The key to Obama's vision in Chicago, according to Marilyn Katz, was the city's most famous radical: "Remember, this is the community of Saul Alinsky. And most of the first housing groups were the Alinsky groups who were still banging at the door."
Katz, an influential Chicago public relations executive and longtime Obama friend and political operative, has visited the White House more than two dozen times since 2009.
Like so many in the liberal power base that served as a springboard for Obama, Katz had activist roots stretching back to her days as a Students for a Democratic Society operative in Chicago.
A Futures Committee handout for the Valentine's Day meeting titled, "Barack Obama's principles of community development," said the proposed program had "to organize around production, not just consumption."
Such words were a clarion call to activists raised on a thousand variations of the Marxist labor theory of value and capitalist alienation.
"He really questioned the kind of surrogate capitalist strategy that most of the nonprofit community-based organizations had been pursuing," Katz told the Examiner.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/chapter-iii-the-1997-speech-that-launched-obama/article/2508419