Joseph Pulitzer and His Prize

The famous Pulitzer Prize, awarded now almost exclusively to leftist journalists, had an interesting history. It is alleged that Joseph Pulitzer was born on April 10, 1847 in Macău (Mako), a village situated on the river Mureș, close to the Hungarian border within the county Timiș of Romania.

When his family moved to Budapest, Joseph attended a private school. When he turned 17, he was declared unfit to serve in the Austrian military service but was able to join the American military service even though he did not speak English. He arrived in Boston in 1864 where he enrolled in some courses, and learned English while working as a waiter and porter. He became an American citizen in 1867 and eventually finalized his law studies.

His first journalistic job was at the German newspaper “Westliche Post” in Missouri, then correspondent at the New York Sun. Using all his savings, he bought the St. Louis Evening Dispatch” in 1878 and merged it with the Evening Post, thus forming the St. Louis-Post Dispatch.

He bought the failing and bankrupt New York World in 1883 and turned it into one of the most successful newspapers in the country with 600,000 subscribers. Pulitzer wrote and published articles about the regime’s corruption and other dubious affairs. Based on his good reputation, Pulitzer was able to raise funds to build the base of the Statue of Liberty.

In 1890, highly stressed, Pulitzer is plagued by many health issues and, at the age of 43, he became almost blind.  He withstood attacks from the political class and many other corrupt newspapers. He fought constantly for freedom of the press.

He donated in 1892 all his savings to the founding of a journalistic school but it was not approved. One year after his death, in 1912, the Columbia Journalism School was formed, and in 1917 the famous Pulitzer prize was awarded for the first time.

Since then, awards are made each April by the president of Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board. This board leans highly left, for obvious reasons.

Pulitzer’s last will and testament bestowed $2 million on Columbia to establish a School of Journalism.  One-fourth of this endowment was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.”

Joseph Pulitzer wrote: "I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training." https://www.pulitzer.org/page/history-pulitzer-prizes

How low have American morals fallen since the turn of the twentieth century! How low has the quality, intellectual training, morality and character of journalists fallen as well since Pulitzer’s will was written! Academia has become almost entirely leftist and the Pulitzer Prize is often awarded to leftist newspapers, writing and publishing on topics dear to the leftist ideology. The level of censorship of conservative journalists today would certainly shock Joseph Pulitzer, a self-made man.

 

The Marxist Boat

Social activists in this country are not familiar with the sordid history of Marxism but are nevertheless brainwashed and absurdly convinced in their ignorance that communism is the best answer to their imagined problems and their failures of personal responsibility.

Ardent Marxists and accidental social activist travelers are convinced by Marxist academics and seasoned NGO lobbyists that they must replace with socialism the capitalism that enabled so many in this country to live the most prosperous lives in modern times.

There is a reason morality and Christianity have fallen so low in the west. The new Marxists take to heart and believe Marx’s pamphlet entitled The Communist Manifesto. They are convinced that “communism establishes eternal truths,” while promising “to abolish all religion and all morality.”

Radical activists and their fellow Marxist useful idiot travelers do not seem to be bothered by the fact that people from around the world have left their birth countries and their families, and some have even died in the process of escaping their totalitarian and impoverished economic regimes, to come to this country legally or illegally. The indoctrinated activists’ irrational thinking prevails. For five decades public schools have not taught them how to think but what to think.

One of the first Russians to identify with Marxist philosophy was Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov who is alleged to have supported the idea that “Marxist philosophy hinges on the coming of a workers’ revolution that destroys existing government systems.” Once the existing government systems were weakened, destroyed, and gone, the dictatorship of the proletariat was installed in their place.

The sad reality is that, once today’s activists are brought in line with everyone else, all rights, freedom of speech, mass communication, and smart devices confiscated, freedom will cease to exist. All will be forced or work for the ‘living wage’ they so desired. They will be prompted when to march for the cause they love but this time they will have to be peaceful. Plenty of menial volunteer work for the good of the government-controlled community will be mandated. And the “community standards” of the radical Marxists will be quite draconic and will censor free speech in the name of protecting the truth as they see it but will have lovely euphemistic names.

The entire planet is already heavily affected in every facet of people’s lives by U.N.’s Agenda 21/2030 and Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset, currently underway. Schwab’s book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, outlines clearly what their plans are for humanity, “stakeholder capitalism.” The stakeholder capitalism will be the “new normal.”

He wrote: “. . . the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more, dissolved in the context of the pandemic. Radical changes of such consequence are coming that some pundits have referred to as ‘before coronavirus’ (BC) and ‘after coronavirus’ (AC) era.” (p. 12)

The U.N., Schwab, and billionaires have already decided that we cannot live in our micro-worlds, we must be forced into the hyperconnected macro-world controlled by a few, with no borders, no countries, and no national governments, just a globalist entity controlling everything and everybody, our energy, exploration, food supply, medicines, types of cars we drive, travel, what homes we live in, how we travel, means of conveyance, where we work, schools we attend, how we play, seek medical care, human interaction, and even sexuality and reproduction.

Schwab, using a boat metaphor, quoted Kishore Mahbubani from Singapore: “The 7 billion people who inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats [countries]. Instead, they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat.”

The metaphor is interesting, quoted by the World Economic Forum’s chairman, where the world’s billionaires are meeting right now in Davos, Switzerland, having traveled there by personal jets, lined up at the airport like dominoes, their owners driven around in expensive limousines, while telling 7.5 billion of us to live simply and drive small hybrid cars, expensive electric cars we cannot afford, walk as far as our legs can take us, or better yet, take public transportation.

Schwab warns us against “conspicuous consumption” and “revenge consumption” because it results in more environmental degradation and climate change. He also talks about inequality and social unrest eroding the “social contract” which none of us have signed.

The environmental degradation finger pointing is rich, coming from jet-set billionaires who live lavishly in mansions, own yachts, fly around the world in personal jets, have a myriad of assistants attending to their every need, and own villas scattered around the world in the most expensive resorts and even own private islands.

The problem with the billionaires’ vision for our collective future is that I and others prefer to live on our own boat called the United States, not on the sinking globalist boat of technocratic Marxism, robbing us of freedoms. The advocated global governance sounds like an innovative idea on paper, but the reality is enslavement.

 

 

 

Technocratic Marxism

A famous acquaintance told me that our country is run and controlled by technocracy, control by those who own technology. Technological corporatism is enabling government control around the world, led by the U.N. and NGOs endowed by woke corporatists and member countries.

The west is controlled by globalist Marxism, more powerful than the former Soviet style Marxism. It is a 21^st century technocratic Marxism on steroids with the addition of a powerful technocracy that did not exist in the former Iron Curtain countries. The former Soviet Marxists had to employ an army of informants who spied on their neighbors and their families. 

The technocratic Marxism should not be confused with transnationalism, advocated by U.N. Transnationalism is the movement of people from their home countries into rich, western nations while borders are dismantled, and sovereignty is destroyed. It is a form of U.N. and government-sanctioned and supported invasion without the drums of war.

This globalist Marxism, with its control of information, voting, and speech on all mass and social media, has created not just the cult of personality made famous by people like Mao and Stalin, but a cult of personality worshipping several influential globalist billionaires, none elected to office, who make life and death decisions for billions around the world, and the worship of Mother Earth, personified in a green energy movement so political and so detrimental to western civilization that capitalist countries may never be able to recover from its heavy solar and wind green energy boot.

Then there are corrupt politicians at all levels of government, beholden to power and lobbyists, media talking heads, and the indoctrinating teacher and professorial brigade financed by corporations, foreign entities, the Department of Education, and educational foundations.

Secular academia replaced references to time periods such as the B.C. (before Christ) with B.C.E. (Before Current Era) and A.D. (Anno Domini), with C.E. (current era), diminishing Judeo-Christian influence on western civilization. The existence and reference to Christ historically became a casualty few noticed. Now it has morphed into BC (before Covid) and AC (after Covid).

Academic revisionism culminated in the last six years with rejection of free speech on all campuses, promoting outright Marxist indoctrination, and replacing history with manufactured history, destruction of institutions, statues, artifacts, and anything else the Marxist academia and its compliant media did not like.

The deletion of facts and of historical figures being judged in the context of the 21^st century’s mentality, was astonishing. It was not unlike the 1926 Stalin’s erasure of his Communist Party advisors from public life, one by one, and from photographic history, i.e., Nikolai Antipov, Sergey Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik.

Stalin ordered the toppling and demolition of historical statues and monuments, the destruction of museum artifacts, and their replacement with statues glorifying unknowns who had helped the Bolsheviks into power.

This revisionist history trend was first adopted by the United Nations, the same purveyor of the Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030 and Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset. In his view, in this revisionist world, “you will own nothing and be happy about it.”

I can tell you with 100 percent accuracy that we owned nothing under socialist Romania, and we were not happy about it at all, we were quite miserable, cold, sickly thin, and always hungry. And we tried to escape the borders of such a depressing existence whenever possible.

In 1992 when the globalists were successful in passing their agenda, few believed the U.N. Agenda 21 existed, people thought it was just a conspiracy theory promoted by nutjobs with tinfoil hats who had nothing better to do.

American socialist Democrats have advocated publicly since President Obama’s reign that they should “never let a crisis go to waste,” like the severely overblown crisis of Covid-19 which was purposefully and grossly mismanaged.

In communist fashion, employed Americans today are called workers instead of employees. They are part of the workers in the proletarian Marxist lexicon of the Soviet era.

Bourgeoisie, also part of the Marxist lexicon, was the “social class” accused of owning the means of production in capitalism in which private property was important.

In the Eastern European socialist republics, Marxists pretended that the proletariat owned the means of production under the guise of collectivism, another Marxist term, when in reality it was the Communist Party’s upper echelon of activists who owned the means of production and used the proletarian class cheap labor to amass wealth for themselves while pretending to be part of the ordinary “people.”

Comrade Stalin was so ruthless that he “liquidated an entire class of Russian peasantry,” infamously and derisively named the Kulaks (country bumpkins) because the kulaks (owners of more than 8 acres of land) opposed Stalin’s collectivization.

His deliberate government policies starved 5 million Ukrainians while grain rotted in train cars and in storage. He killed 15 million of his own people during his 30-year reign of terror. As Nikita Khrushchev said, “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.” Stalin had forced him once to dance to a Ukrainian folk song.

Following the bloody October Revolution of 1917, for seven years, the Soviets issued many decrees such as abolishing private property and distribution of landed estates among the peasantry. But the most terrifying decree stood out, “Anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately.” So many were killed in Siberian gulags for that reason alone.

The globalist Marxists talk about revolution, the working class, the proletariat, the ruling class, capital, and the battle for democracy. It is not a coincidence as the terms stand out in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The aim of the proletariat is to seize gradually all capital from the bourgeoisie, and to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class…” (excerpt from the Communist Manifesto)

To destroy the old social order and install the new social order, the following must take place (quotes from pp. 243-244, Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics, 2002):

1.      Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2.      A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3.      Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4.      Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5.      Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6.      Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7.      Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8.      Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (I can attest to this communist experiment as we were all forced as students and citizens to plow, seed, and harvest crops every year in middle school, high school, and college, and as citizens to forced labor in town on projects such trash removal and city beautification/landscaping.)

9.      Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country. (mass forced movement from country to the city, following land confiscation)

10.  Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

We have expensive college tuition in our rapidly transforming Marxist society but how much is it worth? And what folk tune is the dear leader forcing us today to dance to?

Learn Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese

I remember sitting in my Russian language class, taught by a wonderful, soft-spoken teacher, while my eyes glazed over because the language sounded so much harsher than the lovely sing-song Italian language which I adored and learned on my own after I learned German in school.

I would sit in the back of the class not just because I was one of the taller females but because I wanted to do crossword puzzles away from the teacher’s prying eyes. I did learn Russian, but she was teaching us Russian language for business and trade and, years later, I wished I had paid more attention. Some of my classmates were happy that they finally learned the Cyrillic alphabet and got a passing grade.

A former university colleague started a program for elementary schools in the area, using high school students to teach young American students Spanish under the guise that Spanish-speaking people have a hard time learning English and, it won’t be long before they will dominate society, and why not make it easier for the rest of us by learning their language? I found that statement dubious since she was making it in the 1990, but it appears that she was right.

There is nothing wrong with countries adopting the language of another conquering or invading society, especially when the invaded country does not have an official language. It had happened many times throughout history and especially during the Roman Empire. Although the administrative language was Latin, the conquered tribes mixed their local dialects with Latin which resulted over time in the Romance languages of today, i.e., Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Romansh, and Portuguese.

Given our economic situation right now, perhaps we should learn Mandarin Chinese as well as Russian.

High Inflation and the Dollar’s Velocity of Circulation

A friend had asked me recently about the velocity of circulation of money in an inflationary economy like ours.

Velocity of circulation of money is better understood through the quantity theory of money model.

Our dollar is deemed fiat money because our government said so long time ago before people began questioning the out-of-control printing of it. The dollar has not been backed by gold since 1971 during the Nixon administration. The dollar is only worthy because the government says so and we must take its word for it. Fiat means “let it be” in Latin.

Fiat money (our paper dollar denominations and coins) is used in circulation because barter is too cumbersome - it must rely on a coincidence of wants - you want something I have to barter, and you can offer me some other good or service in exchange.

Let us assume that there are $10 trillion worth of transactions in an economy in a particular year and there is a money stock (supply) of $2 trillion in that year. This means that each dollar of that money stock circulated on the average about FIVE times that year. The number FIVE is the velocity of circulation, the speed with which money circulates in general but not necessarily all of it.

What is money stock (supply)? It is divided into M1 and M2. M1 is the supply of all coins and paper money in circulation plus some checkable deposit balances at banks and savings institutions. M2 is broader, it includes M1 and most forms of savings account balances, plus shares in money market mutual funds. There is also near moneys, close substitutes for money such as credit cards. Credit cards balances are huge in our economy. It is estimated that the total U.S. credit card balances in 2021 was $856 billion, with Alaskans leading the pack at over $8,000 per person. 2022 Credit Card Debt Statistics (lendingtree.com)

It is impossible to measure exactly the velocity of circulation of each dollar in the economy so a formula must be used to give an approximation. Economists decided to use nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) divided by the money stock (supply). Nominal GDP is the product of real GDP times the price level. (in simpler terms, nominal GDP is real GDP plus the inflation rate at that moment)

The problem with using nominal GDP is the fact that nominal GDP ignores many transactions that use money such as large volume of activity in financial markets.

Velocity = Nominal GDP/Money stock          

Velocity of circulation of dollars is not a constant number, it is a variable number, and it depends on other factors, the most significant being interest rates (decided by the Federal Reserve System, which neither federal nor reserve, it is an actual corporation) and the efficiency of payments mechanisms.

1.      Interest rates – the higher the interest rate, the greater the opportunity cost of holding money. As interest rates rise, people tend to hold smaller cash balances. Existing stock of money circulates faster, and velocity of circulation rises.

2.      Efficiency of payments mechanisms – money is convenient to make transactions, but cash does not pay interest and ordinary checking accounts pay extraordinarily little interest.

You remember how, prior to electronic transactions, students would write a check for rent, with insufficient funds, knowing that the bank would take 3-5 days to clear the check, and, in the meantime, the student would be paid by his/her employer and the check would be covered.

Predicting people’s economic behavior is not very dependable. “The incentive to limit cash holdings depends on the ease and speed with which it is possible to exchange money for other assets” – which is what is meant by the ‘efficiency of the payment mechanisms.’

Velocity has risen as banks have added electronic bookkeeping because funds can be transferred rapidly between checking accounts and other assets and funds, and credit cards/debit cards are used instead of cash, thus the need to hold money balances has declined.

Milton Friedman said that “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. And the growth rate of the money supply is the principal cause of the inflation rate in all places and at all times.”

Thank Congress for its out-of-control spending and the Federal Reserve’s System of printing money not backed by goods and services. We print money we do not have to send financial help to third world countries and military aid to Ukraine in the form of $40 billion which was approved by U.S. Senate yesterday.

People hoarding cash in their homes for rainy days would make velocity of circulation slower. Underground cash economy’s velocity of circulation would be hard to predict, of course. Take cash away and make everything digital, there is no way to hide cash anymore and all transactions are rapidly monitored and taxed by the government. If one’s social score is low, then punishments can be meted via travel restrictions, medical care restrictions, housing restrictions, financial and monetary lack of transactions allowed, remarkably like China’s social credit score system.

In a high inflationary economy, people spend money as soon as they earn it because, if they wait, prices for things they are going to need will escalate in price drastically from day to day, or hour to hour as it was the case in the Weimar Republic’s galloping inflation or more recently in  Venezuela where inflation is in the hyperinflation range. There is no reason why an oil rich country like Venezuela should be in such economically dire situation if it was not so badly mismanaged by the socialist government. https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/inflation-cpi

Which brings us to our country, an oil exporting country during President Trump’s administration, turned into an oil importing country from day one when President Biden reversed the fossil fuel policy of his predecessor because the Biden regime wanted to destroy the fossil fuel industry and install the solar and wind energy of his Build Back Better green energy fiasco. When he took power, gasoline was $1.69 a gallon. Now, sixteen months into his presidency, gasoline is over $4 a gallon, fast approaching $5 in all 50 states and far exceeding $6 and $7 a gallon in certain cities in California.

 

 

 

Dilemma

The American technocracy and its mass media’s total control over free speech is so much stronger and more insidious than the control the Communist Party exercised over the former socialist republics in Eastern Europe.

These soviet satellite socialist republics in Eastern Europe did not have the most advanced online technology to censor free speech, their algorithms, a compliant mass media totally devoted to socialism, nor many Marxist universities like we have today around the U.S.A. and in the world.

The former soviet style republics had to rely on an army of letter openers, informants, tapping phones, listeners to recorded phone and in-home conversations, teacher interrogations of innocent and naïve children in schools about their parents, and the snitching of neighbors, friends, and relatives in exchange for a monthly trip to the Communist Party’s grocery stores. Starving and standing in lines daily for a bit of food was not very desirable and people did what they thought saved their lives – turning in total strangers, neighbors, and relatives to the security police as enemies of the state.

Knowing that any message was intercepted by this army of informants, it was smart to find a “trusted” person who, for one reason or another, was going to travel abroad on business or for an international competition, and give them a missive, a journal, a recorded cassette, a card, or the manuscript of an inconvenient book or article that would tell the world what living in a communist-controlled country/prison was like. Such a person would have a personal watcher but, there were ways and opportunities to escape their prying eyes and make contact with the west.

On such a business trip, someone was approached by a high school friend to carry a cassette tape to her fiancé residing in France at the time. The person agreed, not knowing what it contained, and taking a huge risk that he might be discovered, the tape confiscated, listened to, and then he might be arrested before he even left the country.

Such last-minute arrests were not uncommon. My own cousin was not allowed to go abroad to work in the Middle East in the mid-eighties. He was pulled out of the line to board the plane at the airport. The reason given was that he had a cousin in the capitalist U.S., and it was such an undesirable connection for a proletarian.

As fate had decided, the businessman made it out of the country without an incident and flew to Paris. Having run his handbag through several x-ray machines at the airport, the businessman became concerned that the tape had been erased. Upon reaching his destination in Paris, he decided to find a cassette player and to listen to the beginning of the tape to make sure that it had not been erased. After a few requests and a nice tip, a maid brought him a cassette player.

The tape was fine, it did not contain anything politically damaging to his socialist country. To his surprise and shock, the high school friend described HIM in the most unflattering, infuriating, and damaging ways which offended him greatly, given the risks he had taken. He pondered whether he should inconvenience himself further by contacting her fiancé by phone, pay for a taxi to meet him somewhere, or take the metro from his arrondissement hotel to where this person was residing. The tape had to be disposed of or delivered.

What would you have done?

Why is Gas so High?

For those Americans who are foolishly claiming that the skyrocketing price of oil is Putin's fault, here is some news for you - it is entirely the Biden administration's fault. When he took office, gasoline was $1.69 a gallon in my town, it is now $4.55 per gallon while Diesel is $5.55 per gallon. We need plenty of affordable gasoline and Diesel to run our complex and very large economy.

He closed oil leases, fracking, offshore drilling, and the XL pipeline which was delivering gas from Canada. He did this on day one and the price of gas started to escalate immediately. Crude oil is being transported by rail (powered with electricity created with Diesel and coal) instead of the much cheaper pipelines which crisscross our country from Alberta, Canada and other places.

It was Biden's plan all along to destroy the fossil fuel industry in order to replace it with the pie-in-the-sky green energy delivered by expensive, inadequate, and insufficient solar and wind power.

The U.S. became overnight an oil importer again instead of an oil exporter as it had been under the Trump administration.

OPEC took advantage of this situation of a weak and partisan president and refused to increase production, thus further escalating the price of crude oil per barrel.

Speculators entered the fray and affected the futures price as well on the Chicago Board of Trade. This often happens when the political climate is poor, people fear their incompetent government, and the future looks bleak.

The fact that Democrats and some Republicans have voted to print dollars without any backing of goods and services, creating high inflation, highest in forty years, and then spending trillions of dollars we don't have, like drunken sailors, has devalued our U.S. dollar which is the currency in which crude oil is priced and quoted around the globe.

Supply and demand for crude oil, gas, and Diesel are also out of whack due to the economic effects of the lockdowns and other labor and economic decisions made by U.S. corrupt politicians, further exacerbating the price increases.

One caller to the WMAL station in Washington, D.C. area, stated on Friday that she has 7 children and must fill up the van with gasoline every four days. Each time it cost $100. This translates into $750 a month just for gasoline. Middle class Americans must decide whether they eat, drive their cars, or pay their mortgages/rent.

This terrible economy is entirely Biden's fault and the fault of those who voted for him and thus for the destruction of our economy.

Your unwise vote is putting most of the middle class in a poor house filled with shortages and high inflation. The economic and energy situations are quite dire.

 

Farming Practices, Food, and Shortages Caused by Inept Governments

I was watching with fascination a documentary about monastic farm practices in Tudor England.  A historian and two archeologists introduced the viewers and the visitors to farming methods, tools, food, clothing, and customs from 500 years ago by actually tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them, building tools from that period, cooking, burning crockery, churning butter, raising sheep, pigs, and chicken, hunting, fishing, and living, at least on screen, like the monks had done during the fifteenth century. What Life Was Like In The Tudor Era | Tudor Monastery | Absolute History - Bing video

What was fascinating to me was the fact that many of the implements and practices from the Tudor period looked familiar because I had seen, experienced, and used them on my grandfather’s “private” small farm as a child growing up in socialist Romania.

The wooden butter churn was quite recognizable and so was the wooden plow pulled by oxen. Grandpa used to cut hay by hand with a scythe, gather the hay in piles with a home-made wooden rake, and then used a wooden pitchfork to move the hay unto a cart and then to the dry loft for use during the winter.

The family planted the garden in straight rows with deep separation ditches between the seed line (the seeds were spaced out enough to allow for plant growth) to enable water flooding from the creek when rain was scarce, and irrigation became necessary to keep the plants alive.

When the Colorado beetles started devouring every plant in their small gardens, they used powdered DDT to kill them as directed by the government that sold it. No amount of picking the bugs off the plants made any difference in the infestation. The fruit trees were attacked by fruit flies. There were so many open outhouses in the village.

The dirt had to be prepared by hand, using a metal hoe and hard labor to cut the hard-crusted topsoil and make it crumble enough for seeding. All this backbreaking work had to be done in their spare time as each villager owed a certain number of work hours per week to the cooperative farm “owned” collectively by the villagers.

Each peasant home raised a pig for slaughter at Christmas, chickens, ducks, geese, and the occasional rabbits. Some even had a milking cow, and many had sheep. The village shepherd, an actual paid position in the kolkhoz, took the cooperative farm’s cows each day to graze outside the village and returned them in the evening. These cows had either been confiscated by the cooperative farm or were in the ownership of a specific peasant who still had to make produce donations to make up for the cow that they were allowed to keep.

Inhabitants were forced to toil and put in the crops and harvest them. They had no choice as the Bolsheviks confiscated most of their lands and forced them into a collective farm. This collective farm or kolkhoz as the Russians called it, had to be tended to collectively by all villagers. They were left with enough land for the home they lived in, a yard, and a plot for a small garden.

The peasants in the kolkhoz were paid as salaried employees based on quality and quantity of labor contributed. The left describes the kolkhoz as a voluntary union of peasants, but it was hardly voluntary when their land was confiscated by the state authorities in power and, to survive and eat, they had to work for the state-controlled kolkhoz.

Land had been expropriated from the peasants in 1929 in the Soviet Union and later in Romania (there were state farms as early as 1945), after the king abdicated and the monarchy ended in 1948. The royal family’s thousands of acres of agricultural land, forests, several castles, and palaces were confiscated by the communist regime. A king’s inheritance: The properties of the Romanian royal family | Romania Insider (romania-insider.com)

According to Romanian agricultural sources, 75 percent of all arable land belonged to cooperative farms and 17 percent were state farms which were formed as early as 1945. The rest (8%) were small private farms which brought their harvest to the government-sanctioned markets for sale. In mountainous regions where cooperative farms were not feasible to organize, locals grew food for their own extended families.

State farms were a socialist enterprise. They received the best land from the state and were allowed to use the state’s machines, chemicals, and irrigation water. Such advantage increased their crop yield when compared to cooperative farms. The communist government told the state farms how to operate, peasants were paid a fixed wage for their labor and had no rights to a private plot of land for their own gardens.

Cooperative farms also took their production orders from the socialist government, but they technically “owned” the land and basic equipment. “The cooperatives were told what crops to grow, how to grow them, and how much to deliver to the state.” The peasants were forced to work at least 300 days per year on the cooperative and, if the cooperative had no work for them, they could be transferred to other farms or to construction and lumber work sites. These cooperative “farmers” earned an income of only 60 percent when compared to others and had much smaller pensions. It is safe to say that income equality meant misery for some. 

“In the late 1980s, the systematization program aimed to subordinate privately owned land and private plots on cooperative farms to the regional agro-industrial councils and thereby tighten central control of private farming. Systematization would eliminate many of the plots, as villages were levelled to create vast fields for socialized farming. This policy directly contradicted the government's mandate in the 1980s that the population feed itself by cultivating small plots (even lawns and public parks had been converted to vegetable gardens) and breeding poultry and rabbits.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

This period coincided with a period when the Communist Party told all citizens how many calories they were allowed consume per day according to their profession, how much they should weigh, and the shortages of food were quite severe.

The ruling Soviet-style state maintained operational control via “elected” chairmen and political units in the machine-tractor stations which furnished heavy equipment in return for payments of agricultural produce. And the terms were never favorable to the peasants, only to the ruling regime. Often these tractors were not operational for lack of parts or lack of people who could fix them.

Among the many horrible decisions made after the Bolsheviks took power, one stands out. The “agricultural communist planners” ordered the slaughter of thousands of workhorses during the first three decades of communist rule. The horses were replaced by tractors. The number of tractors grew from 13,700 in 1950 to 168,000 in 1983. But in 1986, the regime rulers reversed their management practices through the National Council for Agriculture, Food Industry, Forestry, and Water Management and called for reducing the number of tractors in service by one-third and replace them by horse-drawn equipment. Eighteen to 25 percent of all harvesting and hauling was to be down by horse-drawn equipment by 1990. So much for 500 years of agricultural progress. Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

Mechanizing agriculture raised the possibility to grow more grain and corn but there were some problems. Much of the workforce left in agriculture were elderly peasants who were not seeking better paying jobs in factories within commuting distance. The elderly did not have the expertise to fix these tractors when they broke down nor did they know how to operate them properly. Often crops rotted in the fields because there was nobody left to harvest them.

Poor crop rotation practices yielded smaller crops and droughts plagued the arable lands that were not connected to irrigation. Additionally, only 34-36 kg of fertilizer were used per acre, an inadequate amount.

“Furthermore, much of the best farmland had been severely damaged by prolonged use of outsized machinery, which had compacted the soil, by unsystematic application of agricultural chemicals, and by extensive erosion.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

In the 1970s, the socialist regime I grew up under and its “private” farmers, still used agricultural implements that were 500 years old, the same ones used in the monastic Tudor period. Agricultural progress must be slow in socialist regimes.

Not only did a major agricultural country had very thin and gaunt people, some of whom starved to death in winter, but severe food shortages plagued the country in the 1980s while the socialist centralized planners, political and community organizers, were selling the good crops to the west for hard currency, currency which they used to support their lavish lifestyles and to develop impractical and unprofitable industries across the country.

People were employed for meager wages in factories but had to struggle every day to find food, standing in long bread and grocery lines and for other necessities.

Wallachia, the breadbasket of the country, was once a proud producer of cereals in the Bărăgan Plain, a steppe famous for its black soil, perfect for growing grain in general. On a visit in 2015, I noticed the unplanted fields, then occupied by unsightly windmills turning in the wind, none of which, I learned later from an official with the energy ministry, were connected to any power grid. The windmills had been donated by the EU and had been hurriedly placed across The Bărăgan Plain. What happened to the breadbasket of Wallachia?

According to official online sources, Romania, an EU-member since 2007, imported food from the EU in 2006 worth 2.4 billion euros, up 20 percent from the previous year. Romania exports to the EU 64 percent of agri-food products and imports from EU countries 54 percent of food. Romania imports substantial quantities of grain and 2.8 percent of the country’s GDP is derived from agricultural activity.

In the U.S., about 2.7 percent of the population are farmers who grow food and feed the rest of the country. More family farms are being sold to large agri-businesses or are being paid by the government not to farm certain crops, or to burn the yield entirely to manipulate the market price.

As we see dozens of food warehouses going up in flames recently around the U.S., one wonders, would our fast-becoming socialist country eventually starve its citizens, or might they have to fight for limited sources of food like we had to do in the 1970s and 1980s socialist Romania? I hope not.

 

 

 

Dangerous Mountain Climbing and Marathons in the Desert

I am fascinated by mountain climbers for various reasons but especially those who attempt and sometimes succeed to make it to the top of Mount Everest and survive to tell their ordeal.

1. I could never ascend Mount Everest or any mountain due to physical inability. I see these people as super humans and admirable in a strange way. They spend years training and rehearsing every possible scenario that they may encounter in harsh environments. They spend thousands of dollars on the best gear available, oxygen bottles, and five to six figures for the privilege of climbing the most inhospitable of peaks such as Mount Everest. There has only been one German man who actually climbed Mount Everest without the help of oxygen, particularly in the Dead Zone.

2. I have no desire to climb huge rocks, glaciers, and avoid dangerous crevasses just to test my body and claim bragging rights. God bless those who do!

3. I am fascinated by people who do climb and succeed in the face of certain death by freezing after falling asleep from severely reduced oxygen saturation in their blood, suffocating, or dying of stroke, or heart attack.

4. I am fascinated by the training mountain climbers undergo, the mental and physical challenges they must overcome, and the blood transformation (genetically in some Nepalese) in order to allow them to survive.

5. I am equally fascinated by people who run marathons in the desert of countries like Morocco and Algeria. One such extreme marathon runner, an Italian, survived getting lost in the desert in Morocco and walked 181 miles into Algeria before he was found by a Bedouin shepherd girl and saved. He even tried to slit his wrists to die because he was convinced that he would not be found, and he did not bleed out because he was too dehydrated.

6. It is gruesome and lugubrious to climb past the bodies of those who have perished previously, frozen in time, resting in eternity along the path of climbers who must step over them in order to maneuver the narrow path to the peak. One such famous person is an Indian man nicknamed Green Boots. It is too expensive and logistically impossible to remove these bodies from the mountain and have them buried properly. Those attempting to engage in such a dangerous recovery mission would surely die trying.

7. The most remarkable feat of survival has been that of a Nepalese crew who climbed all 14 highest peaks in the world, in an impossible to duplicate six-month period.