http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz
August 1, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Burn Down the Suburbs?
Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them.
By Stanley Kurtz
Editor's Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How
Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz,
from Sentinel HC.
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. One of Obama's original trainers, Mike Kruglik,
has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which
continues Gamaliel's anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik
and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual
leaders of the "anti-sprawl" movement, have been quietly working with
the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social
reform.
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.
One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities
by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by
discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations.
Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing
low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step
three is to export the controversial "regional tax-base sharing"
scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest
of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money
flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively
redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off "inner-ring" suburban,
municipalities.
The Obama administration, stocked with "regionalist" appointees, has
been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years.
Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely
packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming.
Leaders of the crusade against "sprawl" very consciously use
environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.
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.
Obama's former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the
administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to
the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning
commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of
regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.
In light of Obama's unbroken history of collaboration with his
organizing mentors on this anti-suburban project, and his proven
willingness to impose ambitious policy agendas on the country through
heavy-handed regulation, this project seems likely to advance.
A second and equally ambitious facet of Obama's anti-suburban
blueprint involves the work of Kruglik's Building One America.
Traditionally, Alinskyite community organizers mobilize leftist church
groups. Kruglik's group goes a step further by organizing not only the
religious left but politicians from relatively less-well-off
inner-ring suburbs. The goal is to build coalitions between urban and
inner-ring suburban state legislators, in a bid to force regional
tax-base sharing on middle-class suburbanites. That is how the
practice came to Minnesota.
The July 2011 White House conference, gathering inner-ring suburban
politicians for presentations by Rusk and Orfield, was an effort to
place the prestige of the Obama administration behind Kruglik's
organizing efforts. A multi-state battle over regional tax-base
"sharing," abetted by the president, would usher in divisive class
warfare on a scale likely to dwarf the puny efforts of Occupy Wall
Street.
Obama's little-known plans to undermine the political and economic
autonomy of America's suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar
in ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or "cap-and-trade."
Obama's anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains
his administration's overall policy architecture.
Since the failure of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and the collapse
of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing
have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax
money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure
spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best
ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that.
A campaign against suburban "sprawl" under the guise of
environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base
"sharing" are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a
reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is
following this plan.
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.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center. This piece is adapted from his new book, Spreading the Wealth:
How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.
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