While the media and Democratic establishment continue to laud the #Occupy movement, they ignore the reality of what is going on on the ground — Occupy Wall Street is an extremely small, fractured and ineffective social experiment that is unable to even provide safety for the young, female protesters that it tries to attract. In a chaotic transcript from the January 7 New York General Assembly, it was revealed that one assailant was allegedly responsible for six rapes.

In the posted minutes, anti-rape activist Nan Terrie told the group…

The proposal that I brought was an incident that happened and certain groups did not properly address it or handle it. When we had the park, we had an 18-year-old who got raped. She was drug raped. That individual who raped the 18-year-old raped five other girls in this park. My group dealt with rape victims in the park and still does. We have a court date for the 18-year-old in February. She doesn’t live in this city but she comes here. She was occupying one of the churches. The person that raped her also got out of jail. He was in jail for 30 days, paid $50,000 and he went to the same church the victim was. Keep in mind that victim worked with us and we had a restraining order against that guy. The victim voiced her concern to let them know she didn’t feel safe in that place because of this gentleman. Rather than calling me or other women’s working groups, Housing took it upon themselves to have a jury of about 15 and more people between the victim and the gentleman. And they asked for both them to basically give details out.

Terrie appears to be referring to events that started in October. According to this November 3rd article in The New York Post,

Tonye Iketubosin, 26 — who has been working at the protesters’ makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park since last month — was charged yesterday in the sex abuse of an 18-year-old protester in the tent he helped her pitch on Oct. 24, the sources said.

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Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, recently created a media flap when she said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you!

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Conservatives and libertarians took offense at Warren’s claim that the government has a superior claim to “a hunk” of people’s earnings merely because every individual lives in and benefits from a society to whose creation many other people have contributed.

The critics might well have been grateful for small blessings, however. Warren was prepared, rhetorically at least, to let people keep “a big hunk” of their earnings.

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In light of today’s worldwide anti-capitalist rumbling and renewed feverish interest in leftist redistributive systems, one wonders– just how old is the collectivist idea?

I’ve been reading “Who Murdered Chaucer?” by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame).  It’s a wonderfully detailed, realistic, careful expansion of available data on a historical period, and yet because of the author’s lifelong passion for his topic it’s anything but DULL.  Jones has literally rewritten the history of the late 14th century English court of King Richard II, a time presumed fully known by historians for going on six hundred years.

While exploring how Richard was influenced by the thinkers of his age (including Chaucer), Mr. Jones chanced upon the writings of Philippe de Mezieres, a French clergyman, a proponent of the Crusades, an author and thinker who in his later years presented the young Richard with a book.  As an advocate of Christian crusader war, de Mezieres was an unlikely source of proto-communist thinking; nevertheless it is there, as Jones describes it:

“(de Mezieres) Proposed the abolition of all personal property, on the grounds that the King serves as the ‘father’ to the people and has complete responsibility for their welfare.”

Of course, without the context that the future Republican age would provide, de Mezieres is understandably unable to imagine a working government without a king, and so he weaves one into the fictional utopia he invented to educate the young English monarch.  There in the “Delectable Garden”, as de Mezieres himself puts it:

“All fruits were held in common by the inhabitants, to each according to his need, and the words ‘my own’ were never heard.  These people lived so happily together, they never seemed to grow old.  All tyranny and harsh rule was banished from the Garden, though there was a king, who stood for authority and the common good, and he was so loved and looked up to that he might have been the father of each and all.  And no wonder, for he had such concern for the welfare of his subjects, dwellers in the Garden, that neither he nor his children owned anything in person.”

Given what we know of prideful and competitive human nature, this is of course wishful thinking.  But did you see it?  “To each according to his need.”  Karl Marx would famously expand upon that phrase five centuries later with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  It is of course highly doubtful that Marx read de Mezieres, who did not remain known after his time.

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Like a wily serpent lurking in the dark corners of unsuspecting places waiting to strike, so is the personality of the collectivist mind that is rotting America both socially and economically. Those of a conservative or libertarian mind are aware and on guard for the frontal attack of this beast when it tries to strike using direct government schemes and programs. And we are aware of how the entitlement programs and welfare state are a direct assault on the American philosophy of individual liberty and free market capitalism. But what if this snake is attacking us from dark corners that go unnoticed?

Let’s take two big issues, health care and long term financial security or retirement funding. These are two of the biggest issues we face as people, because they are critical and significant areas of life that concern everyone. For a long time we’ve had social security, Medicare and Medicaid crammed down our throats and washed down by some liberal progressive dogma, and are now told that two of the biggest concerns we face in our lives are no longer a concern because big brother has our back. Well the bill is coming due on this scheme, and it’s coming due on state and local government pension promises. It came due in the private sector with companies like GM, which was being crushed under an unsustainable health care and union pension system until we bailed them out. And it’s going to come due at your company soon, at least as it relates to your healthcare, because prices cannot continue to exponentially go up and companies be expected to pay.

The issue lost in the rhetoric of the traditional left/right argument is not about circumstances and poor people, but rather one of philosophy. Collective systems operate on a kind of “parent-child” philosophy. Citizens are told they are children who cannot take full responsibility for themselves and instead are taught to rely on their parents. Bureaucratic systems take care of them, decide the right choices for them, and always tell them that the system has their best interests at heart. The parent tells the child that they can’t be trusted. That the enemy out there will not protect their future but destroy their future. To the collective the enemy is the individual. And the individual is you! What has happened to the responsibility and empowerment of “doing it yourself”? We are not children and the parental control system is not taking care of us!

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The one good thing about sitting through the painful lies and propaganda of Obama’s State Of The Union address was seeing the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, in Nancy Pelosi’s seat. Seriously, you know it was killing her. I am sure they had to pry the gavel from her stone cold hands.

As for Obama’s speech, don’t make me laugh. That was not a State Of The Union Address as much as it was a campaign speech. Obama will do what he needs to do to get elected and that’s it. Period. Listening to this collectivist laud individualism was insulting. He was stealing my material, which is more than OK, but in deed, my good man. In deed. Do it.

His solution for the incomprehensible 14-trillion-dollar debt is more debt. More stimulus. More enslavement of free men. And, of course, the political fraud of more environ-mentalism, aka “clean” energy. It is insanity to create massive unemployment, destroy whole industries, make rich annihilationist jihad nations and bankrupt America in pursuit of a hoax. All these nature lovers should move out of technologically advanced nations and start their own society in nature. There are plenty of unpolluted places; let these self-made savages move there.

Foreign policy is a disaster. Look around; the world is descending into chaos. Ambassador John Bolton tweeted, “With no foreign policy victory of his own & many failures, bizarre that Obama would take credit for restoring America’s leadership in world.”

Bizarre and worse than bizarre.

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Senator Evan Bayh’s decision not to seek re-election this November makes him just the latest among numerous Democrats who announced they are quitting. They have looked at the Obamacare debacle, the crippling debt, the millions of lost jobs, and the looming national security disaster heralded by the increase in jihad terror attacks on American soil, and they’re getting out. They know that Americans are waking up to how the big government policies of the Democrats are continuing to hurt our economy, and are ruinous for America.

Swindling Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) will not seek re-election; the drug-addled Congressman Patrick Kennedy will not be seeking re-election in Rhode Island; Arkansas Congressman Marion Berry and Senator Byron Dorgan are leaving. Then there’s Michigan Democratic Lt. Governor John Cherry’s decision to end his floundering bid for governor. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter is also retiring. Not to mention the stunning late December party switch by freshman Alabama Representative Parker Griffith — just to mention a few.

And in Bayh’s whiny withdrawal speech, he made sure to take parting shots at the Republicans under the guise of the well-worn canard of their “lack of bipartisanship.” As if the Democrats worked with Bush.

The Party of No? Hardly. It’s the Save-America party, it’s the Say No to Communism party. Bayh didn’t speak of the irreparable damage the Democrats are doing to this country. He whimpered that only the Republicans said no to a jobs bill (although the government doesn’t create jobs, the private sector does) and that the Republicans wouldn’t sign off on another bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive commission to investigate bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive government spending. Funny how even a Democrat who is thought of as honorable and measured showed no honor in his parting remarks. He went out like an ankle-biting Democrat, pathetic and small.

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This book, by emerging author James Byrd, paints a telling portrait of the true agenda of the Green Movement. It successfully exposes the underlying agenda of collective power in the hands of the State; at the expense of the individual. Mr. Byrd creates a world of dynamic characters, their interrelations, and the societies in which they are cast. It is a powerful first book, by an author who has a firm grasp of the way in which an oppressive government uses propaganda and fear to control the general population. The Light of Day is the story of Jeff O’Hara and his struggle for personal freedom and the realization that the things most worth having sometimes require the greatest sacrifice.

From the first paragraph, the reader is thrust into the O’Hara family dynamic.

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