One of the core differences between liberals and radicals is that liberals are capitalists. They believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated—that seeks to level an unfair economic playing field so that all citizens have the freedom to make what they want of their lives. But these are not the principles we are hearing from the protesters. Instead, we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely. American capitalism may be flawed, but it is not, as Slavoj Zizek implied in a speech to the protesters, the equivalent of Chinese suppression. “[In] 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel,” Zizek declared. “This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here, we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” This is not a statement of liberal values; moreover, it is a statement that should be deeply offensive to liberals, who do not in any way seek the end of capitalism.

Zizek is not alone. His statement is typical of the anti-capitalist, almost utopian arguments that one hears coming from these protesters. A recent debate about whether to allow Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon, to speak to Occupy Atlanta was captured on video and ended up on YouTube. As Lewis looked on, arguments on both sides were bandied about. “The point of this general assembly is to kick-start a democratic process in which no singular human being is inherently more valuable than any other human being,” argued one protester. Ultimately, because no “consensus” could be reached, Lewis was turned away. Yes, like the Zizek speech, this was just one data point. But surely it was an indication that liberal skepticism about this movement is not unwarranted.

And it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.

These are not just substantive complaints. They also beg the strategic question of whether the protesters will help or hurt the cause of liberalism. After all, even if the protesters are not liberals themselves, isn’t it possible that they could play a constructive role in forcing Americans to pay attention to important issues such as inequality and crony capitalism? Perhaps. But we are hard-pressed to believe that most Americans will look at these protests, with their extreme anti-capitalist rhetoric, and conclude that the fate of the Dodd-Frank legislation—currently the best liberal hope for improving democratically regulated capitalism—is more crucial than they had previously thought.

In the face of the current challenge from Tea Party conservatism, it is more important than ever that liberals make a compelling case for our vision of America. But we will not make this case stronger by allying with a movement that is out of sync with our values. And so, on the question of how liberals should feel about Occupy Wall Street, count us as deeply skeptical.

The unemployment rate under President Obama is a problem of epic proportions, national (9.2%), black community (16.2%), and among veterans (approx 12%). This comes from someone who told us his almost trillion-dollar stimulus would keep unemployment in America under 8%. As well, the almost $2 trillion Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been a disaster, and the worst is yet to come.

This has nothing to do with race (unfortunately my colleague from Texas, Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee believes so), and it has everything to do with an economic vision which is anathema to our free market/free enterprise system…an economic vision which has failed at every turn.

And all we hear from the President is talk about “shared sacrifice,” “tax the rich,” and “increase revenues by tax hikes.” It was just December 2010 that President Obama and the Democrats extended the Bush era tax rates for two years…now less than a year later they are FLIP-FLOPPING!

The problem is, there is no confidence and certainty in the fiscal vision emanating from Washington D.C. and hence revenues and receipts are down. We are not setting the conditions or creating an environment for economic and job growth. For all of you, that is what has to change, and that is where I am committed to seeing change and not the empty rhetorical doublespeak of 2008.

I suppose the President forgot that 47% of wage earning households in America do not pay federal income taxes.

In the area of foreign policy, the United States has officially recognized the Libyan rebels as the “legitimate” government of Libya. Now, I am just a simple fella from down South, but I recall a previous Democrat President recognizing a bunch of undefined ideological zealots called the Taliban…and we all see how that ended up!

The voices of the American people who want sound fiscal, taxation, and regulatory policy need to be heard this week. I am issuing a “call to action” – let the White House, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid hear how you feel. Are there REALLY 80% of Americans who want higher taxes?

I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool.

 

Here’s what these idiot Madison “protesters” — along with their intellectually bankrupt fellow travelers playing Solidarno?? on fucking facebook as if this is just another cause celebre the world has ginned up to keep hipsters feeling “political” — are actively, vocally agitating FOR: no school choice for kids; no merit pay for teachers; seniority raises, and a first hired / last fired policy that promotes mediocrity, disinterest, and underperformance, while providing no incentive for effective teaching; forced union dues; forced political contributions to the Democrat party, made possible by a tawdry money laundering scheme that in many ways works to disenfranchise Republican voters in the union; the inability of tax payers to have any say over local schools; and on and on and on.

I mean, this is what we’ve come to as a nation: form over substance as a fucking installation art form. The pollutant of “progressive” thinking has here culminated in a surreal civic moment, one in which the idealized cultural sexiness of the 60s, and a desire to re-live it, has given us the spectacle of university students chanting in favor of bigger government, less choice, fewer freedoms, and a total subsuming of the individual into an dictatorial, top-down collective. Like a hive of buzzing drones, these people are now actively swarming in hopes of bringing on the deconstruction of their country’s founding ideals by way of agitating for a neutered collective ruled by a top-down union leadership structure, one that splits the profits with the Democrat party while the private sector taxpayer gets higher property taxes to go with the dwindling opportunity available outside the government ranks.

And they pretend to be for the “working man”!

Not only that, but the scorching scorching irony of the chants of “this is what democracy looks like” coming from these useful idiots is likewise blazingly surreal: because what representative democracy actually looks like happened in November, and would have happened again in Madison had the Dems not FLED THE FUCKING STATE TO AVOID PARTICIPATING IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.

Which means that to these “protesters,” “democracy” boils down to “I must always win, or else it isn’t really legitimate democracy.”

Sorry, but that’s fucking TYRANNY wrapped in word stolen from patriotic bumper stickers.

Fuck them. All.

Civil war is coming. And it’s needed.

Maybe it’s that for the first time, our school didn’t meet AYP because two few English Language Developing students in the entire school didn’t pass their reading benchmarks.

When I heard this, I instantly thought of the two English Language Learners in my class who hadn’t passed their reading tests last year and how unfair I thought it was that they even counted on our test scores when they came to our school in January and were absent at least twice a week from that point on.  I was wondering how I could possibly have gotten them to benchmark level in three days a week for three months. I was thinking how if only those two students hadn’t counted on our scores, we would’ve met AYP as a school.  When I mentioned it to my principal, she just said there are no excuses.  We aren’t allowed to have any excuses.  We have to get kids to the level they need to be no matter what the circumstances.  I thought of the little boy I had with an IQ of 87 who could barely read.  I thought of the little girl in a wheelchair who’d had 23 operations on tumors on her body in her eleven years, and the girl who moved from Mexico straight into my class and learned to speak English before my eyes, but couldn’t pass the state test.

Somehow it doesn’t feel like making excuses to acknowledge that they had good reason not to pass their benchmarks.

Maybe it was the e-mail I got saying that the department of education in Oregon has raised the cut scores again this year by six or seven points per grade level, even though they just raised them a couple of years ago.  I found out that if they would have used these new cut scores last year, over half of the students in grades 3-8 who passed their benchmarks wouldn’t have passed.  That led to a realization that as a school we have very little chance of meeting our adequate yearly progress this year, but of course I’m not allowed to say that because there are no excuses. It’s hard not to feel discouraged.

Maybe it was one of the two parents who contacted me in the first few days of school to tell me that their child doesn’t particularly love my program this year.   I’m so not used to that.  I’ve always had kids achieving highly and loving my class.  I’m just not sure how I can use the mandated materials in the required time periods, focusing on the required skills and still get kids to really love it.

Maybe it’s the fact that I lost a third of my retirement when they reformed our Public Employee Retirement System a few years back and now I keep reading about how they want to slash it even more because of the greedy teacher unions and how this is the main reason for the budget problems in our state.

Maybe it’s that I haven’t gotten a real raise in a really really long time, or that we had to cut eight days again this year to solve our state’s budget problems.  So I’m taking a big hit again, and nobody seems to notice or care.

Anyway, whatever the reason, for the first time in 34 years it hit me, I don’t want to be a teacher any more.  I want to sit on a rocking chair on my porch and drink tea instead.  Maybe if they offer $20,000 for me to retire next year, I’ll take it.  It’s so weird because never in my wildest imagination did I think I’d feel this way. I wonder if I’ll still feel this way when I close my classroom door tomorrow.  I sure hope not because it makes me really sad.

(H/T AP)

*****

It’s rare that a tea party group ever has good things to say about Mother Jones, which most grassroots conservatives seem to view as the leading voice of pot-smoking godless communists. But Wednesday, the founder of the Nashville-based Tea Party Nation, Judson Phillips, sent out an email responding to a 3-part Mother Jones investigation of a rival tea party group, Tea Party Patriots, noting that we had uncovered some “unpleasant details” about TPP’s financial management. While many other conservative outfits and TPP loyalists have dismissed the allegations raised in the story as the work of the liberal media, Phillips takes them seriously, saying, “Just because they are liberal does not mean they are not right.” That’s about as close to a compliment as we’re ever likely to get from him.

The reason for the semi-kind words is that Phillips has also heard some of the “rumblings of dissatisfaction” from local tea party activists about problems with TPP management and has found them to be legitimate. He acknowledges that there is no love lost between the two groups, writing, “We have never appreciated their arrogance, their claim they are the ‘official home of the Tea Party movement’, nor the way they have treated people.” Phillips says that his group decided initially not to create its own local chapters for fear of causing more dissension in the movement by competing with TPP, suspecting that the tea party movement could only handle so many local grassroots groups. Instead, Tea Party Nation has stuck to holding (unsuccessful) conventions and managing a website. Meanwhile, Phillips writes, “we have watched Tea Party Patriots move from being a grass roots organization to being a slick, inside the beltway organization, indistinguishable from groups like Freedomworks.”

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Transcript:

David Keene, George Will, good friends, thank you for the enormous privilege of this podium. Even a casual observer of American public life knows how many great ideas have been born here, how many important debates joined here, how many giants of our democracy appeared on this platform. When David broached the invitation, my first reaction was one I often have: “Who cancelled?” But first choice or fifteenth, the honor, and the responsibility to do the occasion justice, is the same. I am seized with the sentiment best expressed by Hizzoner, the original Mayor Richard Daley, who once proclaimed a similar honor the “pinochle of success.”

We are all grateful to our co-sponsors, the Reagan Foundation and the Reagan Ranch. How fitting that we convene under their auspices, as we close this first week of the centennial. Those of us who served President Reagan were taught to show constant respect for the presidency and whoever occupies it. But, among us alums, the term “the President” tends to connote just one of those forty-four men, that great man with whom God blessed America one hundred years ago this week.

The prefix in “cosponsor” is meaningful tonight. It is no state secret that the two foundations have not always been co-operative, or co-llaborative, or co-llegial. So it is a tribute to the stature and diplomacy of David Keene that they have come together to produce so warm a moment as this. I am now converted to the view that yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved. Well done, David; Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded for far less.

I bring greetings from a place called Indiana. The coastal types present may think of it as a “flyover” state, or one of those “I” states. Perhaps a quick anthropological summary would help.

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we “cling” to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.

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