Category Archives: Communism

Updated: Chairman Anita’s ‘Mao Moment’

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Intelligence, Propaganda

Journalism just gets less inquisitive and more far-fetched and fatuous by the day. This Christian Science Monitor “writer” believes that when White House communications director Anita Dunn delivered (earlier this year) a long, labored, meaningless address to students, in which she referred to Mao Tse Tung as a favorite “philosopher”—she was merely using irony in the best of Socratic tradition.

This is insane. The woman, Dunn, was incoherent—not an individual capable of deploying subtle rhetorical devices. And she was perfectly serious. She quoted Mao’s meanderings for her sub-intelligent message, and proceeded to draw life’s lessons from the Chairman’s asinine utterance. This was for real. She had “crafted” the message.

The clip (below) was an ugly thing to behold. Like a lizard (or like Larry King), Dunn kept licking her lips and flicking her tongue as she mouthed Mao’s wisdom. Our liberal literati’s explanation? Dunn may have been speaking above Glenn’s head.

Here are the dunderhead’s exact words:

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa — not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is ‘you’re going to make choices; you’re going to challenge; you’re going to say why not; you’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.”

What bellies Dunn’s attempt at a retraction is that she coupled Mao and MT as her favorite political philosophers; she made one statement and applied it to both individuals. If she was being ironic about Mao being her Man, then she was also being ironic about Mother. The CSM writer is too stupid to analyze the simplest of texts. Moreover, if she was deploying irony, why would she deliver a lesson to her audience based on the mindless (and menacing) Mao quote? Was the “do it your own way” (à la Uncle Mao) also a twist of irony?

These days stupidity is the default position.

Update (Oct. 19): Writes Roger Kimball:

“Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not ‘progressives.’ They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.

Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer. …”

China At Sixty

Capitalism, China, Communism, History

“Assessing China at 60,” by Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera (one of the best news sources, incidentally):

Sixty years after Mao Zedong’s communists took power in Beijing, there are many reasons for China to celebrate.

China today has become the third-largest economy in the world – second, if you measure it by purchasing power parity – and is well on track to cement its place as the world’s foremost economic superpower.

And while it has been exciting to count the numbers of new millionaires – or billionaires – created every year, the country has also managed to pull 500 million of its people out of poverty over the last few decades.

Of course, we also hear much about China’s worsening wealth disparity: Not exactly everyone is sharing in the wealth.

China’s environment has paid a heavy price for economic growth.
And all these economic changes have come at a heavy price for China’s environment, in the form of dead rivers, poisoned land and toxic air.

Then there are the increasingly frequent reports of unrest and rioting. Frightening numbers of people – often in the tens of thousands – with their complaints.

After six decades of communist rule, there is much for the government to worry about.

They need to watch the mass migration of farmers who have deserted their lands to find work in the city.

There is the corruption, which many ordinary Chinese tell us is getting worse, not better.

It is a story of transformation in often too little time. For every miracle or success story, there is a counter example amongst the disenfranchised.

Growing pains

China’s rise is a complex story and often contradictory – a hallmark of the growing pains of this new world power.

The one thing that rose above all the din of contradiction, the one thing most Chinese can all agree on, is that life is better today than in the past.

On the road for our Long March series of reports, retracing a key episode in the communist’s rise to power, this is what the Chinese we met told us.

The founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949 brought an end to a bitter civil war between Mao’s communists and the nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek.

The communist’s struggle has become the stuff of lore, particularly the epic Long March. Its importance is still emphasized every day.

Turn on the TV and you will almost always come across a documentary replaying the black and white footage from the 1930s and 40s: The Red Army fighting the Japanese, the Red Army fighting the Kuomintang, communist cadres talking to the people, Mao Zedong speaking to farmers.

But, the documentaries will tell you, there was no greater historic event than the Long March.

Spreading the message

The Chinese call it “the walk that lasted 25,000 li”, that is 12,500 kilometres.

No one can confirm the actual distance of the march, but it did take two years and killed about nine out of 10 participants.

It was a military retreat from their civil war opponents, and by most circumstances would have been considered a defeat.

But it allowed the communists to spread their message across a huge swathe of China, where they won the support of the peasantry – which was, and still is, the largest demographic in the country.

It was on the backs of the farmers then, that Mao’s communists rose to power.

We started our trip in Jiangxi Province where the communists declared the Chinese Soviet.

This was their own republic, their little world where they would experiment with what they had read in books, in theory, and now implement them in real life.

But the communists did not end up spending too much time here. They would abandon their Soviet, routed by the Kuomintang army, so beginning their Long March.

Today, the town of Ruijin is as comparatively quiet as it had been back then.

We stopped by Liang Chong Deng’s family. They have always been here, generation after generation. But now, Liang told us, he is not sure how much longer the family will stay on the land.

His son and daughter, he tells us, are not farmers but work in the city. They would not know how to grow anything if they ever returned to their plot of land.

Our next stop retracing the march was Sichuan province, in China’s southwest.

By the time the Red Army reached here, half the soldiers were gone, from death, desertion or illness.

Much of Sichuan is mountainous, deeply forested and even today access is often difficult.

Years ago, the Red Army soldiers would have gone through on nothing but shoes made of straw, or barefoot, in bedraggled uniforms, hacking their way through unmarked territory.

Today, Sichuan is a major tourist area, widely known as the home of that great Chinese icon, the giant panda.

But it would have been hard for any Red Army soldier to imagine it as a friendly place.

The tribes in the area – Tibetans and a minority group known as the Yi – used to doggedly ambush the line of marchers.

Unrest

Today, Sichuan still has large Yi and Tibetan populations, but the dynamic is a very different one than that from history.

It would be difficult to recognize someone from the Yi minority – they speak Chinese like everyone else. The Tibetans are easier to identify, many of them with their prayer beads.

When Mao set out to defeat the Kuomintang, he said he also hoped to unify the country – and that meant including these so-called ethnic minorities.

Most, like the Yi, have integrated into greater China relatively easily. But the Tibetans, as we saw in the recent outbreaks of unrest, remain deeply disenchanted with Chinese rule.

Other ethnic riots earlier this year in the western region of Xinjiang, home to Muslim Uighurs, revealed that, after 60 years of communist rule, some of the most entrenched obstacles to uniting China’s people remain untackled.

The final stop on our road trip was Yan’an, the resting place for the Red Army – the end of their Long March.

Tourists today swarm the caves where Mao Zedong and other top revolutionaries used to live.

They holed up here for years, rebuilding the army and refinancing their revolution using cash earned from the region’s oil wells.

Today, the area around Yan’an remains an important source of oil to fuel China’s booming economy. Wells are visible everywhere, dotting the brown hills.

At the end of the road, you wonder if the China of today is what the first generation of revolutionaries had in mind and whether they believed that they achieved their vision of utopia back in 1949.

China as it is in 2009 would hardly be recognizable to them.

But what the early revolutionaries would certainly agree with today’s Chinese about, is that China today is a strong and powerful country and one that the rest of the world should take notice of.

Unhealthy Propaganda

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, The State

BELOW ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS, interspersed with comments, from BO’s much-anticipated address to the two chambers—an address that was, overall, thin gruel. For those who’ve switch off to preserve their health, the text to the president’s speech on “the need to overhaul health care in the United States” is here. I provided a rights-based primer in a previous post, “Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda.”

“I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” [The historical president’s quest to continue to make history …]

“There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” [Not so. See “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured.”]

“Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you’ll lose your health insurance too.” [The answer is to create the conditions for jobs in the private economy, not to kneecap job creators, Chicago style.]

“Then there’s the problem of rising costs.” [The solution is A Free Market in Medical Care, which we lack.]

“There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.”

“I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months”

“The plan I’m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals:

It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” [Only in defiance of the laws of economics.]

“First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you.

“Now, if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t currently have health insurance, the second part of this plan will finally offer you quality, affordable choices. If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage. We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange – a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices.” [About this “exchange” BO wants to breathe life into: what he’s describing is a phony “market place” brought about by flesh-and-blood central planners. If that were possible the Soviet Union would not have collapsed. Pray tell, where in the world—and in history—have command economists “designed” functioning, efficient, fair markets?]

“For those individuals and small businesses who still cannot afford the lower-priced insurance available in the exchange, we will provide tax credits, the size of which will be based on your need. And all insurance companies that want access to this new marketplace will have to abide by the consumer protections I already mentioned.”

COERCION KICKER: “individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance – just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers.” [BO forgot to mention that so-called Cadillac coverage amounting to $800,000 per annum will be taxed to the tune of 35 percent. Just saying.]

BO is nothing if not benevolent: “Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business.”

Can BO count?: “I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. … based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, we believe that less than 5% of Americans would sign up.” [And this 5 percent will pay through premiums alone for a $900 billion plan over a decade? How on earth?]

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.” [What do they know, but the CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE disagrees, writing, on June 15, 2009, that “enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010–2019 period.” Where did these professional number crunchers go wrong?]

I’m getting tired of following this fanciful fairytale. So let me end my service to BAB readers with one more fabulous assertion by BO: “Most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent – but spent badly – in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit.”

THE PREMISE OF THE ABOVE being that the government, which is responsible for the waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid and the VA system, will also be in charge of eliminating the same features of these state-run systems.

Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda

BAB's A List, Communism, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Objectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

As valid today as it was when it was first written for the occasion of Hillary Healthcare, Dr. George Reisman’s 1994 essay, “THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, is a must read in anticipation of Obama’s obfuscating oratory tonight. As Dr. Reisman puts it, “It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis.”

Begin with the premise undergirding the Obama argument:

“For over a century, virtually all proposals for economic or social reform have been based on the thoroughly mistaken philosophical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, and have aimed at the ultimate achievement of a socialist society, in the belief that socialism represented the most rational and moral system of mankind’s social organization. On the basis of this conviction, individual freedom was progressively restricted and the power of the state progressively enlarged. Individual freedom—laissez faire capitalism—was assumed to be a system of chaos and of the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. The onslaught of the socialists (who in this country call themselves “liberals”)—the step-by-step achievement of their political agenda—encountered virtually no philosophical resistance. Not surprisingly, again and again, the “liberals” defeated their ill-equipped conservative adversaries, who at most could only delay their advance. The victories of the “liberals” were inevitable because it was a battle of men with the seeming vision of a better world that could be achieved by means of intelligent human effort based on a body of ideas (however mistaken those ideas were), against men who, while they valued the relatively free world they saw around them, had no significant philosophical or theoretical knowledge of how to defend it.”

Move on to an understanding of your rights. Who exactly is violating these immutable rights?

“… the right to medical care does not mean a right to medical care as such, but to the medical care one can buy from willing providers. One’s right to medical care is violated not when there is medical care that one cannot afford to buy, but when there is medical care that one could afford to buy if one were not prevented from doing so by the initiation of physical force. It is violated by medical licensing legislation and by every other form of legislation and regulation that artificially raises the cost of medical care and thereby prevents people from obtaining the medical care they otherwise could have obtained from willing providers. The precise nature of such legislation and regulation we shall see in detail, in due course.”

“This then is the concept of rights, and specifically of rights to things, that I uphold. One’s rights to things are rights only to things one can obtain in free trade, with the voluntary consent of those who are to provide them. All such rights are predicated upon full respect for the persons and property of others.”

The solution? A Free Market in Medical Care:

“To be successful, such reform must approach the problem of bringing down medical costs from two sides: on the one side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in demand for medical care fostered by the alleged need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of costs to pay for it. On the other side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in medical costs caused both by the alleged need-based right to medical care and by medical licensing. Everything that rolls back the artificial increase in demand for medical care will, of course, operate to reduce medical costs, but there also needs to be more direct action as well. This is necessary both in order to speed up the process of cost reduction and insofar as the artificial increase in demand for medical care has led to increased government intervention into medical care and to irrational standards of medical malpractice. These latter will not go away just by means of reducing the artificial increase in demand for medical care. Nor will medical licensing and its contribution to the high cost of medical care.”

“Approaching the matter from both sides will make possible a process of mutually self-reinforcing cumulative success in bringing down medical costs. That is, not only will the rollback of the artificial increase in the demand for medical care bring down the cost of medical care, but everything that serves directly to bring down the cost of medical care will make such rollback all the more likely.”

READ the entire piece.