Why climate change will make you love big government

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission.

Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees,  touched off wildfires that burned 4 million acres, and destroyed or  damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture,  particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion — and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts  of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.

That kind of whining about the weather, which is the fault of Barack Obama cruising the country in 17 car convoys, continues on for a bit longer. Because weather never happened before 1980 (until you cruise Real Science, and see the newspaper headlines from the past)

Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important  implications for how we think about the role of government in our  future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state  for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder  of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our  survival.

In the past, people tended to rely on themselves. And there is nothing wrong with government helping out: it’s one of the reasons we have government. There is no need for a massive central government with a giant bureaucracy. Of course, that’s not the progressive narrative: to them, we need giant over-reaching and all powerful government for when the wind blows, it rains, and it snows….hey, remember when the NYC public sector unions slowed the snow cleanup in 2010?

Anyhow, the author goes on and on about how great big central government is, and why the private sector can’t do anything, ending with

In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that  private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d”  democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and  fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as  incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges  now beginning to unfold.

To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale  and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, big  storms require big government. Who else will save stranded climate  refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue  efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?

It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.

What would we do without Big Centralized Government taking charge? Just because they’ll need to take more and more money while imposing more and more regulations/restrictions on its citizens and businesses is Bo reason to poo poo the idea. Government is just here to help. Despite being incompetent and taking vastly too long to accomplish the most minor and mundane task is no reason to be concerned about Government. Just because the climate change movement is about fascism (for everyone else) is no reason to worry.

The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the Tea Party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the Tea Patiers made by some hater from the left and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the Tea Party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the Tea Partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

There is even a website dedicated to chronicling the arrests made at OWS events. As of the writing of this article they had noted 5,975 arrests at OWS events across the nation. And this is a left-wing hosted website, too. You see they are proud of these arrests.

Compared to the several years of Tea Party events, the OWS events have been a criminal’s paradise. Not only have the Tea Partiers never had any arrests, or fights, or criminality, at their events they’ve even left every park they used cleaner than they were when they started their events!

Just because the OWS movement is dying down right now — maybe only due to the winter cold — that doesn’t mean the outrages of the OWSers is slowing. Just recently a church that made the foolish mistake of helping these criminals found its facilities vandalized. A $12,000 baptismal fount was stolen along with laptops and other items. These creeps even urinated on Church property. There have been other churches that have been vandalized when they tried to assist the OWSers, too.

With all the criminality that has occurred at these supposedly peaceful events, the public should have long ago turned against OWS. Yet polls still show that Americans have not turned against OWS. Why? Because the Old Media has told them how great it all is and has made a concerted effort to hide the truth from people.

By contrast, the Tea Party’s image has been thoroughly battered with Americans. Is it any surprise with the near daily barrage of hate the Old Media bludgeons the Tea Party with?

If no other example is believable to show how the Old Media establishment is sold out to the far left, the difference in the way it has treated the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement is solid proof of that bias.

Sadly, even after we’ve exposed all the criminality at the OWS events in conservative media outlets from newspapers to TV to blogs, the fact that Americans still have not turned foursquare against the Occupiers shows that we have made little headway in reaching the country with the truth.

Top White House officials are warning liberal and labor leaders to brace themselves for President Obama’s budget proposal.

Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, sought in meetings last week to lift the left’s gloom about Washington’s crackdown on spending by promising that the president this year will focus on job creation rather than deficit cutting.

Obama staffers sought to present their budget plan as a glass half full. According to sources familiar with the briefings, they promised that the president will focus on jobs and the economy, instead of deficit-cutting, which dominated last year’s debate on Capitol Hill.

Unfortunately, every time Obama focuses on the economy and job, they both go downhill. Because the guy still has no clue how either work.

Senior administration officials fear a backlash from the left and are trying to prepare their allies to expect a disappointing budget, sources say.

So, the Left is going to be upset by reduced government spending? This should show up in a Republican commercial about “spending other people’s money”. I bet if they had to more of their own paychecks, for the 41% of Democrats who actually pay federal taxes, they’d be in favor of reducing the Central Government spending.

Back to jobs. SCOAMF’s election website, via their silly #attackwatch, links to a Talking Points Memo article which whines about Romney saying Obama has no jobs plan

Mitt Romney levels plenty of attacks at President Obama, but his claim in Monday night’s South Carolina debate that the White House “doesn’t have a jobs plan” is so blatantly misleading it really deserves a moment here.

President Obama has been pushing a bill called the American Jobs Act for months, a $447 billion package that includes billions in tax cuts, funding to prevent teacher layoffs, and investments in education and transportation infrastructure. You may remember it from the time he called a rare joint session of Congress in September to announce the legislation or from the many times the Senate debated its individual components throughout the rest of the year. By all indicators, it will play a central role in his re-election campaign. Disagree with it if you will, but it’s factually inaccurate to say he doesn’t have a plan.

Is Obama still pushing that diarrhea of a plan, which includes the same measures that failed in the Stimulus, and only save jobs in the public sector, along with helping out union jobs, mostly in the public sector? Giving people education, particularly college education, doesn’t actually create jobs, and creates depression among those who get their sheepskin in social studies and realize that they are only qualified to work as a burger flipper, if there are any burger flipper jobs around.

And, yeah, it should play a central role in his defeat campaign: the eventual GOP nominee should highlight that Obama’s plan would fail just like the Stimulus.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

There has been a lot of lament by the far left in America that the Tea Party has somehow driven the Republican Party to conservative extremes. This, however, is untrue. The truth is, the American public has been trending toward conservative views for more than a decade before the Tea Party even came about.

According to Gallup, for the last three years more Americans have self-proclaimed themselves as conservatives than have claimed the moniker of moderate.

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This marks the third straight year that conservatives have outnumbered moderates, after more than a decade in which moderates mainly tied or outnumbered conservatives.

But think about this for a minute. This means that fully 75% of America is more conservative than the Democrat Party, a party that decades ago stopped being a party of centrism becoming instead a European-like, liberal party.

Gallup’s several decades of polling finds that “moderates” have been in slow decline since 1992 with Americans calling themselves “liberal” now only measuring at 21 percent. With this we see a nation that is not just center-right as many political pundits have for years claimed, but is actually trending conservative.

As to the Republican Party, it is dominated by conservatives by 71 percent, a number that has grown by nine percent since the year 2000. So it is no wonder that Republican politics has edged toward conservative ideas, its base is getting more conservative.

This all seems to bode ill for the sort of far left policies that President Obama and his comrades dearly love. In fact, one can see the progression of conservatism in America in many areas. Twenty years ago, for instance, liberals were full-throated in their criticism of the Second Amendment and aimed to ban not just handguns but all firearms. Today, with every state but one now offering some iteration of law authorizing concealed carry, anti-gun ideas are the last things Democrat politicians talk about openly. Abortion is also an issue that has trended toward the conservative point of view, though not nearly so quickly as gun issues.

Spending is also an issue that is trending toward conservative ideals. For the first time in well over 100 years the discussion in Congress is how to actually cut spending instead of merely how much to limit the growth of spending and voters are quite high on fiscal responsibility. Look at Wisconsin, for instance. 100 years ago, Wisconsin led the country in left-wing progressivism yet last year Wisconsin was among the first states in the union to vote in a Governor one of whose main promises was to scale back the undue power of government employee unions.

Certainly the country hasn’t gone far enough to the right to suit conservatives — just as the country was not far enough left in the 60s and 70s to suit liberals — but without question the United States has been drifting to the right for several decades.

So, conservatives, don’t feel self-conscious about being a conservative. After all, you are in the majority.

Remember back in the days of the debate over Obamacare when unions were the biggest voices screaming in support of the legislation? Many labor union bosses said that nationalized healthcare was exactly what they wanted. Further they said it was what was good for the country. Yet now we learn that Obama has given waivers to some 550,000 union members so that they don;t have to suffer under Obamacare.

Paul Connor reports that a classic Friday evening document dump from the White House shows that unions employing up to 543,812 members have received waivers from the Obama administration.

Fridays are often the one day of the week when government agencies satisfy transparency rules and release documents that show what they’ve been up to. They release them on Friday in the early evening because they understand that reporters are already headed home for the weekend and TV news departments have already programed their evening newscasts. These agencies also understand that news agencies don’t often cover heavy news on weekends. Further, by the time Monday rolls around the document will be “old news” and many of them will simply escape attention.

But all these waivers really do make one ask a central question. If Obamacare is so great, why all the waivers? Why any waivers? More specifically, if Obamacare is such a well-accepted panacea for all that ails us, why are the unions who pushed so hard for Obamacare trying to get out from under it all?

It’s yet one more example of left-wingers making rules for the rest of us that they don’t want to suffer under themselves and then getting the politicians they bought and paid for to make sure that everyone but they have to suffer under those rules.

Rules are for you people, not liberals.

Like nearly every conservative in America today I am unimpressed by the current crop of GOP nominees for president and feel they all have major flaws — especially the two frontrunners Newt and Romney, both of whom have major deficits as far as staunch conservatives are concerned. But at this point I’ve come to realize that I don’t think I care which one of them is nominated. In fact, I think the White House is not where we should be focusing our intensity in 2012.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we shouldn’t vote for whichever GOP nominee wins the game show plaudits. We should absolutely pick one of them and then we all, conservatives and Republicans alike, should vote for him (or her).

So, what am I saying? I am saying that the White House is less important than people are saying it is. Instead, we need a two-point focus for 2012 that doesn’t include the White House. We don’t need 999 points. Just two. 1). Gaining control of Congress and 2). turning Obama out. The identity and purity of our presidential nominee is the last thing we should be worried about at this point. It is a bit late for that anyway.

Let me assure you that I don’t have a favorite in this GOP race. And I have three real dislikes: Romney, Huntsman, and Ron Paul. This article is no stealth shilling for any particular candidate. I really do have big problems with all of them. But, again, I don’t think it matters which of them we pick if we focus on the two points I note above.

First of all, any of the GOP candidates (yes even the cranky uncle of the GOP, Ron Paul) would be better than Obama. But that goes without saying because I am a conservative that votes Republican. No surprise there, really.

But there are reasons besides blind partisanship that any of the GOP nominees is better than Obama. In fact, it can really be boiled down to but one issue that makes getting rid of Obama imperative: the courts. He has been thoroughly destructive to this country with his judicial picks.

Aside from the courts, of course, Obama has been a very destructive president in many ways — another reason to be rid of him. He’s presided over the continued destruction of our business sector and our economy, we all understand. But there’s more.

Obama has already turned his power to regulate into a tool of Big Labor and United Nations-styled socialism. He’s unleashed his extremist appointees and given them the freedom to push every anti-business, anti-worker, anti-American idea they can possibly get through.

There’s more.

Obama has also created all sorts of extra-constitutional czars and “advisory” committees, the President has issued a slew of dangerous executive orders, and he’s made all sorts of horrible moves in foreign policy. But all this can be quickly negated by a new president — quickly in terms relative to how Washington works, anyway. An active new president could make headway to reverse these Obamanations almost immediately. None of these changes, as bad as they are, have the misfortune of being irrevocably permanent.

But there is great danger that another four years of Obama will create, one that cannot be easily reversed. Obama has been steadily placing radical judges on benches throughout this land. His nominees tend to be abortion activists (not just abortion supporters, but out-and-out activists), Big Labor dupes, anti-Second Amendment activists, and the like. Many are so radical that even Democrats haven’t been able to convince themselves to vote them in.

Let’s just take his latest nominee for the DC Court of Appeals for example. Caitlin Halligan, a close associate of the disgraced Eliot Spitzer in New York, is an extremist anti-Second Amendment activist. If she gets on the bench she will take every opportunity she can to damage the Constitution.

A past example is his attempt to put a radical racemongering ACLU member on the bench in California. Obama’s attempt to place Edward Chen on the bench succeeded, unfortunately.

Let us not forget that the Supreme Court of the United States is already in a delicate balance tipped only barely in favor of conservatives. It is easy to see that with the ages of the current oldest members of the court, the next presidential term will see perhaps as many as three chances to replace retiring justices.

As conservatives we must put our desire for a pure conservative president in second place to the pursuit for the next nominees for the US Supreme Court. The fact is, if Obama gets a chance to put more judges on the bench, especially on the SCOTUS, he will be able to damage this country for decades to come.

I can hear just what you are saying at this point. But Warner, you are saying, if we don’t get a pure conservative president we will still get bad judicial picks, won’t we? If we get an abortion lover like Romney (Or is he? Do you believe his miraculous conversion? I don’t) we’ll still get squishes as judges, won’t we?

I’m hearin’ ya, friends, I’m hearin’ ya.

That is why we desperately need to focus on point two: taking the entire Congress under GOP control. And not just GOP control but conservative GOP control. We have the House now, certainly, but we need to make that control stronger. But more importantly we need to take control of the Senate. Both houses of Congress need to be under GOP control and we need to put conservatives in there to do the controlling.

This is the thing, folks. We need to have the most conservative Congress that we can get. A conservative Congress, you see, will drag the squishy Romney, the unpredictable Newt, the isolationist Paul, or any of the others along behind them whether those folks want to go or not. You see, if we have a more conservative Senate, a president will understand that soft, moderate or leans-left judicial nominees will not be acceptable. A conservative Congress — if we as voters force them to toe the line and get active — will force a president to be more conservative despite his inclinations.

As far as judicial nominees go, even if we do get soft nominees that lean conservative only 70% of the time we will have justices that at least act like Americans! If Obama gets another four years he’ll continue to put people on the bench that despise this country. And these people serve for life, don’t forget, so they will be there to continue destroying this country for decades.

This is something we must work hard to prevent. It is imperative that we deny Obama and his extremist, under-the-table agenda from continuing.

It isn’t a happy predicament to be forced to settle for a less conservative president, to be sure. But that is where we are whether we like it or not. Better than we start to realize where the important matters are located and it ain’t in the presidential election as far as GOP nominees is concerned.

An actress, model, and African American business entrepreneur credited with reviving a once-blighted neighborhood and bringing back theater goers to the New York Theater District is about to lose her business to a greedy union that wants to hike the rent for her famous restaurant 350 percent.

Back in 1986, Barbara Smith, sometimes called “the black Martha Stewart,” opened a restaurant in the Theater District called B. Smith’s. Her eatery soon became the toast of theater goers and stars alike. It also became a favorite in the African American community.

B. Smith’s was visited by such famous people as Denzel Washington, August Wilson, Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier, Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Angela Bassett Liza Minnelli and more.

Unfortunately, the building in which Smith opened her famous restaurant is run by the Local One of the stagehands union and quite despite what she has done for New York Theater the union has decided to raise the rent so high on Smith that she will be priced out of her long-time business.

Now with the lease expiring in February, the union wants to increase the rent 350 percent — from around $13,500 a month to about $50,000, going up to $60,000 a month within five years.

Smith is aghast at the union’s uncaring attitude.

“The very nature of the money they are asking says they don’t want us here,” Smith said. “Our attitude is that we survived 11 years and gave the building and Restaurant Row more value than it had previously.”

So, once again, we see the lie put to every axiom that unions put to businesses. They say that they want “quality of life.” They say that tradition and people are more important than profits. Unions claim they are more interested in the community than evil businesses are.

Yet here they are in this case destroying every single thing they claim to champion.

These greedy, money hungry union thugs are the worst kind of hypocrites.

But, these are tough times, to be sure. Perhaps these stagehands need the money? Hardly. Many of these unionistas extort a salary of upwards to $422,000 per year from theaters. They hardly need the cash.

These are just moneygrubbing, greedy unions at work. Of course, we capitalists don’t mind that unions want the most for their rental property. But doesn’t this go against all the things they say capitalists are evil for doing? Hypocrites.

With this week’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of American Airlines, we again see the results of unions having a hand in destroying American businesses. We also saw GM laid low by union demands costing Americans billions in bailouts. But despite these lessons of the recalcitrance of Big Labor forcing even worse calamities on our jobs climate in this dismal economy, Obama is about to make matters worse by using his powers to regulate to further harm both our business sector and our economy.

Obama likes to stand before the American people and claim that he wants to “help” the business sector. He claims that his crony capitalism is meant to “save” those businesses that are “too big to fail.” But while he stands before the microphones and pretends at being interested in capitalism, he wields his powers to regulate like a club with which to beat down the business sector.

Obama’s latest move — among dozens in the last three years — is to have a regulatory board he controls to issue new rules which would make it harder on business owners to prepare themselves and inform their employees on what it might mean to unionize their workplace.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is supposed to be an arbiter between business and labor. It is supposed to be a non-partisan watchdog standing between the two groups as an impartial judge. But since Obama took office the NLRB has been swung solidly on the side of the far left, union bosses — Obama’s biggest campaign fund donors. Obama has taken the NLRB from a non-partisan judge to a fully partisan actor for unions.

This time the NLRB is mulling changes in labor laws that would take away the time that business owners have to respond to unions that want to unionize workers. Currently that response time is up to six weeks, but Obama wants that cut down to ten days. As proposed by NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce, the changes to current practice are:

(1) a shortened time period between the filing of the initial election petition and election date
(2) post-election NLRB review of contested issues previously resolved prior to the election
(3) increased disclosure requirements for employers.

“If adopted as currently proposed, the most significant loss to employers will be time — time to design an appropriate campaign message and a legal strategy to protect their interests and ensure the workforce can cast fully informed votes,” notes Bob Quackenboss, partner at Hunton & Williams LLP in Washington, DC.

“The solution is for employers to work with legal counsel and labor consultants to plan for elections ahead of time, leaving only ‘fine tuning’ for the shortened campaign period. Organized Labor has been perfecting its campaign message for years; early preparation by employers will ensure they do not get caught flat-footed once a petition is filed,” adds Quackenboss.

Another change that Obama wants to force on America’s business sector is something called “micro unions.” He wants to allow as few as three workers to be able to start a union. This could cause employers to have to deal with innumerable small groupings of their employees starting mini unions throughout their businesses. Imagine the confusion, disruption and cost this will incur.

There is a bill being considered in the House today that will curtail some of Obama’s partisan moves to attack the business sector and further dampen our economy. The Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act introduced by John Kline (R, Minn.) seeks to head off the NLRB’s new rules.

“It’s very clear to me that we’re seeing the rights of employers and employees under attack,” said Mr. Kline, adding, “I expect overwhelming support from my side of the aisle.”

Mr. Kline’s bill addresses this sharp cut in the days leading up to unionization. He would require at least 14 days before a pre-election hearing is held, giving employers more time to find a legal team and build their case. He would also require a minimum of 35 days — about the current average — before a vote can be taken.

We need to stop Obama’s attack on the business sector. Call your House members today and tell them you support Kline’s bill.

Also, feel free to sign the petition below to send a message to Congress and the President.

You might recall in October when it was discovered that a few union bosses had paid off Illinois lawmakers to write a law that allowed union bosses to serve as a substitute teacher for one day in order to qualify them for state pensions for life. Well, apparently one of those union bosses also got freebies from the state for his kids and extended family.

Steven Preckwinkle, the Director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, not only got a free pension for life paid for by the taxpayers of Illinois after being a “teacher” for only one day, but the Chicago Tribune has discovered that Preckwinkle also got free college tuition for his kids and a nephew, also courtesy of the taxpayers.

Through a spokesman, Preckwinkle said that his undeserved pension and the freebie education for his kids was perfectly legitimate and that “political connections played no role” in his amazing good fortune. If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

The whole situation with Preckwinkle and fellow unionista David Piccioli is an affront to the people of Illinois and is just more proof that the political climate in Illinois is set up to benefit insiders not the people of Illinois.

The union thug’s kids got their free tuition through what is called a “legislative scholarship,” a program that allows Springfield pols to give away college tuition waivers to anyone they please. Governor Quinn has proposed eliminating the program but is meeting resistance in Springfield.

The Tribune also highlighted the crooked quid pro quo that occurs every single day in Illinois.

The pol that gave Preckwinkle his free tuition packages was Springfield Representative Mike Curran. Curran left the legislature in 1995 and guess where he works now? Yep, the very union that Preckwinkle works for.

After he left the state legislature Mike Curran got hired as a “consultant” by the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Yeah. Imagine that, eh?

In the meantime, Preckwinkle gave hundreds if not thousands of dollars to Mike Curran’s various political campaigns. Quid pro quo.

This is the sort of corrupt bargain you get when you allow state employees to unionize. The best solution to eliminate such insider dealing, fraud, waste of tax dollars, and corruption is to eliminate all public employee unions.

Meanwhile and unsurprisingly, the children of Red Chinese Communist Party members are living lives of luxury in China while the rest of the nation struggles in poverty. Is it a parallel to the corrupt situation in Illinois? What do you think?

The anti-western, anti-capitalist group whose advertisement started the Occupy Wall Street movement has told its adherents to go home. The first phase of Occupy is over they said. Time to regroup, network, and try to finally come up with some sort of message besides an amorphous we-hate-whatever chant. Time to finally figure out an agenda to go on to the next step.

Only there isn’t one. OWS is now SOL.

It isn’t surprising. After all there was really never any there there. Sure there was some legitimate ire at its heart, but, quite unlike the Tea Party movement, there was never a scintilla of coherence to the Occupy… I hesitate to even call it a movement. To be a movement there has to be something moving.

The Occupy-Whatevers had trouble appealing to the average American from its inception. After all, nearly every major group sponsoring it — and those claiming partisanship with it — are the antitheses of Americana.

A look at just some of those that claimed a love for, expressed support for, or actually helped plan and execute the OWSers is a veritable who’s who of America-haters.

The list includes the Communist Party USA; the American Nazi Party; the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei; the oppressive government of North Korea; racist Louis Farrakhan; racist from the other end David Duke; Dictator Hugo Chavez; The Black Panthers; Socialist Party USA; CAIR; Anonymous; the Marxist Student Union, not to mention every major member of Big Labor. With friends like this…, you know? There’s a lot more than these few unsavory friends of the OWS but these haters of the USA serve as a perfect example of why OWS never evolved into anything other than a mostly white group of angry young men filled with hatred for their own country and its system of government.

Additionally — and again very unlike the Tea Party — the OWSers were never able to field very many people at any given time. While the Tea Party turned out well over a million participants and commonly had thousands at its rallies (even close to a million at the Glen Beck rally, for instance) these OWS sit-ins never amounted to more than a hundred at a time if they were lucky to get that many.

It is clear from the lack of growth, the fact that the events have so far just devolved into lawlessness, rapine, destruction, and pointlessness, and now just petering out, that this “movement” is the movement that never was.

I don’t just lambaste these OWSers because I have contempt for them — which I assuredly do — but because there has been nothing coming out of their efforts. It is impossible to take them seriously not because their ideas are necessarily risible — which they are — but because nothing consequential has come of it all.

Again, using the Tea Partiers as a measuring stick, it was only a matter of months after the first Tea Party event that Tea Party groups began forming all across the country. It wasn’t long before they formed committees that began to assess their local political scene. It wasn’t long before they’d created websites, began writing newsletters, began advocating for particular candidates and then offering their own candidates for election. It wasn’t long before some actual meat was built out of the exercise of Tea Party protest.

On the other hand, OWS has been localized mostly to big cities, and big cities the left already controls. Very few OWS groups have formed “back home,” in the heartland. Further, no coherent agenda has come from any OWS group. No logical agenda built for action has emerged. These goofs are too busy with their “up twinkle” fingers to actually get anything done.

What is the outcome of this whole exercise in futility? A few desultory attempts to drive a narrative, a lot of property damage, a few women raped, a couple of deaths and little to nothing else. OWS is now ungracefully fading into history as the tantrum that did what most tantrums do. Produce much sound and fury but is ultimately ignored as a childish action by immature people.

So goodnight Occupy-Whatever. It wasn’t nice knowing you, but it’s great to see you go.