SAUL ALINSKY
(Saul David Alinsky)
Alinsky was one of the first of the modern politicians who realized the growing control over peoples’ lives that the health care was assuming. Getting decent health care at an affordable price was getting more and more difficult for the working class unless provided by an employer, and the poor were already at the mercy of whatever system there was in the area as they could go nowhere else.
Saul David Alinsky was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) Alinsky defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.
