Reasons the poor are not getting a good education.

@Z_AC_Tech this country is not fare people in poor hoods don't get good educations people without good educations don't get good jobs

This was a question posed to me by  @JAMSRIDE on twitter recently. This was a good example of a popular misconception propagated by Big Government Pro Union Progressive Democrats in their talking points. The Democratic lie is that they are helping the poor but in reality they are most responsible for the continuing decay of the Public Education System. I must devote some space to this subject. The lack of competition is the reason public schools are so expensive and also bad. That is why we need alternatives like vouchers and charter schools. See the articles below for yourself. The government Monopoly of Public Schools is the source of the problem and this must be corrected.

Conservative education policy empowers parents, not administrators

By

Inez Feltscher

Who knows best what will help a child succeed in school? Is it the government or is it the parents, who are closest to their child’s educational needs and desires? This is the fundamental question that conservative education reformers are asking the public school system.

George Miller

Rep. George Miller visiting Manzanita Charter School in Richmond, Virginia, on April 27, 2010.

The one point that all sides seem to be able to agree on is that the American education system is failing our kids. NAEP assessments have concluded that fewer than one-third of our fourth graders are proficient in math, reading, science, and American history. U.S. eighth graders ranked 19th out of 38 countries in math and 18th in science, a failure that will undoubtedly impede our competitiveness in a 21st century global economy. Worse than these statistics, however, is the fact that the failures of our education system are imperiling the American Dream itself. With many failing school districts in urban and minority communities, education as a means to launch the disadvantaged into the middle class and beyond is quickly becoming a pipe dream.
Given these results, all Americans must ask themselves what it is that the public education system lacks. One popular answer from the left has been that our schools are chronically under-funded, but is this true? In the last 50 years, we have tripled federal spending per student, adjusting for inflation. Since the 1970s, education spending has increased by 138 percent, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, national test scores have remained stagnant since the 1970s, with graduation rates remaining at around 73 percent. Even worse, some of the best-funded school districts have some of the worst results: In the District of Columbia, where I live, only 49 percent of students graduate from high school in the public system. Yet D.C. spends roughly $24,600 per student annually — more than the average cost of private school tuition in the District.
Instead, conservatives believe that the answer lies in accountability. Merit pay and tenure reform for teachers are good places to begin. Ultimately, however, we get accountability by empowering parents to hold their children’s schools responsible. Parents know best what their child needs from educators and schools in order to succeed, because they are the ones closest to their child’s particular learning needs; anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows that each student learns differently and needs different tools to succeed.
Conservatives espouse a menu-like approach to education, envisioning a future in which students and their parents may pick and choose amongst many options. For example, we could implement public school choice, allowing children to attend public schools outside of their zip code. Or we could expand the types of public schools through charter school programs, in which certain public schools are permitted by school boards or states to operate on a different model from traditional public school, often exempt from teacher union work rules. Alternatively, we could enable students to exit failing public schools with voucher programs that apply some or all of the education dollars spent on a child to offsetting the cost of private school. Beyond these options are virtual education, home school, and more.
When a variety of options become available, many parents will choose to craft a custom-made education plan for their children. What could be more appropriate in the age of “there’s an app for that” than a customizable model for American education?
Florida offers a case study in the success of comprehensive school choice reforms. In 1999 Florida enacted a series of K-12 school reform bills, including public school choice, limited vouchers, an expanded charter school network, merit pay for teachers, virtual education (Florida currently has far and away the largest number of children enrolled in online education), and an A through F grading scale for Florida’s schools that brought transparency and informed parents about the quality of their neighborhood schools. As a result, more than ten years later, the quality of Florida’s education has skyrocketed.
The percentage of students passing the NAEP exam (the national assessment that compares students in all the states) in Florida has increased from 53 percent in 1998 to over 70 percent in the last several years. Every year, Florida uses performance on state tests, among other measures, to grade the performance of all its schools. In 1999, the first year of the reforms, there were 616 schools that received an A or B grade, and 677 that received a D or an F; the state had more failing schools than schools that were successful in educating students. In 2010, Florida had 2044 A or B schools and only 181 failing schools, a tremendous improvement that was achieved despite the fact that Florida raised its standards four times over that period of time. Over 40 percent of Florida students have taken and passed an AP exam. Additionally, Florida has also had tremendous success in closing the racial education performance gaps that have plagued American schools for decades: Black students in Florida now outperform or tie the reading average for all students in 8 other states, while Hispanic students in Florida now outperform or tie the average in 31 states.
The conservative solution, school choice, gives parents the ability to control the tax dollars that their state spends on educating their child. Empowering parents with control over their student’s education dollars introduces strong accountability to the system by giving unhappy parents the ability to take their business elsewhere, just as they would with any other service. This approach holds schools, administrators, and teachers responsible for the success of the students they are being paid to educate. School choice also enables parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds to choose from a host of options (traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools, online schools, or home schools) in order to best serve the learning needs of their child, preserving upward mobility through education.

Below is some great math showing how a Conservative solution to the failed Democratic model could work.

DC Vouchers Solved? Generous Severance for Displaced Workers

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

Colbert King argues that DC should continue the opportunity scholarships private school choice program on its own dime, instead of complaining that Congress is killing it off. He starts off with a refreshing dose of realpolitik: “It should come as no surprise that Democratic congressional leaders are effectively killing the program. They, and their union allies, didn’t like it in the first place.” Too true. This is what disgusts many Americans about politics, but hey, that’s the reality.
But then he seems to descend into uncharacteristic naivete with this:

If the city likes vouchers so much, why shouldn’t the District bear the cost? The answer is as clear as it may be embarrassing to voucher proponents: D.C. lawmakers don’t want to ask their constituents to shoulder the program’s expense.

That is NOT the answer. DC lawmakers are familiar with DC’s budget. DC’s FY 2009 budget, as I show in this Excel spreadsheet file, allocated $28,170 per pupil for k-12 schooling. And the average voucher amount is not $7,500, as King claims. That’s the maximum. The average is $6,620 – one quarter of what the district is spending on k-12 schooling. So operating the voucher program entirely out of the District of Columbia’s own budget would not cost a dime. And if expanded, it would save DC tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars.
So DC lawmakers are most certainly NOT afraid of asking constituents to pay for it — it would more than pay for itself. What DC lawmakers must be afraid of is that DC schools have become a massive jobs program instead of an educational program. They must fear that if the voucher program were expanded it would put many non-teaching staff out of work — including perhaps some of their own supporters.
Well how about a realpolitik solution to that problem: offer displaced workers 18 months of severance pay at something like 75% of their current salary. That would give them plenty of time to find other work, and it could be paid for from the savings of students migrating from public schools to the voucher program. This would mean that taxpayers would not see savings in the first couple of years, but after that the District would be able to offer taxpayers generous tax cuts while also offering kids significantly better learning opportunities.
Surely the details of such a deal could be hammered out by experienced politicians and negotiators. Because, really, the status quo is insane. Why keep paying $28,000 for a worse education than the voucher program is providing for $6,600? That is sheer madness.

Below is a quote from an  Scot Cerullo email published on his blog http://www.thepersistentconservative.com/ and I could not say it any better.

American schools don’t teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don’t have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids — it’s a kind of voucher system. Government funds education — at many different kinds of schools — but if a school can’t attract students, it goes out of business.
Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.
She told us, “If we don’t offer them what they want for their child, they won’t come to our school.” She constantly improves the teaching, saying, “You can’t afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don’t do their work, because the clients will know, and won’t come to you again.”
“That’s normal in Western Europe,” Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. “If schools don’t perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S.”
Last week Florida’s Supreme Court shut down “opportunity scholarships,” Florida’s small attempt at competition. Public money can’t be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of “uniform . . . high-quality” schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.
The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.
This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

Socialism’s Losing Bet

Humans are at their very basic nature, capitalists. I just had to post this great article written by Danial Greenfield on September 1st 2009 in the Canadian Free Press. This article hits the nail on the head regarding the inherent unsustainability of the Socialist system. Socialism’s Losing Bet

By Daniel Greenfield  Tuesday, September 1, 2009 Humans are at their very basic nature, capitalists. We buy and we sell, and when we do that we try to sell at the highest price and buy at the lowest price. Underlying every economic system, from laissez faire capitalism to communism is the reality that the underlying human nature of the people within that system will not change, they will only adapt those same tactics to function within that system. Economic systems may come and go, but people do not change. When socialism is applied, it does not transform human nature, it is overlaid over human nature. When a socialist system attempts to artificially control the price of a commodity or access to a resource, a black market in that commodity or resource is created. With medical care it can take the form of Canada’s illegal health care clinics at one end of the spectrum or the “bribe economy” that is common throughout Communist countries in which people are expected to bribe doctors, nurses and just about everyone within the system to receive even basics such as a change of sheets. In Israel it can take the form of doctors who work in both the public system and see patients privately, doing their best to push patients into paying to see them privately. There are numerous examples throughout the world, but what matters is that all of them represent profiteering behaviors that have adapted to a government health care system. Because once again, people don’t change. The Soviet Union took away land and private businesses. It drastically limited employee salaries and collective workers’ access to produce. It drastically centralized the economy and removed individual freedom. What it created as a result was a “Black” economic system in which most of the production and even office resources such as pens and paper, were stolen and sold or bartered on the black market. Soviet diplomats and Olympic athletes returned home with massive amounts of items bought in the West, to be resold on the black market. Decades of executions and gulags, campaigns that worked to convince schoolchildren to inform on their parents, made no dent at all in the problem. Everyone stole, and the reason they stole was that it was the only form of individual economic initiative that was available to them. Communism is the most extreme example of government nationalization and centralization, and yet it could not control the free market operating within itself. Having made legitimate economic transactions illegal, its entire economy became illegal. The promoters of Communism boasted that it would insure that everyone would have equal access to the same goods and services. Instead goods and services still went to those who could pay for them, through bribes and black market activities, only those activities were no longer taxable. What happens to a government whose economy that is mostly illegal and untaxable? Within two generations the Soviet Union had become dependent on imports for everything down to food and clothing. By contrast China revised Communist dogma to legalize profit seeking behavior, resulting in a massive economic boom. Socialsim: Government controls actually drive spending into an untaxable and uncontrollable black market Socialism is commonly implemented with promises that it will be fairer and make resources available to more people. Yet the two-fold problem with socialism, is that socialist systems actually consume resources inefficiently, thereby limiting the resources that are available, and that government controls actually drive spending into an untaxable and uncontrollable black market. Setting a price ceiling results in shortages, as numerous socialist systems have demonstrated for us, most recently Chavez’s Venezuela. Price controls decrease production incentive and push more goods into the black market, while sharply decreasing the quality of goods available on the legal market. Attempting to cut costs routinely bypasses the actual “fat” within the system, namely unions, bureaucrats and over regulation, all of which are key parts of a socialist machine, instead targeting producers and consumers. Targeting producers reduces quality and availability. Targeting consumers results in rationing. Either way the end results lead to shortages of vital goods and services. Socialist solutions promise to extend services, but they can only do so at the cost of cutting quality and creating shortages. Rather than addressing the reality of this, they instead trot out propaganda blaming producers for the high cost of services, resulting in crackdowns that worsen shortages and the quality of the services being provided. The follow-up “Soak the Rich” arguments push for higher taxes, but government spending on social problems will sooner or later outpace even the most aggressive punitive tax revenues, because unlike legitimate income, government spending has natural stopping point except absolute insolvency, and because raising taxes drives out the very people and businesses who are supposed to pay for the programs, killing the golden goose of capitalism, only to find that its socialist parasite can’t live without it. Who actually needs socialism And at the bottom of the whole pile of problems, is the question of who actually needs socialism. Its proponents are usually upper class or upper middle class, who want it to be available for the poor. They want public housing they wouldn’t live in. They want health programs they wouldn’t use themselves. Public schools they don’t want to send their own kids to. And free food they wouldn’t eat themselves. Naturally they don’t want to pay for the whole thing either. They want the “other rich” people to do it. The bad rich who don’t care about poor people, the way they themselves do. For the upper classes, economic or ecological morality hold the same role that sexual morality does for hypocritical clergy, it’s very well and good, and they’re happy to sign on to it… for other people. So you’ll find the same entertainers demanding higher taxes to feed the poor and clothe the hungry, have their money tied up in complex ways overseas and out of reach. Because they mean for someone else’s money to do all those things. Not their own wealth. This makes them hypocrites, but it’s also a reminder that human nature doesn’t change. Scratch the long-haired musician calling for everyone to give up their money for Africa, and you’ll still find a capitalist inside. On the other hand what the people socialism is meant to serve want is a social safety net, but without compromising social mobility. Because while the upper classes may toss down a few crumbs, what most people on the lower part of the ladder want is to climb up. Because after all they’re capitalists too. They want their children to be better off than they were, not simply through social safety nets, but through hard work and effort. And those who don’t want to climb up, have been severely damaged by living under a socialist system, to the point that the only thing they want is to live in a box and be taken care of by the government, generating a self-perpetuating social problem for government bureaucracies to gleefully cackle over. The more government centralization there is, the less opportunities for social mobility remain. Climbing the ladder only has meaning, if there is a ladder. The more small businesses become unfeasible, the less room for social mobility there is. The sons and daughters of hardworking fathers and mothers are instead directed to take exams and climb into the echoing steel womb of the government bureaucracy, where they can look forward to pushing paper around a desk for most of their lives, and possibly earn a little extra on the side, if the situation has become extreme enough for a bribe economy to develop. Each step toward greater government control creates a culture of greater illegality opposing it Because human nature does not change. Even within a system that bars people from pursuing their own goals, people will find ways to pursue those goals. If the system does not provide legal and socially positive ways to pursue those goals, they will pursue those goals, illegally and with socially negative consequences. Every attempt to control how people behave, creates an equal and opposite reaction. Each step toward greater government control creates a culture of greater illegality opposing it. Not out of some rebellious political statement, but as an inevitable human consequence.  Philosophers and courtiers have spent a long time dreaming of the perfect state, only to generally conclude that it cannot exist. Because people are not perfect. The great socialist dream of a state that will care for everyone and do everything only functions on paper. When it is implemented in real life, the realities of running a large system ripe with bribery, corruption and inefficiency quickly make a mockery of all the paper plans. And the more the system squeezes people, the more it begins working against the people, putting in motion the very social and economic forces that will finally destroy it. There are few inevitable things in life, but human nature is one of them. And if you bet against human nature, you will lose. And socialism, which insists on betting on human nature, will continue to lose.

Daniel Greenfield  Bio

Daniel Greenfield Most recent columns Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator. “Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and the rising threat to Western Civilization. He maintains a blog at Sultanknish.blogspot.com.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com

The Origins of Political Correctness

The Origins of Political Correctness

Even though this article is over ten years old it is still oh so relevant. I learned a lot when I read this. Please do enjoy.

by Bill Lind, February 5, 2000

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An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

Unions: The 7 Lies You Must Know

A great article by a Former Union Organizer.
The First Lie - You Can't Lose

This one comes out in every campaign:  A union is a "no lose" proposition.  Weaker organizers just promise employees will get a big pay raise or improved benefits if they vote in a union.  Smarter organizers (and the weaker ones when it becomes clear they are dealing with an employee who knows how bargaining actually works) will say something like the union would never agree to cuts in current wages or benefits, so employees can only win.

The facts?  Bargaining is a two-way street and unions regularly agree to lesser pay, benefits or work conditions in a first contract.  Unions need a contract once they are voted in - no contract, no dues and the enormous investment in the organizing effort is lost.  Of course this always depends on the relative bargaining power of the parties, but most of the time - especially in today's tough market - unions have to agree to concessions to get that first contract.

Unions have institutional goals in contract negotiations (like dues checkoff and union security) the smart companies will only agree to in exchange for something else.  That something else is normally something that the employees currently enjoy or something the union promised they'd get during the organizing campaign.

Any former organizer (and even current organizers if they are "off the record") will tell you that as soon as an election is won the job becomes lowering expectations of the new members.  Why would that be true?  Because nobody would vote in a union if they thought they would pay dues for less pay and benefits.  Unions are also great at "spinning" concessions at the bargaining table.

The bottome line is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Negotiations are full of trade-offs from the two sides to the contract.  Some will benefit the union (notice I did not say the employees - the employees are not a party to the contract).  And some will benefit the company.  If that doesn't happen there won't be an agreement.

That's not to say that employees won't benefit at all under the new agreement.  The union has to get an agreement that benefits them and politically won't get them voted out of office (not an easy thing to do).  But the company has to get a contract they can live with.  If that happens there will be a contract - even if that agreement cuts some of the current pay, benefits or work conditions of employees.  If not.  No deal.

The Second Lie - Test Drive

Union organizers like to minimize the risk in the minds of the voter during an organizing campaign.  One of the ways they do this is by offering the "test drive."  They will tell employees to vote them in, try them out and if they don't get a contract they like they can just vote the union out in a year.  The best organizers actually dial this one up a notch and tell employees that if they don't bargain a contract that the employees approve that the union will just walk away without a vote.

The facts?  You just can't test drive a union.  As a legal matter, once a union is voted in it is in for as long as it wants unless employees take the affirmative step of decertifying the union.  While the union does have the power to walk away this rarely happens.  In fact, I've never seen it happen without a petition being filed.

Getting one of these petitions filed is not the easiest thing in the world.  First, the cards are stacked against them.  If a contract is entered you are barred from filing one for about 3 years.  Even then, there is only a 30 day period where you can file and it is not an easy process.

Then there are roadblocks the union will throw into the way of employees who try and get rid of them.  Let's put it this way: you're not exactly welcome down at the union hall if you start passing around a decertification petition.  Unions will do what ever they can to stop one from getting traction, including intimidation and harrasement of the people who support the effort.  It takes alot of guts to do it.  To many it's just not worth the hassle.

So can you "test drive" a union?  I suppose technically you can.  Realistically, however, once a union is in it is in.  The ball is completely in the union's court and the rules are stacked against you.  You should assume when you vote that if the union gets in it is in for good.

A great way to overcome this lie during a campaign is to show employees a copy of the union's constitution and bylaws - especially the section that talks about trials and fines.  Here there is usually language about encouraging secession or conduct unbecoming a member.

The Third Lie - You Are The Union

This one always sounds good during a campaign.  You will have a voice if you vote in a union - your opinion will count.  Who wouldn't vote for that?

Before voting on this promise it is a good idea to consider the mechanics of how your voice is heard in a union.  The only thing a union wins in an election is the right to speak on behalf of a group of employees for purposes of collective bargaining.  That's it.  So it is not accurate to say that you have a voice in the union.  In fact the opposite is true.

The facts?  You lose your individual voice the minute a union is voted in and give that voice to the union.  The union may listen to you, but legally it can do whatever it wants as your representative whether you agree with it or not.  So long as it meets its "duty of fair representation" (and the NLRB almost always says it does) the union - and here I mean the International or Local Union that is certified as the bargaining representative - can do whatever the heck it wants.

Employees who join the union do get an opportunity to vote on union leadership, and if enough people disagree with what the current leaders are doing you might get new leaders.  But again, it is their voice - not yours - that counts.

Organizers often tell you that you or your coworkers will actually sit at the bargaining table and negotiate your contract.  That does happen sometimes.  What they don't tell you is that the bargaining committee is almost always instructed to not comment at the table and to save discussions for "caucus" meetings away from the table.  The committe is told that this shows a "united font" at the table.  By the way, it is great advice.  But it does not give you a voice.

Even if you do get to speak at the table, don't have illusions about where the real voice lies.  Only the local union can approve a contract with your company (and in many cases even the local union has no power to do this - it has to be approved by the International).

To say you have a voice in the union is the same thing as saying you have a voice in American politics.  Technically you do have a voice - you get to vote on representatives and you might even help to get rid of one who you don't agree with.  But do you feel like you have any kind of day to day voice about what happens in Washington (or in your state and local government for that matter)?  This is the exact kind of voice you have in a union.

If you really want a voice at work you have three options.  You could start your own company - then you get a say in every decision.  If that isn't your thing, you could search out a company that already does a good job of listening to employee input (I'll give you this hint - they are almost never unionized).

However, the number one wat to be heard at work is to start speaking up.  Be constructive - if your input is ignored also think about whether the way you are presenting it is the problem.  But whatever you do, don't stop trying.  You may feel your suggestions are ignored.  If you can't handle it anymore, try one of the options above.  But I will tell you this.  If your employer isn't listening to its employees now, it's not going to start just because a union is voted in.

The Fourth Lie - Respect

Another common refrain in organizing campaigns is that the union will get you the respect you deserve.  The company will be forced to respect it's employees if they band together as a union.  It is a great way to rally the troops without actually having to promise anything.  "United we stand, divided we beg," the organizer will say.

It would be great if respect was that easy to gain.  We go around for years getting pooped on by our company until we have a vote one day and then - boom - we are respected.  Sounds appealing, huh?

The facts?  Most organizers who use this line want you to confuse fear with respect.  They are saying that if the union is voted in that the company will fear the union - or at least fear what the union might do - and treat employees with more respect.

Think about that organizer's formula.  The company will treat you better because it is scared of what the union might do.  This formula may have worked back in the day.  Unions used to be able to shut down entire industries on a whim - they did it too.  Violent strikes were not uncommon.

In that enviroment - especially if you were a monopoly and could afford to make concessions like in the automobile, steel or airline industry - you just rolled over and passed the cost on to your customer.  Then the world got flat.

Not to downplay the violence and intimidation that happened in the heyday of unions, but it turns out there are forces that are much more violent and intimidating to employers than any union.  Like competition from all corners of the world.

When you are struggling for survival, the threat of a strike or some bad PR doesn't really get your attention the way it might have in the past.  Look at Ford, GM and Chrysler for good current examples of this.  But there is a whole graveyard of companies - many of them unionized - that were squashed out of existence by the forces of the world market over the last 25 years.

Unions know this lesson better than anyone.  It turns out that the restrictive work rules and unwieldy bargaining and dispute resolution process common to most union contracts are uniquely effective ways to make an employer uncompetitive in today's marketplace.  Even with wage and benefit concessions, these companies get hammered when market conditions get tough.  They just aren't nimble enough to take on the world.

In todays flat economy the threats that worked decades ago are useless:  unions know that a struck company will find another way to get it's product to the costomers, replace striking workers or go out of business.  Either way the union loses a bunch of dues paying members.

Unions aren't feared by companies.  While it remains true that companies don't want a union anymore today than they did 20 years ago (maybe even less), that is not fear of what the union might do.  It is fear that their competitors will eat their lunch.

If a union was truely interested in earning the respect of a company it would help the company eliminate inefficiencies, develop new ways to work and help it open new markets.  It would work as a partner.  Unfortunately unions are stuck in the past, remembering the good-old days and only interested in slowing down change.  That is why they are going extinct.

The Fifth Lie - Company Fight Is Proof

This popular argument is a trick.  It uses the company's opposition as proof that the union would benefit employees.  It puts the unions in the same catagory as drugs and cigarettes when you were a kid - that stuff you weren't supposed to do but everybody did anyway.  The logic goes that the only reason parents opposed those things was because they were fun - thus the parent's opposition proved that it was a risk worth taking.

The bad news for the union (and unfortunately for many teenagers) is that sometimes the "parents" are right.  Drugs, cigarettes and unions can all be bad for you - and those who oppose them may actually be looking out for your best interest.

The facts?  Companies don't oppose unions because they fear the union will negotiate big wages and benefit increases.  This is a silly argument, because that is totally in the company's control.  I guess the union might convince employees that they can trick the company into making improvements that it otherwise wouldn't agree to.  But long term do you really want to work for a company that is that stupid?

The reasons companies oppose union has nothing to do with what they think employees will get.  Companies know that so long as they are patient and firm in their resolve they can pretty much negotiate whatever they want into a contract.  However, they also know that once a union is voted in they lose their ability to make quick adjustments to market conditions.

Here is the problem.  The bargaining process is adversarial and can take months even years.  During that time the company is effectively stuck doing things the way it has always done them in the past.  In today's economy waiting months or a year to implement a change that your non-union competitors can implement immediately can mean the difference between survival and bankruptcy.

Customers also know this about unionized companies - many actually ask their unionized venders to alert them several months in advance of contract negotiations.  Because their is a risk of supply disruptions during contract negotiations, many customers will look for alternate suppliers around this time.  This is never a good thing.

This is why companies fight unions so vigorously.  Studies suggest that the "dead-weight" loss of a union on an organization is around 20% of the companies overall productivity and profitability.  This is not because of wage and benefit increases.  Today the gap between union and non-union employees is shrinking, and if you control for regional and industry differences in many cases there is no gap at all.

The Sixth Lie - Protection

This is one of the main ploys used by organizers: creating fear of the employer in the minds of the voters.  I've seen organizers get employees in a frenzy over job security in companies that never fired employees for anything other than attendance.  Creating fear in the minds of the employees is the quickest way for an organizer to build support among employees.

The facts?  In most companies today employees are only terminated after a series of write-ups or other progressive discipline.  Our employment law landscape is quite different than it was even 10 years ago - employers walk on eggshells whenever they have to fire an employee.

The reason for all this caution is the enormous number of employment laws we have in place today.  There are more than 10 different "protected classes" today (when you add up state and sometimes even municipal requirements there can be more than 20).  Then plaintiffs attorneys have discovered a way to prove "reverse discrimination" which is a cause of action available to anyone who isn't in a protected class - in other words anyone can sue for anything.

While union organizers like to focus attention on things like "at will" status and "open door" policies (telling workers that it really is just an open door onto the street), the truth is much different.  An employer who fires someone without a solid case - including documents and proof that the decision is consistent with prior actions and standing company rules - is just asking for trouble.

So employers take care when terminating employees.  What about unionized employees - do they have it any better.  Turns out the answer is no.

While most union employees are covered by a grievance and arbitration procedure, they also give up their right to speak for themselves or process their own case.  This means that politics can often decide cases instead of merits.

There are thousands of union members each year who accuse their unions of unfairly representing them in the grievance process.  It turns out that unions don't do that great of a job protecting their own members.  You can this to employees by showing them copies of the unfair labor practice charges filed against the union.

In addition, unions can also negatively impact a company in other ways which also threatens job security.  Being laid off by a struggling company doesn't feel a whole lot better than getting fired - either way your looking for another job.

The Seventh Lie - Union Employees Have It Better

This is the last of their 7 lies.  It is the glue that holds all the other lies together.  Union employees are just alot better off than everyone else.

There is alot to like about this argument if you are a union organizer.  The first is that if you aren't very curious about government statistics - and really, who is - it actually looks like this argument is true.

Each year when unions are forced to explain how they manged to lose even more union members over the last year they always will point people to the Bureau of Labor Statistics information on union wage rates.  They will then tell you that these statistics prove that union members make about 30% more than non-union members across the country.

You read that right.  Thirty percent.

Surely if this were true then people would be lining up at union halls around the country trying to get a union into their workplace, right?  Of course the answer can be found in that age-old saying there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

The annual BLS statistics aren't very good.  First, they do not count for regional differences.  It turns out union members congregate mainly  in large metropolitan areas, especially on the two coasts.  Turns out that these same areas are also where it is most expensive to live and wage rates tend to be higher in these areas.

In addition, the statistics that unions like to quote just lump everyone together, which then assumes that union membership is distrubuted across job classifications.  Turns out that also isn't true.  So, you end up comparing unionized NFL and NBA players with non-union McDonald's and Wal-Mart workers.

If you try to compare apples to apples (which is impossible using the BLS data set) the union premium tends to shrink.  In many industries there is no gap at all - in some the non-union employees make more.

People aren't stupid.  The reason why non-union employees aren;t lining up to join unions is not because this union premium is a big secret, or that employers have some kind of mind control over their employees.  It's because they know by observing with their own eyes that the statistics just aren't true.  Some companies pay more than others.  Some have better benefits.  Some layoff half their workforce during the slow time of the year.  Some work overtime non-stop.

The bottom line is having a union does not make life better.  In most of the important, day-to-day ways it makes life worse.  It adds another layer of bureaucracy and politics to your work life.  It adds additional cost and rules.  It can hurt the competivenessof a company, making it more vulnerable to market forces.

Many in the unions have demonstrated a level of arrogance and even greed.

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

We continue to negotiate, and we continue to be hopeful. However, the negotiating process is a two-way street and the unions have not been willing to approve a contract that would allow the company to remain competitive.

I did not write this one myself but agree with much of this post. If anyone knows who wrote this please do let me know so I can credit them?

Just a few unsustainable accomplishments of the Democrats

DEMOCRATIC LOSERS THANKSGIVING RAP SHEET

DEMS vs. GOP

Just a few unsustainable accomplishments of the Democrats:
OBAMACARE HAS SOCIALIZED health care dragging down the overall quality and driving up costs forcing many companies to absorb unexpected costs.
A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) states that repealing a portion of Obamacare will save about $14 Billion as The Hill reports. Click Here to read the article.
Since government bureaucrats will spend your money to implement socialized medicine under Obamacare, we can all look forward to higher costs and decreased care quality unless this program is repealed.
As more and more people become acquainted with socialized medicine under Obamacare, support for Obamacare drops. Click Here to read about how a new AP poll finds that support for socialized medicine under Obamacare has fallen to 35%. Many of us knew this program would be a disaster when it was shamefully muscled through Congress on 3/21/2010.
Obamacare was passed through both the House and the Senate using every dirty trick in the book, culminating with now retired Congressman Bart Stupak caving on his principles.
[OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS] We need to elect more just like them next election!

THE STUDENT AID AND FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT
It’s officially a crisis. Student loan debt has hit the $1 trillion mark, exceeding Americans’ total credit card indebtedness. Unemployed graduates with huge loan balances are camping out in “Occupy” camps -- the Hoovervilles of our age -- around the nation. And President Obama, perhaps afraid those camps will be dubbed “Obamavilles,” as indeed they have already been by some, has unveiled a new proposal that promises to help graduates who are drowning in debt.

Unfortunately, “promises” is the correct word. Though unveiled with much fanfare, the Obama proposal doesn’t really do much. First, as the Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out in an article characterizing it as mostly political, “The benefit is available only to current students. Those jobless college graduates who are protesting on Wall Street and at similar events elsewhere won’t qualify.”

Second, even for those who do qualify, the benefit doesn’t amount to much. Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic Monthly calculated that the president’s plan will save the average grad less than $10 a month. (Even those with $100K in debt will save only $28.50 a month). You can make that sound like more -- and the White House tried -- by touting total savings over the life of the loan, but this isn’t going to rescue anyone who’s financially underwater. It’s a beer and a slice a month, more or less.
At best, it’s a band-aid solution. The real problem is that we’ve been running a higher education bubble, one that -- like the real-estate bubble -- has been pumped up by cheap government money. Since 1999, student loan debt has increased by 511%, while disposable income has increased by only 73%.
That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families -- believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were -- have been making up the difference with debt. After all, we’re told, student loan debt is “good debt,” because a college degree guarantees more earnings.

[OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS] They understand the sustainability of the current system is impossible and are trying to implement fiscally responsible solutions!

DEMOCRATIC EXTREME AGENDA TO APPEASE BIG LABOR!

DCCC THANKSGIVING Wish List
While Republicans pursue their agenda that will certainly create jobs as has been proven time and time again over the coarse of history, Democrats have an EXTREME agenda to increase the size of government, prop up unions thru job killing anti business regulations and promote unsustainable entitlements!

The Hypocrisy of Occupy Wall Street

I have a question to anyone supporting the occupy movement?
Why Don’t #Occupy Protesters Go After Insider-Trading Congressmen?

What a bunch of phonies see the three links below .
Un-occupy the City: Nine out of ten tents remain empty overnight at St Paul's protest camp

Ezra Levant: Occupy secrets revealed!

Occupy Wall Street protesters stay at $700-a-night hotel

OWS Fleabaggers verses Tea Activists

Bill Ayers - Weather Underground Terrorist Organizing OWS

I thought that on the two month anniversary of the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) Zuccotti park take over that it would be nice to compare them against the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) movement.
How the Tea Party movement began The movement is a true grass roots movement started by citizens concerned about billions of their tax money being spent on government programmes and what would happen to their children saddled by public debt?

The Occupancy Wall Street movement began as an Idea from AdBusters Kalle Lasn with lots of help from other heavy hitters of the left. This is no grass roots movement. Organizers of the Occupy Movement had originally intended to name their plot ‘The U.S. Days of Rage’ but changed the name in order to prevent the public from making a connection between the movement and Leftwing terrorist organizations, such as that run by Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. The movement rapidly gained support from some of the extreme lefts most ardent supporters like George Soros's Move On Org, the SEIU purple shirts, and with heavy involvement of Obama's own ACORN (now operating under their new aliases).

 

 A message to OWS protesters: You've been had!

Anthony Martin, Conservative Examiner November 5, 2011

"Occupy Wall Street” protests began in September 2011 in New York City, but the protests quickly spread to other cities. Some (mostly conservative) critics of “Occupy Wall Street” have called the protesters dirty hippies, full of fleas and in need of a good shower. The nickname “Flea Party” was applied, contrasting the political movement with the “Tea Party.” “Flea Party” has been cited in print since about October 4, 2011 and has been used by conservative author Ann Coulter.
“Fleabagger” (imitative of “tea bagger”) has also been used. The term “fleabagger” actually pre-dates the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Similar nicknames for Occupy Wall Street include “Poopstock” and “the great unwashed.”
This was pulled from BARRY POPIK's blog http://www.barrypopik.com/

 Nancy Pelosi Desperately Attempts to Squeeze Out Some Crocodile Tears

That was a priceless moment when the Democrats along with the mainstream media were trying to negatively brand the TEA movement. Funny how that failed so they are now trying to duplicate the TEA movement with their clearly AstroTurfed anti-Capitalist Marxist OWS movement.

She cried (fake) about the violent rhetoric of the tea party. Where are those tears now? OWS is getting ready to boil over into all out riots. They are shutting businesses down. They have threatened people. They have injured people who have nothing to do with their protest. They have injured police officers. Yet she smiles and glorifies them. The double-standards, hypocrisy and out-right lies that she tells are insufferable. Pelosi's afraid of the "irrational Tea Partiers" but has no such fear about the unhinged Left-wing Occupy Wall Streeters. Au contraire, she salutes them! November 2012 cannot come soon enough!