 7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
• 8. "Keep the pressure on.
• 9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
• 10. "Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
• 11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
• 12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
• 13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."...

via American Thinker, 8/21/10, "National Education Association selling its Saul," by B. Costello