But That’s What Community Organizers Do
During the Republican convention of 2008, Rudy Giuliani rhetorically asked: what is a community organizer? I think we always knew the answer without even referencing the guidebook of Saul Alinsky.
President Obama need not worry about budget deficits in the manner of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Unlike state officials, he can print money, and raise fees and taxes. The nation’s more affluent, unlike blue-state refugees seeking red-state low tax sanctuaries, cannot flee anywhere. That makes it easy for President Obama to weigh in on the Wisconsin unrest by suggesting an insolvent state government was more interested in destroying the public unions than meeting a $3 billion budget shortfall.
That characteristic eagerness to grandstand on extraneous issues, while ignoring federal crises, is characteristic of this administration. It will not make meaningful progress in addressing its own massive trillion-dollar debts, reexamine the looming disaster of ObamaCare, gear up to produce more gas and oil in the face of skyrocketing energy costs, or seriously explore ways to get unemployment down below 9%.
Yet in the last twenty-four months, we have learned that the president will indeed declare that: the governor of Wisconsin is using his state budget disaster largely to punish public servants; the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, act “stupidly” and racially stereotype minorities (“typically”) as do most police departments; the state of Arizona harasses Hispanic children when they go out to eat ice cream, and thus Mexico’s efforts to sue the state should be joined by the U.S. government; much of our ills are due to “fat cat” bankers who junket to Las Vegas and the Super Bowl and cannot seem to grasp that at some point they have made enough money; the pro-democracy protestors in the streets of Tehran are not to be encouraged by our “meddling” (because of our past sins of involvement in Iran), but their counterparts in Cairo are to be encouraged by our meddling (despite our past sins of involvement in Egypt).
In addition, why would the president call for “sacrifice” in lean times, advising Americans to cut out going to dinner and to “put off” a vacation — while favoring Martha’s Vineyard for vacation, as the first lady (of erstwhile “downright mean country” repute) seems especially fond of Vail ski escapes in winter and Costa del Sol Mediterranean jaunts in summer? Is not symbolism important in these hard times?
Why, why, why all this? In a word, because that is what community organizers are supposed to do, even — or rather, especially — when they become the establishment. Cannot we answer Giuliani’s question? As a general rule, the “organizer” is not indigenous to the community, but as a sort of roaming utopian he travels widely to detect supposed foci of injustice (think an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson), even to the point of worrying about professors being locked out of their homes or the tranquility of ice cream parlors in Arizona.
Almost immediately there is an artificial divide constructed between an oppressive “them” and a victimized “us,” usually on rigid class, gender, and racial lines. Some such university study is cited to “prove” injustice based on the absence of parity in income, health care, or education. Then the community organizer rallies the “community” to “get in their face” and agitate, which can encompass anything from suing in court, holding mass rallies, conducting voter registration drives with accordant intimidation, visiting the private homes of supposedly culpable officials, bankers, and the wealthy, and threatening strikes, slow-downs and disruptions. These metaphorical “hostage takers” must be “punished” as “enemies,” relegated to a proverbial backseat, and in such a fight have their knives rhetorically trumped by our guns.
Indeed, the supposed exploiters are deemed “fat cats” who often favor “Wall Street,” enjoy privileges that accord them Super Bowl or Las Vegas junkets, continually “raise the bar” on the rest of us folks, and can’t seem to figure out that at some point they have surely made enough money from others.
The remedy is always adolescent — the perceived government program and entitlement are demanded without any worry about who is to fund them or how. The community’s perceived “needs” are the sole point of contention, not society’s ability to meet them. The assumption of the community organizer is that there is an amorphous “they” (so often white, male, heterosexual, upper-middle class, Christian) who have done something wrong, or whose ancestors have done something wrong, that both results in their own present privilege and requires appropriate redress, in the moral sense.
The logic is circular — more public money to deserving constituents ensures political support and in turn requires higher taxes from others to pay for it, a two-pronged redistribution plan of taking from the undeserving to allot to the more worthy. Absent from the community organizer’s ideology is any sense that the individual might in some cases bear some responsibility for the ensuing inequality — encounters with the criminal justice system, poor family planning, reckless use of easy credit, involvement with dangerous and addictive drugs, no interest in formal education, or adoption of a popular culture that promotes anti-intellectualism, misogyny, illegitimacy, and defiance of accepted norms. Again, some sort of deliberate prejudice is more likely, and thus state money is justified as a sort of reparation for the collective sins of society, as well as a wise investment to prevent social disequilibrium, if not outright public unrest.
Note the flip side: those who are better off enjoy such benefaction largely as a result of birth, privilege based on the exploitation of others, bias against someone who does look like them, random chance, accident, illegality, or immorality — rarely is success to do harder work, careful planning, more education and training, deferred gratification, or wiser personal decisions. The point is not how someone got more than others, but the suspect system that allowed them to get that more — and how to correct it.
There is never any followup (think audit of the second stimulus, or reexamination of ObamaCare) about the cost effectiveness of the new grant or program. The key is getting the money, not ensuring that it is well used. The organizer — often far better educated than his constituents — then moves on, either to other crisis spots or into politics on his way up his planned cursus honorum. Moreover, the organizer feels a certain sense of entitlement, given his good works — an exemption as it were to live a particular and much deserved lifestyle not always that different from (and indeed at times far better than) the supposed purveyors of social injustice. That the creation of huge entitlements creates social dependency, disrupts traditional local and family networks of mutual help and reliance, emphasizes poverty entirely in a political rather than a spiritual framework, or enables rather than addresses destructive behavior is of less interest to the careerist organizer — either because he sees problems only in classical material terms, or because he is long gone after the money is allotted, or because unanticipated disasters are not his purview, or because dependency, not alleviation of pathology, is the more important goal.
So we should cease being surprised that the president editorializes about extraneous issues while ignoring critical ones, or that the administration is now addressing breast pumps, or that Obama has ignored the findings of his own debt commission, or that he has added 200,000 new federal workers at a time of fiscal insolvency, and on and on.
You see, that is what community organizers do, now and in the past.
1. Stop using illegal drugs.
2. Stop having children out of wedlock.
3. Stop committing crimes.
4. Get an education.
How hard is that?
Getting an education these days is hard – that part is not the fault of the urban poor.
Everything else follows from that, I fear.
Dianna
Getting an education is as hard as unplugging an iPod and sitting down with a book at the library.
Anyone can have one if they invest the time.
Not true. In many ghetto communities, trying to get an education will get you harrased, sometimes beaten, sometimes killed.
Few even care. Fewer try. Even fewer succeed.
It’s easy to talk about how easy it is when it’s been easy for you all your life.
It’s quite another matter to live in the jungle where daily survival is a real issue, not just a theory.
excuses perpetuate excuses.
Mark, you would know all that how?
Mark v makes sense to me. The Democratic machine is responsible for this situation. And even were autodidacts in the urban ghettoes to try to educate themselves, they would find that all of America is set against them–that is if they read the histories produced by well-meaning “liberals” who support the “community organizer” described by VDH. I wrote about their work here: http://clarespark.com/2011/02/20/are-we-still-fighting-the-civil-war/.
And bless you, VDH for not going populist as some comments here have done.
We need an overhaul of textbooks and school choice in the inner cities and everywhere else.
Just who is perpetrating these discouraging injustices on the would be knowledgeable? The term, “Acting White,” jumps to mind. Just where does the power to change that reside?
I suspect you are correct. Someone I know teaches special ed in a public high-school in a well-to-do suburb. He tells me that in some of his classes, students routinely disrupt the class to the detriment of those actually interested in learning. Giving the offenders detention doesn’t help, they don’t show up and the administration doesn’t want to back the staff up and suspend them. Their parents complain that the teacher is “picking on” their future criminal, I mean child, which further cows the staff. Expelling them is a courtroom battle because it is their “right” to be there. The students who want to learn have no rights because the disruptive ones are constantly exercising “theirs”. Whether out of a misguided sense of egalitarianism, laziness, negligence or plain stupidity, the school doesn’t see fit to try to separate the bad influences out from the rest of the population.
And this is in a “good” suburban school, although the kids he is teaching are not the cream of the crop. But if it happens there, what must the more violent urban area schools be like?
What a minute, you didn’t blame it on teachers?
I grew up in Utopia. An intergrated, lower class neighborhood: Jews, Catholics, Buddists and everything else. Pentacostal minister lived next door to the Chinese family. We even had a lesbian couple on my street. And after 5th grade, if you didn’t read, and write and do simple math, you were just biding you’re time until you graduated, because where we went to school, it was 90% babysitting and other 10% was either drugs or booze or studying.
So don’t you preach to me about personal choice.
Because that is all this comes down to. Choice.
Even in the ghetto, you can get an education if you want one.
You cannot be a victim if you unless you choose it.
My dad’s mom did not speak English fluently, not to day she died at age 87.
But she went English classes 3 times a week once she retired. She never quit trying to master English.
My dad is one of 14 children, he’s an attorney, one of those public employees living on huge pension in California.
No one ever told him he was owed anything. He worked hard and went to night school to become a lawyer while I was little girl.
He now lives in white middle class neighborhood. Because he earned.
And people live in ghettos and “bad” neighborhoods like the one I grew up in and continue to live and die there, because they won’t change.
It’s not the system.
It’s people, individuals making their own choices to go up or go down that determine the quality of human life.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Then it’s really too bad Michelle didn’t pick ghetto culture or the baby-daddy syndrome as her special cause. instead of obesity. She and B.O. had an unparalleled opportunity to help raise the consciousness of inner-city culture; instead, they’ve led the way to more feelings of victimization; more pushing of rappers, athletes; and celebrities as role models;, and more “blame whitey.”
Think what good she could have done for test scores if she had continued Laura Bush’s literacy campaign and talked about “library deserts.” Instead of inviting Jay Z to the White House, they could have invited renowned black neurosurgeon Ben Carson. The possibilites are endless.
Thank you Michal, that is some sound advice. If only the our first inclination were to learn something, instead of assuming we have to be taught, largely at someone else’s expense, perhaps common sense wouldn’t be dead, or very near to it.
That assumes the poor ipod-sporting kid learned to read fluently. On my commute, I see high-school age kids who move their lips reading the bulletins on when the trains are arriving.
It’s hard to become educated when you don’t know how to learn. Theoretically, you have the right of it; practically?
Not so much.
Wish I had a dollar for every student I’ve tried to teach who spent years of schooling goofing off and goofing around. And another dollar for every parent who came in and laid me out for expecting cooperation and effort.
actually, ipods can be a great learning tool: there is a huge amount of useful educational material, from ItunesU down the line. Ipods are like knives, can be fatal as well useful – it all boils down to choosing to do it right.
The library is a fine college. Took Ray Bradbury 8 years at 3 nights a week to graduate. Granted, this was before ipods but back then there were serious drinking of cheap beer with friends at the local pub. Had to give up a few nights of week of partying.
See:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury
I beg to differ. Getting an education is not as easy as unplugging an IPad (these weren’t even available when I was a kid)and sitting down with a book at the library.I grew up in my small town library, read every book they had, and it was a stretch for my family to send me to a city University.
Anyway, it won’t do us much good to discuss Republican or Democrat. Neither party is representing the people. We live in a new world, and it needs new solutions. By that, I don’t mean the “Tea Party” because, as far as I can tell, they are just an offshoot of Republican party.I do, however, appreciate their earnestness.
Whose fault is it?
There’s plenty of blame to go around. I tend to start with the parents – until I notice that half these kids lack two parents, and “mom” doesn’t even read gossip magazines. Then I look at the schools, and flinch at how bad the textbooks are – and then remember what provoked my mother into retirement (the school district told her she couldn’t give spelling tests anymore, which she concluded meant they didn’t want kids to learn to spell, and never mind what that meant for teaching English grammar; and if the kids are not comfortable in English, how are they going to enjoy literature?).
Let’s blame everyone, including ourselves, and demand the re-institution of standards. Standards of dress, behavior, and learning – and if we personally stick to them, we might, eventually, get somewhere.
I reject your blame! The problem with blaming everyone is NO-ONE Needs to change. Change is most definitely needed. Change from the outside does not work. You can gain some insight on this problem by reading, “Come On People,” co-authored by Bill Cosby. Of course he was fairly well torched by the, “Leaders,” of “The Movement!”
Ask a teacher, “What is wrong with the students?” The response, “The parents.” Your follow up question, “Who taught the parents?” Response – stunned silence.
“Let’s blame everyone, including ourselves” ???
No thanks, I’ll pass on the guilt sandwich.
I grew up in a poor rural area as one of seven kids of a single mother. That my mother put herself through community college by working two jobs in order to get a nursing degree makes me, I suppose, one of those “privileged” kids since mom didn’t sit on her duff collecting welfare.
Guess what?
Regardless of who your parents are/were, regardless of the environment you grew up in, at some point you are responsible for yourself — attitudes, actions, consequences. Grow up. In the end, it’s up to you. You are a moral creature with the responsibility of choosing well, first, for yourself, then, for others.
There are too many examples of people who have overcome hideous childhoods and become outstanding citizens (and, conversely, too many examples of people who in spite of every advantage in their background become loathsome villains) to require anyone to subscribe to the “poor powerless victim of my circumstances” routine.
At some point, everyone who is not a certified imbecile owns what they become in life.
It is and always has been (as Plato told us) the teachers’ fault.
You can’t blame everyone for an institutional failure, you blame the operators of the institution.
And YES YOU CAN get an education by yourself. See ‘Margarita Cat’.
Don’t mean to monopolize here, but we are NOT all to blame. Countless numbers of us have spent our lifetimes banging our head against the wall tryng to deal with this problem. There are people who care and try, and there are people who would rather watch MTV and let the kids play Grand Theft Auto in first grade.
I will keep trying; most of us on sites like this will. We will keep doing our best to beat back the culture that leads to the failure of so many students. But it is not our fault, and there is only so much we can do to remedy it.
One thing is to teach self-reliance and self-disciipline instead of making excuses and blaming others.
The entire school system has been under attack for years. It’s just part of the overall strategy of balkanizing the population.
Teachers Unions, handcuffing the teachers, self esteem, social promotion, lawsuits, multi-culturalism, idiot textbooks, bi-lingualism, acting white, teachers can’t be tested, excuses for bad student tests, even a movement to do away with testing.
It all adds up to an environment where learning is often impossible. Bonus!! Parents blame teachers. Teachers blame parents. Politicians blame insufficent money. Chaos!! a community organizer’s dream.
Who profits? not the kids, not the parents, not the communities.
But Democrats profit a lot. It must be a coincidence.
Fortunately, they have solutions. Taxes must be raised as the first step.
‘Urban poor’… gee, I wonder to whom this term/euphemism now applies?
If you are suburban poor, does that place you in a different class? Like with the rich? Ever drive the back roads of Tennessee, Texas or Alabama?
In the Bay Area, where I live? Any kid in an urban environment raised by a single parent could easily qualify. Skin color is irrelevant to the problem.
Perhaps you mean that if the president and his advisors are any indication, getting a “real” education in U.S. universities is a real difficulty.
part of the problem (and by no means all of the problem) is that education is FREE- like most things given for FREE- it has NO VALUE. In the very poorest countries like Jamaica and Haiti you have to PAY to have the priviledge of going to school (the others work in the fields or as servants or to feed the family)
These kids are more than happy to go to school and quite respectful once there.
Yes it does begin with parents- those who show their kids the value of education- those kids do quite well in any school- they have personal motivation-
illiterate parents- I have seen mom’s who only grunt and slap at their children- no language is involved- so of course their kids learn to grunt and gesture to communicate too.
Yes and add in cultural and religious- the poorest children of certain groups do better because it is what they are taught to value- self and community reliance and not expecting a handout or worse expecting the world owes them and so they feel entitled to steal fromthose who have taken advantageof the FREELY available education in these United States.
Public education is one the best benefits of being in USa- to throw it away is a crime.
…………………………………
like this essay about Obumbler still actinglike a community organizer instead of president of ALL the USA people- – said the same in some posts recently
I am tired of hearing about the poor urbanites. Say it – Black. Poor by choice. Yes by choice. They trade food stamps for booze. Fill shopping carts to the brim with junk food. Eat fried fast food, just as costly as a Subway sandwhich or salads at Whole Foods. They shoot, rape, rob and stab each other. And blame white America who has carried them far beyond what any reparations would demand.
Let’s talk about Chinese, slaves. Irish, slaves. Italian, slaves. Ukrainians wiped out by the millions in a generation that are still alive and remembering the atrocities practiced on them by Socialists. Vietnamese who fled their country a blink of an eye ago to become successful business people in America. Oh, and legal immigrants.
We are dumbing down this country because one of the oldest generation to live here refuse to learn to speak English, not urban slang or ebonics. When they get two dimes to rub together they put rims on their car and impregnate at will.
I could go on and on about one of the most important constituents the Dumbo crats have but what is the point?
Fed Up!
#4 might be a bit difficult to do in Wisconsin at the moment.
Remember, they’re doing it for the Children. (Yeah, riiiiiight.)
Yes, vdh has nailed this one. We are all shaped by what we do and the boy king is certainly no exception. He is acting as the Organizer in Chief; a self-styled expert, disconnected from the community, and focused on exploitation of situations, frequently on exploiting a situation he induced himself. And since he has spent his entire life creating problems in situations he knows nothing about, and getting away with it, he assumes that this power has no bounds. Little lenin is as free to instigate, reverse and re-instigate trouble in Egypt as in Madison as in Washington. If stirring the pot doesn’t produce the desired results this time, there is always the next time. And if the pot stirring is done correctly, the results seemingly always produce at least one desired result…more money for the Organizer to use to upgrade his lifestyle and cause more trouble at the next opportunity down the road.
In many ways, the health care disaster is a perfect example. The best health care system in the world; one becoming pricey, but hey, if people are willing to spend 20% of their income on medical care, more power to them. Common sense puts that cap a long ways below 100%, so no, prices could not possibly increase forever. Some structural issues that a dose of increased competition, price transpencey and control of vulture lawyers would easily solve. So what can a clever organizer do with a situation that is the best in the world? Well, of course, immediately create as many villains as possible…in this case, by demonizing the industries and practioners who have literally brought the gift of longer life to billions of people. Top that for hutzpa (only an Organizer would even consider topping it). Beat the drums of hatred for a few years, and then throw the problem over a fence to some rabid partisan zealots and in no time the Organizaer has created a massive set of huge new problems that make little things like price transparency fade into the woodwork. Just wait until the boy king begins demonizing doctors for leaving the profession because they can’t make any money. That pot just might fast track us to Cuba before the boy king even gets any real gray in his hair.
What are community organizers and what do they do-rhetorically speaking?
In a nutshell, they organize regular folks to create a heightened sense of incitement, leaving communities in chaos while they live high on the hog.
Most people would be offended to be used as incendiary fodder, but not progressives.They are pleased to be included in societal psychodramas, oblivious to the piggish inciters in their midst.
And, liberals/progressives call conservatives stupid!
Adina I will copy this explanation and make a fridge magnet out of it. Thanks!
Ironic how Obama rode in promising to pass “card-check” so that unions could get a stranglehold on the American economy and taxpayers, yet we may very well be seeing the death rattle of big unions because of his great crashing ego (and his policies).
Heh.
Wow! Well laid out case (as usual) using the ample evidence from the last 24 months, Mr Hanson, to succinctly justify my fear & outrage.
Ditto!
I have to disagree here. Of course the right wingers get mad if Obama opens his mouth even in response to a question. Of course people who don’t like health care reform call it Obamacare.
But then there are many who wish Obama was in Wisconsin thundering in the manner of Theo Roosevelt against this union busting neanderthal governor. And those who wish Obama didn’t cave into pressure so easily on true healthcare reform. And those who wish he didn’t reward the wealthy with more tax breaks.
Most people understand cuts have to be made at all levels. But they also know that these generous contracts were made at the time when people were sitting on their asses at home day trading in the Wall Street Casino in dotcom companies that never made a dime. These folks were doing their job while others were flipping houses as if they were baseball cards. It wasn’t the union workers that brought this country to its knees. Sadly nothing has changed. Wall Street still plays its games, these workers be lucky to have anything in their pension funds after Goldman and the rest of them bring us down again.
Asking for concessions is no reason to bust unions. Walker risks igniting the fire that can’t be put out. Eugene Debs was from that part of the country. (the Socialist they didn’t teach you about in school) Watch for his reincarnation.
I remember my junior high school social studies teacher talking about Debs and how he was from the Midwest (Terre Haute, Indiana, which frustrated his critics.. What he didn’t mention was that it was a Democratic president (Woodrow Wilson) who imprisoned him, called him a traitor and a Republican president (Warren Harding) who pardoned him.
“Walker risks igniting the fire that can’t be put out.”
This sewer rat likes to make threats of violence on widely read web-sites.
Gee, what if the governor had asked the union thugs to accept wages commensurate with the value of their overpriced gubamint “jobs”? Bill would be headed to a Safeway if that were the case.
But I’m happy that guys like bill are finally whipping up some courage to say how they feel directly to Americans instead of jerking each other off on Kos. The country will be better off when more people who are consumed with hatred of successful people come out of their spider holes to express themselves so honestly. Then we can put them in places where they can’t hurt themselves.
Let’s hope he lights the fire that destroys public unions.
At the turn of the previous century with industrialization and mass immigration from Italy and eastern Europe it was easy to exploit common factory workers. You name it. Garment industry, Automotive industry, Trucking… There was cruel oppression by owners or bosses. So the unions organized against real foes.
But with teachers, postal workers and government desk clerks it’s not that way at all. Do you suggest that ma & pa citizen taxpayer is a real foe? Yet unions will argue that the taxpayer (me and us) are terrible masters that want to crush them. After all, the legislators who will reign in union excess were selected by me and us.
Unions can either walk out which I wish they’d do or become violent risking a confrontation with their bosses…the public who is more numerous and can be just as insistent.
If you were threatening anybody, be careful what you wish for.
Read Richard Pollock’s column today. We’re on to the con, and you can stop getting all sanctimonious about a whiny bunch of spoiled, overpaid union teachers. Wisconsin ain’t LaFollette country any more.
The pretence that the explodiong costs of public-sector benefits is somehow not culpable (and of course blaming Wall Street) is what one would expect from a socialist: a childish, bratty complaint with silly “you’ll be sorry” threats.
I guess every teacher in this country is overpaid.
Heck, Teachers have to work almost 20 years to get overpaid.
It takes time to get overpaid, and money out of pocket, year after year to become overpaid.
So, what is overpaid?
What is an overpaid wage for a teacher with 6 years of college and 20 years experience? that has to go to school, year after year, paying for that out of pocket each year, just to keep that overpaid salary and continue working in an overpaid job?
Sure, there are summers off(which end about the 3rd week of June and start back up the 3rd week of August), which generally turn into 3-4 weeks vacation, like most of the underpaid workers in the US. But those summers are spent going to classes, so teachers can become more overpaid.
Oh wait, the salary scale tops out in our state. So after 20 years, you can make no more as you reach the top of the pay scale, but still must go to school and continue getting more hours to remain employed.
Can somebody tell me what the wage for and overpaid teacher should be?
Bill:
Like all socialists you live in a fantasy world. For you it’s always 1917 Petrograd or Harlan County in ’30s. These aren’t the “workers” of your imagination, these are pampered civil servants who have secure jobs and great benefits who are living off the taxpayer. Public employee unions are nothing more then a scam to suck money out of the public for a subsidy to the Democratic Party and make a few union bosses rich along the way. This isn’t a case of the people rising up against the dictator. It’s government workers rising up against the people who pay their salaries. It isn’t progressives fighting in the vanguard, it is regressives fighting in the rearguard.
One second thought:
bill reminds me of so-called moderate Muslims who say that non-Muslims had better appease the Muslim street because the moderate is afraid of the violence that the ‘other’ Muslims might perpetrate.
Because we all know how uncontrollable and unhinged the ‘other’ union member or Muslim is and we should be afraid and let them have their way. Then, we get tread upon.
This confrontation will take courage.
Bill – could you explain why these public sector employees should receive wages and benefits far above those available in the private sector? Paid by the taxpayer.
Could you explain why a taxpayer working in the private sector should pay for his own pension and also, the pension of that public sector man who does not contribute to his own pension?
After all, you are extremely upset by the disparity between the lifestyle and benefits of the Wall Street banker. Does the disparity between the lifestyle of someone working within the Walls of the Public Service Union – and someone working outside in the private sector not bother you?
Does receiving a year’s salary for 8 months of work – paid by the guy who gets only two weeks off – not suggest a huge gap in fairness?
Does working within the Walls of the Public Service, which means a job-for-life, and no accountability – compare to working within the private sector where you must do your job – or lose it?
Could you explain your support for the public service unions? So far, you’ve just declared your support. But haven’t told us why.
Oh my. Pretty much everything you had said is wrong.
For starters, Obama did not “cave in into pressure” on “true healthcare reform”. He had signed the bill presented to him by congress, completely controlled by democrats. He had no chance in hell of getting single payer/universal healthcare through, and you know it.
But you also complained that some Wall Street executive got bonuses because they had contracts. What is wrong with that? Contract law is one of the foundation of our republic, whether you like the contract after the fact or not. In any event, those were not supposed to be our money to pay their bonuses, and if system had worked the way it suppose to do (as in their employer had folded) there would have been no bonuses to pay anyway.
As far as “wasn’t the union workers that brought this country to its knees”, they had certainly contributed a huge amount. It was GM unions that made their car uncompetitive. It was SEIU and other unions that contributed so much to Fannie/Freddy lending policies. But the worst of them all is public unions. So, people, who’s existence is covered and paid by OUR money, complain that their pension fund, also 100% funded by our money, is now worthless? Cry me a river, will you.
People understand that “cuts should be made on all levels”? What about levels of my taxes? People like you expect those to increase. To pay for your pals the unions, who can collectively bargain, have an illegal strikes, use intimidation and physical threats of violence to make me pay for them.
The only recourse we have is ballot box. And we used it, by electing people like Gov. Walker who was running on platform of reigning in the unions. And by electing republican majority senate. So, how about your buddies just shut up and follow the will of the people?
And then there are those who understand that what’s going on in Wisconsin (or Arizona, etc.) is none of the President’s business.
He’s the CEO of the federal government. He has no authority over the states.
Bill,
I don’t fear the fire that can’t be put out at all. It is time to burn all of you dishonest, greedy bastards. As far as I am concerned every union should be busted and driven back under the rocks that too often protect their corrupt, thieving bosses and socialist mentors. It is time for revolution and if it has to be bloody, so be it. Anything is better than suffering the continued abuse and theft from the lazy and faux-entitled. You can’t succeed on your own? Perish! Sorry, that is as civil as I wish to be–I’m completely fed up with this BS.
bill, you don’t HAVE to disagree, just pony your extra money up to the fedralguvmint. Simple, a cover letter with your SS #, mail to the Bureau of Public Debt, Department of the Treasury. And don’t be hard on Wall Street, they were in the bag for The O. In any case it’s not Wall St we really have to worry about, it’s Pennsylvania Ave, where for you the Sun emits it’s life giving rays.
Yes, Bill repeats the Terrorist’s mantra: “Look at what YOU made US do.”
I appreciate the comments of my conservative friends here. We meet in common purpose on number of subjects. I hate to see these fine folks in Wisconsin described in such harsh terms. Yes we taxpayers are paying for a soild gold government with our outsourced, illegal labor fueled tin plated economy. Unions are an imperfect solution to an imperfect form of government. As far as I am concerned our labor history is a key component of American Exceptionalism.
Our forebears fought and died for our right to organize and bargain collectively. We watch in awe as other nations fight to overthrow repressive governments while we seek to weaken our own hard won freedoms.
‘we’?
One last story. I knew a tailor who came from Zagreb. He got a job in the garment district of my city. He was working and the union went on strike. The owners just closed up and went away. Everybody was out of work.
So he went to another place and they talked about going on strike and he warned them. But they called the strike and the same thing happened. The owners closed the place.
If ‘we’ can get Republicans in the Senate and the Presidency, we may have to let the union people go as well or better still, reduce their compensation and keep them working. It’s really up to them…and up to us if the people speak with their votes.
2012.
Bill, what color is the sky where you live?
Dependency for the sake of votes and divisiveness for the sake of diversion are Obama’s goals. He personally depends on the ignorance of the American people who elected him with the aid of a corrupt media. This will win him a second term. It worked the first time. Never the less another good description Dr. VDH. Where are your solutions ? You continue to preach to the choir. Thanks anyway – it feels so good.
Great article, except for the very end.
Prior to the 60s, community organizers often WERE from the community, and organized to solve some local issue, often if not usually, by peaceful, voluntary, community action of the willing.
Without gov’t. Often primarily asking gov’t to get out of the way, or to give permission for the citizen’s desired solution.
Since the boomer’s left college, they want all problems to be solved by the gov’t, without thinking about whether there isn’t a more peaceful way.
Yet another noble and valid word and component of society, distorted by central command statists.
What a shame for all the individuals that contributed, and particularly for those individuals that could have benefited.
In the “New Class” all the way back in 1957, Milovan Djilas noted how the ‘apparatchiks’ and ‘nomenklatura’ had evolved into a New Class in Communist society. This class was above the workers and always hectoring them but reserved to themselves the best of all things while professing to be the true guardian of the interests of the working class (note the hypocrisy). How easy it is to see Obama, union leaders, civil rights leaders and liberal politicians as the inheritors of the failed Communist system.
“inheritors of the failed Communist system”
More like descendents of the failed Communists themselves. They puked in that pond so long there wasn’t anything to inherit.
Some people think little lenin was trained in Russia. A guy named Tom Fife has told an interesting story about it.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/global_elite_picked_obama_171.html
I don’t believe a word of it. Seems to me that little lenin had a very typical midwest American upbringing. Someday he will write a book about his dogs, his little league teams, his boy scout merit badges and his life as an altar boy while his middle-of-the-road, America-loving, patriotic life views were developing.
In the meantime, I’m going with the long paper trail of personal revelations and feelings he has written or had written for us in lieu of birth, health, school, work, political, social security, marital, genealogical, passport, financial, debt, legal, housing and tax records, and other unnecessary information that nobody could possibly have an interest in for the leader of the most powerful country in history.
I know you must be suspicious as to how such an incompetent, shallow individual could get to this level of government.
He has been groomed for this position by an underground cult in America. It is widely known as the Democrat Party, but, it has many other chapters, just as effective, and more covert.
Don’t forget they promised to “get in our faces’, and “bring a gun”. They’re not afraid of confrontation.
…not necessarily. he has been a con man all his life and gamed it to the top.
something to remember …the pool (cesspool) of candidates running for the presidency. NO SHINING STARS THERE ..
…not necessarily. he has been a con man all his life and gamed it to the top.
something to remember …the pool (cesspool) of candidates running for the presidency. NO SHINING STARS THERE ..EITHER SIDE. but the democratic side was pathetic beyond measure.
One of BHO’s primary supporters from way back – Henry Kissinger.
Agreed Thomas. A must see film, ‘The Lives of Others’ to get a true sense of your comments.
(1984 GDR Stasi or secret police agent, begins monitoring a playwright. This film demonstrates the insidiousness of socialism, and it’s predictable failure.)
VDH:
We do have, it turns out, an Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson race baiting shakedown artist for a President. What makes this even more disastrous is we have another Jimmy Carter (full of hate for Israel and screw your allies) foreign policy genius in the White House. Just imagine the legacy and how long it will take to recover. Meanwhile, good news, the Left is now defending the status quo exposing their greed for all to see. It’s pretty hard to defend the 100K salary and super premium benefits packages at the expense of those taxpayers who on average make half as much and pay out of pocket for their fringe benefits if they have any. Who is the greediest of them all? They live in the White House.
The revolutions the Left say they want are not the ones they’re getting, at home or abroad. So it turns out after 5 years worth of evidence the Left is as greedy as it is corrupt.
Excellent work as always.
We are where we are because when women flooded the ‘work-force’ and abandoned their offspring to support their three children by three different [possible] fathers who paid no child-support, we ended up with the ultimate nanny-welfare-state-country.
Unfortunately, many men still see ‘sex’ as just ‘busting a nut’ and not ‘procreation’ and they feel ‘victimized’ when they actually have to help pay for the sexual consequences of producing a child out of sexual activity while women are often left holding the bag of ‘oops, that one night with you means I’m with child’.
Until we grow up and become more sexually responsible so that we can not only avoid unwanted babies but also eliminate the need for abortion, we are fools playing a fool’s game where the people who breed the most are the leeches and the people who breed the least are the doers and thinkers.
Somehow, there has got to be a better way.
Have you no shame? The one thing modern women have going for them is the certain knowledge irresponsible sexual activity is their RIGHT. Guarandamteed by the SOTUS. Have you never heard of Roe v. Wade? What you’re suggesting here flies in the face of everything promised gals by their Women’s Studies programs in major universities. It’s not fair to ask men and women to be more responsible when engaging in procreative behavior. It’s just not….. not……. not American of you to ask that. That’s why we have a government, isn’t it? To help out if things go awry?
Shame should be reserved for the @sshats who f*ck like rabbits and don’t take any personal responsibility for what they decide to do randomly with their own genitals.
If men and women were paying for their wayward offspring (planned or not), there wouldn’t be a welfare state. Period. We pay for the skanks of society, the lowest of the lows, the “players” and the “hos”…
I’m tired of paying for some “PUA’s” and one-night-stand hobag’s babies.
I see. When two irresponsible people create a life they can’t care for, it’s just the man “busting a nut” while the poor little victim is left “holding the bag”.
Socon women are worse than feminists when it comes to this “women are perpetual victims” mindset. Who could possibly expect the poor dear to expect that biology punishes women more harshly for promiscuity, it’s only something that gets covered in grade school sex ed.
I can’t imagine why you find it so objectionable to demand that everyone — males as well as females — support their own offspring, the existence of women’s studies programs notwithstanding.
Really, there is no defense for leaving the rest of us, females as well as males, paying for your kids.
Both the fathers and mothers are being let off the hook by swinging onto the government teat in the current system. Get mad at the people taking advantage of you — not just one subset of them.
EXACTLY, Tina.
It must be remembered that this train wreck began with Delia’s brain fart. She posited a woman having 3 children by 3 different contributors. Providing for these souls was an after thought, if a thought at all. A woman who has little or no experience in the workforce floods out there to do what? Start out at below the bottom. No skills. No history. She’s flippin’ burgers or tottin’ trays, she and the kids starve. It should be noted, she begins her saga in the middle. In my life time unwed pregnancies have gone from a statistical rarity to the norm. Multiple unwed pregnancies were rarer than hen’s teeth. Women, of necessity must be more responsible. At the moment she learns she is pregnant her youth is over! She is faced with the most dreadful of decisions, to kill her baby, or carry it to term. Then comes the choice of keeping or casting away that life from her life. For those that I have known and would talk about it, those decisions continued to reverberate. The point is prevention beats remediation.
RE illegitimate births: Easy first step — turn off the spigot of money. Having a houseful of children with no father is a living. Women are not stupid. Pass a law that “You are on your own” and it would take about nine months to fix the problem. They and the absent fathers are the cruel ones then. We have to be heartless to get back on track.
foreman, I don’t think your idea is “heartless” at all! I think that’s exactly the tact we Americans have to take because really that would mean “one child” rather than “ten children” living in perpetual poverty because it’s made so ‘easy’ right now. The saddest part being that those “ten children” will have “ten” and so on and so on all while riding the welfare gravy train and never rising above their lot in life. The welfare state completely destroyed black families and white families aren’t far behind.
You mean I should only have sex if it is for procreation? That’s enough to make me a liberal again.
LOL! My point completely went over your head eh?
My point being that sex is a direct part of procreation and even if you just look at ‘sex’ for pure ‘pleasure’ and nothing else, that doesn’t mean a ‘baby’ won’t ‘accidentally’ result from said sexual activities even if that wasn’t your initial intention and you should help pay for that ‘accident’ if you want to ‘play’ rather than make the rest of us shmucks pay for your baby-mama. Get it? ;)
Right on!!
Destroying the nuclear family is probabaly the #1 target of the Cuddly marxists/statists/eagerFeudalLords.
See abortion, welfare babies, no-fault divorce, denigration of Christianity, gay marriage, pre marital sex, feminism, condemnation of males, elevation of single mothers, gangsta culture, and normalization of homosexuality for reference materials.
And why might that be?
Just a hunch…when a person has no family to provide support and comfort during hard times, then that person is far more likely to become dependent on the government.
Isn’t it curious how virtually every Democratic policy seems to fit into that crazy idea?
Just a hunch…when a person has no family to provide support and comfort during hard times, then that person is far more likely to become dependent on the government.
What a spookily truthful post, pro! Indoctrinate the youth to not only hate their parent’s values but to hate their own country and then make big brother their ‘keeper’. Destroy the idea of ‘family’ and introduce the ‘nanny state’ where all of your basic needs are met from the cradle to the grave.
*shiver*
Not probably…is
This time they went too far. They got greedy, and they got lazy at the same time. And that is a losing combination. They got greedy in that they decided to go for broke; To push things over the edge and break the last vestiges of inidivualism, self-reliance, economic mobility, consensual government and pride in American exceptionalism – once and for all. They preferred a poorer nation with a more docile, beholden population and them on top and out of reach, to a bold, dynamic and confident one, with little time for their whining.
They got lazy in that, with the election of The One, the believed the hard part was over. They thought that we would just go away now, sullen and defeated. That their legions of adoring acolytes would shout us down and reveal us to be outdated and irrelevant in ther Brave New World. They didn’t realize that we would drag them down to the mat with us, gasping. And that when its all over, only we will remain.
Their vast global schemes are crumbling (or back-firing) one by one, their tactics quickly morph into pathetic jokes. Their forces are in dissaray and grow weaker by the day. They are finished. It’s just a matter of time, but at this rate I don’t think they’ll last two years. And then the reckoning begins. There must be an object lesson, one that will remind future generations that freedom itself can be used as a weapon by those among us who fall victim to their own egos.
Never Again!
Well said.
Never again.
the Communists are out of the closet. It’s just a matter of time before the blue dogs realize it.
It’s difficult to quash truth.
Those that live by it, can’t go away, just as truth can’t.
To the Distorted One and his amigos – “adios” won’t be soon enough.
Personally, I’d like to thank the Organizer-in-Chief for being so blatantly hypocritical. It’s quite motivating. Seems a fair number of people feel the same way. For too long creeping socialism operated sub rosa, unnoticed by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Congresscritters. Not anymore. Everything is seemingly spinning out of control/The center won’t hold/The beast slouches toward Babylon/etc etc etc. All the old cliches now pertain. We see where this fool would lead this country.
So, thanks for the clarity of purpose Mr. Obama. Your legacy will be having organized your own undoing.
Spot on analysis by Dr. Hanson!
Just look at his career in Chicago-fleecing of millions of taxpayer money for the housing project, now inhabitable.
Now I understand why Jesse Jackson was crying at Obama’s inauguration.
He knew that half-assed 47-year old fool was going to drive the whole gravy train into a ditch.
I’ve always thought of the community organizer as a sort of gadfly: a guy who could observe government from the outside, and criticise individual actions it took, without reference to the overall picture of the agency’s performance. It doesn’t matter if the money isn’t there, the people have a “right” to X, whatever it is. Government needs to be more responsive to “the people”, of course those people almost always being defined as wanting whatever said community organizer says they want.
At this point, things have gotten so bad that I imagine that the refugee state legislators are wondering whether the President weighing in like this is a good thing or a bad thing. Regardless, I imagine they’ll get recalled or otherwise be dealt with before too long–this is silly. Funny how the same people who railed against a filibuster in the Senate now think deliberately absenting yourself from the whole state to stop the legislative process a “clever” move.
From the way VDH describes it, the title ‘community organizer’ is just a euphemism for con artist.
Bingo!!
Obama’s actions could certainly be explained by the theory he is acting as “community organizer” in keeping with his personal background.
They might however just as well be explained by his history of radicalism and radical associations, be they overt Marxists or “liberation theologists.”
Or they could simply be pragmatic in reinforcing the belief system of his base of support and, in the case of Wisconsin, defending the income and activism streams unions supply to most Democrats, and especially this President.
None of these possible explanations reflects well upon Obama. But it seems premature to ascribe his actions solely to any one of them, when they are not mutually exclusive in any sense.
Neither can we exclude positively the old rule: “Never assign to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.”
“…social disequilibrium, if not outright public unrest.” I sure hope not but that may be the understatement of the year.
“…up his planned cursus honorum.” I cursus the day Obama got elected. ;- )
As always your commentary says it all. One small issue though: when did communist agitator morph into “community organizer”? Obama – just another street pimp with a better clothes sense. Hell, at least the pimps are entrepreneurial. And have “bidness” experience.
Stanley Kurtz says it was a deliberate strategy established in the early 80′s in reaction to the Reagan revolution, and little lenin was one of the earliest acolytes. He has a ton of evidence to back up the assertion.
dem·a·gogue/ˈdeməˌgäg/Noun
A political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.
“President Obama need not worry about budget deficits in the manner of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Unlike state officials, he can print money, and raise fees and taxes. The nation’s more affluent, unlike blue-state refugees seeking red-state low tax sanctuaries, cannot flee anywhere.”
The problem is that now, even if you taxed the “rich” (and Obama’s definition of what “rich” is changes by the day) at 100% it will not change either the budget deficit or the national debt. Things are so out of control now that, unless there are massive spending cuts in BOTH discretionary spending AND entitlements, we are bankrupt. And if Obama simply keeps printing money, either huge inflation will kick in or the money will become worthless. So Obama and his minions have to come to grips with the fact that they have finally run out of spending other people’s money. Unless they do, our economic condition next year will be a shambles.
According to YOUR side, anyone who disagrees with the union juggernaught is a “union buster”. That’s how you people do it. No discussion, just demean….see rule#5 in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The real busters here are the unions who want to bust the budget for their own purposes. The only thing that is going to get busted here is the direct pipeline from the teachers’ unions to the democrat party. That’s what the REAL ruckus is all about. Walker doesn’t risk anything as he was elected to office, and just like obama told the 10 top bankers in that famous meeting, “I won”. Well, Walker won. What’s your point?
There’s another part of Barack Obama that VDH fails to address. Obama has been socially promoted his whole life as an affirmative action candidate. He has never been held accountable for his failures. How bizarre that a man should reach the pinnacle of power on a series of free passes. After a time such an individual starts believing in his own mythos (“What’s different this time is that you have me!”). His faux success feeds his pathological narcissism. So why not wade into every controversy no matter how local? After all, whatever you say, do, or propose is always right simply because of who you are. Great nations have survived boy kings in the past. Our republic will survive, too, albeit with some damage to repair.
“Because I still think I am right”
B. Heusein Obama at the unveiling of another $1.5 trillion deficit budget proposal
You are right. At heart Mr. Obama is a community organizer. Unfortunately now his community is not a neighborhood, town or even a state; it is the entire country. His little band of protesters is the entire public service union (SEIU) and he has the money and power to send them (like an army) anywhere he chooses. In his mind America is Chicago. He knows nothing else.
I do like your use of Latin, Dr. Hanson. In my teens, I wanted to learn to speak Latin, but, it was phased out of the classes offered for other more necessary subjects.
But, a Latin expression that I think fits in with this scenario is ‘mea culpa’.
America has a flourishing ‘mea culpa’ industry. And ‘mea culpa’ means ‘pay up, sucka’. Looks to me that this is the Latin being used in Wisconsin, at this time.
And, by now, everybody knows how much of a bold faced liar Obama really is. And he dares anyone to confront him with his lies. As you say, he’s got his soldiers and his media creating diversions to detract from the most pressing issues, and their heretical legislation.
There IS a crisis unfolding in the United States like a threatening storm building because of the autocratic leaders at the helm of our government. And as they’ve promised, they will get in our faces, and bring a gun.
They want a national confrontation. And I think they’re going to get one.
Not to be too picky, however, mea culpa, actually means, My Fault. In a practical way, the Obuma giving a mea culpa, says it’s America’s Fault, so their tax payers will pay-up.
Yes; I know. Humor is in such short supply in America.
Ya ever had Dominus Vobiscum beer?
Beer is proof that God loves us…
The monks would back you up on that!
Amen.
Community Organizers are people designed to create trouble, not to alleviate it. Think I’m using hyperbole?
My nephew is in an “leadership” program in high school. It is run by far left provocateurs and the slogan for the program is “making troublemakers…of the good kind”.
“Leadership”, you see…is infused into the Ayers Youth, by teaching them that being troublemakers on “key social issues” makes one a “leader”. Of course, the thuggery, treason, lying about the issues, hiding criminal behavior, and often committing acts of aiding and abetting criminal behavior…are all nicely buried beneath the “coverage” by the complicit media fawning farms.
And when I say “coverage”, I mean that as in “cover up”.
So, when the “community organizer monarchy” tsk-tsk and tut-tut, ANY act, deed, legislation, word, utterance, or even benign omissions made by “target” persons or groups, that is the first code transmission to sic Orwell’s dogs on that person or group or legislation.
The steps toward getting their way, is the initial tantrum. Calling them “enemies”, racists, warmongers, haters, greedy, …you know the drill. Second, is to “demonstrate” which is French for throwing a public fit. Third is to sue. Get the leftist lawyers to get the leftist judges to make it “illegal” to do “x” and make it “legal” to commit “y”.
Obama and the First Lady are both knee-jerk tsk-tsk’ers and tut-tut’ers.
In fact, Obama is King Tut-Tut. Whether with bitter clingers, or the Gates affair and the police or Governor Walker or Governor Brewer, or Joe the Plumber or UNO’s “enemies”. He can tut-tut in multiple languages apparently.
He is the Supreme Community Organizer, the Chief Sue ‘Em lawyer…tinkering with the Constitution like an erector set, making it…and the fiscal health of this nation a trifling thing…his to play with and destroy as a child with a destructive streak.
King Tut-Tut, whose Sue ‘Em name is Dances With Words.
We have no idea how deeply these scumbags have burrowed into our culture. Your nephew’s leadership program is one more example, but I think there are thousands of other examples large and small, most of which are operating below the radar screen or are so clever that you wouldn’t even notice unless you looked deeply into the matter.
Prediction. I have no contact at all with boy scouts, but I’ll bet that someone can tell us some stories about how their son brought home stories of indoctrination even from that all-american organization.
And I’ll bet the the america-haters are dominating the social networks as well. I’ll bet the terminology in those programs is even constructed to foster anti-americanism.
Proreason,
RE Boyscouts vs Leftist “communities:” the two are similar campuses with opposed mission statements. It is that simple.
Human groups all use campusing techniques to bundle their individuals into more effective collective instruments. This is the “community organizers’” main job.
Consider a liberal learning institution like UC Berkeley in California: it currently blocks US military recruitment on its campuses. Why? Answer is, another human campus, the US military has a mission statement – that of defending the US consitution, that is directly at odds with the UC regents’ elected mission statement. Again, we have two campuses, both similar in that they are bounded by strict writs, behavioral codes and governing bylaws, but both are chartered by their constitutions to pursue opposite goals. They must needs be as immiscible as oil is in water.
And so, ROTC doesn’t mix with the UC-”System.” Wisconsin’s TAA doesn’t mix with a verifiable citizens’ franchise (ie. democratic elections). The Boy Scouts (a recognized civic, Constitutional youth milita) won’t mingle with the Left’s conceptual “Americorps.” The Hatfields didn’t cohort with the McCoys. And “Islam” will not cohabit with the US Constitution.
Different campuses all, with colliding missions. Is all this antagonism deliberate? Did, for instance, the UC system amend its charter in order to set it on a collision course with the US military campus on purpose?
I don’t know. But I do think the Left’s “organizers” are more aware of their campus’ abstract and concrete interfaces with American civil society in the ongoing “culture war” than Conservatives are of their own. They know that the basic unit arrayed by the combatants in our ongoing soft civil war is the identifiable, bounded campus, “virtual” and real.
And, in Wisconsin’s current constext, the Left’s killer T-Cells are playing for keeps.
Some campuses reveal themselves by their attempts to avoid accountability in America’s forgiving civic environment. You can “tag” them and get a hint at their missions by studying the means used to their chartered ends. For instance, tactical camouflage techniques, like deniability, faked non-cooperability, media (as opposed to balloted) consensus’, and regular rebranding are hallmarks of the left’s proliferated networks of cells. Soros’ aligned media organizations, to point at just one super-campus (each network is campused by directives to perform propaganda for Soros), engage regularly in exactly the types of that an objective observer would expect to see prowling America’s pluralistic stew of cellular campuses.
All in service to their individual campuses’ elected mission statements.
It is that simple. Sorry for running on…
-S
More of a ‘Cold’ Civil War than soft civil war
Progressives Are Well Versed In The Human Emotion Weakness This Is Easy To Spot As They Begin Their Conversation Especially Be Wary When The Words Include Envy,Anger,Pride And fear But Watch For Obamas Favorite Revenge
There is more of a gap between the rich and the rest than there has ever been. We need to BOTH reduce spending and increase taxes on the rich. 4-4-4. Decrease spending 4%, increase taxes 4% and increase taxes on pensions over $75,000 4%. You can never find a politician who wants to do all three, whereas you can find 99% who are willing to do one of these.
Well dwightmatthew has finally arrived at for the party. Of course, it isn’t as much fun as Tucson was.
First, the “gap” data is from one bogus study by French marxist sociologists that has been entirely discredited. The “gap” is completely in-line with what it has always been. They just didn’t count transfer payments, income that doesn’t appear on 1040′s and about another dozen lies to distort the data.
Second, the people in the “quadrants” of the studies like that change all the time, including people at the very top and the very bottom. Financial mobility is so significant in the US that the “gap” is simply a useless concept. If it wasn’t for libwit welfare schemes to deceive minorities into becoming a permanent underclass of Democrat voters, financial mobility would be even greater.
Third, all increasing taxes does is decrease tax collections. This is so well known and understood now that it isn’t worth discussing. It is the exact opposite of what is necessary to reduce the national debt. It is profoundly stupid, as can be easily proven by reading what Krugman has to say about it.
Fourth, reducing spending is the equivalent of pissing in the pacific. Spending has to be reduced by at least 40%, which isn’t even a challenge, since 30% of that is just the bribes and funny money that little lenin laddled on in the last two years. After removing the fat of the fat, the fat can be reduced by eliminating departments like HHS, Education, Energy, Commerce, the EPA and many more. The country would notice ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE if that happened tomorrow. Within a few months, the economy would begin roaring. The useless bureaucrats who would be fired could begin doing something useful at McDonalds or minimarts and experience the joys of financial mobility first-hand.
OK, so let me get this straight; the wealth IS proportioned as it should be? Whew, what a relief!
Dumber even than usual.
These dolts think they can control everything. Essentially, they think they can overcome life, nature, probability, weather, anything. Wave their fingers and ergo, fairness appears (as defined by them, of course).
Astonishing arrogance combined with breathtaking stupidity.
Some, like this fool, appear to really believe it. Of course, for them, lying is like breathing, so you never really know.
Most of them though just want to get their elbow in your pocket.
A voice of sanity, crying in the pajamas wilderness.
Gee, that’s mighty brilliant: “4-4-4.” What was your inspiration for that? Let me guess; you were probably watching daytime local TV and one of those commercials for a personal injury law firm came on : “Call 444-HELP now! We’ll get you the money you deserve for your injuries.”
Regarding the comment about the income gap; I always ask people who bring this up, tell me how exactly do you think income SHOULD be distributed – what is the ideal distribution between the current income quintiles?
As we are all congratulating ourselves on the apparent fall of the boy king and his power base remember the real enemy lies within.
The Republican Establishment is willing to allow these clowns to misplay their cards, but don’t be dumb enough to think that means they have any intention of allowing the people to actually re-establish the Republic.
It is John, McCain,Linsey Grahmn, Orin Hatch and the Mitt Romneys of our leadership(sic)who sit in the wings waiting for the action to turn their way that we should be watching now. Chaos will not return us to freedom, only to another false king.
Nah. Look at the current Republican governors, McConnell, Perry, Christie, Daniels, and now Walker and soon Kasich. These are strong, principled leaders who will show the country the way out of debt. I suspect at least one of them will be on the ticket for president in 2012. Compare them with more-of-the-same Democrat governors, (such as Dan Molloy of Connecticut), who are raising all kinds of new taxes rather than touch entitlements.
nickel:
“The Republican Establishment is willing to allow these clowns to misplay their cards, but don’t be dumb enough to think that means they have any intention of allowing the people to actually re-establish the Republic.”
With the R’s and the D’s, it is, has been and will continue to be preservation of the corrupt system that allows the players to assume ever increasing power and influence over the lives of others.
I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who produce and those who live on the fruits of those who produce. I believe that is true.
It is not the political actors that need to be replaced, a new script directed at survival of a nation should replace the old one so eloquently explained by Angelo Codevilla recently regarding the “Ruling Class” that increasingly controls the lives of the “Country Class”.
The sole job of professional politicians at this stage in America’s history is to preserve what they have for as long as they can. And the American producers and the country be damned if they don’t get that to which they are “entitled”.
The sole job of serious American Citizens who care about preservation of the once greatest nation on the face of the earth, at this stage in our history, should be to identify a unifying candidate for the presidency in 2012 who will take the battle to the real enemies of this nation, tell the truth, and carry him or her to victory over the communist look alikes who now control the nation. It’s now or never, in my always humble opionion. I could be wrong but I don’t think I am.
To a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.
Seems like Obama is either too damned dumb – or too damned eager to show his minions he’s still ‘got it’ as a community organizer to keep quiet on Wisconsin. In any case I have to thank him for his stupidity/eagerness – he’s showing millions of otherwise disengaged Americans who he really is. And like a bunch of dumb Obamatons – Pelosi – among others – followed suit.
As some not-so-famous philosopher once said “they are who we thought they were”.
DOH!!!
Here’s hoping that class warfare comes back and bites the Community Organizer in the azzz….oh I’d love to see his daughters knocked up, holed up in a trailerpark with a couple mullet wearing rednecks…I can dream can’t I?
Another classy PJM remark. We are so proud…
I saw the ‘trailer’ for that on YouTube!
We are in quite a few of the multiplying and deepening series of economic/political/foreign policy crises we are in currently because Obama was elected President, and I don’t think that a lot of people have quite yet grasped just how deeply and totally they were deceived and screwed by our MSM, grasped the depth and the perfidious nature of the complete and utter betrayal of their supposed “journalistic principles” and their role in our democratic Republic, nor the extent of the MSM’s near total unanimity in functioning as a propaganda/disinformation arm of the Left and of Democrats and, consequently, the MSM’s quite thorough betrayal of each and every citizen of the United States, especially in their pre-election coverage, but also in their continuing post-election “coverage” of Obama as well.
Here was a 40 some year old candidate who–with the exception of two “autobiographies” that he supposedly “authored” giving his version of some very few aspects of his life–seemingly had no real, solid past, no back trail; it had all been obliterated, the records sealed up and locked from public sight. We had and have no marriage records for his parents, no full, long form birth certificate for him, and with the exception of one very revelatory college poem to “Pop,” who some speculate was not Barack Hussein Obama but was black Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis (see http://lutheransurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/10/obamas-adolescent-poem.html), we have no papers from Obama’s time in elementary school, high school, college, or law school, no college scholarship information, no draft registration information, no passport information, no college papers or theses, and although he became editor of the Harvard Law Review–no law review articles, nor any articles he wrote in his seven or eight years as an associate professor teaching Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Moreover, very curiously indeed, only a handful of people out of the thousands one would think he must have shared classrooms and jobs and free time with have eagerly and proudly come forward to reminisce about Obama and the times they spent together, and what they did say was so sketchy, so minimal, so essentially uninformative as to add nothing to our knowledge of Obama.
Obama was a community organizer, but has never given us any example of his “accomplishments” as one, the Director of the $100 million plus Annenberg Challenge in Chicago for three or four years, but Obama never mentions and hardly acknowledges (perhaps because all concerned agreed it was a complete failure and a total waste of money) this, his only actual “executive experience,” preferring instead to say, in answer to a rare probing pre-election question, that running his campaign was his chief “executive experience.” Here we had a politician who had a relatively meteoric rise through the ultra-corrupt system of Chicago Democratic machine politics, then an Illinois State senator with a record whose details and extent no one seems to be able to find and, finally, a U.S. Senator who in almost two years in Congress sponsored exactly one bill that became law, a routine bill dealing with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Yet, no major questions were raised about this lack of detail, this suppression of even basic information, about Obama’s lack of significant, real experience, qualifications, or accomplishments, no actual and sustained digging for more information or any real analysis but, instead, it was almost totally 24/7, wall-to-wall, pro-Obama propaganda and disinformation–“a tingle down their legs,” and their breathless, worshipful reportage on our “brilliant” new “lightworker,” “healer,” and “man of post-racial politics” by the MSM, with anyone asking for details or any naysayers labeled “racists,” mouth-breathing “boobs,” or “haters.”
Just exactly who and what Obama’s parents were, Obama’s childhood Muslim upbringing, questions about his meeting the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” requirement, Obama’s friendships and ties with a whole cadre of radicals–like his beloved “mentor”: throughout his teenage years, hard drinking, pot smoking, Communist Party member, admitted “sexual pervert” and hard core pornographer Frank Marshall Davis, his long association and friendship with unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, and with Ayer’s very wealthy father, called by some the “Godfather of Chicago politics,” Obama’s long term friendship with “ex-PLO operative” Rashid Khalidi (and the suppressed video/audio tape of Obama’s remarks at Khalidi’s Chicago going away party), the role that Muslim Black Nationalist Khalid al-Mansour, financial adviser to Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, played in raising money and letters of recommendation for Obama’s admission to Harvard Law, Obama’s 20 years of faithful attendance at the white-hating Black Liberation Theology/Marxist oriented church of the (ex-Muslim) Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America,” Wright, listening to his constant conspiracy-laced, anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Jew rants, and on and on9–each item more worrying than the last and–cumulatively—a huge Magnesium flare—all were either ignored, minimized, or blown off.
So, if you want to know who is chiefly responsible for the deepening pit of shit we are in, realize that directly in line behind Obama & Co. stands the MSM.
go deeper Seth.
Find out created the msm, our 24×7 leftist propaganda machine masquerading as cuddly middle americans. Then you’ll know who the masters of Obama really are.
Your diatribe on the MSM reminds me of when Katie Couric ads were running to announce her impending take-over of the CBS Nightly News. Her words (I paraphrase) were that she would be bringing us the news in a straight forward manner – then she’d tell us what it meant for us. Even my very liberal older sister chaffed at that one. When I pointed out Perky Katie’s remarks she said “I can figure that shit for myself”! She’s starting to understand just how spoon-fed the news has been for all these many years and doesn’t care for the condescending attitude that gets served up.
She watches The Factor and Gretta Van Susteren now. She still can’t quite come around to watching Hannity but I’m working on her.
Sometimes epiphanies come in baby steps!
It occurs to me that there are few professions or jobs that have such an impact when the job is done poorly, or with malice and an agenda, as the media’s. If I do my job poorly few are affected other than my family – if I do it poorly enough. If a doctor does his job badly his patient and the immediate family suffers but no others. The same with lawyers or any of most of the vocations I can think of. When journalists do their job poorly or with malice entire nations suffer. They suffer by making poor voting decisions based on manipulated, distorted information. The media are shamelessly acting as the Public Relations Arm of the Democratic Party…while not long ago the White House Communications Director accused Fox News of being the Republican Party’s propaganda arm. My mind reels at the bald-faced lies in a statement like that. The media are supposed to be our watchdogs. What they are in fact are the Democrat Party’s junkyard dogs ready to rip apart anybody posing a threat to their master’s domain. Shame on the journalistic profession. Report the news. If you want to change the world or voice your opinion, quit your job and run for office.
Jack Cashill in the archives of American Thinker Blog has some interesting theories about the beginning of Obama’s life and is coming out with a book soon to bring the speculation to print. It’s fascinating. A real mystery story.
But there is shame that so many people just seem to be incurious or not intellectual and will believe everything they’re told. And many of those who are incurious ridicule us who are curious. Obviously.
It’s not that we think he’s born here or there. It’s just that a Certificate of Live Birth is typically something that’s required of children that are born outside of the USA. Ask anyone who’s adopted a child from South America or the parent of a child born out of the USA. That’s how I found out. Who had ever heard of a Certificate Of Live Birth before Obama?
That’s a fact that can’t be denied yet we who remain curious about Obama’s birth, educated as so many of us are, are the ones held up to ridicule. And we’d ridicule the incurious but the heck with them.
Those unquestioning incurious souls who would like to think they condescend to us will not stop this game of hide and seek that frankly at this point is fun. And frankly, it’s a game Obama started by not coming clean in the first place.
Too much attention is paid to the birth certificate. And there is little doubt his mother was an American citizen, so even if he was born somewhere else (not likely) or had a dual citizenship, in most people’s minds, he would still be an American citizen.
Meanwhile, the guy has purged virtually every other record of his exceeding stange and foreign life, and little attention is paid to the astonishing cover-up.
They might be deliberately holding the birth certificate back to distract the public from the black hole covering the rest of the creature’s life.
…. The key is getting the money, not ensuring that it is well used. The organizer — often far better educated than his constituents — then moves on, either to other crisis spots or into politics on his way up his planned cursus honorum. Moreover, the organizer feels a certain sense of entitlement, given his good works — an exemption as it were to live a particular and much deserved lifestyle not always that different from (and indeed at times far better than) the supposed purveyors of social injustice. That the creation of huge entitlements creates social dependency, disrupts traditional local and family networks of mutual help and reliance, emphasizes poverty entirely in a political rather than a spiritual framework, or enables rather than addresses destructive behavior is of less interest to the careerist organizer — either because he sees problems only in classical material terms, or because he is long gone after the money is allotted, or because unanticipated disasters are not his purview, or because dependency, not alleviation of pathology, is the more important goal ….
This mentality, sadly, doesn’t limit its activities to Watts, to inner-urban Detroit, to South-Central Los Angeles and to the South Side of Chicago. For this mentality’s long long long self-anointed, self-appointing and self-perpetuating brown-shirted brainless also own operate and control every feral-gummint largess-squandering department, bureau, office and agency.
And so the Agriculture Department’s organizer pays America’s New Welfare Rich – the American “farmer” to grow multi-million ton mountains of grain than the market can possibly absorb. Much of the content of such subsidized grain and butter mountains are dumped in the traditional markets of such of our allies-in-name as, say, Canada or real allies, as Australia and New Zealand and pretty-much bankrupt those nations’ real wheat growers and real dairy farmers.
But the real damage is done by such organizer-designer agencies as, say USAID whose organizers — and Foggy Bottoms’ — oil-sheik-like, travel the world looking for and/or delusionally fantasizing situations for exploitation … um … needing “help.”
Like, say, in Somalia, which, before USAID’s organizers arrived, was an agriculturally self-sustaining state and even exported some. USAID’s organizers soon fixed that. When ship-loads of “free” grain were dumped at the port of Mogadishu, Somalia’s essentially subsistence farmers, unable to compete for “price,” were wiped out — and as they fell, took down Somalia’s banks and financial institutions, whose fall savagely negatively impacted Somalia’s every other institution. All of that made Mogadishu and Somalia decidedly unatractive to USAID’s traveling organizers for whom, in any case, …. the key was getting rid of Agriculture’s grain, not ensuring that it was well used. The organizers — far better educated than their constituents — then moved on, either to other crisis spots or into State — as Commercial Attaches, say — on their way up their Peter Principled cursus honorum.
USAID’s Mogadishu godowns (warehouses) and grain mountains vitally important to the very survival of vast numbers of Somalis and were immediately occupied by “war-lord” led gangs of terrorists, who shipped the grain to clients in the middle-East and elsewhere — and starved their countrymen to death.
Enter the hapless George Herbert Walker Bush Gng, NBC’s Ted Jennings and ABC’s Peter Koppel, the United States Marines’ Midnight Missionaries and the recidivist, treasonous, lying, looting, mass-murdering, co-serial-rapist Billy-Bubbah Blythe bumbling brigades?
And the rest is, ‘they’ say, History.
Instead of whining about Barak “Insane” OBama ( he has two more years, like it, or not), who do you support in the 2012 election? Personally, I’d vote of Sarah Palin. PLAN AHEAD!
Fred Yeager,
Lancaster, OH
Dr. Hanson does another excellent job of dissecting the Organizer-in-Chief.
I don’t understand why the Administration in D.C. is acting like Wisconsin is some political outlier. Gov. Walker is merely applying that sage dictum, “Never let a Crisis go to Waste.”
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
http://weaselzippers.us/2011/02/19/us-government-software-creates-fake-people-on-social-networks-to-promote-propaganda/
Saul would be proud.
My comment above deals mainly with Obama’s family and background, but what about his philosophy, the positions he has taken, the organizaitions he has worked with, the things he said regarding public policy issues, things you would think that voters should have been informed about, things that the MSM—in its supposed role as the objective investigator and public distributor of information, as the guardian of our democracy, of our Republican form of government, and of freedom–should have investigated, analyzed and publicized before and since the election.
But this did not and, largely, still does not happen, and when some disturbing piece of information did or does surface on the Internet or what has been termed the “undermedia,” it was or is still—it is getting to be a greater and greater strain but the MSM is still at it–buried, ignored, belittled, or dismissed by the MSM as nonsense that was and is not worthy of the MSM’s or our notice or investigation.
As they did in the case of VP candidate Sarah Palin, where a virtual army of reporters invaded Alaska and Wasilla, ransacking the place for any possible information i.e. “dirt” on Palin, before or even after the election, did the MSM also send an army of reporters to Indonesia to investigate Obama’s childhood experiences, family members, and Muslim education there? How about to Kenya? No. And the very revealing information about Obama, his adoptive Muslim family and life in Indonesia, and his education in and involvement with Islam unearthed by those curious undermedia types and bloggers who did take the trouble to go to Indonesia and to dig around were ignored by the MSM (http://www.danielpipes.org/5544/barack-obamas-muslim-childhood and see also http://www.ministers-best-friend.com/Obama-Urged-by-World-Muslims-to-become-MUSLIM-GLOBAL-LEADER.html) .
As for Kenya, while in 2007 Sarah Obama, Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, had told the New York Times that she—like virtually all of Obama’s Kenyan relatives–was a Muslim and “a strong believer in the Islamic faith,” by 2008, as the election neared, we were told by the AP and by USA Today that—not to worry—Sarah Obama was really actually a Christian (http://custosfidei.blogspot.com/2008/03/obamas-grandmother-is-christian-now.html) and, by implication, Obama was too. I note here a news story from 2009 saying that Obama’s Kenyan Muslim grandmother, Sarah Obama, made the required Muslim pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca in that year as a guest of Saudi King Saud (http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/obamas-christian-grandmother-in-mecca-for-hajj.html) .
Some information about Obama’s deep and longstanding connections with ACORN eventually seeped into the MSM, but—to this day–no one in the MSM has been willing to actually investigate and lay out those connections, and ACORN was only one of several problematic organizations Obama was involved with in Chicago. What about Obama’s reported involvement of several year’s duration with the shadowy Alinsky-type community organizing group, the Gamaliel Foundation, what about Obama’s ties to the Democratic Socialist Party of America? Not a word in the MSM that I have seen.
Nor were the intrepid reporters of the MSM willing to do a thorough investigation of Obama’s ignored/reluctantly acknowledged 3 or 4 year long career as Director of the Annenberg Challenge of Chicago (appointed by Bill Ayers with the help Obama’s future wife Michelle, then a lawyer in Chicago—say, what did happen to Michelle’s license to practice law and to Obama’s too?)—surely an investigation that should have been done in light of Obama’s claims to be so concerned about “education.”
Obama’s career as an Illinois State Senator just somehow never got investigated in any great depth either but, via the undermedia, it did emerge that Obama had several times argued against and vetoed against a bill that would have required doctors who delivered a live baby after a botched abortion to give such babies life supporting medical care, and that the Illinois Senate Committee chaired by Obama received testimony and he was present for testimony from at least one nurse who testified that the current practice was not to provide medical care or assistance in any way, but to put such born alive babies by themselves in a closet or in a closed room—so that the doctors and nurses couldn’t hear their cries–until they died (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225404/why-obama-really-voted-infanticide/andrew-c-mccarthy and see the nurse’s testimony here, http://www.illinoisrighttolife.org/newpage36.htm). Obama’s arguments against requiring doctors and nurses to give life supporting medical assistance to such babies who were born alive after botched late term abortions? Well, beside legal pettifogging about the definition of “life,” and person-hood, and rights, one of his arguments was that requiring doctors and nurses to provide such life supporting care would be “too burdensome” for the doctors and nurses involved and their institutions(http://www.nrlc.org/obamabaipa/Obamacoveruponbornalive.htm). Again, wouldn’t it have been instructive if the MSM had thoroughly investigated and publicized this matter and Obama’s actions and opinions before the election or even after? But, again they didn’t and still haven’t. And the list goes on an on.
Then, of course, there was the potentially derailing and catastrophic pre-election eruption of the Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright affair, in which once Wright’s sermons “God Damning” America hit the Internet, Obama was allowed to get away with declaring that, although Obama told some interviewers that he, his wife and children were faithful, usually weekly attendees at Wright’s Black Liberation Theology directed Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) church over the course of 20 years, Obama never heard Wright utter any of the anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-American diatribes that this church thought so noteworthy and exemplary that they featured them in a DVD of Wright’s “greatest sermons”, produced and sold by TUCC, and in Wright’s magazine length Sunday church bulletin. And then, when the heat of this controversy got even more intense, Obama was allowed to very “reluctantly” disown and disavow the man he had formerly proudly called his “mentor,” his “close personal friend” and “spiritual and political adviser.” And, for the MSM, this extinguished this threatening and dangerous firestorm for Obama, which Obama and the MSM simply ignored thereafter.
What about, as well, the January, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle video interview with Obama, in which he said that his “cap and trade” energy plan would “necessarily mean that electricity prices would “skyrocket” (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4)? Wouldn’t it have been very informative, indeed, if his remarks had been generally presented to voters by the MSM, have been given center stage, and were widely publicized and analyzed prior to the election? But, they weren’t.
How about a thorough and objective presentation and analysis of the works and philosophy of Saul Alinsky, that Obama thought so highly of (I note that Hillary Clinton thought very highly of Alinsky and his ideas and methods too, and wrote her thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky, his ideas, and techniques) that Obama taught them, and put them into practice as a “community organizer” ?
And on, and on, and on.
When you come right down to it, Obama & Co–with the absolutely essential, thorough, widespread, and virtually unanimous aid of the MSM—swindled voters here in America, who were sold the proverbial “pig in a poke,” a saying at least as old as Medieval times describing the ancient swindle of selling a country bumpkin a supposed prize piglet bagged up in a burlap sack (the “poke”), getting the payment upfront for the piglet, and somehow persuading the bumpkin not to open the bag to look at the pig until he got home. Of course, when the bumpkin did open the sack he discovered there wasn’t a prize pig but rather a weasel or a cat in it, thus the origin of the phrase “letting the cat out of the bag” i.e. disclosing the heretofore hidden truth.
In the case of American voters, in this past election, we were the bumpkins, and it was Obama & Co and the MSM who swindled us by selling us the “pig in the poke” of Obama, by reassuring us that he was, indeed, “the man we had been waiting for,” by telling us not to worry, and don’t look any further than what we report and are telling you, and don’t open up the sack to see what is really in it; a MSM that is still hoping that only few people have, as yet, opened the bag to discover a weasel in it.
Excellent summation Seth. I have long said that I don’t see how a republic like ours can survive when the institution tasked with presenting information to its citizens is so blatantly and unashamedly in the tank for one Party. They are number one on the list of domestic enemies that need to be dealt with if we ever hope to take back America. What is equally disheartening is that there are so many people who thoughtlessly and unquestioningly let themselves be spoon-fed by the likes of Couric and her ilk in the MSM (but that’s another essay for another domestic enemy – our education establishment – currently on display in Wisconsin, as well as in a town near you). I give more credit to Pravda, who performed similarly but at least had the excuse of reporting under threat of going to the gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck. Katie and her friends perform this service free of duress and voluntarily. May they soon face a reckoning they will never forget.
It is time to stop itemizing the President’s inconsistencies and one sided view of the office of the President of the United States. He is a parttisan through and through; using at all times tired conventional cliches. He hasn’t demonstrated any leadership whatsoever, at all times posturing to those whom he thinks will re-elect him and squandering public money to gain their votes. His conduct in the field of foreign affairs is nothing short of abysmal. He has earned the contempt of foreign leaders to the point that the United States has minimal influence in foreign affairs. Leaders in Iran and Venezuela are openly contemptuous of him. Others are less vocal.
President Obama is nothing short of a disaster for the country whose Constitution he is sworn to “uphold and defend”.
Hah, another liberal and his “should be’s”. There is no “should be” in life; not in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or any of the Bill of Rights or any of the Subsequent amendments. “should be’s” are liberals’ attempts to make life look as they want it to, and it looks at lot of Russia, N.Korea, China, Cuba, Venezeula, etc., etc. We have a country where freedom does not say anything about “should be’s”. On the other hand it says everything about “could be”. You could be a millionaire if you had any brains. You can go where you want to school if you have ambition, etc. etc. I suggest you worry less about the person or persons who you think don’t “deserve” their money, or what you THINK their money is, focus on your own life. That is a challenge for liberals as they seem to think that the “should be’s” of the world are theirs to change.
I live in a black neighborhood in a Florida town. Two years ago the county built a huge, beautiful, state-of-the-art library right in the middle of our neighborhood, with plenty of brand-new books and 35 public-access computers with high-speed internet. After school the place is full of teenagers, but nobody’s reading books. They’re all crowded around the computers, taking turns at the keyboards, staring raptly at the screens. Are they doing homework or catching up on school lessons? Of course not. They’re all on Facebook, flirting with teenagers on the other side of the world who they will never meet. These kids aren’t stupid, illiterate or thuggish. They’re just not interested in what the public schools are teaching, and the teachers don’t care enough to get them interested.
I read as many of these posts as I could, but soon, became quite bored. Amoungst all the responses, not a one seemed to be interested in resolving our current economic/political problems, only interested in proselitizing their own view.
The US, and the world, is in trouble. A “global economy”, like it or not, is what we now have. We must now come together on expectations,rules and regulations. I could play the blame game forever, but fact of the matter is, that does not matter. What we need to do now is stand up and be counted.