Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them.
Stanley Kurtz
National Review Online
8/1/2012
President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.
The alliance endures…
…In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence…
…The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term…
…Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isn’t just the pocketbooks of the “1 percent” he’s after; it’s yours.
Read the complete article at National Review Online.
Also, 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….
…When Andrew Breitbart launched “The Vetting,” his aim was not only to highlight the radical past that the mainstream media had obscured when promoting Barack Obama, but also to show how Obama’s early ideas were the key to understanding his policies in office thus far, as well as his plans for a second term. Spreading the Wealth does that–and more, revealing new insights into some of Obama’s most notorious Chicago allies…
Related: Ban Ki-Moon names civil society, private sector and government leaders to post-2015 panel
” ‘I look forward to the Panel’s recommendations on a global post-2015 agenda with shared responsibilities for all countries and with the fight against poverty and sustainable development at its core,’ Mr. Ban said.”
H/T American Alert–Sustainable Development
Update 2: Federal Government Sues to Gain Control of Southern State’s Water Supply
