An old saying goes that a typical idealistic movement “starts out as a crusade, turn into a business, then degenerates into a racket.” In the case of the modern Left, that’s far too generous. It’s clear that the most successful technique in the Left’s playbook, “community organizing,” started out as a racket. In fact, its inventor, Saul Alinsky, developed it based on the “protection rackets” practiced by the organized crime syndicates whose leaders he befriended in the 1940s. Check out the chilling documentary A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing to learn more about Alinsky.

He is the modern Machiavelli who figured out how to exploit the ethnic and social divides inside a community, manufacture outrage, and bully large institutions into funding the very groups that attacked them.

Of course, it was in an Alinsky training school that Barack Obama got his start in politics. And now we learn from news reports that the shakedown methods of community organizing were applied by Obama’s White House, on a massive scale that corrupted our judicial system. As we reported here at The Stream a few days ago:

Department of Justice officials diverted millions of dollars slated for victims of the 2008 housing meltdown to politically favored third parties, including “left-wing radical groups,” according to the chairman of a House of Representatives oversight subcommittee…. Rep. Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Financial Services oversight and investigations subcommittee, said Friday the officials “skimmed” off three percent from mortgage-related bank settlements. This created what he called a $500 million “slush fund” that could be steered toward favored groups….

Among the political activist groups favored favored by the settlements is La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic activist organization that routinely supports Democratic candidates and causes. Cecilia Munoz, a La Raza senior vice president, was appointed by Obama in 2012 to head the White House Domestic Policy Council…. The Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA) is also slated to receive $50,000 from the Bank of America settlement, according to Cause of Action…. A February 2016 independent monitor report about a Bank of America settlement, obtained by TheDCNF, showed that $125 million had been “donated” by the bank in 2014 to 147 “community” groups and “housing counseling agencies.”

Leftist Groups That Helped Cause Housing Crisis Profit from Payouts

La Raza (“The Race”) and MEChA are radical Mexican nationalist organizations, which have long been accused of being the Latino equivalent of white supremacists. As Mark Kirkorian of National Review has pointed out, La Raza took its very name from the writings of a Mexican radical who claimed that the blend of Spanish and Indian blood that took place in Mexico had produced a superior race.

Instead of paying homeowners or taxpayers, banks would sluice money into the coffers of leftist activists like La Raza.

The Obama administration arranged that instead of paying out money to homeowners whom they had harmed, or to taxpayers who bailed out investors, banks accused of wrongdoing would sluice money into the coffers of leftist activists like La Raza, which oppose the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.

The irony becomes even richer when you remember that part of the reason for the 2008 crisis was that banks had lowered their standards for giving out mortgages, under pressure from leftist groups like La Raza to offer more home loans to members of minority groups regardless of their credit scores. So leftists help to gin up a national economic crisis, then profit from the collapse. Nice work if you can get it.

Sending Taxpayer Money to George Soros

Obama’s Alinskyite methods have gone global. As The Stream reported, in the small post-Communist Republic of Macedonia, Obama’s diplomatic appointees have been funneling U.S. tax-funded foreign aid through the aggressively leftist, pro-abortion Open Society Foundation created by international banker George Soros:

The Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador in Skopje, Jess Baily, has come under congressional scrutiny over accusations that he has shown a political bias against the Macedonian conservative party, VMRO, and that he facilitated coalition negotiations between the main leftist party and ethnic Albanian parties. In a letter sent to Baily on Jan. 17, Republican members of the House and the Senate also asked him to explain reports that his embassy had selected Soros’ Open Society Foundations as the main implementer of U.S. Agency for International Development projects in Macedonia…. Feb. 27 USAID announcement of a $2.54 million contract with the foundation revealed that the project included paying for training in “civic activism,” “mobilization,” and “civic engagement.” Far from strengthening the rule of law or regional security, these are activities associated with the redefinition of civics as 1960s-style progressive political activism. They are all strategies straight out of Saul Alinsky’s subversion manual, Rules for Radicals, whose translation into Macedonian, incidentally, was funded by Soros’ foundation in 2014. One of the world’s richest men, Soros has a long history of intervening politically around the globe in the pursuit of his dream of open borders, global governance, and the erosion of regional particularism — what he calls the “open society.”

Barack Obama may not have personally engaged in the kind of shameless pay-for-play that seem to have characterized the Clinton Foundation, as it monetized access to the U.S. State Department. But he did aggressively corrupt the use of public money taken from taxpayers or owed to them, in service of overtly partisan goals.

Donald Trump has promised to “drain the swamp.” Let’s hope he starts by investigating the Chicago gangland methods Obama learned from Alinsky and brought to the highest reaches of government. Given his years in the building trade, Trump has doubtless seen more than his share of this kind of corruption. Who better to root it out?