To the extent that the Occupy Wall Street crowd has a core cause, it is an economic one.  However, its title and location are the only real clues, because when it comes to demonstrating their vast economic knowledge, these people cannot.

They claim to be among the 99% of Americans who are victims of various legal and moral crimes committed by the financial sector, and that has risked their futures.   But, what sort of future do they have?

Does Che know how well off he is?

What they are truly demonstrating is the vast failure of the education system.  They have no global perspective or understanding of their historical position.  They fail to understand THEY are the 1%.  My Che Guevara looking friend to the left here stands to earn $1.6 million more in his lifetime than his high school party buddies who did not go to college.    This means, on average he will earn $35,500 more a year than his high school counterpart will, and this is just the American part of the story.  The average world citizen earns $7,000 a year right now and that is highly skewed, the median income is much lower.  Only 19 percent of the global population lives in a country with mean per capita earnings greater than $7,000.  Che is among the 20 to 25 percent of Americans that attend college and, assuming he graduates, will be in the upper income strata, likely the upper 20 percent.  So, Che here is in the upper 20 percent of the upper 19 percent, which means, globally speaking, he will be among the wealthiest 4 percent in the world.  Just like his Woodstock grandparents who became the BMW driving yuppies, he will protest and rail against the man or rage against the machine or whatever and then go earn a very good living over his lifetime and all of it brought to him by capitalism.

Historically, his case is worse.  The fact that he has the time to go and camp out and not have to hunt, forage or farm speaks volumes that his twenty years of schooling do not seem to have prepared him to realize.  While he is standing on the pavement thinking about the government and what it owes him, he does not realize that his urban camping trip is costing more than most people who have ever lived earned in a lifetime.  As Deidre McCloskey points out in her book Bourgeois Dignity, Americans spend on average $120 a day, if this were 200 years ago the figure would be lucky to be $3 a day in current dollars.  Living before the advent of wide spread free market capitalism would be like trying to live in the current economy on $3 a day, Che’s visit to Starbucks cost more than $3.

The sad aspect is not so much that Che is protesting but that he does not know any of this.  His teachers and professors either do not know it or do not believe it.

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When we first heard this union protester saying he would rather vote for Castro over a GOP member, we thought he meant ‘vote’ ironically, since, um, the Cuban people don’t exactly get to ‘vote’ for Castro. But then we remembered, this is Wisconsin–they don’t really do irony. Plus, he doesn’t exactly look like a 20-something hipster. So, we’re left having to take him at his word. Why does the left have such an affinity for authoritarian tyrants?

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The folks who brought us the “Defend Public Education” actions last March in California, Wisconsin, New York and Michigan are planning a new round this year and will be drawing on the “energy” created by the violent, destructive riots in Europe.

The Huffington Post reported last year about college students shutting down major freeways in California.  In Wisconsin, protesters threw “punches and ice chunks” at police after the students were refused entry into an administration building in Madison.

Now, plans are being made for a month of similar actions this year, kicking off March 2^nd.

Some activists have complained that unions are not currently leading the charge because they’ve become too “corporatist.”  But they believe once they make their move, unions will move to “co-opt” the movement.

“Student strikes” will occur in March to fight budget cuts and increased fees for students.  What’s happening in Europe is about to be emulated in America, friends.

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You may have read that there is strong evidence of voter fraud in Houston. Here’s what you may not have heard: the organization accused of shady behavior is linked to a former head of an Obama campaign office. She is a fan of Che Guevara. She is also the person who invited to a town hall meeting a woman who then posed as a doctor at that meeting during the health care debate.

Here are the details.

Last month, Houston’s Registrar accused a Democratic organization called “Houston Votes” of voter registration fraud. The allegations were recently detailed here, and make compelling reading:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

. . . .

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. . . .

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney.

Guess who was active in recruiting for Houston Votes? That would be one Maria Isabel.

Does that name sound familiar? It should. She is a radical Obama supporter who ran an Obama campaign office that sported a picture of Che Guevara. (more…)

“Oh, no…  What have I done?”

That is the lament of innumerable people staring into a mirror at the garish tattoo they added to their lower backsides the previous night during a spell of misjudgment.

Such tattoos are often referred to as “tramp stamps,” a term that has gained such cultural currency that it was named one of the “Words of the Year” for 2009 by the New Oxford American Dictionary.  Perhaps the best definition, however, can be found atwww.urbandictionary.com:

2.  Tramp Stamp:  “Tramp Stamp” is a derogatory term referring to a tattoo which a woman places on her lower back.  It is especially popular among women born in the late ‘70s, ‘80s, and even early ‘90s.  Fair or unfair, these tattoos have a socially constructed connotation associated with them.  Although these are often biased and generalized claims, there have been sociological studies done by the American Psychological Association, Federal Bureau of Prisons, and other demographic researchers showing strong correlative evidence associating tattoos with high-risk behavior, illegal substance abuse and sexual promiscuity.  These risk factors are greatest in the age range which these types of tattoos are gaining mainstream popularity.  Some have also jokingly stated that by 2050, the “tramp stamp” will be renamed the “gramp stamp.”

What thus seemed at first a hip, daring way of demonstrating individuality to the world quickly becomes a lasting and unsightly cliché of indiscretion.

It seemed so cool at the time.  But now, the cool is gone and all that remains is a silly permanent mark.

Today, one can travel down any busy American street or highway and usually spot the new political equivalent of the tramp stamp.  Namely, the ubiquitous 2008 campaign decal with the cartoonish stenciled portrait of Barack Obama gazing wistfully into the distance above the nebulous term “HOPE.”

Created by “street artist” and George W. Bush antagonist Shepard Fairey based upon the 2006 photograph of Obama by Associated Press (AP) photographer Mannie Garcia, the image became synonymous with the Obama hysteria.

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How resilient is the ghost of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who ably assisted the Castro brothers’ sadly successful mission to turn Cuba into an island hellhole? His legend survives even a lackluster, long-winded biopic released in 2008 and now just out on DVD.

More important, Che’s legend survives the facts of his own life. Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.

By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world. Despite Che’s pronounced contempt for rock music, Carlos Santana wore a Che T-shirt during a performance at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony. Other invocations of the Che image, such as the image above from a greeting card line that features a dog as Che, suggest unconscious (or at least unknowing) parody.

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Several days ago, Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum published research here indicating an ACORN alumni in the White House (other than the president): Political Director Patrick Gaspard.  As I did three weeks prior at ACORNcracked.com, Matthew used a Wade Rathke blog as the source, which Rathke, the founder of ACORN,  immediately changed after Vadum’s report, citing “memory tricks.”  Politico led the way in poo-pooing the connection once Rathke played cover-up.

Rathke said it not only on his blog, but also at a book signing in New Orleans, which was recently covered in the Fox News Special: The Truth About ACORN.”  While we attended that book signing and were not able to get that portion on tape, the Fox documentary crew did.  Sadly, the remarks apparently ended up on the cutting room floor.

The fact is, Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s “Glue Man,” is more important than Van Jones ever hoped of being.  The fact is, one of the most critical and influential jobs in a White House, the Director of Political Affairs, is occupied by a former SEIU health care lobbyist and ACORN organizer.  To be exact, he was Executive Vice President–the #2–at SEIU 1199 in New York City.

After Gaspard was appointed to the White House, Carribbean Voice quoted him as saying, “I grew up in 1199…and I will always be an 1199er wherever I am.”  SEIU’s luxury is that now taxpayers are paying for it.

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