Milktoast Expose of Socialism

I listened recently to a milktoast expose of socialism by a 38-year old conservative who spoke to a crowd of elderly and well-off Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians.

They wanted to know how he became a conservative, considering that he went to Columbia. They wanted to replicate that in their own progressively indoctrinated grandchildren.

The speaker told them that he studied the classics when he started school in August 2001 and then 9/11 happened and he and his roommates had a front-row seat and perfect view of the Islamist terrorist attack from their dorm balcony. The unfolding terrorist attack by Saudi nationals, who had murdered 3,000 innocent Americans, he said, turned him into a conservative more than anything else.

I was thinking that, probably, some if not most of those in the audience had grandchildren going to the vaunted universities around the country on their trust funds probably set up when their progenies were born, not batting an eye at the cost of the tuition and at whatever the tenured progressive professors were indoctrinating their grandchildren with.

I corresponded back and forth with the organizer of the event, suggeting concrete ways to reverse the indoctrination that had taken place since Jimmy Carter decided to establish the Department of Education in 1979. Generations of teachers were trained themselves at Colleges of Education around the country in the fine points of socialism and communism, knowledge which they then imparted to the rapt audience of American children who looked up to their teachers as the arbiters of truth and knowledge.

These teachers were usually the worst students one could marshall to teach anybody - they scored constantly in the lower 50th percentile of any teacher education tests, including the National Teacher Exam.

The organizer of the event read my three emails and responded that, I was probably mistaken, things are not so bad and never will be. But we still have to do something about it.

Chernobyl

Wikipedia photo

The HBO mini-series Chernobyl is very intense. It is not just an expose of what has actually happened with the nuclear reactor in the former Soviet Union in 1986, but an indictment of the reckless communist rule that has brought to disaster many nations and their wonderful people who allowed themselves to be bullied into the false promises of collectivism and communism, the land of free milk and honey, of impossible equity and equality.

The proletariat suffered greatly at the hands of activists and apparatchiks with a low-grade education, useful idiots who helped implement totalitarian communism, deprivation, and mass starvation. The Marxists, Bolsheviks, Leninists, Stalinists, and Maoists had engineered and were complicit in the death of 100 million people.

In episode 2, a nuclear physicist is trying to explain to the communist secretary in charge of the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, that he needs to evacuate the town and he responds that there is no danger, the exposure is equal to one x-ray, a bold, fat, and deliberate lie to the public who was kept in the dark during the most essential time when they should have evacuated the residents of the town located three miles from the nuclear reactor which melted down, scattering radioactive graphite everywhere and blowing radioactive fumes and particles into the atmosphere, raining down on unsuspected locals. The wind carried radioactivity all over Germany, Nordic countries, and even to northern Romania.

Frustrated, the physicist tells him, I am sorry Comrade so and so but before you were a local party secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.

His answer, delivered with a distasteful smirk born of ignorance and self-importance, was, yes, but I am in charge here now, not you.

This is typical of the irresponsible comrades who ran the communist countries, all the Soviet satellites - low on education and intoxicated on power, not caring about the dangers that they put millions of people in every day with their Marxist-based crushing rule and ill-informed decisions.

A faithful Russian reader, wondered if the HBO series mentioned that the tragedy was in fact, bound to happen. According to Slava, “Years before the festive inauguration of the Chernobyl’s nuclear station, quite a few inspectors were warning that the construction was done below any standards, thanks to nearly all the contracts being gifted to the corrupt relatives or friends of local party bosses. The general opinion of those brave and honest experts was that, due to constant substitution of good building materials with cheap trash, the future catastrophe would be simply inevitable. Naturally, their written reports were at once gagged and hidden by the communist leadership – you just couldn’t criticize the Party’s projects, especially the top-secret atomic ones. The dreadful truth was declassified in the late nineties.”

In a similar vein, the current young and old American socialists are running our country from Congress openly. Radical socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes to mind, a former bartender, with no political or economic knowledge of what it takes to run the largest economy on the planet, now makes fundamental decisions for the future of our country, for our people, via the Green New Deal, not just for 330 million of Americans today, but for generations to come.

P.S. I watched episode three last night and was brought to tears. It was not only the sacrifice innocent Russians had made willingly and unwillingly to save their fellow Russians and the horrible deaths so many suffered. 
It was also the reminder of my past life under the exact communist society, the drab surroundings, the police state everywhere, the lack of rights and self-determination, the bribery of medical personnel to do their jobs, and the sense of hopelessness that I personally had experienced in Romania; it all flooded back with gut-wrenching sobs.
I was never in Chernobyl, thank God, but I felt a sense of kinship with the suffering of fellow communist proletariat subjects who languished and died at the hands of useful idiot apparatchiks. They constantly watched, harassed, and arrested citizens with the all-mighty Security Police branch of oppression called KGB, just for asking questions to get to the truth.

The Magical Energy of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal proposed by radicals in Congress brought back best-forgotten memories of my life under the “paradise of socialism.” 

I am too old to live under socialism because I like simple luxuries like soap, detergent, toilet paper, electricity, food, clean water, and comfortable shoes, and being able to express my opinion in public without severe retribution.

It sums up in a simplistic way the dreary daily life of surviving under a socialist economy where the means of production were owned by the incompetent state and each citizen was at the mercy of the government centralized planners who would not know what supply and demand was if it hit them in the face.

People brought these elementary-middle school trained incompetents to power because all they’ve heard was free stuff, equality, and fleece the rich, which they were. Those who were lucky, escaped with their lives and lost everything they’ve worked hard to earn including ancestral lands and private property. You see, the massive and forced confiscation was sold to the useful idiots as “for the common good.”

I am also too old to live in stack-n-pack prefab reinforced concrete apartments, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with other families in a space no larger than the average hotel room.

Russians are demolishing many of the Soviet era grey concrete high-rise buildings, admitting that the experiment to offer “affordable housing” has failed miserably. But we are going full steam ahead with it because the Wunderkind AOC of the U.S. House of Representatives told us to – if we don’t, the planet will perish in 12 years.

I like my stellar healthcare, I do not desire Medicare for all, meaning healthcare for none, once rationing ensues. Most people don’t understand basic economics, including AOC, who is shouting in microphones every chance she gets, promoting her global communism environmental deal.

Sustainable Developers of the Green New Deal, the Agenda 2030 imposed on Americans, promises all sorts of amenities to the population at large if we are just willing to cram into high-rises and to adopt a walkability/bike life style, living like sardines in a small can, assembling and disassembling modular Bauhaus-style furniture, giving up our independence and mobility, cars, and everything that makes life fun and worth living, all because it is not deemed sustainable by U.N. planners and it is endangering the planet with global warming.

In my experience, the socialist utopia radicals in this country are promoting, was made worse in the socialist republic run by the Communist Party, by ardent apparatchiks with no formal education but the gift of gab, loquacious enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator who brought them to power in the first place (think Venezuela, Cuba, Soviet Union, North Korea, and all the Iron Curtain Soviet satellite dictatorships).

A cartoon from the Soviet Union with the following caption under one solitary brown boot in an otherwise empty display case read, “we have received a new shipment, come see the boot,” aptly describes our shopping reality and the existence of the black market and bartering in order to survive.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortes wants America to dispose of cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes.  In twelve years, her “magic energy” will replace all the dirty fossil fuel energy that is destroying the planet we inhabit.

The Green New Deal is placing solar panels on our roofs, which is a good move in the long run if taxpayers’ subsidies are paying for the installation and the panels. When the sun is out, good ole fossil fuels must supply the energy.

Let’s not mention wind turbines which are so expensive and inefficient to operate and run that they seldom provide enough energy in their lifetime to offset the cost of producing and maintaining them. When the wind dies down, the turbines move but precious little energy is produced.

How is the rest of the largest economy on the planet going to be supplied with energy? How will trucks transport our food, medicine, parts, cars, mail, and other necessities we take for granted daily? Who is going to move people when cars are gone? Buses? Trains? What is going to replace millions and millions of jobs lost? How are these people going to make a living? What is going to replace the ships and recreational boats? How are we going to cross rivers and oceans? By fast train and buses? Perhaps that IS the idea, keeping the population immobile in one large and crowded area, under the control of our all-knowing government.

How is energy going to be produced? AEI's Mark Perry explained,

“Despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016), that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the electric power generated in the U.S. last year. And that’s a lot of solar workers: about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford and P&G. 

https://www.aei.org/publication/inconvenient-energy-fact-it-takes-79-solar-workers-to-produce-same-amount-of-electric-power-as-one-coal-worker/print/

In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas), that sector produced nearly one-third (almost as much as gas) of U.S. electricity last year. 

In 2016, the coal sector generated an average of 7,745 megawatt hours of electric power per worker, more than twice the 3,812 megawatt hours of electricity generated per natural gas worker, and 79 times more electric power per worker than the solar industry, which produced only 98 megawatt hours of electricity per worker. Therefore, to produce the same amount of electric power as just one coal worker would require two natural gas workers and an amazingly-high 79 solar workers.” It does not seem that AOC thought this out before she read her TelePrompTer about the Green New Deal. 

In Virginia, Spotsylvania, Chesterfield, Accomack and now Culpeper, solar providers have set up shop with help from generous subsidies. The proposed solar facility in Culpeper, operated by Cricket Solar of California, will install panels on 800 acres of agricultural land and provide 80 megawatts of power. Who will produce our food each time agricultural land is taken out of commission for solar panels and wind turbines? Socialist co-operatives here or China? https://freebeacon.com/issues/virginias-push-for-solar-panels-offers-few-rays-of-hope/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=0af9d2d776-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_05_08_19_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-0af9d2d776-45619005

There is no other country in the world where I can seek the best health care right now, go to a hospital and be treated the same day, have medical tests relatively quickly, buy what I want to eat right now, cooked or uncooked, find a pharmacy open that would fill the prescription I need, walk into an abundant grocery store at all hours of the day and night and find what I want to buy without standing in line and fighting other shoppers for the last potato. There are myriads of choices provided by capitalist supply and demand, by freedom, by mobility, by entrepreneurship, and by the much-maligned fossil fuels which brought us out of the dark ages of poverty, want, and disease and into a successful western civilization that everyone envies and risks life and limb to get here.

But we should not let reality and truth stand in the way of corrupt politics. Every time AOC opens her mouth to speak, more pearls of communist wisdom roll out onto the floor. They spread in all corners of the country and disappear, never to be found again. Her socialist ardent supporters just hear “free, free, free for all.”

Virginia, Fairfax County, Education, and Trailers

Virginia is an interesting educational and political study in how to destroy a formerly well-off state with tolerance and multi-culturalism dictated by politicians from Richmond and Washington, D.C. It is a microcosm of the civilization suicide that is taking place in Europe.

Virginia is not very far behind the Seattle School District that sent a letter recently to teachers asking them to bless Muslim students in Arabic during Ramadan. Virginia obsesses over accommodating those who will not give an inch in their quest to be a specially protected class.

The Guardian wrote that “Virginia students learn in trailers while the state offers Amazon huge tax breaks.” And the unhappy teachers went on strike in January 2019 to express their dissatisfaction with what they saw as low pay, $9,000 less than the national average, while the state of Virginia was so generous to Amazon. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/27/virginia-teachers-strike-amazon-tax-breaks?CMP=share_btn_fb The Washington Post published data from the National Education Association that the average K-12 teacher earned $58,353 in 2016-2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/03/05/how-much-or-little-teachers-earn-state-by-state/?noredirect=on

According to the Guardian, “more than 22,000 students in Fairfax county [the third richest county in America] receive their education in cheaply constructed plywood trailers, often with visible signs of green mold, like those parked next to the baseball fields next to McClean High School.”

McClean is a rich area in NOVA where the average homes cost over a million dollars. The property tax base to help fund public schools is thus very large.

Quoting school board member Ryan McElveen, the Guardian wrote, “Our staff often likes to say that Fairfax Public schools is the largest trailer dealer on the east coast. We own 820 trailers, more than any other entity on the entire east coast.”

Gov. Ralph Northam proposed to increase the education budget by approximately $270 million. Teachers objected to Northam’s proposed $750 million expenditure to lure Amazon to build its second HQ in Virginia, while classrooms were overcrowded, necessitating the use of trailers.

Why is there such an overcrowding in northern Virginia’s schools?  It is certainly not because Americans are having more babies, far from it, it is because illegal aliens have so many anchor babies that we are educating for free.

Educators are the first to push the liberal agenda of flooding the country with illegals whose children must be educated in their own native language, often dialects that require financial investing in specialized translators, teachers, textbooks, classes, and special tutoring, at the expense of American children who must learn in trailers and make do with less.

These new illegal arrivals must be also be fed at taxpayers’ expense and illegal families must be sheltered in welfare housing and provided with everything they may need to survive, including free and expensive healthcare.

Some teachers believe that giving tax breaks to Amazon is wrong when they could teach so many more illegal aliens’ children instead and house their families at the expense of the Virginian taxpayers.

Local and very vocal liberals in Fairfax county, who push for more school funding, argue that “building new schools could actually create more jobs than bringing in Amazon.” More schools mean more teachers and a lower teacher-to-student ratio argues Lee Carter, a Democrat Socialist state delegate from Manassas.

Northern Virginia (NOVA) with its progressive and corrupt political atmosphere is the reason why the entire state of Virginia is turning socialist. Republicans barely control the House of Delegates by only one delegate and the Senate by two Senators.

The NOVA population is composed mostly of federal government workers from Washington, D.C. and an ever-growing and very large contingent of illegal and legal aliens who vote Democrat as a block because they want to turn Virginia into the socialist paradise they’ve fled from.

Fairfax County Public School has adopted highly controversial curricula on sex education, sidestepping the important role of parents to teach their own children about human sexuality.  FCPS agenda was transgenderism and co-ed bathrooms.

The state education budget and local property taxes fund the public schools but is the money being used judiciously?

FCPS, with its budget of $3 billion annually, focuses more on globalism, with graduates who have “…attributes of Communicator, Collaborator, Ethical and Global Citizen, Creative and Critical Thinker, and Goal-Directed and Resilient Individual.”

Next year’s proposed budget increase of $117 million will “provide excellence and equity, hiring more staff to teach 1,000 fewer students.” According to Arthur Purves, “FCPS has a Chief Equity Officer but not much equity.” https://thebullelephant.com/Fairfax-county-public-schools-excellence-for-a-few/

Bicycles and The Great Leap Backwards

Photo: Wikipedia, Danish female bike

Americans hold constitutional elections in order to choose, among many positions in government, the local mayor. But a non-governmental organization (NGO), Bycs, which created the bicycle mayors’ program, wants to change that. How can an unelected ‘mayor’ be constitutional? “It is nice to have one, centralized voice,” … “And, honestly especially in the U.S., it’s so much easier to do as a party of one, than a committee, meeting, month to month. It’s a great way to speed things up. We have to catch up, to provide alternative transportation.” I’ve heard that ‘party of one’ tune before under totalitarian communism. https://bycs.org/

The nonprofit Bycs “wants to use the network to aim for an ambitious goal of moving half of all local trips to bikes by 2030 as a way to address climate change, air pollution, health, and other urban challenges.” https://www.technocracy.news/sustainable-mobility-half-of-all-city-trips-by-bicycle-by-2030/

Adam Stones, strategy and communications director for Bycs, advocates to use the Dutch bike control experiment around the world by 2030 in line with the 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals of U.N.’s Agenda 2030.

The Dutch who already have a bike-obsessed culture, have chosen in 2016 a “bicycle mayor – a person who serves as a connecting point between city departments, nonprofits, and other bike advocates in order to make Amsterdam even more bikeable.”

The NGO Bycs wants to bring “bike mayors to 200 cities by the end of 2019. And they are already in nearly 30 cities, from São Paulo to Istanbul.”

Can you not envision thousands of people biking to work on the busy interstates that crisscross our nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs? And these bikers would try to take their children to school, “bike-pooling,” lugging sacks of groceries on a bike, carrying everything else home on a bike, including perhaps perishables such as ice cream?

It would be so much fun biking in snow and on ice, especially for people with prosthetics, artificial knees, and other handicaps. It is indeed fun to have the option to bike in some picturesque areas, but the bike lanes are springing up all over the nation to the tune of billions of dollars, yet I see scarce few actually riding a bike on them because Americans love their cars and the freedom of mobility it affords.

Bikers can only travel so far, maybe 15 miles, if they are in good physical shape and young, before collapsing from the effort. Perhaps the idea is to keep people close to home so that the land can be re-wilded and protected from the encroaching humans.

The millennials who helped push this bike craze are actually driving alone to work in their expensive electric cars with a smug look on their faces and no idea where the electricity that powers their vehicles is coming from other than recharging stations popping up like mushrooms overnight, taking up parking spaces for the handicapped. They just know that they are saving the planet from an impending manufactured climate doom caused by the greedy humanity itself.

On the other hand, if they are unable to bike, humanity should move into the U.N. planned high-rise, walkability-designed urban areas, where everyone would be neatly stacked and packed in high-rises within five minutes walking or public transportation distance from home, work, shopping, and entertainment. Such a shrunken megalopolis would be a dream for globalists to control the population. To me, it will be The Great Leap Backward, the American version of China’s failed Great Leap Forward to total global control of the population.

We had public transportation under communism, only the elites had cars, and we never got to travel very far, only as far as our biking, walking, buses, or the train took us, if we could afford the tickets that were already subsidized by the government. The salaries were so low and equal, that things had to be subsidized by the communist government for people to afford basics such as transport, shelter, and food.

The bike “craze” began with United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals, specifically number 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/goal-11-sustainable-cities-and-communities/

If your roads are narrower, bike paths are springing up alongside roads, and parking lots have been taken out of existence, it is owed to the work of the “civil society” of the United Nations and its NGOs staffed by Americans who just know what is better for the planning of your community, where you live, where you go to school, what you study, where you go for recreation, and how you live your life in general and do business.

United Nation’s NGOs comprise a shadow government by proxy, unelected, but nevertheless quite powerful. Their Visioning Committees are working around the country to change your local and state governments and their zoning laws.

The 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals were adopted at the U.N. Summit on September 25, 2015, committing the signatory countries to a world of “sustainable and equitable future” as part of U.N. Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. It is a multi-faceted, well-moneyed effort to globalize the world for better control and redistribution of wealth under the aegis of the United Nations. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/

The SD brainwashing encompasses everything around you. In April 2019 National Geographic dedicated an entire special edition to walkable Cities of the Future, sustainable land, rethinking cities (whose vision?), and Urban Hubs. “In a densely developed hub, sustainable land use within and outside its borders helps people thrive by providing water, food, and recreation. High-capacity transit reduces emissions and speeds commute times.”

The progressive argument is that an urban area is a good and safe place to raise a family. Is a large metropolis a nice place to raise children and a better place for them to live? As a parent, my answer is NO. I prefer country living and suburbia, much maligned by the progressive left as “suburban sprawl.”

Hong Kong, pictured in the Nat Geo next to the verdant Victoria Park, with its other vast and undeveloped land areas while people live-in high-rise spaces the size of cages like animals, is certainly no urban model to emulate.

Susan Goldberg questioned in National Geographic, “Should we live in dense urban areas with public transit and walkable amenities? In sprawling suburbs created by our infatuation with the car? In high rises like those envisioned by Le Corbusier, now dotting urban districts across China?” Some of these buildings, malls, and towns in China are still empty.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect and Bauhaus urban planner, considered the pioneer of modernism, argued in 1925 that everything on the right bank of the river Seine in Paris should be demolished – statues, homes, monuments, streets, and identical glass towers, 650 feet tall, should be built instead. A quarter of a mile apart, these towers would be surrounded by grass for pedestrians and elevated highways for automobiles.

Referring to his perceived war between “lovers of antiquities” and “progressive thinkers,” he allegedly stated that “progress is achieved through experimentation; the decision will be awarded on the field of battle of the ‘new.’” https://www.famous-architects.org/le-corbusier/

If we look at the amount of money and effort, mass indoctrination, including the most recent video, spent by the United Nations, academia, public schools, mass media, Hollywood, environmentalists, and “civil society” (I am still not sure to this day who the members of this ‘civil society’ are, although I have a pretty good guess – the globalist elite who know better what is good for us, like a kind and benevolent dictator.) to bring about world-wide compliance with its 1992 Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, it seems that we are at war with the United Nation’s progressive plan called Agenda 2030.  This new “social contract” with 17 SD goals that no American citizen has voted on, “is good for us,” assures us Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. https://youtu.be/ElJDadfkhEo

The stakes are high – will we be able to keep our much envied “antiquated” American way of life, our very freedom and mobility which defines who we are?

Recycling to a Fault

Photo: Ileana Johnson

2018

Roy, an elderly gentleman in his 80s, is a Democrat from a bygone era, when being an American was a source of pride. He grew up very poor and never forgot the value of a penny. He became the proverbial penny-pincher.

He cracked me up when he told me he cut the top of his socks off because they constricted the circulation around his ankles, a sensitive area stemming from removal of veins in the area. Why spend money on a new pair of short socks when an old cut-off one could do just fine?

On our last visit, he served us birthday cake to honor Tim and me. The plates were elegant square shimmery white with matching forks. Knowing that he would never buy such expensive plastic, I wondered where they came from.

After inquiries, I found out that they were the plates from his granddaughter's wedding the previous year which he had carefully carried home, reused and washed numerous times.

After I ate my slice of cake, I dropped the dirty plate in the trash can in the kitchen. When we were all finished, Ray retrieved my plate and washed it again, along with the rest of the trice-used plates and cutlery.

It is amazing that he has never forgotten what it was like to grow up part of the time in foster care during a time in America when we had not yet become a throw-away society.

I sympathized with him - mom and I used to wash plastic cutlery and even Styrofoam containers from McDonald's and re-used them. I felt that it was such a waste of materials.

Nobody recycled in the late 1970s because it was too expensive to do, I was told, it was cheaper to bury the trash in the city landfill. Our hometown’s junk yard tried recycling aluminum cans and used payment as an incentive.

I drove one day through the mounds of crashed old cars and twisted rusted metal to turn in my three bags of empty soda cans. Loose nails and pieces of jagged metal littered the yard everywhere. I left with $14 and a badly punctured Michelin tire that cost me a bundle to replace. But I had recycled.

While I could not forgive Roy his vote for Obama twice and for Hillary, I respected his penny-pinching and appreciation for reusing, repairing, not replacing, and recycling. A skilled handyman who could repair most things, his garage was filled wall to wall with tools and pieces of junk that might come in handy to fix something for his family or the neighbors.

P.S. Years ago, when my first husband and I got married, we visited an older lady in the country and she took us to a shed she wanted cleaned out for the spring. We found a beautiful china hutch that was discarded on one side, with beautiful carvings. The wood was discolored by time but otherwise undamaged. We asked if she was willing to part with it and she sold it to us for $25. My husband proceeded to refinish it with love as a weekend project. His best friend from high school refinished antique furniture as a hobby and taught him how to do it. When he was done, the cabinet was beautiful! I still have it to this day in my dining room. I would never part with it. They don't make such beautiful things out of wood anymore. And it still has the key and the original glass. I keep my decades old china and crystal from Romania in it and the wine glasses his grandmother received as a wedding gift in the 1920s. She has long since passed away but I remember the joy when we received the never-opened box of china and crystal that she had not unpacked since her wedding - the tissue paper was disintegrating as dust when I opened the box. She gave it to us in 1978 after our wedding. 

What Do Bernie’s Millennials Know About Socialism?

A former communist prison under dictator Ceausescu
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

Recently Bernie Sanders was asked the following question during a townhall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, by a Harvard student, Samantha Frankel-Popell, whose father had fled the former Soviet Union.

“My father’s family left Soviet Russia in 1979 fleeing from some of the very same socialist policies that you seem eager to implement in this country.” She followed up with the question, “How do you rectify your notion of Democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?”

Bernie replied, "Thank you for asking that question,” before continuing with a question himself. “Is it your assumption that I supported or believe in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union? I don’t. I never have, and I opposed it. I believe in a vigorous democracy." https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bernie-sanders-socialism-harvard-student

He cleverly tried to skirt her question by denying that he promotes soviet style socialism. Yet a video exists of him praising Soviet socialism/communism and its achievements: the public transportation system, the clean and artsy metro stations with crystal chandeliers, cheap tickets to museums and concerts, and the infamous “cultural palaces” of the young pioneers, with total indoctrination by the communist party apparatchiks. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+video+bernie+sanders+praising+soviet+accomplishments&view=detail&mid=50A4BDC800730CFFF75F50A4BDC800730CFFF75F&FORM=VIRE

I rode the public transportation system a younger Bernie Sanders is praising. The buses were old, rickety, with holes in the floorboard, allowing for choking fumes to come in. The trams, metro trains, trolleybuses, and rusty railroad trains were smelly and filled-to-capacity.  Riders were squashed like sardines.

Few could afford to purchase or own cars. It wasn’t just coming up with the money to buy an overpriced domestic vehicle and being placed on the long waiting list for years. It also depended on how well you were scored or regarded by the local Communist Party and the local Economic Police which made sure that nobody owned anything in excess of what they needed in order to be more easily controlled.

Schools gave grades for students’ behavior each semester and parents were chastised publicly in front of other parents if their children behaved in any un-socialist/un-communist way that strayed from the communist party’s collectivist rules of brainwashing.

No matter how you try to repackage socialism, Bernie, or how the liberals controlling the web twist the definition of socialism in order to confuse the useful idiots, in Marxist theory socialism is a transition state between the overthrow of capitalism and the implementation of communism. Democrat socialism is the P.C. definition of a system that robs people of initiative, independence, their worth, their wealth, and their creativity.

Using Nordic countries as examples of successful models of socialism is dishonest if not a flat-out lie. The means of production are not owned by the government in these countries, as is the case under socialism, they are owned by private companies. The government is socialistic in nature as it hands out generous welfare to the masses, welfare derived from heavy taxation of private companies and citizens.

Under socialism (see Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela), the proletariat masses have no choice but to accept the crumbs that trickle down from the benevolent government ruled with an iron fist by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Salaries are very small and everything must be subsidized by the government which in turn rations everything, food, toilet paper, electricity, water, and everything else Millennials take for granted in this country, not realizing that their abundant lifestyle is provided by the laws of supply and demand of free market capitalism.

I was a child under socialism and a young pioneer.  Membership was not voluntary; we were forced to be pioneers as part of our school curriculum. We attended plays, puppet shows, and movies that glorified the dear leader and his wife or taught us how to be good little socialists/communists. The cultural palaces for art, music, and theater, were organized places to keep young pioneers on the right track to communism.

The cost of entertainment was free or minimal, as Bernie Sanders said, $1.50. But $1.50 may have been cheap to the mind of an American like Bernie Sanders, but it was a deceptive cost since socialist/communist salaries determined by the government ran on the average $50 per month depending on the occupation. Miners, for example, were paid a little more as their jobs were very dangerous.

Bernie, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that life under socialism and communism was miserable. There is a good reason why there are so many of us who fled socialism/communism at great risk to our lives, leaving everything dear behind, family and wealth, to escape to the “free” west, specifically to the United States. Nobody in his right mind runs away from a good situation.

People are not free under socialism, Bernie. The government keeps the population imprisoned within its borders with barbed wire and soldiers armed to the teeth and ordered to shoot anyone who tries to escape across the border.

Socialists and communists were not very good environmental conservationists. Towns and nearby rivers were so heavily polluted that it only took a small spark to set a river on fire. The soot fell thick on everything and the laundry drying on the line turned from white to grey in mere hours.

The young pioneer clubs, Bernie, were indoctrination mills that raised compliant citizens and future communists. Schools and universities were places of heavy indoctrination and grooming for conformity. Universities were free but places were limited, and the progeny of the higher placed communist elites were admitted first.

Everyone was paid equally, there was no incentive to excel, and to be the best. There was no middle class at all, only the working class and the communist elites. Theater, puppetry shows, television, and movies were all subsidized by the government and had to meet their standards and criteria for communist indoctrination.

Soviet metro was and still is beautiful, with works of art but was built at the expense of cheap labor and exploitation of the proletariat who was told that they owned everything collectively. Nobody could demand a piece of this ownership ever, lest they be arrested for bourgeois demands and democracy having gone to their heads.

According to PraegerU, Bernie Sanders the socialist won more votes from Millennials during the presidential primary than Donald Trump and Hillary combined.

“The majority of Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) identify as socialist.

Nearly 70% of Millennials support a government-funded, “Medicare-for-all” healthcare system. Our kids and grandkids aren’t learning that America is a land of opportunity, a defender of freedom around the world, and a source of pride. Instead, they’re being taught that America is a land built on racism and imperialist oppression.” And more than 50% of Millennials also support the radical “Green New Deal,” which is neither new, nor green, and not a deal for any free society with a thriving economy, it is global communism.
https://secure.giveworks.net/prageru/national_petition_to_re/GOP7151

Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, spoke against socialism and explained how the free market system has lifted so many people out of poverty.

He said, “Young people especially have been indoctrinated into believing that free enterprise is immoral because it enriches the greedy and depresses the poor. Even the word ‘capitalism’ is not politically correct to use, but the reality is that the free market system has created the biggest middle class population in the world and, while some may say socialism is well-intentioned, the fact is it robs people of their independence, their dignity, and their finances leading to government dependence, suppression of ideas, and lower standards of living for those under its thumb.https://therightscoop.com/it-pains-me-to-see-people-in-this-country-glorifying-socialism-co-founder-of-home-depot-speaks-out-against-socialism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRightScoop+%28The+Right+Scoop%29

And, should you still heed Bernie Sanders’ praise of socialism and decide to vote for his manufactured Democrat Socialism, be prepared to eat “zebras and peacocks” from the zoo because socialist central planning has not worked very well in all the countries in which it has been tried, most recently in Venezuela.