Still, many union supporters attending the rally on Saturday . . . were not yet ready to stop voicing their grievances about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s education policies, which have been at the heart of these contentious negotiations.
 
“Until it’s signed on the line, we’re still going to fight,” said Julie Gabrick, a physical education teacher on the city’s Northwest Side. “We’re not going to give up that quick. We’ve been flexing our muscles all week and we’re going to keep at it until the bitter end.” . . . 
 
While details of that framework were not made public, the conflict has largely centered around issues that included a longer school day, principals’ ability to hire teachers, a new teacher evaluation system and improving school conditions. The last proposal made public also suggested that raises for teachers — who make an average salary of about $75,000 a year, according to schools officials — could land somewhere around an average of 16 percent over four years.
 
The Saturday event, however, gave little attention to the deal being hashed out nearby. Instead, it celebrated the power of unions in Chicago and across the nation, which many here said have been under siege in recent years.
 
Billed as a “Wisconsin-style” event, in reference to the hundreds of thousands of people who flooded the streets in Madison last year to protest cuts in collective bargaining rights for most public workers, the gathering in Chicago drew hundreds of supporters from other states, including at least a half dozen busloads from Wisconsin and Minnesota.
 
“We had just been working toward these things in St. Paul and here they were erupting in Chicago,” said Mary Cathryn Ricker, the president of a teachers union in Minnesota who attended the Chicago rally, adding that workers across the country are watching this city’s negotiations closely.
 
Speaker after speaker, many from non-teacher unions — police, nurses, custodians — echoed that notion, proclaiming the power of organized labor and the need to stick together.
 
“You have proven to the world that you’re not going to take it anymore,” said Lorretta Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, in a speech to strikers, who later marched through Chicago streets, led by a high school marching band. “What you’ve done is send a message across this country and we heard it loud and clear.”"
 
{NOTE: So that's what is happening in Chicago with the teachers. Now let's take a look at how the Democratic Party itself has changed in recent years and not for the better, at least as I see things. It helps to put the Chicago teachers strike in a broader context.}
 
The Obama Democrats is subtitled 'This isn't the party of FDR, Truman, JFK or Clinton. They're different." Please consider what the following excerpts say about the Dems of today:
 
"It is no accident that the Chicago teachers union would walk off the job, seeking a 29%, two-year wage settlement, days after the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C. The Chicago teachers union and the podium speakers in Charlotte are part of the seamless political fabric that has been created by Barack Obama and the modern Democratic Party. They've got goals, and what they want from the people of Chicago or America is compliance.

The speakers in Charlotte fastened the party to a theme: We're all in it together. This claim is false. The modern Democratic Party, the party of Obama, is about permanent division and permanent opposition. You'd never have guessed they were speaking on behalf of an incumbent and historic presidency. One speaker after another ranted that the American system remains fundamentally unfair.

 
Despite seven Democratic presidencies since FDR, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Harvard still grieves, "The system is rigged!" Jennifer Granholm, who seems to have summered in Argentina, shouted that for Mitt Romney, "year after year, it was profit before people." The economics of San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro (Stanford, Harvard Law): "It's a choice between a country where the middle class pays more so that millionaires can pay less." Sandra Fluke: "Six months from now, we'll all be living in one [future], or the other. But only one."

How is it that this generation of Democrats, nearly 225 years after the Constitutional Convention, sees 21st century America at the precipice of tooth and claw? . . .

The Obama Democrats are no longer the party of FDR, Truman, JFK or Clinton. All were combative partisans, but their view of the American system was fundamentally positive. The older Democratic Party grew out of the American labor experience of the early 20th century, which recognized its inevitable ties to the private sector. The systemically alienated Obama party more resembles the ancient anticapitalist syndicalist movements of continental Europe.

In its 2008 primaries, the Democratic Party made a historic pivot. The center-left party of Bill and Hillary Clinton was overthrown by Barack Obama and the party's "progressives," the redesigned logo of the vestigial Democratic left. . . .
 
image

What binds Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Sandra Fluke and the rest of the Charlotte roster is the belief, learned early on, that their politics has made them a perpetual band of American outsiders.

Barack Obama in his grave acceptance speech fears that "this nation's promise is reserved for the few." And so out on the plains, the Obama Democrats will assemble a voter army from that vast proletariat, the U.S. middle class, to pull down "the wealthiest."

This is a party whose agenda is avenging slights, wrongs and the systemic theft of "our democracy." For all this injustice, someone must be made to pay. . . .

An Obama victory wouldn't be just a defeat of the GOP. It would be a defeat of the post-World War II Democratic Party. And they know it. The progressive left has wanted to push Democratic liberalism over the cliff for decades. This is their best shot to get it done."

SUMMING UP

There you have it. The public sector versus the private sector. The self appointed intellectuals helping the "proletariat" defeat the private sector. The proletariat aganst the capitalists. The "middle class" against the wealthy.

From where I sit, it looks a lot like the failed and bankrupt European experiences with statism, socialism and collectivism. That's a loser for certain.

And it's troublesome to see it all unfold. Not being willing to see things as they really are, however, is far worse than seeing reality for what it is.

If we're willing to look reality squarely in both eyes and don't like what we see, we can work to create a better reality.

But if we don't see it or see it and do in fact like what we're seeing, we won't work to change it.

And that means America as we've known it will be no longer.

My own view is that we can't let that happen, and we won't. Too much history, facts and freedom are at stake.

Thanks. Bob.