Earlier this month, the left-wing magazine The Nation highlighted Joe Therrien as a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A New York City public-school drama teacher, Therrien was frustrated with the shortcomings of the school system. So he quit his job and “set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion — puppetry.” Three years and $35,000 in student-loan debt later, Therrien returned home, only to find he couldn’t land a full-time job. Apparently, a master’s in puppetry doesn’t provide the competitive edge in the marketplace he’d hoped for.
Therrien joined Occupy Wall Street, constructing giant puppets and “figuring out how to make theater that’s going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It’s what I’m driven to do right now.”
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I think I speak for everyone when I say: Good luck with that.
One other thing: He may not realize it, but Joe the Puppeteer may be for Democrats what Joe the Plumber was for the GOP. (Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher was the Ohio man who confronted candidate Barack Obama about raising taxes on small business.)
Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times that the Democrats have made a fateful decision: “All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up . . . of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers, and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African American and Hispanic.”
After decades of trying, the white working class is now “an unattainable cohort,” according to Edsall and a slew of Democratic strategists.
The most common explanation for this failure is a self-serving and mossy tale about a racial backlash. The most recent version holds that the “tea parties,” which are about as white as the Occupy Wall Street movement, amount to a bigoted reaction to a black president. Never mind that the leading Tea Party contender for the GOP nomination is Herman Cain.
In a less-charged environment, the differences between Obama and Cain would be seen as a continuation of the great philosophical rivalry between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, a socialist intellectual, favored promoting a “talented tenth” — a black progressive elite focused on state-run, top-down reforms — while Washington preached self-help and entrepreneurialism from the bottom up.
Today’s Democratic party has an ingrained cultural aversion to the Booker T. Washington school. Liberal elites see themselves as a multiracial talented tenth, planning the economy and guiding society. In power, they lavish support on fashionable but unproductive sectors of the economy, such as green-energy boondoggles, and they buy off big constituencies invested in ever-larger government, such as public-sector unions, the “helping professions,” and even too-big-too-fail businesses.
The NYT article mentions "voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers, and therapists."
Notice anyone missing? I do: doctors and engineers, those who apply the hard sciences primarily in the private sector (as opposed to conducting research in academia, dependent on government funding) and those who inarguably attained far more educationally than HR managers, librarians, and social workers.
It's tempting to read quite a bit into that omission.
Jonah's 401k is now a 201k because the very smartest people in America, all working in the private sector, did some really complicated things that almost brought down the entire economy.
There ought to be laws against letting those arrogant, greedy elites run our affairs. You know, the FDIC only insures the first $250,000 you have in the bank. After that, if the bank goes under, it's your loss. What's that? Get rid of the FDIC, you say?
Not so fast. Barney Frank's still in "public service".
I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that private sector banks decided of their own accord that it was a great idea to loan money to borrowers outside of the traditional risk profile because the facts say otherwise.
For any private sector entity to decide to bear additional risk, they would have to determine that they were legally required to do so or that this additional risk would be borne by somebody else. In the case of mortgage lending, how fortuitous that BOTH criteria were met. The Federal Government required lending be expanded to higher risk borrowers and also had two GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, standing by to relieve the lender of that additional risk.
And for this liberals blame the "private sector"? Nothing to do with progressive plans at all, eh?
Sorry but that dog won't hunt. It was the very smartest central planners in the country that created the impetus for the financial crisis.
You are unreal smart. You're right! Let's get rid of the parasitic private sector. We can turn every aspect of the American economy into a government program, and tax the millionaires and billionaires making over $250K a year to pay their public-sector union negotiated salaries! If everyone works for the government, we won't need a private sector!
You're a freakin' genius! All of the graft and double-dealing: Gone!! You should run for office to be our overlord. Goodbye, 1%! See you in hell!
"Jonah's 401k is now a 201k because the very smartest people in America, all working in the private sector, did some really complicated things that almost brought down the entire economy." You conveniently left out the part that these "very smartest" people were doing these "complicated things" in order to protect their institutions from the disaster that was set up by the liberal notion that everyone in the country has a right to buy a house, even if they can't pay for it.
"Arrogant, greedy elites"? Yes, let's start with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.
The elites of the left work on the premise that government can make us equal, while the founders believed we were all created equal.
The leftist elites are inherently opposed to what makes America unique.
"Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat"). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers*, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two."
“if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent . . . your aspirations because you will have health care,” she explained
This would be a hilarious comment if we weren't $15 trillion in debt, mostly due to leftist idiots and their equally stupid constituencies.
My son's grade school should get an award for teaching "process" over actual science. They actually will downgrade students for learning actual science over the "hypothetical" process. So, the kids who experiment with 12 pieces of moldy bread get higher grades than the kids who build generators or robots that are software driven. Since our college system is based off grades than content then the soft sciences with higher grades get both the admissions and the government subsidities in the form of grants.
The fall of America had lots of helpers. The late author Michael Chriton identified that America is now dominated by the legal, educational, and governmental complex.
"Joe the puppeteer" is merely the symptom of a larger society rot.
The Dems wrote off the white (well all of) working class decades ago. Unfortunately for union members, the union bosses haven't gotten the memo. If the union bosses were actually paying attention they would notice that the Democratic platform has no real room for them anymore. The working class is paying for its own destruction with its own dues.
There is a reason why over half of union members don't vote for Democrats anymore. My retired union dad hasn't voted for a Democrat since the late 1970's.
"Job locked?" That's a wonderful term! Republicans should use it liberally.
One thing for sure, Nancy and the gang certainly delivered on that promise.
“if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever..."
I'm going to leave my job and be creative; maybe write the OWS version of Hamlet. "Free-be or not Free-be, that is the question."
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