A Ocasio Cortez Education

1. Education Of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

How is it, considering the economic nonsense she spouts, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could graduate cum laude from Boston University, with a degree in international relations and economics? Worse, how is it that her generation could embrace the very economic system that destroyed Eastern Europe and collapsed Venezuela, which sixty years ago was one of the top three economies in the world?

In Finland, which is still a capitalist country, the government resigned over being unable to push through free-market reforms vital to the survival of its health care system, which is projected to collapse without them. Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece teeter on the verge of economic breakdown because of unsustainable social programs.

Denmark has very high taxes and high social benefits. It also has the largest household debt relative to income of any of the industrial countries. Automobiles carry 180% tax and sales tax is 25%. Many young Danes emigrate for economic opportunities.

• Ocasio-Cortez’s committee would differ in that the legislative branch, not the executive, would be the arbiter and would presumably appoint the fact checkers. But the net result would be the same. Liars in the media, and I am guessing that umbrella term includes the already heavily policed social media, would be brought to heel.
• 2 days ago  Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made it clear that she doesn’t need a co-sign from her Republican colleague Sen. Ted Cruz, and that Cruz isn’t off the hook for the role she.

The idea that the Nordic economic model is the panacea that will “save” America is mythical. Nordic countries are small, relatively homogeneous societies that possess the philosophical bond, which originated in Lutheranism, of community sharing.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the rising star in the Democratic party. The 30-year old self-proclaimed 'Democratic Socialist' and former bartender is New York’s 14th Congressional District for 2020 and beyond. AOC, for short, is the third most popular US politician on Twitter after Barack Obama and President Trump. Some believe AOC will be president one day as well. One of the biggest question. 2 days ago  Ocasio-Cortez was referring to GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has sparked widespread condemnation. Greene has promoted a slew of.

America is a multicultural society with vastly different ideas about sharing, taxation, and the role of government.

To understand the attraction of American capitalism, you might want to attend an expat party in Silicon Valley. There are, for example, 142,000 Frenchmen and women living in the United States. About a quarter of them are estimated to live in and around Silicon Valley. I asked one young woman who ran a software company why she didn’t create her company in France. She laughed that it would take forever to get a business license and even with California’s convoluted attitude toward business, she was up and running in less than a year.

So why does a generation of millennials want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Welcome to the changing values movement in higher education.

The most cited and influential educational philosopher of the twentieth century was John Dewey. Known largely for his bringing the real world of pragmatism to educational philosophy, Dewey is less known for his democratic socialism and progressive economic theories.

Schools of education adopted not only Dewey’s pragmatic approach but also his zeal for collectivism and statism. In the late 1950s, Philip E. Jacob authored Changing Values in College, a book that was seized upon in colleges of education to show that value-based outcomes could be the desired goal of education.

For the most part, these ideas were confined to colleges of education, but they received strong reinforcement when Paul A. Samuelson’s Keynesian economic theories increasingly took hold in departments of economics.

But the most dramatic impact of progressivism, however, came from the expansion of the higher education bureaucracy as it responded to the twin demands of multiculturalism and affirmative action in the late 1960s.

The implementation of quotas masquerading as goals required the expansion of the bureaucracy to oversee programs, implement coercive requirements, and placate government bureaucrats who conducted audits of diversity achievements.

Colleges of education responded to these demands by increasing their programs in higher education administration. Those who survived the “rigorous intellectual demands” of such programs could sit on an administrative perch and control budgets and personnel decisions of faculty that viewed them as the ignorant children of a lesser god.

This resulted in a new class of professional administrators drawn both from colleges of education and from faculty who no longer possessed a desire for scholarship as much as a desire to implement a progressive agenda.

The new class’ behaviors could find parallels in the writings of Yugoslav philosopher and critic of communism Milovan Djilas. Academic administrators became a class unto themselves with their own ideology and interests that increasingly departed from the historic purposes of higher education.

This new class was nurtured on the philosophy prevalent in colleges of education that higher education was about taking the progeny of the “great unwashed” and reeducating them to become committed progressives. College was about changing values and educating students to embrace the leftist view of “social responsibility” and “social justice.”

Such shibboleths as diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice became mechanisms for implementing revisionist history, substituting activism for scholarship, and indoctrinating a captive audience of naïve young adults into the glories of progressive solutions to complex economic and social problems.

The captive audience of the classroom was, nonetheless, insufficient to satisfy the new class’ quest to remake the university into a hothouse for progressive ideology.

Like all bureaucrats seeking a proliferation of new offices, they quickly discovered the untapped resources of the college dormitories and orientation programs, what has been described as the “shadow university,” could provide additional venues for coerced political indoctrination. Many of these programs were fashioned on the theories and approaches of Lawrence Kohlberg, whose “Just Community” outcomes, like John Dewey’s, were inspired by collectivism.

It is no accident that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spouts socialist banalities. This is what colleges teach.

As progressive ideologies and political correctness became woven into the cultural fabric of higher education, people who did not share those values did not look upon higher education as a career -- unless they gravitated toward the sciences and technical fields.

Political correctness produced the activist scholar, who, in the true Marxist sense of the word “praxis,” demands to use university resources for tribal leftist political activism while arguing that activism be considered a glorified substitute for scholarship.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the product of the modern university. We might find her naivete and ignorance laughable, but the joke is on us because she is but a symptom of her generation, and we have subsidized the making of that ignorance.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science who has spent 35 years in academia at major research universities. He was a Bradley Fellow with the Heritage Foundation and is currently a distinguished Fellow with Hyam Salomon Center.

How is it, considering the economic nonsense she spouts, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could graduate cum laude from Boston University, with a degree in international relations and economics? Worse, how is it that her generation could embrace the very economic system that destroyed Eastern Europe and collapsed Venezuela, which sixty years ago was one of the top three economies in the world?

In Finland, which is still a capitalist country, the government resigned over being unable to push through free-market reforms vital to the survival of its health care system, which is projected to collapse without them. Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece teeter on the verge of economic breakdown because of unsustainable social programs.

Denmark has very high taxes and high social benefits. It also has the largest household debt relative to income of any of the industrial countries. Automobiles carry 180% tax and sales tax is 25%. Many young Danes emigrate for economic opportunities.

The idea that the Nordic economic model is the panacea that will “save” America is mythical. Nordic countries are small, relatively homogeneous societies that possess the philosophical bond, which originated in Lutheranism, of community sharing.

America is a multicultural society with vastly different ideas about sharing, taxation, and the role of government.

To understand the attraction of American capitalism, you might want to attend an expat party in Silicon Valley. There are, for example, 142,000 Frenchmen and women living in the United States. About a quarter of them are estimated to live in and around Silicon Valley. I asked one young woman who ran a software company why she didn’t create her company in France. She laughed that it would take forever to get a business license and even with California’s convoluted attitude toward business, she was up and running in less than a year.

So why does a generation of millennials want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Welcome to the changing values movement in higher education.

The most cited and influential educational philosopher of the twentieth century was John Dewey. Known largely for his bringing the real world of pragmatism to educational philosophy, Dewey is less known for his democratic socialism and progressive economic theories.

Schools of education adopted not only Dewey’s pragmatic approach but also his zeal for collectivism and statism. In the late 1950s, Philip E. Jacob authored Changing Values in College, a book that was seized upon in colleges of education to show that value-based outcomes could be the desired goal of education.

For the most part, these ideas were confined to colleges of education, but they received strong reinforcement when Paul A. Samuelson’s Keynesian economic theories increasingly took hold in departments of economics.

But the most dramatic impact of progressivism, however, came from the expansion of the higher education bureaucracy as it responded to the twin demands of multiculturalism and affirmative action in the late 1960s.

The implementation of quotas masquerading as goals required the expansion of the bureaucracy to oversee programs, implement coercive requirements, and placate government bureaucrats who conducted audits of diversity achievements.

Colleges of education responded to these demands by increasing their programs in higher education administration. Those who survived the “rigorous intellectual demands” of such programs could sit on an administrative perch and control budgets and personnel decisions of faculty that viewed them as the ignorant children of a lesser god.

This resulted in a new class of professional administrators drawn both from colleges of education and from faculty who no longer possessed a desire for scholarship as much as a desire to implement a progressive agenda.

The new class’ behaviors could find parallels in the writings of Yugoslav philosopher and critic of communism Milovan Djilas. Academic administrators became a class unto themselves with their own ideology and interests that increasingly departed from the historic purposes of higher education.

This new class was nurtured on the philosophy prevalent in colleges of education that higher education was about taking the progeny of the “great unwashed” and reeducating them to become committed progressives. College was about changing values and educating students to embrace the leftist view of “social responsibility” and “social justice.”

Such shibboleths as diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice became mechanisms for implementing revisionist history, substituting activism for scholarship, and indoctrinating a captive audience of naïve young adults into the glories of progressive solutions to complex economic and social problems.

The captive audience of the classroom was, nonetheless, insufficient to satisfy the new class’ quest to remake the university into a hothouse for progressive ideology.

Like all bureaucrats seeking a proliferation of new offices, they quickly discovered the untapped resources of the college dormitories and orientation programs, what has been described as the “shadow university,” could provide additional venues for coerced political indoctrination. Many of these programs were fashioned on the theories and approaches of Lawrence Kohlberg, whose “Just Community” outcomes, like John Dewey’s, were inspired by collectivism.

It is no accident that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spouts socialist banalities. This is what colleges teach.

As progressive ideologies and political correctness became woven into the cultural fabric of higher education, people who did not share those values did not look upon higher education as a career -- unless they gravitated toward the sciences and technical fields.

Political correctness produced the activist scholar, who, in the true Marxist sense of the word “praxis,” demands to use university resources for tribal leftist political activism while arguing that activism be considered a glorified substitute for scholarship.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the product of the modern university. We might find her naivete and ignorance laughable, but the joke is on us because she is but a symptom of her generation, and we have subsidized the making of that ignorance.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science who has spent 35 years in academia at major research universities. He was a Bradley Fellow with the Heritage Foundation and is currently a distinguished Fellow with Hyam Salomon Center.

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Yes, Colorado's 3rd Congressional District is sending Representative-elect Lauren Boebert to Washington, D.C. Before her election, Boebert took on a lot of roles, from a wannabe model to a restaurateur whose biggest claim to fame was getting shut down by the state to a gun-totin’, QAnon-embracing candidate for Congress. You know, a true stateswoman.

One of the strategies that got Boebert elected was playing to the far right’s intense hatred of anyone to the left. Smack-dab in the center of Boebert’s sights has been Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’d already become a target for conservatives when Boebert positioned herself as the anti-AOC.

Before and after her victory at the polls, Boebert has taken on her social media nemesis...while AOC has never bothered to tweet about Lauren Boebert (and Ocasio-Cortez is not shy about using social media herself). Still, it's worth comparing and contrasting these young politicos who will soon meet in Congress.

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Education
Lauren Boebert’s relative lack of education doesn’t seem to have bothered voters in the 3rd Congressional District; she earned her GED certificate after dropping out of high school. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, graduated cum laude from Boston University, where she double-majored in international relations and economics. While there’s no shame in getting a GED (along with taking some rumored community college business courses that have yet to be verified), the relevance of education to the work of Congress is stark, especially since that work has very much to do with, for example, international relations and economics.

Work Experience
Both Ocasio-Cortez and Boebert began their work life earning a paycheck at least in part in the service industry— AOC as a bartender and server, and Boebert as a caterer and restaurant owner, albeit one who seems to make more money on T-shirt sales than T-bone steaks.

Legal Entanglements
There have been legions of conservative journalists scouring the records for any suggestion of legal impropriety on AOC’s part. What they’ve found so far has been New York Post-level investigative journalism about an ongoing tax issue for about $2,000 that AOC’s campaign claims is in error and will be successfully contested and dismissed. Boebert, on the other hand, has legal issues ranging from reckless-driving charges to failures to appear in court, and a 2015 incident where she was detained for interfering with the custody of underage drinkers at a party. But the most applicable comparison is that Boebert, too, has her share of tax issues. Jason Salzman reported in the Colorado Times Recorderthat Boebert has been “hit with 8 liens since 2016 totalling $21,841.33,” and while a fraction of that has been paid (which more or less proves that the tax bill isn’t contestable), Boebert still owes nearly $20K.

Style
Boebert tried to make hay over a recent AOC magazine cover: “I wonder what brand of socialism allows you to get a $14,000 suit for Vogue photoshoots,” she recently tweeted, adding that she was “looking forward to dismantling your socialist agenda in my finest Macy’s clothes like normal working people.” The pointedness of the jab was undercut by a few things: one, AOC didn’t get to keep the expensive outfit — the magazine borrowed it for her. Second, Boebert throws around the label “socialist” in a way that seems to suggest that she doesn’t really know what it means, other than that it makes her supporters hoot and holler. (Supporting this theory: a November 2 tweet defining socialism as “the equal sharing of misery.') And three: That’s not Vogue. It’s Vanity Fair. It’s right there on the cover, Congresswoman-elect.

Jello Wrestling
It’s exactly what every American thinks Congress needs: to get raunchier. On the notably racist podcast In Hot Water, one of the hosts claimed that Boebert wanted to win her race and go to Washington “to wrestle Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in jello or pudding, and that would be fun to watch because she is a lovely woman.” Boebert could have let that bad and sexist joke pass (along with the casual racism of a follow-up comment about “the Japs”), but instead she embraced it and returned to the joke several times in the interview.

It was an unsurprising move by Boebert, who posed like the swimsuit model she once hoped to be for most of her campaign ads, but not one that will change the way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responds to Boebert…which, again, is not at all.

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Education Of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez