Poverty Induced by Socialism Is Hard to Shake

Empty meat market     Photo: Octavian Paul Draja

To say that poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an understatement. Ask Cubans and now Venezuelans what is like to live in the workers’ paradise that Fidel forced upon his people while he stashed away billions he has stolen with his cronies.

The socialist dictator Hugo Chavez left behind billions in personal bank accounts while Venezuelans struggle to survive under his socialist successor Maduro, who mismanaged the economy just as badly. One of the nations with the richest oil supplies cannot feed its people and provide basic goods that Americans take for granted, bread, milk, butter, diapers, detergent, just to name a few, and must spend hours each day in endless lines to find what they need if they are lucky.

Most people are confused about poverty and each person and economists define it differently. People, who desire socialism and are voting for either Bernie the borderline Marxist or Hillary the Socialist, complain endlessly how unjust and rigged the system is, how the Man keeps them down and there is no equality and social justice. Nobody seems to have any idea about personal responsibility and work ethic.

When compared to most countries in the world, American “poverty” is a bonanza from heaven paid for by government largesse with taxpayers’ money. This government largesse will eventually come to an end when it runs out of other people’s money and it can no longer print trillions once hyperinflation sets in.

According to many Romanians, including hundreds of thousands of poor gypsies who refuse to integrate into normal society and change their lives, Romanians are the citizens impoverished by the communist party and their Securitate successors after the revolution of 1989 when communism ended officially on paper.  Twenty-seven years later, not much has changed for most rural populations.

The online news expunere.com reported that fifty percent of Romanians are very poor and 54 percent of rural inhabitants do not have an occupation.  Most children raised in rural areas have one family member working or the family depends entirely on social welfare.  According to this source, 72 percent of rural families cannot provide their five-year olds a minimum acceptable diet, resulting in malnutrition and disease - 225,000 children go to bed hungry.

To make matters worse, 37 percent of people fifteen years and older are functionally illiterate – they either cannot read or cannot write correctly. In the rural area, 20 percent of children have only an eighth grade education. Citing Eurostat, the overall school dropout rate in 2014 was 18 percent. Unemployment in rural areas among young people, 18-24 years old, was 22 percent. http://www.expunere.com/jumatate-din-populatia-romanieie-este-afectata-de-saracie-in-mediul rural-54-din-localnici-nu-au-ocupatie.html

The standard of living, while vastly improved for people in most large cities, remained the same in the suburbs and rural areas where no significant progress in terms of infrastructure has been made. People live and die trudging through deep ruts in the mud of mostly unpaved roads, carrying water from the village well because nobody has running water or sewer pipes. Outhouses dot the landscape.

In a comment to the poverty news, Silvia Cristescu stated  that “all corrupt individuals who fall under the investigation of the National Directorate of Anti-Corruption (Directia Nationala Anticoruptie or DNA) were members of the former Romanian Communist Party and their heirs. All who defrauded the country, she said, are pro-Russian communists and their children. 

The more than four million Romanian citizens she believes, who left the country for greener pastures of economic opportunity and freedom, understood perfectly who robbed the country blind.  A large percentage of this diaspora voted anti-Ponta, anti-PSD (Social Democrat Party), and anti-socialism. “The enemy of the country is socialism, Marxist atheism of KGB origins,” said Cristescu.

In her view, those who sold the national forests, the land, the factories, and other items in the patrimony of the country, were the same individuals who rejected serious foreign investors under the pretext that they were not “selling the country” but sold everything they could in secret. After all, they knew all the ropes and judges, and, without accountability and fear of the law, pocketed the money, enriching themselves beyond belief.

When honest Romanians tried to replace these former Securitate members who were running for office or incumbents, their votes were stolen by those who were bribed to vote favorably or, not unlike here, mysterious boxes were discovered with hundreds of thousands of votes for the presidential candidate the people did not want.

The Russian KGB influence was so strong in Romania that overturning the disaster of socialism is still a daily battle that takes place today. Socialism will eventually die with the older people who grew up under the mentality of socialist dependency.

However, young people who have no experience, no historical knowledge or recollection of how bad it was under a socialist dictatorship, are lured today into the promise and blind belief that socialism is egalitarian and socially just, the same leitmotif running through the strident and eager-for-their-own-demise collegiate voting crowd, the very ignorant millennials.

Some Romanians take comfort in the fact that Christian America is on their side, that there is now a strategically placed American military base around Constanta, and that socialism will collapse in Romania. Unfortunately, there are many NGOs at work on the ground in Romania that interfere in its politics with loads of cash and grants that are hard to resist, given the stressed economic situation there.

 

 

Interview across Cyber Space

“Truth is sleepwalking with a hole in its head.”  - Mircea Brenciu

Mircea Brenciu Photo: Wikipedia

I met Mircea Brenciu on a sunny day in May 2015 in the downtown park as he was delivering a speech in Brasov on Heroes Day. The background of the rally was a huge cross erected in the memory of those who lost their lives during the Revolution of December 1989, when dozens of people were shot in the anti-communist revolution. Some of those young people were buried not far behind the cross.

I don’t believe in coincidence – there is a higher purpose for this seemingly chance encounter on such an important day in Romania’s history.

I interviewed Brenciu that day and again, more recently, across cyber space. Mircea Brenciu, born and raised in Brasov, educated in Economics and mass communication, is a writer, poet, founder, co-founder, and editor of many publications and organizations, including the prestigious Journalism Society of Romania, author of many books and recipient of numerous local and national awards. He comes from a family of scholars with a long history of anti-communist activity. He and Mircea Sevaciuc proclaimed November 15 the Anti-Communism Fight Day.

My theory is that a “fundamental transformation” is currently sweeping the globe and this massive change is not necessarily in the best interest of the citizens of various countries nor desired or initiated by them.

I asked Brenciu about the political power in Romania. Those currently in power and the opposition form a “common front” against the executive, the president and the prime minister, he wrote. Even though there are numerous political parties, they have no real power, he said, they make up a “decorative Parliament” reminiscent of the Stalinist era, easily recognized by those who were unfortunate enough to have lived in that dark period of history and who do not belong to the “Facebook generation.” Brenciu calls this type of political power, “artisan politics.”

The majority of the members of Parliament are just voting machines, Brenciu said, with salaries and inflated official bonuses much higher than what the average citizen earns. There are a few among them who have amassed huge fortunes, taking advantage of the traffic of influence among those who have the power to make decisions, who received bribes in exchange for rubber stamp approvals, for faux public auctions, and even for political and judiciary decisions.

Using a hyperbole to describe the corruption, Brenciu believes that the majority in this category of influence trafficking belonged to the former President Basescu regime. He was “a retired sailor who reached Romania’s deck with the goal of transforming it into a pirate ship.” The Romanian people were and are still taking all the risks while floating on this boat called country that is taking on water really fast.

“Our government is named by Brussels through the strange intervention of President Johannis, resulting in a total loss of state sovereignty. The government answers to Brussels. I spoke about the dissolution of Romania in my book, Cardinal Dialogues, Brenciu said. One of my interlocutors, Ilie Serbanescu, a political and economic analyst, had introduced for the first time the idea that Romania had become a colony.

The technocrats have enabled this colonization which took place under the pretext of eliminating corruption and moving the country towards a European way.  Hired by various non-profits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and financed by the ‘generous and dispassionate’ George Soros, the technocrats were principal enablers.” Brenciu wondered why Soros was connected to the interests of the Old Continent. Soros seems to be interested in many continents but particularly North America and Europe.

I asked Brenciu who elects such corrupt members of Parliament and if there is a connection to the former communists who went underground, disappeared, or died during or shortly after the tyrannical couple, the Ceausescus, were executed on Christmas Day 1989.

The crypto-communist period of the children of former Securitate members and communist apparatchiks has somewhat passed in great measure by biology; those were mostly present during the regimes of Ion Iliescu and Emil Constantinescu who ruled following the 1989 Revolution.

Crypto-communists secretly sympathize with communism or are secretly members of the Communist party if the communist party is allowed to exist. In the U.S., crypto-communists have come out of the shadows and engage in overt anti-American activities, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and destruction of property without any fear of prosecution or retribution. There are ample examples where communist minority groups funded by Soros have burned, looted, and pillaged businesses in several towns and neighborhoods while the police watched.

But there is a more nefarious group at play in Romania called “intellectuals,” added Brenciu, with Masters and Doctorates purchased with cash in dubious subjects such as political and military strategy, former and current officers, faux journalists who shape the political opinion with their inaccurate reporting by deriding and annihilating patriotism, faith, and hope in a nationalistic future.  These manipulators, whether they are found in politics, justice, business, mass-media, or in pseudo-cultural circles, are the actual millionaires and billionaires who are sinking Romania into the abyss of the Mariana Trench, to use another maritime hyperbole, said Brenciu.

Brenciu concluded that talented, honest, and sincere opinion makers who are not financially motivated or bribed are usually marginalized, eliminated, and compromised. “Truth is sleepwalking with a hole in its head.”

The one world government elites with the help of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and European Union (EU) are busy incorporating and bringing in line as many countries as possible under their global communism umbrella.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

A 70-Year Old Unit

Uncle John had brain surgery last July to remove a benign tumor. The fact that this type of surgery was available to him under the former communist socialized medical system was a miracle. The fact that he survived the surgery was another miracle. He was 69 years old at the time.

For two months after he emerged from surgery, he confused past and present, living and deceased, angry with himself that he could not remember important things, words, or recognize loved ones such as his children. He lived in his own confused world while my aunt nursed him back to health.

Although communism has long been gone, the corrupt medical system and the way they operated lingers. Around the clock nursing care is still provided by family, including food, linens, baths, and expensive meds bought in private or public pharmacies and administered in the hospital. Bribes to medical staff are expected even though salaries have risen from the paltry communist era when everyone was paid equally low salaries.

I visited him in September. It was my first stop after we left the airport. John was happy to see us even though he thought I was my daughter. During the two-hour visit, we noticed the milling about of patients and their families in the hallways, no doctor or nursing staff in sight. His wife was administering medication and his diabetic shots. His son brought him lunch from a nearby restaurant who had been preparing his meals for the last two months, following the prescribed diet.

The only indication that we might be in a hospital was the bed with rails, everything else looked like a motel room with sparse amenities. There was no indication of any sterilization and the common bathroom for the entire floor had no toilet paper, the windows were wide-open for all upper floors to see inside, the tub was filthy, and an elderly lady was doing her laundry by hand in the sink.

We tried to take the tiny 4-person elevator down to the lobby but it was out of order. I wondered how they transported patients up and down the stairs.  

Stray dogs were roaming around the hospital courtyard. The gate sentry was happy with his 5-euro mandatory bribe to let us into the hospital.

Images were flashing in my mind of the luxurious lobby of our American regional hospital, the gift and coffee shops, the spotless and shiny-to-perfection linoleum floors, the professional staff milling about, the comfortable rooms with private, disinfected, and well-stocked bathrooms, the nutritious food prepared with care and served three times a day, and round-the-clock expert care from the medical staff.

Do Americans really understand what socialized medicine provides? Do they really want to have what my Uncle John has under socialized medicine? Are they willing to give up the best care in the world they have in America right now? Why? Do they really believe Michael Moore’s lies about the “excellent and free” medical care in Cuba? Do they not understand basic economics that nothing is free, somebody has to pay for it? As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

At some point, rationing of care and drugs kicks in, no matter how old the person is. Even briberies no longer work. The patient has to be placed on a waiting list, prioritized by age.

After a few months of improvement, John developed fluid on his brain. All progress reversed. This development required surgery and the placing of a shunt to drain the fluid. He was added to the waiting list for MRI and then another waiting list for surgery. Meantime, his condition worsened. He talked very little and slept constantly.

John had become a 70-year old “unit,” he was no longer a human being who needed immediate care. Palliatives were his only options after the age of 70 because his worth was deemed small by the medical “death panel.”

I suggested more bribes to the doctors and nurses in order to move his name up the list. It seemed to have worked. They moved up his MRI this week. He is having surgery next week. His life is in God’s hands and the skill of the doctors.

People used to speak of the golden age, traveling, and enjoying life upon retirement, now it is the fear of being killed by our fellow citizens who have lost their humanity and are dismantling our excellent medical care in the name of insuring more people, particularly those who are here illegally and should be cared for by their countries.

I do not know of any hospital in the U.S. who refuses emergency care to anybody, regardless of financial status or national origin. It is illegal and unethical to do so. Yet such rhetoric helped pass Obamacare. 

I do know doctors who have stopped taking government insurance. I also know that Tricare, medical insurance for our soldiers who sacrificed so much will sky rocket, while civilian government workers who sacrificed nothing for our country will continue to benefit from their unchanged stellar insurance.

People are fighting about contraceptives, ignoring the real issues, the loss of control over one’s health and body to an omnipotent government that can take all rights away on a moment’s notice. If we live long enough, we are all going to become “units” like Uncle John.