So, You Want to Buy a Car?

Here is another element of socialism/communism that most of you don’t realize what it is - the ability to buy high-priced items such as a car or a house.

For one, poor people, and we were all equally poor, could not afford a car or a home. Should they have saved and scrimped their entire lives collectively in the family, the economic police were always on the prowl, looking for people who had more resources than the socialist/communist man was allowed.

Single family homes were out of reach for the proletarian masses. They had to rent the concrete and steel high-rise apartments while giving up to government confiscation of their single-family homes and their land for “the good of the people,” who needed more agricultural land.

As a socialist/communist economy was not based on supply and demand, just on the centralized government’s five-year economic plan, there was always a shortage of most consumer goods, including cars. It is true, you could only purchase the one model produced in the country, the Dacia. A Dacia cost around 70,000 lei during the 1970s while a concrete apartment cost around 30,000 lei.

To put the car price into proper perspective, the average salary then was about 800 lei per month. A person would need to save his entire salary for 87.5 months (about 7.5 years) to buy his own Dacia, assuming that the spouse would pay the bills and provide food and clothing.

A buyer had to pay upfront the full price of the car and wait for it to be produced and delivered by the factory whenever they felt like it, the wait list, or the assembly line permitted.

Sometimes the wait was as long as 10 years because the inept economic planners under communism were unable to deliver even the most basic goods like food and medicine, much less a car.

The wait for phone installation was 14 years. You had to go to the post office to order the phone service, pay a fee, and wait. We would ask the frowning clerk jokingly if they would install the phone in the morning or afternoon and she would say, irritably, “what difference does it make, it’s 14 years from now!” Our answer would always be, “the plumber is coming in the morning.” She never appreciated the jocular tone of our sad reality. We got our phone service when I finished high school and dad had applied for it when I was of kindergarten age.

The Communist Party elites, on the other hand, could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. A simple phone call did the trick and the requested item(s) arrived at their house in a relatively short period of time, depending on the type of merchandise.

Another element of communist life was the lack of basic health services and pharmaceutical drugs. We are not there yet in America, but the variety is dwindling for over-the-counter drugs in highly populated areas.

In the socialist economy controlled by a one-party rule, the Communist Party, even vitamins and aspirin were missing on shelves and medicines had to be compounded, providing that the ingredients were available on the market. The capsules that contained the compounded powder were huge and made of dissolvable paper. I cannot tell you, as a child, how difficult it was to swallow these horse-sized capsules filled with bitter tasting, choking powder.

In our American economy, the shortage of goods in highly populated areas is quite steep, including cars. Unless you are extremely rich and buy a high-end priced car or a Tesla, you can no longer walk into a dealership and expect to leave with a car that day even though you may have the money, all of it.

In the Biden economy, you have to reserve a car, put down a certain amount, and wait 6 to 8 months to receive it. For now, it is 6-8 months, but the wait time will increase as we slide more and more towards an inept socialist economy which is not based on supply and demand but is controlled centrally by one party, the communists. Today, the controllers are the socialist Democrat Party and their enablers, the establishment Republicans.

The moral of the story is, be careful what you wish for. Keep vilifying capitalism’s free markets and wishing for a socialist/communist economy, and you shall get it.

"Free" Socialist Stuff or Capitalist Goods

I am cooking breakfast this morning and as the smell of oven-baked bacon is wafting through the house, memories flood in from my childhood spent with my grandparents in the country.

As a child, I did not realize at the time how much hard work they were putting in every day to keep their family alive in the socialist economy disastrously run by the Communist Party.

The smell of bacon conjures up grandma’s numerous jars of lard, carefully stored on shelves in the damp and cool cellar, arranged next to jars filled with tomato sauce, cooked in the large iron pot over the fire in the yard as the tomato crop came in by the bushels and nothing was left to waste or rot.

The tomato jars and bottles were sealed with tar. Finding convenient Mason jars, wax, and other canning supplies easily found on the shelves in America, was unheard of in communist Romania. The villagers used whatever they could find or repurpose. These jars of lard were the source of flavorful cooking and frying many dishes through the winter and spring when food was scarce.

Sunflower oil was hard to find and, when available, was distributed in long lines to citizens fighting over that day’s delivery, with rationing cards in hand, distributed specifically for oil, sugar, flour, rice, and other basic cooking ingredients.

When sunflower oil was in short supply, the state decided to produce rapeseed oil, a dark yellow, thick, and peculiarly smelling oil that nobody cared much for but bought it when nothing else was available. You will be surprised what you can eat when food is hard to find. The centralized socialist government ruled by the communist party was not particularly adept at planning for the food supply properly. The economy was always in shambles and the proletariat’s standard of living was probably the worst in Europe, save for Albania.

We did not have bacon per say, it was just home-smoked pork fat which we used in cut cubes to eat with bread, mustard, and paprika for breakfast. When grandma rendered pork fat into bacon so that she could fry things with lard throughout the year, the house smelled like heavenly fried bacon. A few small pieces of fried meat were left behind, and grandma would let me eat one or two as a treat when she cooked. I enjoyed hanging onto her skirt or grandpas to learn everything.

I never realized how fortunate I was when compared to the proletariat (read even poorer people) in the city who were at the mercy of the inept socialist government for their food supply.

Grandma and grandpa always raised chickens and a pig to slaughter at Christmas and had a large garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, okra, onions, garlic, potatoes, and egg plants. The proletariat did not have the luxury to grow a garden, they relied only on their factory labor and on poorly run state stores.

My late uncle Tache, a wiry and thin man all his life, still had a large garden as late as 2016 when I last saw him. He was putting away the potato and green pepper harvest. He was in his late seventies, still strong as an ox and active, a man who worked tirelessly to feed his family even though now they had plenty of food in grocery stores decades after the demise of the communist state in 1989.

My children and American generations since the baby boomers, have never really had to survive each day with scraps of food, watery soup, no meat, no fruits, fresh vegetables, canned and frozen everything, and other basic fresh food they so take for granted that fill grocery shelves in America.

No entitled millennial who has the gall to call survivors of communism like me white-privileged, can fathom not finding their favorite food in so many varieties and brands, much less standing in line for hours each day in order to eat or buy milk, bread, and toilet paper.

The latest angry and violent generations of Americans, I call them Generation BC, Brainwashed Communists, will be so surprised when the socialist paradise they envision and demand, will not deliver them all the free stuff they were promised and believed they will receive.

The biggest surprise of the free paradise they are being promised by the Socialist Democrat Party is that their gluten-free bread and food will not be available at all. They will be lucky to have food to eat much less foo-foo coffee from Starbucks, spit and chewed by some bird high up in the Andes mountains.

By the time the reality of “free” and rationed socialist goods will set in, it will be hard if not extremely unlikely to switch back to the abundance of capitalist goods and services, to the best standard of living and healthcare anywhere in the world.

 

4 in 10 Americans Want Socialism

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher

Nikita Khrushchev in 1963

Photo: Wikipedia

I don’t put much value in polls. They can be often skewed by the composition of those polled and the honesty with which they answer questions, however, I paid attention to a Gallup poll which claimed that 4 in 10 Americans want socialism, the precursor to communism. If this poll is correct, then Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” would have come to pass decades after his death.

Those asked about their views on socialism, generally have no ability to explain it, or why they desire it; they just think it’s a good idea and they want “free stuff.” Such advocates of socialism have never opened a history book on socialism, nor have they studied the basic Principles of Economics.

They hate capitalism while enjoying the freedom to say so without fear of being sent to a gulag, and owning goods produced by the very capitalism they loathe. To say that they are uninformed fools and tools of the few who are designing the one-party state (Democrat Socialist), is an understatement.

None of the advocates of socialism understand that the European socialist welfare they admire, is supported by high taxes and strong capitalist corporations with shareholders and investors, who pay taxes to the state in order to support such lavish welfare.

In 1903 Lenin founded what was to become eventually the Communist Party with a group of “close knit dedicated professional revolutionaries” who would blindly follow without question the decisions of the leaders. It is important to focus on the word professional, indicating people who were well-trained in political activism, community organizing, and manipulation of the masses. Their goal was to establish “the one-party state” better known as the Party.

The Party allowed “democratic centralism,” meaning that discussion was permitted within certain parameters, until a decision was reached. Once the decision was “adopted,” all minions had to follow it faithfully. The Party was illegal as they were aiming to overthrow the Czarist regime, an act which eventually came to pass.

In 1905 the Party had 8,500 members and a few months before the October 1917 Revolution only 23,000. By 1961, statistics indicate that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had 8,708,000 members, about four percent of the population. (Conquest Without War, Pocket Books, Inc., 1961)

Membership was limited to those who wished to join. “Only workers, peasants, and intelligentsia who are enlightened, active, and devoted to communism are admitted.” They had to understand communism and be “its active soldiers,” supporting its ideas as Karl Marx had envisioned.

One representative (deputy) per 300,000 Russians was chosen to be in the Soviet of the Union, one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet. These representatives were nominated by the Party, trade unions, cooperatives, youth and cultural organizations, all under the boot of the Party’s control. An electoral commission could reject any candidate without giving a reason. The unopposed candidates always received 99 percent of the votes.

In the long line of communist leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev is less known today than Stalin, his contemporary who is responsible for the death of millions. I’m not sure how many victims Khrushchev left behind during his tenure as supreme leader.

During Khrushchev’s formative years, the socialist propaganda was intended for the working class, quite a “minority in overwhelmingly rural Russia.”

The socialist propaganda in today’s America is aimed at affluent college indoctrinated Millennials who decry their “whiteness and white privilege” which happened at the expense of other races. How that suddenly occurred in the 21^st century in one of the most tolerant and law-abiding countries in the world where discrimination of any sort is punishable by law, is unclear and irrational.

The “Party schools” in the Soviet Union were indoctrination centers for the Communist Party membership. It was a privilege to be admitted to such schools, not the phony variety “white privilege” Democrat Socialists in America suddenly claim. Soviet privilege consisted of living in substandard conditions in crowded, unheated dormitories with little food, setting the standard for future modest living conditions under communist dictatorships around the world.

The curricula were composed of interminable meetings during which daily life was deconstructed into Marxist terms and the students’ behavior and attitude toward the “class struggle” was carefully monitored and dissected. They were taught how to better control “the lives of others” through carefully scripted guidelines of mental and physical oppression, depriving the population at large of any choice and of their freedom.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924, a contagion spread across Europe - Russian communists stirred upheavals in Germany, and in other capitalist nations.

The Soviet leadership offered a new brand of “socialism for a new class.” Stalin launched the slogan “socialism in one country,” a socialism that would not turn out to be the promised egalitarian society, but a society in which the Communist Party members would be the sole beneficiaries.

Subservient communist functionaries became the apparatchiki, the bulldozing machine of control through fear, snitching on neighbors and relatives, jail, repressions, and purges. Even the Marxist Trotsky was beaten and exiled as a “left winger,” and the “right wingers” were labeled “petty bourgeois” by Stalinists.

Apparatchiki forced peasants to give up their land, equipment, and animals into collective farms (kolkhozes). If apparatchiki wavered, they were swiftly eliminated as “untrustworthy elements.”

Apparatchiki also watched one another. “Socialist vigilance required the uncovering of deviations and deviationists, the unmasking of the class enemy who might have wormed his way into the Party.”

When the Ukrainian peasants were not delivering enough grain in 1927 and 1928 to feed the urban population, Stalin sent the Party apparatchiki and the secret police on a requisition drive, “liquidating” with machine guns the “kulaks,” peasants they saw as enemies because they were “unwilling to satisfy the demands of the Party agitators.” Peasants resisting collectivization were not just attacked as “kulaks” but as “enemies of the people.”

Stalin “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and peasants, who could hire workers and owned their farms and agricultural equipment, existed no more.

After “squashing the enemy” of the Party, the “socialist construction” expanded by building up Stalin’s “cult of personality.” The purges that followed eliminated people and confiscated their property which was later distributed to loyal party members for their personal use. The Communist Party was infallible, so scapegoats were found for every failure of the system.

When Stalin died in 1953, a period of “de-Stalinization” began. Khrushchev promised a “great leap forward” for his proletariat who would outproduce the U.S. in per capita meat, milk, and butter and “to make Soviet toilers wealthier than the capitalist slaves.”

Not at any time did the Soviet proletariat live better or wealthier than the “capitalist slaves.” To this day, the Russian overall standard of living is lower than the American standard of living even though the cost of living in Russia is cheaper. The average monthly disposable salary is five times higher in the U.S. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Russia/United-States/Cost-of-living

By the end of the 1960s Khrushchev “stopped the terror of the secret police, emptied the concentration camps, gave his people enough to eat, new apartment housing, and promised détente and peace.”  He even wore a very bourgeois sable-lined winter coat. (Conquest Without War, pp. 39-41)

In his lifetime, Khrushchev failed “to see the communist flag fly all over the whole world” as he so zealously desired, but progress is made in the 21^st century U.S.A. through domestic communist activists, anti-American politicians, and the MSM.

Communism, conceived as a world philosophy and a world movement, “Proletarians of all lands, unite” (The Communist Manifesto), declaring that social class, not nationality, not race, is the important link between humans, has killed 100 million innocents in its quest to conquer the whole world.

Krushchev believed in the “inevitable triumph” of socialism because, he said, “Capitalism is a worn-out old mare while socialism is new, young, and full of teeming energy.”

Having experienced and endured a tough life and severe hardships under the socialism he spoke of, I can honestly say that I would choose capitalism any day over socialism. Nobody will be able to “bury capitalism” as he so enthusiastically desired. Humans are born entrepreneurs.

If the Soviet version of world-wide socialism were to triumph, it logically follows that large countries like Russia, China, or both, with plenty of experience in socialism, would become the world power.

I should also mention that Lenin taught followers in his lifetime that war was inevitable if “imperialism” existed.

An interesting question begs asking, if the socialist proletariat, prompted by the elites of the Communist Party, does conquer the whole world, what are they going to do with it?

                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                

Senator Joe McCarthy and Hollywood

Sen. Joe McCarthy, a WWII hero, belittled and vilified by Hollywood and the MSM alike, has been vindicated not just by the release of the Venona papers but, most recently, by the appalling and constant anti-American rhetoric and behavior of Hollywood. There were communists in Hollywood. Today actors and actresses are no longer shy about their communist views and affiliations and want to make sure that Americans buy into their communist social engineering and perversions while they enjoy the spoils of celebrity capitalism. http://www.senatormccarthy.com/
www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/venona_docs.html

In 1995 the NSA released translation of Soviet cables decrypted in the 1940 by the Venona Project. “Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union, including those chronicled in NOVA’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/intercepts.html

Overtly communist anarchists and pro-Islamic activists with a microphone in their hands attack the tax-paying middle class during organized protests that turn into riots, calling ordinary Americans names that cannot be repeated in polite company, not the least of which is “simpletons” and “delusional,” suffering of “cognitive dissonance” because most Americans refuse to believe their immigration lies and the anthropogenic global warming deception.

Hollywood and the MSM are hotbeds of Marxists, no longer hiding their hatred for the fly-over country, the millions of Americans they want to make irrelevant because they happen to love our country and disagree with their global communist agenda of re-engineering our lives in the image of their desired tyranny.

Actors and singers are drunk with self-importance. The vicious Hollywood denizens forget that they have money and a lavish lifestyle because we, the middle class “simpletons,” highly educated, successful in their own careers, paid to see their movies, plays, and concerts.

Americans in general spend their hard-earned money to “watch you pretend to be characters in movies and on TV. Your only job is to entertain us, to take us away from reality. Your personal opinion means nothing to us. You are significant and influential only in your own mind and within the minds of your elitist peers. You are a marionette to us and nothing more. Your job is to sing, act, and hold your opinions to yourself.” (David van Ness)

Some CEOs are equally eager to impose their world views on Americans by mixing the retailing of their products with their far left political views and anti-Americanism. Americans can use their wallets to send a message to these CEOs that they can live without their goods and services, buying from pro-American businesses. Often the progressive (read communist) ideology espoused by a CEO backfires and their stock takes a considerable dive, in some cases racking up billions of dollars in revenue losses.

Most recently, Nordstrom’s move to remove Ivanka Trump’s line of clothes under the pretense that her clothes did not sell well anymore backfired.  The timing was circumspect, to say the least. Many conservative women immediately closed their accounts, cut up their store credit cards, and returned thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise back to the nearby stores. One woman returned $14,000 worth of shoes and purses from one transaction.

Many women, myself included, in a gesture of solidarity with our President and his family, bought Ivanka Trump merchandise from other retailers such as the Canadian-owned Lord & Taylor.  

Unfortunately, returning merchandise back to the return-friendly store, does not really affect the retailer that much; they have contracts with the various wholesalers and can cut their losses by returning defective or unwanted items at cost to the respective wholesaler.

Returns on a whim or for a boycott affect the associates, whether liberal or conservative, associates who work hard on commission and are punished by their employers for not meeting their goals when large returns occur.

When an associate spends an entire hour to make a sale to a difficult or demanding customer, and that shopper later returns everything she bought, either for buyer remorse or because she wanted to boycott the store, associates suffer. Since payroll is the largest item for a company, any boycotted store responds by cutting employee hours. The billionaire major stockholder owners seldom suffer, they make up the temporary losses in the long run unless the boycott is sustained.

For a few days, in a move of solidarity with stores that removed Ivanka Trump’s line, progressive women showed up with a “holier than thou attitude,” purchasing a single and inexpensive item, telling the sales person that they’ve never shopped there before but they came in that time to buy something, symbolic of their intolerant cause.

Because progressives don’t generally take economics classes for their social justice or women’s studies degrees, they cannot possibly understand that repeat and satisfied customers make a substantial difference in the bottom line of any business, not snowflakes trying to score a misguided political point.

We must not allow Hollywood, wealthy athletes, and CEOs to bully us into submission to their leftist political view of the world. We must vote for our capitalist way of life with our wallets and make them understand that it is the free market economy based on supply and demand that has put them in the affluent positions and the jet-set lifestyle they enjoy so much.

Shooting the goose that lays the golden egg is not a good idea. When the goose dies, a.k.a. the middle class, so does the wealthy elitist lifestyle.  As an actor or athlete, you become irrelevant and the pliable subject of a totalitarian regime that will tell you if, when, and how you can exhibit your “talent,” and it must be the communist-approved or theocracy-sanctioned kind of “talent,” presented in the proper attire for women.

 

Talking to Joseph Stalin

H. G. Wells and Joseph Stalin

H.G. Wells, the prolific British sci-fi writer, who self-described to be a socialist left of Stalin, interviewed the infamous Soviet dictator for three hours on July 23, 1934. The interview was recorded by Constantine Oumansky, the chief of the Press Bureau of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.

The scope of the interview, after he spoke at length with President Roosevelt, was to find out what Stalin was “doing to change the world.” Wells told Stalin that he tried to look at the world through the eyes of the “common man” not the eyes of a politician or a bureaucrat.

Indicating to Stalin that “capitalists must learn from you, to grasp the spirit of socialism,” Wells stated that a profound reorganization was taking place in the United States, the creation of a “planned, that is, socialist, economy.” He witnessed Washington building offices, new state regulatory bodies, and “a much needed Civil Service.”

Stalin expressed his skepticism about U.S. being able to build a planned economy. It is not possible, he said, because “the Americans want to rid themselves of the [economic] crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity without changing the economic basis.” Stalin was touting the new economic basis that socialism had built. In his view, the existing capitalist system was rooted in anarchy. “A planned economy tries to abolish unemployment.” But a capitalist would never agree to completely abolish unemployment, Stalin said, because capitalists want to maintain a supply of cheap labor.

Stalin was wrong about unemployment under a socialist Soviet economy for three reasons:

1.       Data in general was never accurately kept or reported.

2.       The labor was highly manual with low levels of automation; under a free market economy automation often displaces labor, causing retraining of workers into other skills.

3.       Women who sought employment worked for shorter periods of time and were thus not included in the statistics.

Stalin explained to Wells that planned economies increase output in those “branches of the industry which produce goods that the masses of the people need particularly.”

Having survived for twenty years in such a system Stalin described, I remember precisely all the shortages of goods and services that the economically illiterate central planners created, the long lines, the rationing we had to endure, and the empty shelves everywhere.

Furthermore, to see how wrong Stalin was, just look today at Venezuela under Maduro’s centrally planned socialist policies, a continuation of his mentor’s, Hugo Chavez, and you will see the empty shelves and suffering. Look at Castro’s Cuba after 50 years of central planning and at its decaying infrastructure and decrepit buildings. Fidel “protected” Cuba’s hapless citizens from the “evils” of capitalism and instead gave them a nightmarish socialist economy and a political socialist dictatorship.

Stalin described to Wells that capital flows into those sectors of the economy where the rate of profit is highest.  A capitalist would never agree “to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people.” A central planner like Stalin did not understand supply and demand, only saw collectivism, and viewed profit as evil. Who wants to open a business if they are going to lose money?

Stalin admitted that “without getting rid of the capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create a planned economy.”  When the “financial oligarchy will be abolished, only then socialism will be brought about,” Stalin added.

He believed that Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was a very powerful socialist idea. But, in Stalin’s opinion, Roosevelt would not be able to achieve his socialist goals for many generations because “the banks, the industries, the large enterprises, the large farms are not in Roosevelt’s hands.”

All the railroads, the mercantile fleet, the army of skilled workers, engineers, and technical personnel are all working for private enterprise, he said. Even though the State offers military defense of the country, maintains law and order, and collects taxes, this private ownership of the means of production, renders the State unable to control everything, “the State is in the hands of capitalist economy.”

Stalin explained that, if the State controlled the banks, then transportation, then heavy industries, industries in general, commerce, an “all-embracing control will be equivalent to the State ownership of all branches of the national economy and this will be the process of socialization.”

I wonder if the Millennials understand that they would lose their smart gadgets, TVs, laptops, and other electronics they love to their socialist utopian dream of social justice. If they can’t get rich then everybody must be equally poor and miserable.

The important question is, are American citizens ready to lose everything they own privately, giving government carte blanche to own the means the production and to tell them what they can and cannot have, consume, and do?

Stalin argued that Roosevelt made an honest attempt to “satisfy the interests of the proletariat class at the expense of the capitalist class.” Today, we, the taxpayers/capitalist class, are still satisfying the interests of the non-producers who receive welfare at our expense from the heavy taxes we pay. Are we willing supporters of such idle individuals? Roosevelt, with his programs, created a generational welfare class that feels entitled to what they receive, and destroyed the family in the process.

Stalin described the two classes in capitalism, as he saw it through the lenses of a socialist:

-          “The propertied class” (the owners of banks, factories, mines, farms, “plantations in colonies,” who chased after the “evil” profit)

-          “The exploited class” (the class of the poor who existed by selling their labor)

Wells told Stalin that, although he personally saw the need to “conduct propaganda in favor of socialism,” he met many educated people such as “engineers, airmen, military-technical people” who regarded “your simple class antagonism as nonsense.” Additionally, he asked, were there not people who were not poor but worked productively?

Stalin admitted that “small landowners, artisans, small traders” did not decide the fate of a country, but “the toiling masses, who produce all the things society requires.”

We sure have a lot of unemployed and disabled “toiling masses” today that are sitting idle at home and don’t seem to mind one bit, benefitting from the “evil” capitalist spoils.

Calling J.P. Morgan “old Morgan,” Wells described him as “a parasite on society,” who “merely accumulated wealth.” On the other hand, Wells admired Rockefeller whom he described as a “brilliant organizer” who “has set an example of how to organize the delivery of oil that is worthy of emulation,” while Ford was “selfish.”

Further excoriating the capitalist system based on profit that, in his opinion, is “breaking down,” Wells surprised Stalin by saying, “It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stalin; I think the old system is nearer to its end than you think.”

Stalin corrects him that these capitalist men possess great organizational talent which the Soviet people could learn from. “And [J. P.] Morgan, whom you characterize so unfavorably, was undoubtedly a good, capable organizer.” But people like him who “serve the cause of profit” are not “prepared to reconstruct the world,” they are not “capable organizers of production.” 

Reminding Wells, “don’t you know how many workers he throws in the streets,” Stalin added that capitalism will be abolished by the working class, not by the ‘technical intelligentsia’ or the ‘organizers’ of production. If this “technical intelligentsia breaks away spiritually from their employers, from the capitalist world, that will take a long time and only then can they begin to reconstruct the world.” The working class will become the “sovereign master of the capitalist class.”

In reality, this working class Stalin described as the savior of society, was a dumbed-down, poorly paid, miserable majority who could not care less if the factories under-produced, broke down, and were never repaired. They were paid regardless of how much they produced, how many mistakes they made, what shoddy products they sent to the market, how much theft was going on in order to barter with others to survive, and did not own much of anything. This working class pretended to work and the communist organizers and centralized planners pretended to pay them.

The Soviet economic system was a dismal model which failed miserably and eventually collapsed on its own utopian weight while the free market system thrived.

Unfortunately today, the Democrats and Social Democrats are gaining tract in their efforts to resurrect around the world a mummified model of economic failure, inventing new euphemisms, in order to stay in absolute power and control of the population.

Wells described the Royal Society whose president had delivered a speech on “social planning and scientific control.” The Royal Society, he told Stalin, held “revolutionary views and insists on the scientific reorganization of human society. Mentality changes. Your class-war propaganda has not kept pace with these facts.”

“Capitalist society is in a cul de sac,” Stalin responded, and “A devoted and energetic revolutionary minority requires the passive support of millions.”

“Revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and cruel struggle, a life and death struggle,” Stalin admitted. And the process will not be “spontaneous and peaceful, it will be complicated, long, and violent.” And the new world order “revolutionaries” should use the police to support them in the fight against “reactionaries.”

“That is why the Communists say to the working class: Answer violence with violence; do all you can to prevent the old dying order from crushing you, do not permit it to put manacles on your hands, on the hands with which you will overthrow the old system.”

Citing history, both Wells and Stalin described how Cromwell, on the basis of the Constitution, resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed the Parliament, arrested many, and beheaded others; how much blood was shed to overthrow the tsars; how the October Revolution overthrew the old and decaying Russian capitalist system and how the “Bolsheviks were the only way out.”

Explaining the Third Estate (the common people) which existed before the French Revolution, Stalin pointed out that “not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class” and the “Communists would welcome the voluntary departure of the bourgeoisie.”

Wells argued that force must be used within existing laws and “there is no need to disorganize the old system because it is disorganizing itself enough as it is.” In his opinion, “insurrection against the old order, against the law, is obsolete, old-fashioned.” In addition to the educational system which must be radically changed, this is how Wells explained his point of view:

1.       He supports order.

2.       He attacks the present system “in so far as it cannot assure order.”

3.       He thinks that “class war propaganda may detach from socialism just those educated people whom socialism needs.” (H.G. Wells, p. 20 of the interview transcript)

Stalin countered with his own points:

1.       “The social bulwark of the revolution is the working class.”

2.       An auxiliary force must exist; the Communists call it a Party.

3.       Political power is the “lever of change” to create new laws in the interest of the working class.

From my experience, the only interests represented in the socialism/communism of my youth were the interests of the dictatorial ruling elite of the Communist Party. They became the millionaire rulers at that time, and, when disbanded and stripped of power, their heirs became the billionaires of today.

Ending the interview, Wells thanked Stalin for his explanations of the fundamentals of socialism and said that millions around the world hang on to every word Stalin and Roosevelt utter.

Stalin, engaging the infamous and demagogue idea of ‘self-criticism,’ which had sent many honest intellectuals to gulags, replied that much more could have been done by the Bolsheviks, had they been “cleverer.” Wells suggested making human beings “cleverer” by inventing a five-year plan for the “reconstruction of the human brain which obviously lacks many things needed for a perfect social order.”

The idea of mind control, which is not so far-fetched today, brought shivers down my spine. Bombastic and not-ground-in-reality Five-Year centralized plans issued by the Communist Party elites and their apparatchiks who had no idea how the economy should be run, many of whom did not have but an elementary education and could barely read, write, and do simple math, those plans brought the economies in all Soviet satellite countries to unmitigated disaster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blustery Winds and the Gobal Warming Scare

Standard apartment blocks in Bucharest
Photo: Wikipedia

A blustery winter Hawk is blowing wind gusts of 60 mph and the temperatures are 15 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.  It is not unusual, it is winter time, and the weather has alternated periods of extreme cold and unusual balmier temperatures. The global warmists, of course, are blaming it on man-made global warming. The climate change industry’s golden goose is laying larger and larger eggs to those who stand to gain from this false narrative. And of course, the biggest gainers are the United Nations and its third world corrupt members who demand ever more redistribution of wealth and destruction of capitalism.

The real reason behind the global warming scare and why the United Nations’ alarmists have been driving us into forced submission of environmentalist stewardship of Mother Earth is that they want capitalism destroyed and replaced with their vision of a utopian communist economy that has never worked across the centuries.

These progressives have a problem with the Industrial Revolution, with “fossil fuels,” (They are not so fossil since the earth keeps producing them), with the only successful economic model that has provided generous income to all these hot-air spewing, idle bureaucrats, who have nothing better to do than meet in exotic locales planning the destruction of the goose that lays the golden eggs that feed their exorbitant lifestyles, salaries, bonuses, and pensions.

Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of U.N.’s Convention on Climate Change, disclosed the real reason for the climate change industry when she told us that they are not interested in saving the world from global warming Armageddon but they want to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Having lived under such economic model that these progressives advocate, I can say with 100 percent certainty that, on a cold day like today, the proletariat in the village would be huddled around a cast iron stove, or an adobe stove made of mud bricks and straw with a cast iron top, or a porcelain stove fed with chopped wood, trying to keep warm further than a few feet from the source of heat, providing they had money to buy the wood, and the wood was available since it was forbidden by the state to cut down trees.

City dwellers, who were forced to live in high rise concrete block quarters, heated their tiny apartments with steam sent from a plant via underground pipes. By the time this steam made its way up to our fifth floor apartment, we were lucky if the ambient temperature was 45-50 degrees F.  Bundled up inside the house like Eskimos, with icicles forming on the inside windows, we sometimes turned on the gas stove to heat the miniature kitchen, if the flame was strong enough. We were slightly better off than our communist Chinese brethren, who did not even have heat in winter time. There were times when we stayed in bed, fully clothed and covered by heavy wool comforters.

Have these promoters of communist utopia and of an unproductive but supposedly “equal” and “socially just” economy ever have to live like this? Of course not, their elitist reality comes from the Ivory Tower of academia, political office, and from college textbooks’ propaganda at Ivy League bastions of progressive thinking that enslaves people rather than frees them to pursue free-market capitalism.

Even the poorest person living under free-market capitalism has food, heat, medicine, health care, electricity, refrigeration, phones, TV, running water, water heaters, a bathroom, and other amenities that make life more pleasant, healthier, and double human life expectancy.

On a day like today when it is so dangerously cold even domesticated animals are sheltered, Americans should remember that these environmental global warmists and the United Nations want to put them out freezing in the cold, in the dark, hungry, sick, and hopelessly dependent on the global elites, who are wealthy, healthy, warm, and happy, bureaucrats that never produced anything, but would control our survival with a law, decree, or a treaty, dropping crumbs to keep us alive and under control.

Copyright:  Ileana Johnson 2015

Only in America, How Wise an Immigrant

As a legal immigrant, I came to America because it was “the shiny city on the hill” where everything was possible if you were willing to work hard because everyone had the freedom and equal opportunity to succeed.

I came to America because I wanted to pursue higher education, something that was very limited under communism as the children of the communist party elite had first choice at any college no matter how bad their grades were. I did not want to wait until I was 60 years old and had the approval of the communist party to pursue a doctoral degree.

I came to America because I wanted a better life for myself and my children. I did not want to toil day and night under the watchful eye of the totalitarian government who decided how much our labor was worth and how much we were allowed to eat, where to travel, or live.

We knew there was a better place to live, a place called capitalism, a place called America, where they had freedom of speech and assembly. I knew there was a better life under capitalism where everybody had the opportunity to create wealth if they “served their fellow man” with needed products and services. I also knew that equal results were not guaranteed, only equal opportunity.  

I did not want to live any longer under the failed socialist economy and the failed communist utopian ideology where wealth was stolen, property plundered, and the workers, “lovingly” called the proletariat, were enslaved with the false promise that the government will take care of them if they relinquished their most cherished possession – their freedom.

I wanted to own a home, no matter how small and I did not want it indebted to the government. I wanted proper medical care and medicine when needed for which I fully expected to pay. I did not feel entitled to anybody’s wealth that I had nothing to do with creating.

I wanted freedom to exercise my faith if I so chose and be able to own or read a Bible. I wanted my children to learn historical truth, not revisionist communist indoctrination. I also did not want to yield to other religions imposed by the government whether be the worship of Gaia, atheism, environmentalism, or Islam.

I did not want free housing, free medical care, free child care, free cell phones, free education, and I certainly did not want to be indebted for generations to the federal government for my family’s well-being. I did not want welfare and I expected to have as many children as I could afford to bring into this world, raise, support financially, and educate without the government’s interference. I certainly did not expect political correctness to stifle my freedom of speech.

I came to America to escape having to march in May 1 (May Day) forced parades paying homage to the grand communist party. Yet now our President has proclaimed May Day “Loyalty Day,” to “reaffirm our allegiance to the United States of America, our Constitution, and our founding values.” Do we really need a loyalty day? Are we not loyal to our country already?

I must admit that I am a bit confused. Since the rest of the world celebrates May Day as a communist day, does this mean that we are joining in with the commies, or is it just an accidental and unfortunate coincidence that we celebrate loyalty to the United States, fly our flag, and pledge allegiance to our Republic on the same day?  http://www.whitehouse.gove/briefing-room/presidential-actions/proclamations

Listening to the Voice of America, the only radio of freedom news that we could covertly listen to under the oppressive communist regime, we held in high esteem the 100 Senators from the magical and free land of milk and honey, the United States.  Unfortunately, living here as an American citizen, I must admit that I am shocked and puzzled by the bizarre behavior of some U.S. Senators and Representatives.

Take for instance Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) who spoke on May Day in Chicago to a rally of “nearly two thousand trade unionists, open communists, socialists, anarchists and illegal aliens.” He spoke of May Day as “Law Day.” I must admit, I have never heard of such celebration, “Law Day.”

Sen. Durbin, quoted by Rebel Pundit, said that, because he believes in free speech and the Constitution, he decided to come to “Law Day” rally attended by individuals who promoted the goals of communism. It is hard to believe - I fled communism 35 years ago and communism is following me to the United States, promoted by a U.S. Senator who also thinks that illegal immigration, breaking the laws of the country he swore to protect and defend, should be legalized because, he said, “My fellow immigrants, this is a once in a lifetime chance to get immigration reform.” I wonder from what country did Senator Durbin immigrate illegally. http://www.breibart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/02/Exclusive-Senator-Durbin-Defends-Rallying-with-Communists-and-Anarchists

We did “get” immigration reform in 1986 for 3 million illegal aliens and it did not work so well, we have gained since then 11 more million illegal immigrants. And they are still coming because the largesse of the American government towards invaders is world-renowned and their rights trump the rights of any American immediately upon arrival. All they have to do is “lawyer up.”

According to the Border Patrol, thousands have been apprehended since the administration and the Gang of Eight’s announcement of amnesty has been made. CBS news reported that in McAllen, Texas, 900 illegals were caught over a three day period. In March, 7,500 illegals were arrested in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, more than triple from previous months. (Todd Beamon, Newsmax, May 1, 2013)

Illegal immigration in the U.S. had slowed during our deep economic recession, particularly since Mexico’s unemployment rate has held steady at 3.68 percent from 1994-2012. This prompted the American Border Control, the formerly U.S. Seaport Commission, a project of the U.S. Public Policy Council, to demand through its Executive Director, Jonathon Moseley, that U.S. citizens have the right to take jobs in Mexico. Moseley commented that “We are gullible suckers. The error of amnesty is the myth that Mexicans are in financial trouble.” www.AmericanBorderControl.org

American Border Control is “demanding that any compromise include a right for unemployed U.S. citizens to find jobs in Mexico after losing their jobs in the United States as a result of Sen. Marco Rubio’s policies.” Executive Director Jonathon Moseley said that “Those who showed contempt for our country by violating our laws and crashing the gate should not be also stealing jobs from U.S. citizens.”

Our President took an apology tour to Mexico to tout his immigration reform and shore up more Democrat voting support for the upcoming election. According to Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard, he made the following gaffe, “It would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally.”

He apologized to Mexican college students for our sovereignty and thanked them for helping elect him President. Should Mexico not apologize to us for their lack of social responsibility to their citizens? Should Mexico not at least thank us for feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, and treating medically for free millions of their citizens who sneak into our country illegally, becoming a burden to the U.S. taxpayers?

Perhaps instead of waiting 8 years to gain a green card and then my American citizenship, I should have crossed the southern border with Mexico illegally. It would have been quicker, I would have received immediate financial help to support myself instead of working, I would not have needed to learn English or assimilate, the government would have translated everything for me, given me free medical care, free education, easy citizenship, no waiting in line, earned income credit for other people’s innumerable babies, and no uncomfortable interrogations and interviews.

Isn’t self-suicidal, tolerant America grand? What other country in the world rewards law-breakers with citizenship for anchor babies, voting rights, free education, free housing, free health care, welfare, and chain migration? La Raza should be so proud! Our own officials are subtly promoting Reconquista of southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

I came to this country to find freedom and I did find it for a while. But the bright lights of “the shiny city on the hill” are getting dimmer day by day, and the “shiny city” is getting more tarnished with every new regulation, law, executive order, and proclamation that benefits illegals and other foreign groups and hurts American citizens.

 

 

My new home in Woodland

I was too excited, scared, and anxious to sleep. Every object, smell, landscape looked utterly unfamiliar and scary. I did not know how to act, the English I learned in school did not resemble at all the Southern slang I was hearing. I had to ask Bill to explain to me what people said all the time. I felt lonely, isolated, and did not trust anything or anybody. I was expecting a knock on the door any moment to take me away to jail. Every time I saw a policeman, sheriff, or a State Trooper my heart would race and I fully expected them to ask me for my papers. I was finally free from communism but did not understand anything around me. I needed time to explore my new found freedom. I could not understand why the population could come and go as they wished without the government giving them permission and without legally notarized papers , why they could move from town to town, state to state, change jobs, own property, or do anything for that matter. Surely, there must have been some centralized power that pulled the strings to make this society run so smoothly. My understanding of how capitalism ran so successfully without any centralized interferrence was minimal.
The next morning the constant parade of visitors began - I was a novelty, almost like a new circus act in town that everybody had to come gawk at, touch, and ask question of, marvelling at my foreign accent and my "exotic" looks. If I had to hear the word exotic one more time, I was going to explode. People would ask stupid and insensitive questions out of sheer ignorance. "Do they take a bath in Romania?" "Sure, once a month, whether we need it or not." I felt compelled at first to answer the idiotic questions truthfully, but, after a while, it got old, and I had to improvise by being sarcastic or cocky. I had as much fun with it as I was legally allowed to do so. "Do women drive in Romania?" Not really, we still use wagons with oxen." That was not so far from the truth in country areas where people were still pretty backwards, riding wagons with wheels made of car tires, pulled by horses. I was fascinated by the fact that even the most remote farms in the boondocks had plumbing and indoor bathrooms. That was so unbelievable to me, the septic tank was a novelty since my grandparents and the family at large that lived in rural areas still used a hole in the ground covered with wooden slats, good luck trying not to fall in the big goo of poop. I still remember my grandparents' water source - a hand pump that resembled the 1900s water pumps. As a matter of fact, my paternal grandmother took her drinking water from a well about two miles up the mountain. It was fun coming down, but way too difficult climbing with a big wooden bar over your shoulders, balancing two heavy buckets, one on each end. Has anybody seen a bathtub or shower in the country? Not really. My maternal grandfather, ever the enterprising engineer, had rigged a rusted bucket over the outhouse for impromptu showers when the August sun was strong enough to warm the water. We would pull a string, tilt the bucket, and the entire content would rinse the pre-soaped body. That was our shower. Did we take showers in winter? Noooo! They still had Turkish baths in the city. Villagers could bathe once in a while for a meager fee - the interior looked positively medieval, dank, dingy, dirty, dark, and quite smelly. It was alwyas frightening to go with my mother when the communist government would cut our hot water off in the city in summer time or cut water off period for reasons of rationing. The official excuse was that they had to clean the large vat of mineral deposits. This process took three to four months each summer. You can imagine how spoiled and priviledged I felt in the backwoods of Mississippi having a hot shower, runing water, and an indoor commode. I felt positively rich. Gone were the summers when we pooped in the corn fields because the outhouse stunk. Grandpa always lectured us on the bacterial sins of befouling the corn crops. The corn looked greener and healthier to me and it tasted even better.
The next dog and pony show was going to the Baptist Church with my new "family." I did not know what to expect since my mother-in-law believed I was pagan since I was orthodox. She considered our marriage in an orthodox cathedral with four priests non-existent since it was not performed in the Baptist Church. Never mind that the Orthodox Church was one of the oldest religions in the world, she insisted that we had to marry again, otherwise our children would be bastards. I learned not to object much so as not to raise the ire of my new in-laws. I agreed with her, or pretended to, but I did what I thought was the proper thing to do as an orthodox christian.
The most ardent defender of my new status was Tom, Mr. Johnson's hired hand who had a heart of gold but was poor as a church mouse. I could never understand what he said, I would have needed a dictionary for that, and he was pretty much toothless on account of his smoking habits, but he did teach me a few choice idiomatic expressions and introduced me to wild game, especially fried snapping turtle from one of the farm's many ponds - it tasted like chicken.