Bailout, Bailins, and the Greeks' Trojan Horse

Istanbul Archeological Museum Trojan Horse (Wikipedia)

While Americans are eagerly signing petitions to ban the American flag on the heels of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam leader call to ban the Stars and Stripes “due to its links to racism” or are busily banning anything attached in any way to the Confederate flag and our history, the United States and the world are in serious financial trouble driven by out-of-control debt, particularly the most visible nation of all, Greece.

Healthcare for illegals, gay marriage, and other non-stop crises occupy the American overwhelmed minds, while the Trojan Horse of huge national debt and loss of sovereignty to the globalist Transpacific Partnership (TPP) mystery “committee” are ignored.

Greece is bringing to the forefront the issue of debt, what happens when it spends 60 percent of GDP, lives from borrowed billions, and refuses to curtail spending on entitlements, expecting more bailouts from the EU, essentially Germany.

Banks and the stock exchange are closed for the week, issuing a 60 euros limit per withdrawal. Not unexpectedly the euro fell against the dollar and the British pound. Sky News reported Prime Minister Tsipras as blaming the European partners and the European Central Bank for the debacle because creditors “have refused a request to extend Greece’s international bailout beyond Tuesday, until after the referendum.” The move risks a Greek default on 1.5 billion euros payment to the International Monetary Fund.

Tsipras claims that the bank deposits of the Greek people are fully secure and the payments of wages and pensions are guaranteed. I am not so sure that is the case since Greece is carrying a government debt load of over 175 percent of its GDP.  Countries cannot service such level of debt without printing money. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-debt-to-gdp

The European Central Bank will maintain its “emergency cash lifeline to Greece’s banks” without an increase. The Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) on which Greek banks depend, if lowered, may force the country out of the Eurozone.

There were many economists, of course, who questioned the wisdom of accepting Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain into the EU because their monetary policies were plagued by high inflation. Others believe that a return to the drachma may not be such a bad idea.

Expecting the worse after banks announced closings, Greeks stood in long lines to withdraw cash from ATMs and many horded gasoline and food. After five years of various bailouts, demonstrations, protests, refusals to adopt more austerity measures, negotiations between the leftist government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Brussels creditors have broken down. For months economists have predicted Greece’s pull out from the Eurozone.

In preparation for the national referendum on July 5, police patrols are more visible especially around ATMs. Tsipras asked voters for a “yes” or “no” vote on the bailout proposal considered by his government as confiscatory. The plan would “raise taxes and hurt pensioners,” forcing Greeks to “an endless cycle of austerity.” But the Greeks have been told few details of the deal – nobody really knows the implications of a “yes” vote or a “no” vote and everyone fears they “would become Venezuela.”

But the well-off Greeks, fearing the election of the leftist Syriza, have already moved money out of Greece or took cash out and stored it elsewhere.

The Tsipras government favors a “no” response to the referendum because the bailouts terms are “humiliating” and would deepen Greece’s economic recession. But without bailouts, “most Greek banks would have totally collapsed by now.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/article-3141480/Hundreds-queue-outside-banks-fears-Grexit-grow-ahead-MPs-vote-bailout-referendum.html

It has been reported that withdrawals of 500-600 million euros have emptied more than 2,000 ATMs.  When the austerity referendum was announced, people started withdrawing money. When the Greek banks reopen, would they need bail-ins like the Cypriot banks? Would the depositors be forced to accept worthless I.O.U.s for their cash?

The European Union has required its member countries to enact bail-in legislation. Bail-ins force creditors and shareholders to rescue troubled banks. Cyprus citizens holding private bank accounts had to take “haircuts,” a form of wealth confiscation. Private pension funds were raided in Poland. http://www.dcclothesline.com/2013/09/25/cyprus-style-wealth-confiscation-is-now-starting-to-happen-all-over-the-globe/

Bailouts forced taxpayers to financially rescue big banks that had engaged in risky financial activity, using the infamous “too big to fail” excuse.

How much longer can Germany sustain the very shaky European Union? Should they bring back their own currency, the Deutsche Mark? As more large deposits and capital leave Greece when banks reopen, corporate asset controls may emerge. The Greek market may be shocked and defaults of various debt instruments may emerge.

A Romanian friend, Florina, explained the Greek crisis in terms that most people can understand. “I loaned money to a family in a time of financial crisis so that they can survive, and the family did not curtail their spending, they blew the money on unnecessary stuff; now the family is holding a meeting to vote if they are going to pay me back or not. That’s Greece now.”

 

 

Political and Societal Conundrums, Normalizing the Abnormal

As I attempted to discuss politics in my former country, one young cousin commented wryly that individuals are not preoccupied with politics like Americans are; people are too worried about daily economic survival and loss of “entitlements.”

After decades of communism, the culture of dependency is strongly ingrained and is not likely to go away. Voters are too uninformed, he added. They say, ‘who cares who is elected, they are all corrupt,” but then eagerly accept the meager bribes of $15-$20 in exchange for their vote, whether it’s a vote for mayoral elections or for higher office, and then line up for the promised “social benefits.” Once they obtain said benefits, they complain that nothing ever changes in society because it is all rigged against the poor. Sounds familiar?

I’ve never seen so many young people idle, out of work, smoking and drinking in cafes, discussing philosophy and the virtues of socialism, unashamed to extend their hands to receive undeserved and unearned government support, as I have seen in Europe. A few countries are tightening their welfare belts but the citizens protest vehemently.

Our young Americans, the products of decades of public school indoctrination into socialism and Marxism, are equally perplexing in their outrageous and confusing demands.  

They want equality but fail to understand that “free people are not equal.” They refuse to understand because their revisionist history teachers have taught them that communist utopia makes everyone “equal.” They don’t know that communist elites were rich beyond anybody’s dreams and wanted to maintain the status quo while everyone else was equally poor and equally miserable.

Another conundrum is expressed in the chants rioters use during organized mayhem, like “America is capitalist and greedy.” Yet almost half of the population is on some type of welfare and citizens on the dole see themselves as the “victims” of white men, the “white devils,” who succeeded in life because they had bogus “white privilege.”

In a country where every child receives an award and a trophy for participation in a competition and an undeserved, often shocking praise for fiascos, it is no surprise that failures want to be recognized for sloth and lack of work ethic.

When blatant lies and deception are endlessly justified, while corruption and treasonous behavior are no longer punished, right is wrong, wrong is right, is it any wonder that our youth have a distorted view of reality?

These imagined “black victims” predominantly run the government in most bankrupt U.S. cities and enable their constituents to remain on generational dole, asking constantly for more. As they claim to be poorer and poorer, in spite of trillions of dollars spent on the War on Poverty, they have personal property that people in other countries wish they had and fantasized about.

These same “poor,” “enslaved” people, who never mention the real slave states in 21^st century Africa and Asia, are demanding reparations for their ancestors’ slavery, egged on by progressive academia; they drive the manufactured narrative of racism, of bigotry, of hate speech, in the most tolerant country on the planet, in an attempt to silence and shame all whites into blind submission to the bipartisan rulers of the country.

We are not supposed to judge an entire religion for the actions of one Muslim terrorist because he is a “lone wolf” but because one lunatic, drugged-up individual chose to murder in cold blood nine innocent people, we must immediately blame everything liberals ever wanted to change on various symbols this deranged young man displayed or used, and reorient our entire society to fit the one world government agenda. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” even a crisis as senseless and hateful as this one.

The country is described as “racist,” everyone cowers in shame, and immediately agree with the “transformational liberal agenda” that we must purge any symbol of our history, of our past, any word or phrase in our language that may be deemed offensive to someone of a “darker-pigmented skin.”

The American flag, the Confederate flag, and any statues, monuments, and graves must be removed because it offends those who don’t know nor care to know their history; if you are not removing them fast enough, let’s deface them with graffiti such as “black lives matter.” Farrakhan wants to remove all American flags!

If you cannot purchase a Confederate flag in the Gettysburg museum shop, where can you? And why are large retailers banning the sale of the Confederate flag but still selling the Nazi swastika flag and Che Guevara t-shirts, the butcher who “murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile,” and an inveterate racist? http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/truth-about-che-guevara

Young Americans, who live in a distorted world manufactured by the progressive academia and the deceitful main stream media, have no idea what they are asking for or what they are admiring.

As Michael J. Totten said, “…anti-establishment young people all over the world have Che’s face on their walls and their T-shirts. Most of them don’t know anything real about the man they admire. They have no idea he was one of the most violently illiberal establishment figures in the Western Hemisphere’s history. They admire the image, which is and always has been a fraud.”

But we must destroy our own history and all the symbolism attached to it and remake our American past in the fake vision of liberalism that wants to shape the youth of the world into global citizens. The only country that stands in the way is the United States. But this former bastion is crumbling day by day into the dustbin of the former empires. It is falling from within through the work of its elected self-serving representatives and the ignorant and dishonest voters.

Illegal aliens and amnesty must be our number one priority, we are told ad nauseam, they represent a significant and very important voting block for all politicians; money is no object in pleasing them, while benefits to veterans and to the military are being cut.

America is so “unjust” that we must change it and make it like those perfect socialist and bankrupt European countries liberals envy and admire where everyone is “equal” on paper and “social justice” reigns supreme in theory, basking in the glory of failed multiculturalism.

America must change because it has had a good run as an “evil empire,” we are told by progressive admirers of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.

Any perversion that violates religious beliefs and family values must be taught to our children starting in kindergarten, without parental approval. “Free-range parenting,” another liberal category constructed to demean our worth and bring us down to animal level, is verboten. Parents who engage in such practices that allow kids to be kids, play outdoors, or home-school them away from the destructive Common Core, must be arrested and stripped of their rights.

Liberals invent new language, force strange labels on us, trans-gender, trans-racial, trans-normal, trans-sexual, trans-human, just add the prefix “trans.” Liberals are normalizing the abnormal, marginalizing the majority of us as irrelevant. Only then will we achieve the sought-after “equality” and “justice” under the sun.

Will we then be a perfect society built in the progressive image of utopian Marxism with citizen slaves to the Orwellian government where some animals are more “equal” than others?

Or is this just a distraction to do the bidding of large corporations and pass the basement-guarded Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a disguised giveaway of our sovereignty (under the excuse of globalist trade) to a foreign entity composed of a “committee” nobody knows, elects, can talk about, reign in, nullify, or supersede?

 

 

 

 

 

Guide to Staying Alive and Healthy under Castro Care

Coming in contact with the “new and improved” American Castro Care for the masses that squeaks like a rusty wheel wrapped in cellophane and tied with a red bow, I realize that quality healthcare for American citizens and their undocumented brethren, who crossed the border illegally or were brought here by our government to fulfill the quota of Democrat voters and to alter the “racially unjust” and “bigoted” profile of sleepy little towns, might soon be a thing of the past.

If you take a handful of antibiotics before you have a medical procedure, your chances of survival double, especially if you know that your doctor’s handshake to improve his/her bedside manner passed to you all the germs from the previous eight patients because surveys say that doctors only wash hands after every eighth patient they touch. Very reassuring, isn’t it? But, it could be worse.

And then there are the foreign nurses and orderlies who come from third world countries where soap and water are scarce and sanitation is hard to grasp, especially since bacteria and viruses are invisible to the naked eye. Too much washing is bad for human skin and not part of some cultures. Who are we to judge, liberals ask rhetorically. Hand-washing may be against their religion as well.

You better thank your lucky stars that you get freshly cleaned and bleached sheets. As Marean Menghelie wrote, in eastern European socialized medicine, you could find yourself wrapped in a sheet with Crayola graffiti, with dried up blood that does not belong to you, ketchup stains when ketchup is not served in the hospital cafeteria, motor oil stains from the previous patient who cut his finger in an auto shop, suspicious yellow stains, or even dried-up vomit if you are really lucky.

And don’t dare to use the shower or the bathroom on your own, especially if you are hooked up to a tree of life with glucose and other happy drugs that can stop your heart. Why take the chance to pull the needle right out of your vein and spray the walls with a spritz of fresh blood.

Always ring the bedside button. When nobody shows up, and they seldom do, try to crawl out of bed carefully so as not to set off the bed alarm and watch out – the floor is really hard. If it rings anyway, hurry up to the bathroom and lock the door. There is always a young college student in nursing school assigned to babysit you and force you into compliance with hospital rules.

Menghelie suggested that you should be careful what you eat from the socialized medicine hospital offerings. Smell it suspiciously, wait for other patients in the ward to try it first, and consider eating only if nobody croaks right away.  Better yet, don’t eat at all. If you wanted to eat, you should have gone to a restaurant, not a hospital.

If you must have a procedure, you have to bribe the doctor (it is expected) to make sure he/she does an extra good job and you emerge alive. Watch to make sure they put the bribe money clearly labeled with your name in an envelope and ask, in case you don’t make it, if there is a refund policy payable to the family for burial expenses.

Menghelie even recommended a nice payoff for the RNs, the next in line to make sure you are properly sedated and cared for after surgery. Bring proper amount of cash as they are not ATMs to make change. It is good insurance that they will smile, give you shots properly, or draw blood on the first try without bruising your entire arm. Make sure, he advised, you bribe two nurses so that the second shift won’t leave you thirsty, in pain, or with your diaper wet.

Socialized medicine is great and it works well in the small bankrupt countries of Europe when you have the sniffles or the flu. It will work wonders for our 308 million Americans, give and take a few million undocumented arrivals that the government does not seem to be able to count accurately.

Dental care in socialized Europe is another story. There is a reason why so many Europeans don’t smile. It’s not that daily life is harder or that they are in a perennial bad mood. They are just either sporting gaps in their pearly browns or yellows or have ill-fitting dentures.

Aren’t you glad that the U.S. is going to finally join the rest of the civilized world? What took us so long? We’ve been overpaying for services, good doctors, and good insurance for so long. How could we have been so ignorant for so long? Lucky us that the ‘wise’ progressives came along to set us straight and give us Obama Care!

I can give you lots of savvy advice but it suffices to say that it would be better if you could stay healthy and away from doctors and dangerous pharmaceutical products that tend to cause more harm and mortal danger than the actual disease. And take your vitamins. You are going to live as long as God intended you to live no matter what you do.

A Cancer across the Earth Called Globalism

I just returned from a two-week trip to Romania and, I am sad to say, what many have warned us about years ago, has come to pass even in Romania, the country that had suffered so much under four decades of communist dictatorship. They managed to replace one evil master, the communists, with another, the globalists/corporatists/statists. 

At one of the empty truck stops and restaurants where we stopped for a soda, a southern Romanian was telling us how afraid people are of their children’s uncertain future, of their finances, and of the dwindling opportunities for success that seem to vanish more each day.

No sooner had Romanians freed themselves from communism in 1989 that the European Union has stepped in with their Fabian Socialism, bringing in lots of indoctrination and other demand strings attached to their financial help for the newly minted and impoverished EU state in dire financial need, Romania.

Dr. Savage warned us about liberalism as a mental disorder. European progressive liberals on steroids, with their failed multiculturalism, have influenced Romanian economics and politics so much that they are now well underway to global governance, an insidious and noxious control by a few elites poised to own the globe.

Romania now has the green party, environmentalism gone-amuck, school indoctrination into the cult of Gaia, destruction of national identity, revisionist history, Muslim and multicultural immigration, ignoring anything that identifies and ties Romanians to their culture and language, strange music, depraved and debauched fashion and behavior, drugs, replacement of perfectly good Romanian words with English neologisms, brainwashing of the population by the church into blind submission to the statists, corruption at all levels, bribery of 5-15 euro for each vote, socialized medical care on a dwindling budget, and disappearance of the middle class which had emerged successfully after the supposed fall of the communists in 1989.

A few conservatives, like ignored Cassandras, have lectured listeners who cared to pay attention about the out-of-control immigration and all the hallmarks of the new world order that is taking over like a metastasized cancer every facet of our lives in the U.S. and across the globe.

Unemployment is high, inflation is escalating, jobs are not created, politicians make empty and dishonest promises to the voters, contracts and companies are moving overseas, young people seek jobs elsewhere in the European Union, no big time corrupt politicians are going to jail, and there is a feeling of hopelessness for the future of their children.

I was saddened to see in Romania the same elements of global control, despair, and welfare dependency we see in the U.S. today. The church supports statism and the hoax of global warming packaged as the climate change industry worth trillions of dollars. Even the Pope is now a climatologist and anti-gun lobbyist.

But there are some important differences. Romanians are very proud of their beautiful country. The Romanian flag is patriotically flown on every building and on every summit. Everybody speaks fluent Romanian if they want to become citizens. No ballots come in any other language and no translators are necessary or provided by the government for welfare services.

The border is safe and secure and one must have a valid passport to cross it. There is no stoked racism and bigotry every day from the administration in power. Nobody wants to disarm Romanians and certainly not their government. If the population learned anything from an embattled and painful history is that disarmed citizens become hopeless slaves to their government masters in power.

Freedom of speech is safe for now.  There is no liberal-imposed political correctness that stifles and prevents freedom of speech, nor are there academic corners dubbed “free speech zones.” Academics as a group love their country and students still have free exchange of ideas at the university. People who disagree with progressives are not labeled haters and terrorists and their lives are not threatened. The Constitution is safe and does not operate side-by-side with Sharia Law. Immigration is legally permitted within the bounds of “how does it benefit the Romanian people.”

 

Earth System Global Governance, The Earth Charter, and Sustainable Development

One of the influential voices of the progressive environmentalist movement is The Earth Charter. This organization emphasizes global control of everything. Here is a sampling of its charter with direct quotations.

“Respect and care for the community of life”

-          Respect Earth and life in all its diversity (Protect the delta smelt in California by dumping fresh water into the ocean while an entire state is experiencing drought?)

-          Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love 

-          Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful (Is it statistically true that democratic societies are peaceful, just, and do not go to war but constitutional republic do? Where is the evidence?)

-          Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations (Would that be accomplished by taking arable land out of production, re-wild it, and then restrict human habitation to designated urban areas as evidenced by the Biodiversity map also known as the Wildlands Project map?) http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/images/wildlands_map.jpg

“Ecological integrity”

-          Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations that make environmental conservation and rehabilitation integral to all development initiatives (This is definitely in full swing in all the Green Growth, Smart Growth Initiatives of Agenda 21 that restrict zoning to multi-purpose high rise living, particularly in the U.S.)

-          Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being (Would U.N. decide the patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction?)

-          Ensure universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction (Who exactly decides what is responsible reproduction and what is not and how will it be enforced?)

-          Adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world (Who becomes the arbiter of lifestyle and what constitute material sufficiency?)

-          Act with restraint and efficiency when using energy, and rely increasingly on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind” (Who decides what ‘restraint’ is in using energy and what is the cutoff when use is disallowed?)

 “Social and Economic Justice”

-        Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative

-        Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations (Redistribution of wealth is already underway, from producers to non-producers.)

-         Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity (This gender equality and equity seems to be working well in the Muslim world dictatorships.)

-        Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities” (If it’s universal access, isn’t it discriminatory to give special attention to certain groups? What kind of ‘right of all’ are they talking about?)

“Democracy, Nonviolence, and Peace”

-        Provide all, especially children and youth, with educational opportunities that empower them to contribute actively to sustainable development (Empower youth to do what with sustainable development?)

-        Treat all living beings with respect and consideration (Would animals receive lawyers to make sure humans treat animals with ‘respect and consideration?’)

-        Demilitarize national security system to the level of a non-provocative defense posture, and convert military resources to peaceful purposes, including ecological restoration (Who decides what constitutes levels of non-provocative defense posture and how military resources will be converted to peaceful purposes?)

-        Eliminate nuclear, biological, and toxic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, Ensure that the use of orbital and outer space supports environmental protection and peace http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html

And who is going to do all this global governance (control) of the Earth through sustainable development, the lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 21? United Nations, of course, run by none other than third world nations, the very beneficiaries of this wealth redistribution through “justice and peace” scheme.

I would not exactly call wealth confiscation from the producers to the non-producers “justice” or “peaceful.” I would call it unjust and coercive seizure of earned wealth under the guise of saving the planet from a non-existent   environmental meltdown. The constant loud rhetoric coming from the progressive main stream media, academia, and crony capitalists has created a very rich and lucrative climate change industry worth trillions.

“In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.”

On the occasion of the Earth Charter’s 15 years of sustainable global governance indoctrination, the Earth Charter is planning activities and propaganda around the globe to push further its “universal ethical principles of sustainable development under the slogan, “One Earth Community, One Common Destiny” and the banner “Earth Charter +15.”

The Earth Charter was launched on June 29, 2000 in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The partners of the Earth Charter are listed here. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Partners.html Council members listed oversee the work of the Earth Charter Secretariat. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Council.html The Earth Charter Secretariat staff is listed here. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Secretariat%20Staff

Mikhail Gorbachev, the co-author of The Earth Charter wrote, “I envisage the principles of The Earth Charter to be a new form of the Ten Commandments. They lay the foundation for a sustainable global earth community.” The citizens of various countries who believe in the Biblical Ten Commandments must reorient their entire lives to fit this new directive of progressive global governance.

According to the United Nations Commission on Global Governance, “Regionalism must precede globalism. We foresee a seamless system of governance from local communities, individual states, regional unions, and up through to the United Nations itself.” What a neat Ponzi scheme of wealth redistribution in the name of saving the Earth from man-made Armageddon!

If you wonder about this new world order, here is a simple explanation how they are doing it. “The alternative to the existing world order can only emerge as a result of a new human dimension of progress. We envision a revolution of the mind, a new way of thinking,” said Mikhail Gorbachev at the State of the World Forum. Schools have been quite busy in the last forty years indoctrinating children into the global governance new way of thinking and the global citizen mindset.

The 2015 Canberra Conference on Earth System Governance, “Democracy and Resilience in the Anthropocene,”  will offer a Summer School on Earth System Governance (December 9-12, 2015) and an excursion to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve (December 13, 2015).

According to the Smithsonian, “Anthropocene has become an environmental buzzword ever since the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen popularized it in 2000.” Environmental activists have blamed “man” (anthropo) and “new” (cene) for causing extinction of plants and animals and polluting the planet through man’s industrial revolution, having changed the atmosphere and the climate irreversibly.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/#RApVwdO4tHMSkqrT.99

The newest title in the Earth System Governance series is available from MIT Press, “Consensus and Global Environmental Governance: Deliberative Democracy in Nature’s Regime,” exploring “the practical and conceptual implications of juristic democracy as a new approach to international environmental governance.” More global governance publications and abstracts can be found at www.earthsystemgovernance.org/publications

If you are wondering what “juristic democracy” is and what it has to do with the environment, you are not alone. I don’t think that “consensus” has a place in science and science reasoning; “consensus” means general agreement of opinion, it is not a scientific fact.

According to its website, “The Earth System Governance Project is the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change.”  The researchers include “social and natural scientists.” http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/

The Sustainable Development buzz word that is now used in every facet of our lives has been defined in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission) report titled ‘Our Common Future.’ Sustainable Development is “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

United Nations agencies working against the economic needs and wishes of U.S. citizens compiled a blueprint for achieving sustainable development called U.N. Agenda 21. This 40 chapter document (about 300 pages) addresses every facet of human life and how sustainable development should be implemented through local, state, and federal government. With its grant-making power (‘visioning grants’ and ‘challenge grants’) and conservation easements (lower taxes in exchange for taking land out of agricultural use or any use for several years or in perpetuity) , the federal government promoted the sustainable development idea and policies to the state and local levels with the creation of an army of new community of sustainable development NGOs (non-government organizations) such as the American Planning Association, the Sustainable Resource Center, and the Institute for Sustainable Development. There is not one level of government left in the U.S. or university that does not have a Sustainable Development plan in place or a degree program that involves the phrase Sustainable Development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism and Sighet Museum

I was digging furiously through my book shelves, looking for one special volume which I had brought with me from Romania when I immigrated to the United States. After half an hour I found my May 1977 first edition of Romulus Rusan’s book, “Greyhound’s America,” published in Romanian during the brutal communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

I never understood how such a book that told the truth about life in the west escaped his publishing censoring goons. I was going to finally find out as I was going to meet Romulus Rusan and his equally famous and lovely wife, the poet Ana Blandiana.

Romulus Rusan told me that his editor revealed to him that, of the 100,000 plus copies of his first edition book that were sold in Ceausescu’s Romania, probably half of the readers immigrated to the U.S. He could not understand why Rusan was not arrested by the communist regime. His wife joked that they must have labored under a lucky star, under divine protection.

Romanian Ambassador at Washington
Romulus Rusan and Ana Blandiana
(Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 3, 2015)

I met Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan at a Romanian Embassy serata honoring their literary work and their untiring efforts to bring to light the horrors of communism in the First Memorial to the Victims of Communism at Sighet, Romania. A true labor of love, their work began in 1993 with the acquisition of the Sighet Prison, a condemned ruin.

The former prison built in 1897 to incarcerate common criminals, was used during First and Second World Wars for political inmates, priests, Polish revolutionaries, and Romanian deserters. During the period of 1948 to 1950, resistance fighters from Maramures, peasants and students, were imprisoned here.

Between May 1950 and July 1955, it served as a maximum-security facility, holding ministers, members of Parliament, journalists, officers, priests, and other religious leaders. During this time, 54 of those held died while in custody and were buried in unmarked graves. In 1955 the prison became again a jail for common criminals with more creature “comforts.” Because of a decree in 1975 which ruled that prison sentences had to be served in the workplace, the prison was closed and abandoned.

Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan petitioned the Council of Europe to open a museum in the former prison which had become, as they described it, an “insalubrious ruin.”

Sighet Museum
(photo: Wikipedia)

With funds from the Civic Academy Foundation, the International Centre for Studies of Communism, and the untiring efforts of Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan, the former prison became the first museum of its kind in the world, dedicated to the victims of communism in Romania and in all former communist countries of the Iron Curtain.

Each cell became a separately-themed room with its own chronology of death and destruction of the human body and spirit caused by the most oppressive form of dictatorship in history – communism.

After the Civic Academy Foundation was established to create the museum at Sighet, the 175 founding members chose Ana Blandiana to be President.

The exterior of the building was repaired with help from Hanns Seidel Foundation and from private donations. The actual repair work commenced on July 1, 1996 and the Memorial was inaugurated on June 20, 1997.

Former political prisoners, Orthodox priest Constantin Voiculescu and Graeco-Catholic priest Eugen Popa, held the religious service to consecrate the Space for Recollection and Prayer.

I was amazed that a husband and wife team was able to bring to life such a significant memorial with limited resources and a gargantuan effort, yet the west is still struggling to raise funds to build a similar museum.

In addition to the Civic Academy which is attended by students and professors from Europe, the International Center for Studies into Communism, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, the Sighet Museum has been visited to date by more than one million people.

The Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims by Aurel I. Vlad

(Photo: Widipedia)

 

The symbolic statuary entitled “The Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims” by Aurel Vlad depicts humans walking in various stances of resignation, heads bowed down or raised to the sky, some with hands up, begging, imploring, appealing to a higher power, and wondering why. When it rains, the rivulets make the statues appear as if the victims are crying.

Sighet prison cells

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Dozens and dozens of rooms in the museum tell the horrible stories of the most oppressive period in Romania’s modern history:

-          More than 10,000 trials were held according to the Communist Party template – accusations of  ‘treason,’ ‘plotting against the social order,’ ‘espionage,’ ‘sabotage,’ ‘diversion,’ ‘inimical attitude,’ ‘public instigation,’ ‘fraudulent crossing of the border,’ ‘omitting to make a denunciation,’ and ‘dissemination of forbidden publications;’ they were always followed by hard prison time and sometimes death.

-          More than 2 million people were persecuted politically using “coercive methods,” with hundreds of thousands arrested administratively, without trial, some up to ten years.

-          600,000 Romanians were arrested and sentenced to prison between 1945-1989

-          200,000 Romanians were deported to forced labor camps.

-          Destruction of traditional parties, National Peasant Party, National Liberal and Social Democrat Party, and installation of one party, the Communist Party, replacing a multi-party democratic regime with a one-party state.

-          Repression against the Romanian Orthodox Church, Graeco-Catholic Church, Protestant and Evangelical churches.

-          Installation of the dreaded Securitate by decree in August 1948, following the infiltration by communists of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1944.

-          Use of political detainees in hard labor camps for various building projects.

-          How individual farmers were forced into collectivization, the peasants’ resistance, and their swift repressions.

-          The sovietization of the population, forced submission into communism by purging, beatings, and confiscation of personal property.

-          Orchestrated by communist organizers like Emil Bodnaras, Ana Pauker, and other Moscow agents, the army, the police, and the justice system were forcefully transformed into communist arms of the police-state.

-          Firing and assignment to manual jobs or labor camps of any teachers opposed to the communist regime; those remaining and the new teachers had to become the “new man” through violent ideological and propaganda subjects, becoming tools of the Marxist-Leninist education based on Soviet-style textbooks.

-          Ethnic repression, accusations of “Zionism” and the maltreatment of gypsies.

-          Deportation of 44,000 people to the Baragan steppe; 1,700 of the deportees died; the oldest person was deported at the age of 95 and lasted until he turned 100.

-          Anti-communist resistance in the Fagaras Mountains and Western Carpathians.

-          Women who gave birth in prison and their children were removed and sent to orphanages; 4,200 women, mothers, wives, or daughters of political prisoners were also imprisoned as “dangers to the social order.”

-          The famous historian Gheorghe I. Bratianu was imprisoned at Sighet for twenty-four months and died there in April 1953; on August 6, 1953, the Interior Ministry decided to increase the prison sentence of a dead man by 60 months.

-          High school students were deported and served time in communist prisons for either running into the mountains to join the partisans or defacing/tearing up official posters and portraits, telling jokes, writing epigrams, and drawing cartoons.

-          Doctors and medical students were imprisoned for refusing to adopt communist jargon and for not rejecting “all that was western.”

-          Room 9 is the cell where the famous Iuliu Maniu died in 1953 (1873-1953); his cell was left untouched, with thick bars and the broken bed with wires sticking out from the dirty mattress; Maniu, the architect of the unification of Transylvania with Romania in 1918, the former Romanian Prime Minister, leader of the National Peasant Party and of the National Romanian Party, former Parliament member in Bucharest and Budapest, attorney for the Graeco-Catholic Church, landowner  and leader of the Democratic opposition, a man who dedicated his entire life to public service, died alone in his frigid cell, without a candle or the presence of another human being.

-          Those who died in prison at Sighet from 1952 on were buried secretly at night on the banks of the River Tisa at the border with the former USSR. (Romulus Rusan, Museum Archives and Guide, 1993-2014)

Horrible details about the prison life had emerged slowly from those who survived, from guards, and from those forced to clean and sweep the hallways and the prison courtyard. They would sometimes exchange a few words with political prisoners who were stronger and able to stand up and speak. Those who became very ill were usually isolated and deprived of medical treatment until it was too late to assimilate extra food such as potatoes, and they expired.

The food served was inadequate for survival. The communist guards hoped the prisoners would die quickly of malnutrition and starvation. Cardinal Iuliu Hossu of the Cluj Graeco-Catholic Church wrote in his memoirs that the “soup was water with a piece of vegetable floating in it.” It was considered a delicacy to find a “hard piece of a cow’s hairy lip” bobbing in this watery soup. http://www.romanialibera.ro/aldine/history/cum-a-murit-iuliu-maniu-la-sighet-215636

The inmates received no medical assistance. Knowing that dying men and women were unable to metabolize the extra calories, the guards would give them extra food. And if the lack of proper nutrition and medical care did not kill the political prisoners, the bitter cold of northern Romania exacerbated by the thick walls most certainly caused hypothermia and death.

The Sighet Museum is a living monument to the cruelty of communism and to the inhumane treatment that millions of innocent citizens were subjected to by tyrants and their failed ideology, an ideology concocted by a dangerous man named Karl Marx whose theories ultimately destroyed the human spirit, imprisoned free men, and killed over 100 million worldwide in the name of collectivism, equality, and social justice. http://www.memorialsighet.ro/index.php?lang=en

 

 

The Socialist Left Wants to Make Things Right

It is a tune many failed socialist nations have heard before. When the mainstream media proclaimed a few years ago, “We are all socialists now,” people shrugged their shoulders and went about their capitalist business. http://www.newsweek.com/we-are-all-socialists-now-82577

Do Americans at large understand that socialism involves various economic and political theories which advocate collective or government ownership of the means of production and the distribution of goods? I bold-faced the word “theories” because the practice is quite a resounding failure in all countries in which it was tried or it is currently used.

If you point to European Fabian socialists as a success story, you are not paying attention to the bankruptcy level of debt of all these countries, the result of decades of unrestrained welfare and failed multiculturalism, to the level of confiscatory taxation, enslavement to government, and its forced tolerant social programs.

Under socialism there is no private property, advocates and supporters say. It could have fooled me. During the twenty years I lived under the transition form from socialism to communism, all the elites had their private property, including the union bosses appointed by the Communist Party, while the proletariat had nothing. The State run by the Communist Party controlled everything, all the means of production. All we could and had to control was our speech. We could only use thoughts to curse the abject enslavement that the Communist Party apparatchiks subjected us to every day.

The ever-clever theoretician and parasitic thinker who survived on the generosity of rich friends and patrons, Karl Marx, wrote while scratching his dirty hair, that socialism is an imperfect transition between capitalism and communism where goods and pay were unequally distributed, according to work done. 

In practice, doctors and unskilled labor were paid approximately the same, removing the incentive to spend years in college to become a doctor. The Democrats and their Occupy Wall Street denizens said, it is obscene for a doctor to make a profit, they don’t deserve it.

These same socialists advocate quite loudly a living wage of $15-25 per hour for minimum wage unskilled workers. It is only “fair” and “social justice” to pay someone enough money where they can live comfortably while expending no effort to educate themselves for a career that would enable them to earn a deserved living wage.

As someone said, in socialist/communist countries, the remuneration was so poor, “we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.” The elites, however, were paid handsomely for doing nothing. But then again, community organizing and agitation must have been hard work for most Bolsheviks who often did not have a high school diploma and were hard-pressed to write an entire sentence coherently.

Socialism is an economic system in which the omnipotent government controls “substantially” the production and distribution of goods, while private enterprise dwindles. We have witnessed the growth of big government in this country and the shrinking of the private sector. Under socialism, competition no longer guides economic activity, cooperation and submission to government rules become the norm.

And then there are the Fabian Socialists in existence since the Fabian Society (a British socialist group) was founded in 1884 with “the purpose to advance the principles of socialism via gradualist and reformist means.” The original purpose was to have a socialist economy. Today the society is a think tank affiliated with the Labour Party.

There is never a shortage of new converts to socialism or socialist wannabes. Take for instance the socialist reading groups spreading around the country among Millennials. Michael Savage called the Millennials “the new Red Brigades.”

Influenced by the magazine named after the Haitian rebel slave Jacobin, the reading groups (Millennials and Occupy Wall Street “veterans”) are focused on organized labor even though union membership has dropped to 11 percent in this country. Jacobin is a popular magazine among “a disaffected white bro socialist demographics.” http://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post1047/20150613/282183649677663/TextView

Because the economy is so bad and these Millennials are finding that employment is hard to find especially when they have pursued unmarketable majors such as Studies of…, Human Rights, Social Justice, Sustainable Development and other worthless degrees, they are easy prey to community organizers who want to put a shiny new coat on socialism in the 21^st century, repackage it, and sell it to a bunch of spoiled brats who have never experienced shortages of anything in their lives but were subjected to constant indoctrination in schools about the utopian marvels of socialism and communism. And the indoctrination of the last 40 years is finally bearing fruit.

They should have asked the people who risked death fleeing hellholes of socialism in order to come to this country where private enterprise gave them the opportunity to grow out of poverty and become successful if they were willing to work hard. Unfortunately many new immigrants, legal and illegal, want to establish in this country the exact third world poverty and crime they’ve escaped.