Spreading the Wealth:
How Obama is Robbing the
Suburbs to Pay for the Cities
by Stanley Kurtz

You've probably heard that President Obama was associated with dangerous radicals such as Bill Ayers in years past, or that his co-workers in Chicago were devoted to Saul Alinsky's extremist tactics. You may not have heard, however, that the president still works with some of his old Alinskyite colleagues today -- and they're just as radical in the White House as they were in Chicago.

Stanly Kurtz, author of Spreading the Wealth, describes how some of Obama's mentors from his community organizing days continue to shape his opinions -- and his policies -- today.

Mike Kruglik, Gerald "Jerry" Kellman, and Greg Galluzzo were an active part of Chicago's political machine, and they hired and mentored Obama in the mid-1980s. In 1986, the four men helped establish a training network for community organizers called the Gamaliel Foundation. Gamaliel was a driving force behind the movement to redistribute wealth and encourage class warfare by abolishing the suburbs, and Kurtz believes Obama still persists in these "regionalist" goals.

Obama still works with Mike Kruglik, who in 2009 helped found a community organizing group called Building One America (BOA) in order to continue the Gamaliel Foundation's work. Kruglik has served as an informal advisor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the past several years. According to Kurtz, BOA has worked extensively with the White House to redistribute wealth by blocking suburban growth, stripping suburbs of their right to self-rule, and redistributing suburban tax money to the inner cities.

Obama's plans to destroy the suburbs are not openly discussed, writes Kurtz, because they are too radical for most of his supporters: It isn't just that Obama keeps his anti-suburban plans below the public radar because they confirm virtually everything his conservative critics have ever claimed about him. The deeper problem is that were the full truth about Obama's regionalist agenda to come out, it would split his electoral coalition. Obama's regionalist plans are nothing less than a direct attack on large sections of his own middle class supporters. . . . Were Obama's plans to be revealed, they would show him to be substantially to the left of even his own party's center of gravity.

This would no longer be a concern for Obama if he is elected to a second term, however. "It isn't just the suburbs at stake," writes Kurtz, "but who we are as a nation."

(Sentinel, 2012, 223 pp., $25.95)