Now that the Occupy movement has been coat-tailed and co-opted by big labor and big government forces that should by definition be their targets of dissent, the shuffled miscellany of loose-cannoned conniptions that’s become the movement is conspicuous even to ultra-left-wing social critics.

The protests of last week from Oakland to Portland to the Super Bowl to CPAC were testament to this, but perhaps a rally planned today in Beverly Hills will signal a healthy shift.

During the Ohio fight over Issue 2, which would have curbed collective bargaining “rights” of public sector industries including Ohio police forces, Occupy Columbus protesters took to the streets in defense of cops. Meanwhile in Oakland, Portland, and Washington, D.C., Occupiers last week took to the streets to chant “Fuck the police!” “All cops are bastards!” “No pigs!” and to throw bricks in cops’ faces.

The #OccupyOakland rally dubbed their march the “Fuck the Police Rally,” noting to its attendees: “If you identify as peaceful and are likely to interfere with the actions of your fellow protestors in any way…you may not want to attend this march. It is a militant action. It attracts anti-capitalists, anti-fascists and other comrades of a revolutionary bent. It is not a march intended for people who are not fully comfortable with diversity of tactics.” So apparently Occupy protesters have cops’ backs, that is until they’re reminded that cops are hired by the public specifically to stop people just like them.

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In Ohio, as union bosses have embraced Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS) class war between the “99 percent” and the “1 percent,” it has becomes increasingly difficult not to ask an obvious question:

Aren’t union bosses basically the 1 percent?

Throughout the run-up to Ohio’s Issue 2 election on November 8, in which voters will consider a referendum on the state’s new public sector labor reforms, I’ve met pponents of the bill at Occupy Columbus who say they are fed up with “the rich taking from the middle class.” They direct their class warfare energies at the abstract Wall Street anathema, but the scenario is literally accurate–and not in some obtuse, Marxist form–as a description of the fiscal dynamic between union bosses and rank-and-file members.

I asked one teacher how, being an Occupy demonstrator and opponent of Ohio labor reforms, she justified the $210,000 annual salary of Larry Wicks, executive director of the Ohio Education Association (OEA), of which she is a dues-paying member. She paused for thought–understandably, since that fact would seem to justify class warfare against the “rich” Mr. Wicks. Ultimately, she concurred with my criticism, and even condemned her very own OEA.

Other Ohio teachers are even less hesitant to criticize their union. One teacher (who wished to remain anonymous for her own safety) shared that she had requested a waiver to opt out of paying the union’s political assessments, to which the response was, “We’ll get back to you.” They didn’t. (more…)

Cincinnati firefighter Doug Stern, frontman for union efforts to defeat public sector labor reforms in Ohio, is apparently unable to explain the health costs he has been describing to millions of Ohio voters.

For most of the past year, the Washington Big Labor-funded $7 million “grassroots” union front group We Are Ohio (WAO) has been campaigning for a no vote on Issue 2 come November 8th, which would repeal Senate Bill 5, passed in March by the Ohio legislature and signed by Governor John Kasich. The bill asks public sector unions to contribute 15 percent towards their health care premiums, of which they currently pay 5 percent. This unfair bill would have them pay only 8 percentage points less than the average that the private sector pays. (Unfair, of course, for the unions. Somehow.)

Last month, WAO featured Stern in its famous “Emergency” ad:

That wasn’t the last we heard from Stern. In a recent piece in The Columbus Dispatch, Joe Vardon writes:

“Cincinnati firefighter Doug Stern, who starred in We Are Ohio’s first TV commercial, took on provisions of Senate Bill 5 that require all public employees to pay at least 15 percent of their health-care premiums…Stern said that as a Cincinnati firefighter, he [already] pays 20 percent toward his health-care premiums.”

Days later, the Dispatch ran a correction:

“Cincinnati firefighters pay 5 percent of their health-insurance premiums. Because of incorrect information provided to The Dispatch, a story on Page B1 of Wednesday’s Metro & State section included a different percentage.”

So I approached Stern at a Cincinnati Teamsters anti-Issue 2 rally (with Jimmy Hoffa also in attendance) to give him an opportunity to explain the discrepancy. Unfortunately, within 81 seconds, Stern multiplied it by four new discrepancies: an incoherent alibi about his statement; an imaginatively penumbraic interpretation of SB 5; a misunderstanding of who is actually paying his medical bills; and an apparent confusion over what his own contract says. I was only trying to make it easier for him.

Interestingly, after the interview, Stern warned me against releasing it unless I was an opponent of Issue 2. Yeah, no.

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Yeah, that just happened. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) informed us all that her Republican congressional colleagues are only uneasy about raising the debt ceiling and allowing the president to spend more money we don’t have without any Democrat concession to a balanced budget amendment…because he’s black.

And it is not The Onion reporting this. Those who are familiar with Lee are aware that this insatiable impulse to carve open the long-healing wounds of America’s racially divided past is merely her signature leitmotif.

Last February, Lee took to the House to condemn a perfectly funny Super Bowl Pepsi commercial featuring a woman aggressively reprimanding her husband over his unhealthy diet yet surprising him with her lenience over his drinking Pepsi Maxx–only to throw the can at him after catching his pass on another woman and accidentally hitting the woman. Not that this would have consciously occurred to anyone other than Lee, but the couple happened to be black, thus the ad was obviously implying that all black people, you know, throw soda cans.

To be fair, Lee did begin her statement by clarifying: “Mr. Speaker I do have a sense of humor,” before explaining that she, well, has no sense of humor. (As if Pepsi hadn’t done enough by virtually emulating the Obama campaign symbol as their logo around the time of his inauguration.)

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If the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were remade today (I’ll leave that to Michael Bay), Sydney Poitier’s character ought to be replaced with C.L. Bryant, Herman Cain, Larry Elder, or Alfonzo Rachel. One watching would think that nothing has changed since 1967.

This is because the institutional left has not changed, and by its very nature, cannot change–this despite its virtual corporate ownership of the term “change.” It is defined by intolerance, division and xenophobia, and not as unfortunate side effects, but as structural pillars. Without these pillars, there would be no structure.

Be it “socialism,” “liberalism” or “progressivism,” as the left repeatedly changes names like an escaped convict fleeing from state to state, perhaps the most accurate denotation, aside from Mark Levin’s “statism,” is “collectivism.” This is due to the apparent inability to register persons as individuals, with the dignities afforded the description, but as nameless molecules of more relevant “collectives.”

It is a movement which seeks to retard discourse and critical thought to a vegetative state, resisting dissent from every corner by the strength of the establishment press. Via community organizing, it plays upon the unassuming optimism of its grassroots to empower the ever-assuming opportunism of its elite. It runs intellectual deficits as swiftly as it runs economic deficits, feeding on knee-jerk emotionalism, hobgoblinism, and manufactured xenophobia as its lifeblood.

By trade, the institutional left preys on populations, herds individuals into respective factions; convincing them against their individuality so as to organize them into groups that will congregate into strategic alliances as soon as wage internecine warfare against one another on cue. Its message to the black “community” is a paraphrase of a Jerry Maguire line: “Help us help you!”

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This was found by an anonymous source on the corner of Lincoln and Olympic in Santa Monica. If anyone finds any more of these, please let us know.

And now, for the subsequent, “heavily edited” version:

If they want to take this battle to the streets, we will gladly meet them there.

One morning last week I awoke and read the news: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature were ready to pass a budget repair bill aimed at bridging the state’s $3.6 billion deficit, protecting 5,500 public employees from lay-offs and furloughs, granting freedom of choice to public employees with regard to joining a union, granting freedom of choice to local school boards with regard to health care, and ending a perennial cycle of Corleonesque backroom dealing between legislators and union lobbyists using taxpayer funds as collateral.

In response, all 14 Democrat state senators decided to stand by the people of Wisconsin by scrambling to hide out in Illinois. Within hours, busloads of out-of-state union members, many from Illinois, swarmed the Capitol with “Democracy at Work” signs to thank the senators on behalf of the people of Wisconsin. (You know, the people of Wisconsin whose majority elected Scott Walker into office by 52 – 46 percent.)

While I tried to figure out how “Democracy at Work” meant Democrats not showing up at work, the demonstrators made it abundantly clear in their favorite chant: “This is what democracy looks like!” So a few hours later, I caught a flight from Los Angeles to Wisconsin to find out what I was missing, and for that matter, what precisely democracy looks like.

Notwithstanding some of the rather audacious tactics employed by their supporters I was to encounter upon my televised doctor’s appointment, I was for the most part impressed by the rank and file, the actual Wisconsinite demonstrators, who bear little if any resemblance to the friends I made at another union protest in Palm Springs just weeks prior, nor the winners documented in my video Teachers Unions Gone Wild.

To the contrary, they are warm, kind-eyed, genuine. Among them are some of the politest protestors I have met at a left-wing rally. They are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, grandmothers and grandfathers, who have simply been misguided into believing this they have been marginalized and ignored — despite the 17-hour public testimony hearings the legislature had just held.

Wide-eyed and idealistic, they are dreamers, but they’re not the only ones. As Chicago’s new mayor famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Mindful of this axiom, scores of operatives from groups such as Organizing for America (the campaign arm of that mayor’s former boss) flocked to Madison. Pizzas orders came in from at least 14 foreign countries to feed the demonstrators camping in the Capitol who had instituted their own socialist people’s government with their sleeping bags, first aid tables, and “food share” stations. This was not just a legislative battle in Wisconsin. The SEIU, AFSCME, SDS, AFL-CIO, WIAC, NEA and other national and international “progressive” groups had all shown up to invest their capital into this crisis—inspiring me to investigate what their anticipated dividends might be.

One such shareholder (I hope they’ll forgive these analogies), is a group called the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyite international organization that has been committed to organizing unions, and particularly students, since 1976.

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I recently took a two-day trip down to Palm Springs to attend an event called “Uncloaking the Kochs” hosted by Common Cause. Accompanied by my dear friend, former assembly candidate Alvaro Day, I traveled as an independent investigative journalist, and not in any official capacity on behalf of Big Government or Breitbart.com (though I was pleasantly surprised to run into a familiar friend of mine on rollerblades jovially inviting everyone to Applebee’s).

Among Common Cause’s, well, common causes, are campaign finance reform, net neutrality, outlawing the filibuster, promoting cap and trade, and in this particular case, herding a mass of protesters outside a nearby hotel to yell at Charles and David Koch for being conservative and rich.

Unfortunately several “haves” have missed the memo that you’re not to be both rich and conservative at the same time, and that bankrolling your pet causes is an extra no-no if you’re conservative—thus exempting left-wing billionaire philanthropists George Soros (from whom Common Cause has received $2 million over the past eight years) Peter Lewis, John Doerr, Julian Robertson, Nicolas Berggruen, and many others from being yelled at too. (more…)