Thursday, July 31, 2014

Taxing Carbon in the Name of Climate Change

The former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin wrote in Washington Post on July 27, 2014, “How ignoring climate change could sink the U.S. economy.”

Not counting the non-enforced southern border and the hordes of new and lawless Democrat citizens who demand their fair share of the American dream now turned into a welfare nightmare, the national debt is most likely to sink the economy sooner than any other variable and that includes climate change that has been changing for millennia.

Rubin asserts that, since the “scientific community is all but unanimous in its agreement that climate change is a serious threat,” we have to include climate change risks in economic policy, fiscal and business decisions, even though we cannot define climate change risks with precision.

He cites a Gallup poll (we know how accurate opinion polls are) that nearly “60 percent of Americans believe that global warming is caused by human activity.” We’ve had 17 years of record cold temperatures and an unusually cold and late spring and summer. Every time progressives have met somewhere to hold a global warming protest or conference, Mother Nature rewarded them with blizzards and snow storms. Since the coastal areas are not underwater as Al Gore has predicted due to the melting of the polar ice caps, progressives have modified their talking points from global warming to climate change.

“The buildup of greenhouse gases is cumulative and irreversible.” Even though we’ve had record ice this year, Secretary Rubin repeats the environmentalists’ fallacious statement that “the melting polar ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise.” Did he learn in school why melting ice cubes in a glass does not cause the water to spill over?

The discussion, he said, has been incorrectly concentrated on the trade-off between environmental protection and economic prosperity. Instead, the discussion should be focused on the “cost of inaction.” Inaction is an exaggeration since every agency of the federal government has been ordered to adopt a climate change platform and the EPA has been busy forcing many coal powered plants to close due to their inability to comply with the draconian new rules imposed by the EPA.

Rubin believes that the long term cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action. We are spending a lot of money on a healthy patient on the assumption that, at some point, this patient might get the plague.

A bipartisan effort (It must be good since it’s bipartisan) is measuring the economic risks of unchecked climate change in the U.S. Are we now so powerful that we can keep the climate in check? The report named “Risky Business,” was released in June 2014 under the co-chairmanship of the former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

Apparently agriculture, energy, coastal property sectors, public health, and labor productivity will be significantly harmed by climate change by 2050.

We cannot accurately predict the weather a week in advance, or where the tornado will decide to touch down, but we can now predict and manipulate climate change? Maybe we can with cloud seeding.

How about Mark Armitage, the professor who found in 2012 soft tissue on a triceratops horn at Hell Creek Formation in Montana? His discovery sure turned on its head the “consensus” science that dinosaurs roamed the earth 60 million years ago.  The soft tissue found under a powerful microscope proves that the fossil is “only 4,000 years old at most.” If triceratops roamed the earth at the same time as humans, then what theory are scientists going to advance now about climate change, its causes, and how dinosaurs disappeared? (Acta Histochemica, July 2013, Vol. 115(6): 603-608, doi:10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001)

Properties in Florida and Louisiana will be below sea level and thus flooded to the tune of $48-68 billion, said Rubin.  I could be wrong but a lot of Louisiana and Florida are already below sea level and subject to floods. Al Gore told us in his award-winning documentary that sea levels would rise by 20 feet and many coastal nations would be under water “in the near future.” http://scienceline.org/2008/12/ask-rettner-sea-level-rise-al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth/

Damage from super storms that are yet to occur, like Katrina and Sandy (combined $193 billion in economic losses), will drain the economy, he says. He states that “we can’t attribute all the damage caused by Katrina and Sandy to global warming,” but rising sea levels caused higher surges and these “super storms will increase if global warming persists.” He is sure that the damage will not be on a straight line, it will be on an “upward sloping curve.”

How do we mitigate the damage from a potential super storm or an erupting volcano? Why mitigate just potential super storm costs? Because environmentalists blame CO2 (carbon emissions) on human activity and they want to tax it. They certainly cannot tax a volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere or under sea volcanos that release lava and gases constantly, possibly accounting for the acidification of sea water.

“Carbon” is the chemical element with the symbol C and the atomic number 6. A second definition pops up, obviously driven by the global warming agenda, “carbon dioxide or other gaseous compounds released into the atmosphere, associated with climate change.”

Rubin’s Malthusian prognosis is that “dramatically rising temperatures in much of the country will make it far too hot for people to work outside during parts of the day for several months each year – reducing employment and economic output, and causing as many as 65,200 additional heat-related deaths every year.”

The actual deaths associated with exposure to excessive natural heat in the U.S. in the period of 1999-2010 when several super storms and hurricanes hit was 7,415, an average of 618 per year, the highest in 1999 (1,050) and the lowest in 2004 (295).  http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6136a6.htm

Incidentally, 2004 was the year that registered three super storms, Hurricane Charley that hit southwest Florida, Hurricane Ivan that hit the Caribbean and the Mid-Atlantic states, and Hurricane Frances that hit the Bahamas, Florida, the Carolinas, Ohio, and Canada. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2013/11/top-10-super-storms-2000

Perhaps we should recall that unemployment is already at a very steep 18 percent, not the rosy and inaccurate MSM reporting of a constantly dropping unemployment rate (due to a larger and larger contingent of discouraged workers who gave up looking for work and are thus no longer counted, but receive unemployment or welfare), GDP has been negative in the last quarter, and measured temperatures around the globe have been cooler in the last 17 years.

Rubin identified three risks associated with “unmitigated climate change:

1.      “Future federal spending to deal with climate change is likely to be enormous and should be included in fiscal projections” (the spending is already enormous, to the tune of trillions of dollars during this regime); costs must be covered either by increasing the deficit, raising taxes (Democrats’ favorite playbook), cutting spending on defense (they’re going that), cutting our social safety net (the safety net no longer exists due to government out of control spending and welfare largesse to evil dictatorships around the world), and cutting public investment in infrastructure, education, and basic research. Where did the stimulus billions go that were supposed to build and fix roads and bridges?

2.      Investors should demand that companies “disclose their exposure to climate risks, assets that could be stranded by climate change, and the costs they may someday incur to address their carbon emissions.” (There is the real reason for this entire article, more taxes, taxing the carbon footprint.)

Former SEC chairwoman Mary Shapiro wants to encourage businesses to make such reporting mandatory in their quarterly disclosures. If not, SEC, the Wall Street regulator, should mandate such disclosures.

If climate-related risks are exposed, companies would be forced to change their polluting behavior.

3.      GDP is not a good measure of our economy because it does not include negative externalities resulting from climate change. Rubin proposes a parallel GDP that reflects the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

Tax the companies for the damage resulting from their emissions involved in producing goods and services and then pass the cost onto hapless consumers who need the goods and services to survive.

Suddenly we are faced with the never-before proposed scenario “to protect our economy by protecting the environment” or “allowing environmental havoc to create economic havoc.” The economy is “risky business” but it is even riskier when environmentalists are driving the debate of an economy to reflect the world as the globalists plan it to be.

 

                                                                                                                                      

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Communism Revisited - Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”  - Lenin’s formula as presented by the Communist Party Program of the Soviet Union, p. 62

Photo: ebay.com
The draft of the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was presented to the Communist Party’s Twenty -Second Congress in October 1961. Crosscurrents Press in New York published it in English “as an aid to everyone wanting to understand the plans and intentions of those who lead and govern the Soviet Union.” It was a time when the Cold War highlighted the existential fight between communism and capitalism, separated by an invisible red line in the sand.

The communist platform emphasized the phrase “scientific communism,” with contrived stages of development in an attempt to give it a scientific facade.  Communism, as a concept and linguistically derived from the Latin word “communis” (shared) is neither scientific nor “shared.”

The theory of scientific communism had to be developed and propagandized and the Communist education had to be improved. (p. 124)

Public education was required to prepare citizens for vocations needed by the communist society. Children were to be molded into “harmoniously developed members of Communist society” and the “elimination of substantial distinctions between mental and physical labor.” The principles of the “Communist outlook” were to be taught and school children were to be engaged in “socially useful labor to the extent of their physical capacity.” (Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Crosscurrents Press, New York, 1961, p. 112)

The parental influence of their children’s education had to be harmonized with “their public upbringing.” Schools were meant to inculcate not just “love of labor and of knowledge in children” but also “to raise the younger generation into the spirit of Communist consciousness and morality.” (p. 113)

Literature and art had to be “imbued with optimism and dynamic Communist ideas.” (p. 119)

Collectivism was highly encouraged and the cult of the individual was discouraged. (p. 124)

The Party’s banner was inscribed, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  The Party’s motto was “Everything in the name of man, for the benefit of man” and the militant slogan proclaimed, “Workers of all countries, unite!” (p. 9)

In case there was any doubt that the socialist world was expanding and the capitalist world was cut down to size, the program proclaimed that “Socialism will inevitably succeed capitalism everywhere” because it is the “objective law of social development.”

When communism eventually accomplished its mission, the Soviets said, there will be no social inequality, no oppression, no exploitation, no war, just “peace, labor, freedom, equality, and happiness on earth.” I wondered how the 100 million innocents worldwide who were killed by communists would have responded to such empty and meaningless rhetoric.

“Capitalism extensively exploits female and child labor.” (p. 11) Before this document was published, child labor was a thing of the past in the United States, and women comprised 29.6 percent of the labor force in 1950. Many women stayed home to raise their children and care for their families. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf

Communists, under the leadership of Lenin, “worked out a plan for the radical transformation of the country, for the construction of socialism.” The plan had three prongs: the industrialization of the country, agricultural cooperation, and the Cultural Revolution. 

Industrialization

As those who lived through socialism can attest, forced industrialization into a large scale modern industry resulted in an impoverished populace who survived on the crumbs left after a lot of funds and natural resources, that should have been earmarked for improving the population’s standard of living, were used to industrialize a poorly run centralized economy that wasted a lot of resources.

The program of the Communist Party proposed the development of a first-class heavy industry, defense, and services for the population in the areas of “trade, public catering, health, housing, and communal services.”  As we well know, life under communism was very brutal in every aspect.

Total industrial output proposed was to exceed in 10 years 150 percent of the 1961 level of the U.S. industrial output and in 20 years by 500 percent, leaving the U.S. far behind. This was to be accomplished by raising productivity in ten years by 100 percent and by 300-350 percent within 20 years.  The goals are laughable today just as they were in 1961. (p. 65)

Major economic areas were set up in the Urals, the Volga, Siberia, Transcaucasia, the Baltic area, and Central Asia and production planning was centrally done. (p. 82)

Labor productivity was supposed to increase in agriculture through the kolkhoz (collectives) system as charted by Vladimir I. Lenin by merging kolkhoz property and individual property into one Communist property.  Productivity was to increase 150 percent in ten years and then 5-6 times more in the following ten years. That certainly never happened.  Machinery, spare parts, and repair know-how were lacking and the young agricultural labor force tended to seek employment in cities for better opportunities. (p. 74)

Agricultural Cooperation

Agricultural cooperation meant that everyone had to give up their land for the common good, willingly or by force, with no compensation whatsoever, and form cooperative farms from which the communists derived the lion’s share of income from crops, cattle, pigs, horses, and chicken. Peasants were lucky to escape with their lives and the clothes on their backs, and very fortunate to survive the forced move into high-rise concrete block apartments located in very crowded cities.

“Millions of small individual farms went into voluntary association to form collective farms.” Large-scale “socialist farming” predicated on confiscated land destroyed the formerly plentiful crops of each individual family who brought home the fruits of their labor. Now each family had to be content with the leftovers after the Party claimed their planned share.

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution included the forced indoctrination and reeducation in labor camps of those who resisted communism:  “skeptics, capitulators, Trotskyists, Right opportunists, nationalist-deviators, and other hostile groups.” (p. 15)

To achieve this Cultural Revolution, illiteracy had to be wiped out. The socialist intelligentsia was created through indoctrination and the so-called classless society was now comprised of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, all ruled from the top by the communist party elites.

The ridiculous idea that now citizens have a material interest in the fruits of their labor was expressed in the motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” They never raised the people’s standard of living as they claimed, on the contrary, they impoverished the former well-off farmers whose land  they confiscated.

There was never an awareness that workers labored for themselves and society. The awareness was that everyone worked for the government bureaucrats who were beholden and answered to the communist party elites.

Although freedom of speech, press, and assembly were written in the Constitution which was often revised, nobody lived under the false sense of being able to speak their minds without disappearing the very next day and never to be seen again.

Because the Socialist revolution “established the dictatorship of the proletariat,” 100 nations and nationalities lived harmoniously within the USSR. At least that is what the propaganda  led you to believe. The only dictatorship the Eastern European block has experienced has been the dictatorship of the Communist Party elite and its chosen dear leader.

“The Socialist reorganization of society” has been so successful, claimed the Communist Party’s program, that “The highroad to Socialism has been paved. Many peoples are already marching along it, and it will be taken sooner or later by all peoples.” (p. 21)

“The countries of the Socialist system have accumulated considerable collective experience in the remolding of the lives of hundreds of millions of people.” (p. 22)

I can personally attest to this remolding of our lives. We were comfortable and had a home one day and the next day we lost everything to the new communist regime. Several family members went into gulags for being “bourgeois,” some survived, some did not, property was confiscated, everyone was impoverished overnight, savings and personal belongings taken, and forced re-education into the cult of personality and adulation of the president and his wife Elena.

According to the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Socialists had in common:

-          Same type of economy based on the social ownership of the means of production

-          Same type of political system based on the rule of the people led by the working class

-          Same Marxist-Leninist ideology

-          Same defense against the “imperialist camp”

-          Same common goal of communism (p. 22)

Communists believed that their number one responsibility was to educate the “working people” in the vein of “internationalism, Socialist patriotism, and intolerance of all possible manifestations of nationalism and chauvinism. Nationalism is harmful to the common interests of the Socialist community.” (p. 25)

It is now easy to understand the planned drive to erase national borders and sovereignty that have previously defined successful western nations with capitalist economies. “Bourgeois nationalism” and “national egoism” are vehemently opposed, however, “Communists always show utmost consideration for the national feelings of the masses.”  (p. 26)

It is interesting to note how much money, force, police, and military might the Communist Party employed to keep the masses from escaping the borders of the impoverished, poorly-run and spirit-suffocating socialist states, heavily guarded by devoted and brain-washed apparatchiks and well-paid informants. The East Germans even built the Berlin Wall between them and their West German brothers and sisters who believed in freedom. The wall was built not to keep people from coming in but to keep people from escaping communism.

The Soviets stated that World War I and the October Revolution caused a general crisis of capitalism. Part two of its crisis began with World War II and the Socialist revolution. ”World capitalism has now entered a new, third stage of that crisis, the principal feature of which is that its development is not tied to a world war.” (p. 26)

In their 1961 opinion, world wars, economic crises, the military industrial complex, and political unrest accelerated the transformation of “monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism.”

“The oppression of finance capital keeps growing. Giant monopolies controlling the bulk of social production dominate the life of the nation. A handful of millionaires and multi-millionaires (make that billionaires today) wield arbitrary power over the entire wealth of the capitalist world and make the life of entire nations mere small change in their selfish deals. The financial oligarchy is getting fabulously rich.” (p. 27) Of course they left out the Communist Party elites who were also getting offensively rich at the expense of the proletariat. The paragraph contains eerily similar developments today.

“The state is becoming a committee for the management of the affairs of the monopoly bourgeoisie. The bureaucratization of the economy is rising steeply.” The Communist Party recognized  bureaucratization because they perfected it to an art.

What does state-monopoly capitalism do? It combines state and monopolies into a single power whose sole purpose is to enrich the monopolies, suppress the population, and “launch aggressive wars.” (p. 27) The industrial military complex eager to start new wars around the world comes to mind.

Some interesting points were made about technology that replaced workers through automation, while displacing small producers. Using bombastic language, the Communist Party stated, “Imperialism is using technical progress chiefly for military purposes.”   While devouring an ever-increasing fraction of the budget, “The imperialist countries are turning into militarist states run by the army and the police.” (pp. 28-29)

The Communist Party conveniently hid the fact that their police state and military readiness kept the Soviet population in a constant state of fear and of need. The communist platform identified the U.S. as the “world gendarme” (police) who at times supported “reactionary dictatorial regimes and decayed monarchies,” and at times opposed “democratic, revolutionary changes.”

Accusing the “exploiting classes” for “resorting to violence against the people,” the Communist Party conveniently hides the fact of mass killings, 100 million innocents who lost their lives to the aggressive communist movement, indoctrination, and power grab. (p. 39)

“Anti-communism is a reflection of the extreme decadence of bourgeois ideology.” (p. 50) “Thus any staunch anti-communist born by solid experience with the pathetic life people lived under socialism and communism, by this definition is a decadent bourgeois individual.

The Soviets called the capitalist state the “bourgeois state.” It is a “welfare state” for the “magnates of finance capital and state of “suffering and torture for hundreds of millions of working men.”  (p. 51)

The commies were wrong in that we have a welfare state for the masses – 50 percent of the labor force today does not work but receives “entitlements” paid by those who choose to work for a living. Our “free world,” said the communist platform of 1961, is a world of “lack of rights, a world where human dignity and national honor are trampled underfoot.” (p. 51)

The Soviets would be shocked and disgusted with so many Americans and illegal aliens on the dole. “It is impossible for a man in Communist society not to work, for neither his social consciousness nor public opinion would permit it.”  According to the Communist Party platform, “Anyone who received any benefits from society without doing his share of work would be a parasite living at the expense of others.” (p. 108)

The communist moral code included the following principles:

-          Devotion to the communist cause

-          Conscientious labor for the good of society – “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”

-          Public duty and Intolerance of actions harmful  to the public interest

-          “Collectivism : one for all and all for one”

-          Mutual respect and humane relations

-          “Honesty, truthfulness, moral purity, modesty and guilessness in social and private life”

-          Intolerance of national and racial hatred

-          Mutual respect in families and proper upbringing of children

-          Intolerance to “injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, and careerism” (p. 109)

The Soviets described capitalist clericalism as using the church, political groups, unions, youth, and women’s lobby to advance their agendas. Today these groups are used to advance the communist agenda.

The Soviet people with their average equal incomes were never more prosperous than employees of the capitalist economy. What Soviets termed “parasitical classes” under capitalism were no more parasitical than all the communist apparatchiks who stole left and right from the wealth of the people. (p. 84)

Did Soviet communists deliver the promised public consumption funds and goods as promised, according to need and at public expense ? The answer is generally no. When they did deliver some services, they were highly inadequate: (pp. 90-91)

-          Caring for disabled people, orphans, and elderly with no family left (few were cared for, were abused, and died shortly in their care)

-          Free education (yes, but it was highly competitive and unfairly distributed at the university level)

-          Free medical services (yes, substandard care and full of malpractice that was never addressed because it was government run; severe shortage of medicines)

-          Rent-free housing, free public transportation (no, it was subsidized)

-          Free use of some communal services (yes, libraries, bath houses, culture houses)

-          Grants to unmarried mothers (yes)

The communist experiment at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 failed miserably when many starved to death. Bonded laborers worked on the communal land but there was no incentive to do more. Crops were placed in storage from which everyone took according to their needs but members worked according to their ability. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2120669/posts

Communism did not succeed around the world and will never succeed no matter who is in power because it is premised on a highly organized society of free, socially conscious workers who self-govern and labor for the good of the people.  Some men by nature work harder and are more conscientious and altruistic than others. Responsibility, consciousness, industriousness, equality, discipline, and devotion by government fiat cannot be dictated or implemented. Some men or groups of people will always be more equal than others.

© Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

 

Butler on Business, July 23, 2014

I talk to Alan Butler about the latest on the illegal alien manufactured crisis and other topics. I come on at the one hour and 34 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//27149.mp3

Illegal Aliens from Failed Socialist Economies or War Refugees?

As our government is insanely arranging flights at taxpayer expense for Honduran children so that they don’t have to make a dangerous trek across Mexico  and pay coyotes $5,000 to invade our country illegally, their president is smiling, making no excuses for his inept and corrupt administration or the fact that this “refugee” airlift will encourage a continuous flow of illegal immigration to grow the ranks of Democrat voters in the U.S., moving large numbers of Hondurans and displacing American citizens.

A correspondent named Robert proposed a solution that the main stream media is not willing to discuss. He suggested that the illegal immigrant children now baptized “refugees” of war by the United Nations be reunited with their parents and guardians who should then be immediately arrested for child abuse and endangerment. Such parents should be placed on a watch list and never allowed to enter the United States, never be issued a visa, and never be permitted to apply for permanent residence or American citizenship.

Illegal alien “children” have been shuttled and resettled in our cities around the country for months now without the knowledge or vote of the local population. As Eleanor Holmes Norton, the representative for the District of Columbia, said, “you don’t have a right to know what is going on in government.” http://washingtonexaminer.com/eleanor-holmes-norton-says-you-dont-have-a-right-to-know-whats-going-on-in-government/article/2551313

I would like to think that, when it comes to taxpayer funds and communicable diseases, some of which are incurable, and to the safety of our neighborhoods from MS-13 gangs walking across the border without questions asked, the citizens of the United States who are footing the bill and suffering, have a right to know.

The citizens of Suitland, Maryland should have known the whereabouts of illegal aliens dumped close to their neighborhood since six MS-13 illegal aliens stabbed to death Amos Jones, a homeless man. http://weaselzippers.us/194474-six-ms13-illegal-aliens-murder-homeless-man-in-maryland/

Sending the 1,000 National Guardsmen to the southern border may help corral  the flood of illegal aliens, transport them, and do surveillance. However, on Newsmax TV, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “They can’t actually arrest anybody. They can detain illegal immigrants temporarily if they find them, but only the Border Patrol can arrest people.” Unfortunately, the Border Patrol agents have been reassigned to diaper duty, bottle feedings, lice baths, “making sandwiches and filling out paperwork instead of trying to keep illegal immigrants and smugglers out.” http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/Rick-Perry-Mark-Krikorian-border-legal/2014/07/23/id/584499#ixzz38TxlbSbn 

Butler County Sherriff Richard Jones was complaining about the flood of illegal aliens who are committing crimes and bringing drugs into his county.  A teenaged illegal alien molested an elderly lady and an 8-year old girl. Violence is on the rise even though his Ohio county is so far away from the border with Mexico.  Butler County spends “eight to ten million dollars each month on welfare programs, which he called ‘free stuff,’ and said that’s ‘some of the reason that they come here.’” http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/25/heres-what-happened-after-an-ohio-sheriff-sent-a-bill-to-the-mexican-president-for-the-illegals-in-his-jail/

New Jersey residents were so upset about the 1504 illegal alien children dumped in their state that they are organizing protests in Trenton, Morristown, and Middletown on October 24-25. http://theeconomicguardian.com/wp/?page_id=328

Boston organized the largest rally on Beacon Hill “against Obama’s illegal aliens.”  Buzzpo.com reported 10,000 people who protested the dumping of illegal aliens in their city.  And they are not children, most of them are teenagers, 15  or older. http://buzzpo.com/10000-rally-boston-obamas-illegal-aliens/

According to the Justice Department’s Immigration Courts, 46 percent of illegal immigrant “children” do not show up for their court hearings, an estimated 46,000 out of the 100,000 who were apprehended in the last two years. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20140722-migrant-children-are-no-shows-at-dallas-immigration-hearings.ece

Alipac is reporting that schools are bracing for the impact the enrollment of at least 30,340 illegal children will have on their communities and the education of their own children.  Bringing down averages and overwhelming poor schools are just the tip of the iceberg. Some cannot count to ten, are really sick with tuberculosis, have not been vaccinated,  can’t turn on a computer because  they’ve never seen one, are home sick, have been abused or molested during the trek across Mexico, and do not speak English or Spanish, they speak Mam, a Mayan dialect spoken in Chiapas, Mexico, and parts of Guatemala. http://www.alipac.us/f12/us-schools-brace-flood-central-american-immigrant-students-308182/

The Daily Caller reported that Texas received 4,280 students, Virginia 2,234, Maryland 2,205, North Carolina 1,191, and New Jersey 1,504. Fairfax County, Virginia enrolled this year 5,192 Central American students, 22 percent more since 2011. Few speak English and perform several  years below grade level. Some students are old enough to be in college.

The administration is calling the regime’s  290,000 illegal aliens immigrants even though immigrant is a term reserved for legal immigrants. http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/05/border-meltdown-obama-delivering-290000-illegals-to-u-s-homes/

It is painfully obvious to anyone why cartels and terrorists are allowed to invade America  - and they do not discriminate between political views, they steal, rob, and murder anybody with impunity. Are the millions of extra Democrat votes worth the loss of our country to ethnic displacement and replacement?

Will Canada, U.S., and Mexico be the new North American Union without borders, with its own currency, the Amero, replacing the deliberately destroyed dollar?

 

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Home Sweet Home in Freight Shipping Containers

Photo: containerhomes.net
While the world is sizzling and percolating in conflicts and wars, and U.S. is roiling in manufactured crisis after crisis, real or imagined emergencies, overwhelmed by the constant invasion of illegal immigrants, The Washington Post writes on the front page, “Thinking inside the box on D.C. housing costs,” living in repurposed dinged freight shipping containers. Two days before, Deborah K. Dietsch featured “Thinking big in a small way.” (Michael Laris, July 21, 2014)

It is understandable how a damaged shipping container may be an appealing substitute for shelter to a broke student, a homeless person, or a third world shanty-town dweller, but Americans have plenty of housing space and resources to shelter its citizens.

We are so well-off that we even house generously people who break our laws every day when crossing our no-longer-enforced border. Why force Americans into tight and ridiculous spaces when we have so much land? Environmentalists are afraid that we are destroying the planet with our very existence. If they crowd all humanity into as tight and dense urban areas as possible, animals can roam free and land can be rewilded and reclaimed for the creatures we displaced with our civilization, roads, and undeserved mobility.

These tiny spaces are expensive but they give the occupants a false sense of saving money and the planet by not using a car, walking or biking everywhere, just like the zoning environmentalists have been pushing for a while now, high density, and high rise living, five minutes from work, school, shopping, and play while the metro is nearby. Absolute heaven if you want to live like a rat in an 8-by-40-foot box! Who would not enjoy living in “lovingly repurposed steel husks” that have been previously “sloshing across oceans on mammoth container ships?”

A demolished student house will be the location in D.C. of 18 shipping containers to make “eye catching” rentals. Citing Ayn Rand’s novel, “The Fountainhead,” the owners are compared to the rebellious architect in the novel who fights against “evil” conformists.

After container doors are replaced by windows and mirrored wardrobe in each container/bedroom, the residents no longer feel confined and claustrophobic. Cut steel panels will make room for the kitchen and living room when the containers are joined. The containers cost $2,000 but the rent price is not divulged. The project is slated to be completed by August.

The builders dream to “float hundreds of sea container apartments on a barge in the Potomac and creating a homeless village on the river to serve Georgetown.” The zoning officials are skeptical, they must see if “code will allow them.” But zoning codes can be changed to accommodate environmentalist agenda.

Renting micro-dwellings in the 144-unit building called Harper for $2,500 a month for a one-bedroom, 400 square foot apartment and a parking space enticed many. Because it is so small, residents would want to go out, to get rid of claustrophobia. “This location couldn’t be more perfect for the socializing lifestyle,” says Leah Wald. Renting the average 375 square foot hotel room by the day can cost you about the same and the maid is free.

The micro-units are advertised under different euphemisms, one-bedroom unit, junior one-bedroom apartment, compact living space, efficiency units, but the square footage is anywhere from 350-400 square feet.  A 600 square ft. studio rents for $3,350 a month.

The nine-story, 218-unit called the Drake, will open in September. Lots of glass and amenities such as oak floors, stainless steel kitchens, and Bosch appliances are supposed to compensate for the lack of space.

The Wharf apartments which are slated to open in 2017 will have 501 micro-units, 171 will be 325-354 sq. ft., highlighting a Murphy bed, with a “built-in shelf for storage when the bed is stored vertically against the wall.” The kitchen on wheels can be used as table or as a desk. “The units are designed like the inside of a boat.”  It seems perfect for anybody who hates cleaning and does not mind living in a glamorized jail cell.

More micro-dwelling units are going up in D.C., Latham Hotel (2016), Patterson Mansion (2016), Blagden Alley building (2016), and WeWork apartments in Crystal City (2015).

The 200 square ft. aPodments in Sammamish, Washington rent for $600-900 per month. There are no elevators and no parking spaces. Resident Judi Green, who rents a 10 by 10 ft. loft cubicle, must climb six flights of stairs, and “shares the kitchen with seven other tenants on the second floor.” The micro-housing units increase the population density of the area greatly. http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020845443_apodmentscitycouncilxml.html

In countries like Japan, where land is very scarce and expensive, tiny dwellings are popular. It is not the case in the United States where land is plentiful. Unfortunately, millions of acres of our land have been locked to human habitation and set aside for conservation.

Across the country, Sustainable Urbanism, Sustainable Development, Equitable Communities are government plans to change the counties’ desired low density character and scale to high-density crime-ridden slums. Social engineering is being imposed on entire neighborhoods.

Alley pods are placed between townhouses and in suburbs micro-residential units are built between single family homes, destroying their property values. These people have worked their entire lives to buy a single family home.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will dismantle local zoning and force people to move into certain areas in order to achieve what they consider “racial, economic, and ethnic diversity.” Multiple illegal immigrant families purchase or rent one single home creating a third world nightmare for the single family neighbors who must live next door.

“Nationalizing neighborhoods” on a grand scale is done for “our own good and to achieve utopia.” By obliterating zoning regulations, we will have neighborhoods by government fiat quota. (Rush Limbaugh monologue, September 12, 2013)

Rush Limbaugh pointed out that “HUD’s power grab is based on the mistaken belief that zoning and discrimination are the same, zoning is disguised discrimination.” Introducing 200 square ft. pods between single family homes is “social justice.”

The progressives’ social engineering projects implemented around the world are not aimed at just destroying national sovereignty, language, and cultural identity. They are now engaged in a massive replacement of rural areas and “suburban sprawl” with high density, high rise urban dwellings in the name of green environmentalism, saving the planet from the destruction of manufactured man-made global warming/climate change.

 

 

Sunday, July 20, 2014

"We've Proved that Communism Works"

Building the Berlin Wall
It is no surprise that young people are enamored of communism. Their teachers have been indoctrinating them for years into the utopia of “social justice,” “environmental justice,” the “evil” middle class, and the spectacular equality for all as envisioned by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Communism is “cool” in the land where wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is a hypocritical political statement made while enjoying capitalist amenities. But we expect them to mature eventually and give up the absurdity that communism has not succeeded because the wrong people were in charge.

Furthermore, we don’t expect them to elect representatives that mirror their youthful ignorance. Rep. Joe Garcia, a Democrat from Florida, said, trying to explain our “broken immigration system” that needs to be fixed by enacting comprehensive immigration reform, “Two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico. And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that communism works. If you give everybody a good, government job, there’s no crime. But that isn’t what we should be doing on the border.”

He tried to walk back the outrageous statement by saying, “My grandfather died under house arrest in Cuba. I’m under no illusions of what evil is.” Apparently he does have some explaining to do how 100 million innocents died through mass starvation, executions, imprisonment in gulags (re-education and forced labor camps), beatings, and torture at the hands of communist rulers during the 20th century and how Cubans and North Koreans still suffer today under totalitarian communist regimes.

Communism promoters may want to explain what is happening now in South Africa under a Marxist-Leninist regime where the South African Communist Party (SAPC) plans to pursue the “radical second phase” of the ongoing communist revolution, confiscation of private property and businesses. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/africa/item/18594-south-africa-enters-second-phase-of-communist-revolution

Perhaps Hollywood, the MSM, and academic progressives in this country who worship at the altar of communism and wish to transform our country into a communist “paradise” should explain how the dear leaders elevate themselves to god-like status and expect total worship from their subjects, even in their homes, the huge self-portraits and statues erected everywhere, a dangerous cult of personality, the glorification and celebration of the dear leader who replaces the parents of every child in the country, and how communists destroyed the middle class and killed intellectuals.

Can the influential elite explain to us Lenin’s secret police force, Cheka, established to eliminate dissent through execution and forced relocation to hard labor camps? It served as a model for other police force bodies in Soviet satellite countries. How about the executive orders Lenin wrote to shoot or hang kulaks (wealthy peasants), priests, and other “harmful insects?” How can anyone say that communism was or is good? Gone were religion, freedom of speech, private gun ownership, land ownership, food, medicine, decent housing, shelter, and clothes.

Viewed from space at night, North Korea looks pitch-black, but the rest of the world is illuminated. Billions are spent to support the dear leader’s cult of personality while the population suffers and exists in a suspended state of malnutrition. If anybody protests, North Korea has “Camp 22” forced labor encampment which holds in excess of 50,000 people.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara brought communism to Latin America. Over 100,000 Cubans have fled Castro’s regime and an estimated 15,000-18,000 had been killed by the Castro government. During fifty years of repressive rule, Castro destroyed property rights, freedom of speech, press, assembly, put on show trials to dispose of enemies, banned Christmas, and built a prison camp to lock away those labeled “enemies of the state” who disagreed with him - poets, priests, journalists, nuns, dissenters/activists, and homosexuals.

Che Guevara, Castro’s chief advisor, left in 1965 to train communists in Africa and Bolivia. Che was not successful in Africa and was executed in 1967 by government forces in Bolivia. However, the current Bolivian president, Evo Morales, “redistributed land and nationalized key industries, expressing his belief that ‘he [Che] inspires us to continue fighting, changing not only Bolivia, but all of Latin America and the world.’” (Paul Kengor, “Communism: Its Ideology, Its History, and Its Legacy,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 2013)

Venezuela was radically transformed by Hugo Chavez, a Castro ally. He nationalized industries, redistributed land, and censored the MSM. Medical care was nationalized, and people suffered under his rule. The communist Shining Path guerrillas killed close to 35,000 Peruvians. Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, trained in Cuba to become the leader of the Sandinistas, the communists who overthrew the government in 1979, and who nationalized industries and redistributed the land. “Since 2007 Ortega adopted a policy of democratic socialism.”

Perhaps progressives can explain to the rest of the American voters who are lulled into a false sense of security by clever rhetoric and euphemisms, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its existence until November 9, 1989.

Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht gave orders and, on August 13, 1961, the construction of the infamous wall of shame made of concrete and barbed wire began. The Berlin Wall was a glaring expression for 28 years of communist repression which restricted the freedom of movement of its citizens. Those living under communism became “captives” overnight, cut off from the rest of the world while some family members lived free on the opposite side of the street and of the wall.

“For half a century, nearly all of Eastern and Central Europe suffered under communist rule.” Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia fell one by one under the rule and influence of the Soviet regime.

After 1989, a host of changes took place, European Union was formed, 27 countries gave up their monetary policy power to bureaucrats in Brussels, the environmental lobby became very powerful in their quest to protect earth from a manufactured global warming crisis, the communists went underground to regroup and emerged more powerful and stealthy around the world, taking over slowly through academic indoctrination, with the help of crony capitalist millionaires and billionaires.

The illegal immigrants who are currently in our country and who are sending their young through coyotes via Mexico come from Latin and Central American countries where dictatorship, repression, and corruption are the norm. They do not understand any other form of rule and therefore vote, legally or illegally, for the same type of failed society which they’ve escaped from, either socialist or communist. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would be proud – his dream of a world-wide workers’ paradise may commence under the leadership of a one world elite government guided by the borderless United Nations.