Filed under: Capitalism, Communism, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Freedom, History | Tags: Capitalism, Communism, History
Historians inescapably both write with the benefit of hindsight and shape the stories they tell. So history always appears much tidier and more dramatic to the reader than the events depicted seemed to those who lived through them day by day. Human beings have to live with a future that is always unknown while enveloped in the fog of mere existence that can be as hard to penetrate as the far better recognized fog of war.
……………………………………………………………………..John Steele Gordon
……………………………………………………………………..An Empire of Wealth
In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, it’s principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism in nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combined with “Fascism.” In recognition of this reality, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union abandoned the slogan, calling on all proletarians to unite.
………………………………………………………………………Richard Pipes
………………………………………………………………………Communism, a History
We don’t have a “profit system” – we have a profit and loss system, and the loss is the important part because it is a signal that company is badly managed and needs to do something about it.
………………………………………………………………………Milton Friedman
Filed under: Energy, Latin America, Politics, Socialism | Tags: Communism, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela
Venezuela, one of the world’s great oil powers — one of the top five providers of crude oil to the United States — is having trouble keeping the lights on at home. Every day for the past three months, government-programmed blackouts means the lights flicker and go out, in a once prosperous country.
A months-old energy crisis and state interventions are taking a brutal cost on private business. It’s a major challenge for Venezuela’s President-for-life Hugo Chavez, and his vaunted 21st century socialist experiment.
“The government is paralyzed, unable to handle the situation — and there are no fiscal plans to deal with the crisis,” said José Guerra, a former Central Bank economist who directs the economics department at Central University in Caracas, the capital. “Our situation is unbelievable, because we have one of the biggest reserves of oil in the world, thermal-electrical and hydroelectric sources.”
Chavez hails his 21st century socialism as the answer to American-style capitalism that he calls an abject failure. The oil industry is pumping 20% less crude than in the 1990s and is saddled with debt. Venezuelas hydroelectric plants are unable to generate enough power because they have failed to make the necessary investments to upgrade facilities. The inflation rate could rise to 35% this year, economists say. Thousands of factories have closed since 1999 for lack of access to money.
To save energy the government has imposed rolling blackouts in cities that can last as much as four hours or more a day. And they fine businesses that use too much energy.
They always think that socialism will bring a brighter tomorrow. But the lights are going out sporadically in Venezuela.
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Filed under: Capitalism, Environment, Global Warming | Tags: Black Nationalism, Communism, Radicalism, Van Jones
Listening to the news on the radio today, as a minor item ABC reported that Van Jones, Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, had resigned. He had, ABC reported, once “inadvertently signed a petition” requesting an investigation of the government’s involvement in 9/11. He didn’t want any controversy over that to damage the presidency.
Wow! That is an amazing bit of spin. Bloggers began some time ago to investigate Van Jones background. Since the various czars are not approved by Congress, they do not get the public vetting that cabinet secretaries do when they have to appear before Congress in order to be confirmed. Since the so-called czars report directly to the president, their influence over policy is not clear, and troubling. They seem, in many cases, to outrank the cabinet secretaries who are responsible for policy.
From inside the White House, Jones has been developing a campaign to “greenwash” the meaning of 9/11, using federal resources and a political organization he founded. The group called “Green for All” has been one of two groups involved in a campaign called “Green the Block,” which would promote 9/11 as a “national day of service” to connect with people who were passionate about “repowering America and greening up and cleaning up America.”
Matthew Vadum has pointed out the leftist groups that are attempting to modify the meaning of 9/11 and focus instead on bicycle paths, carbon emission controls, solar panels and, of course, community organizing. The idea is to further the goals of the radical environmental left by convincing Americans that their fantasy world of an oil-free economy is possible.
The transformation is intended to tax wealth away from the wealthy, and return it to minority communities in the form of non-existent “green jobs.”
Jones is a self-described communist, a radical leftist activist, a “9/11 Truther”, supporter of cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal, black nationalist and organizer of the boycott against Glen Beck (from the White House). Also, serial liar. In his resignation letter, he said “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me.” Unfortunately the “smear” came in his own words. People in politics really need to learn about YouTube and the “Wayback Machine.” It’s a little hard to argue with film of yourself —smearing yourself.
Stories about Jones have been all over the internet, but oddly not one word appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, CBS Evening News. The first mention came in the Sunday Papers after his resignation late Saturday night, and that as soft as I heard on ABC Radio News. And the mainstream media wonders why they are losing customers steadily.
Van Jones was anxious to “change the system.” His problems are not just his serial slurs against American society— “an apartheid regime” and capitalism, the coal industry, American farmers, the white population, the Bush administration for causing 9/11. The Obama administration seems to have selected him with full knowledge of those qualities.
His green fantasies — that we can eliminate oil and gas and depend on such alternative energy as wind and solar— earn him a rousing “good riddance” for promoting another useless sink-hole for taxpayer money. This article, by Jones for the organization he founded, summarizes some of his views. It’s worth reading to get the full flavor of attitudes prevalent in the Obama administration.
Filed under: Economy, Election 2008, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, History, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Socialism | Tags: Communism, Nancy Pelosi, Stalinist, Totalitarianism, Vaclav Klaus
What is it, anyway, that is so important that Nancy Pelosi had to slam her gavel down and shut down the House of Representatives silencing debate and prohibiting a vote on increasing America’s domestic energy supply? What is more urgent than bringing relief to Americans suffering from staggering gas prices?
A self-serving book tour naturally!
You didn’t know Pelosi had a book out? That’s ok, neither does anyone else.
While you and I fork over $4 and more a gallon, cutting back our driving, pinching our pennies — while Republicans speak by candlelight, sans cameras and microphones, to spectators in the House gallery about the need to bring down gas prices — Premiere Pelosi is hitting the bookstores, running the talk show circuit, promoting a book she “wrote” for little girls — presumably teaching them to grow up to be insufferable Stalinist dictators like herself.
The book, Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters, is ranked #782 on Amazon’s bestsellers list. For perspective, that makes it approximately 55 times less popular than Tori Spelling’s autobiography.
Polls show 75% of Americans support off-shore drilling. But Pelosi can’t be bothered with little things like “Democracy” and representing the American people — she is saving the planet!
Ring a bell?
It ought to. I’ve pointed out several times the warnings by President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, that environmentalism is the new totalitarianism — that there is no aspect of your life the State cannot control when “saving the planet” is the goal. He’s not kidding. I’m not kidding.
We got a preview of it last Friday with Pelosi’s Stalinist tactics.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, History, Media Bias, News, Politics | Tags: Communism, EU, NATO, New York Times, Russia, Soviet Union, Ukraine, War, WW2
Russia’s lawmakers have passed a resolution stating that the 1930’s famine that killed millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine should not be considered genocide. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 89 year old renowned author dismissed Ukrainian claims that the famine was genocide as a myth. Historians agree that the 1932-1933 famine was instituted by Soviet authorities under Joseph Stalin.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of the famine as an act of genocide.
That the Great Famine was engineered to force peasants to give up their plots of land and establish collective farms is a matter of history. The number of peasants deliberately starved to death is estimated to be around 10 million, but the actual number is unknown. Grain was removed by the authorities from the villages, and the animals, and any food, and the peasants and their children were forced to remain. Ukrainians call it Holodomor, or death by hunger.
Many argue that the famine was meant to target private landowners as a social class in order to pay for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. Others suggest that the famine was simply meant to eliminate Ukrainians as an ethnic group, as if one were better than the other.
President Vladimir Putin’s government has angrily clashed with nations formerly of the Soviet bloc about efforts to reinterpret 20th century events. Moscow accuses those nations of seeking to rewrite history and cast Russia as the villain.
Americans in 1933 were assured by New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty that “any report of famine” was “exaggeration or malignant propaganda”. Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, though the British chargé d’affaires in Moscow reported in his dispatach that “According to Mr Duranty the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga had decreased in the past year by three million and the population of the Ukraine by four to five million”. Robert Conquest says that “the influence of his false reporting was enormous and long-lasting”.
Also in the news is President Bush’s visit to the Ukraine to stress America’s support for its leaders hopes to join NATO. President and Mrs. Bush visited a memorial honoring famine victims along with President and Mrs. Yushchenko.
Of course the demand for the recognition of the Great Famine as an act of genocide is connected to Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership, and Russia’s angry denials are a sign of their displeasure at the actions of its former state.
Events have consequences. People have long memories.
