Yes, those are people. Huddled masses of Africans yearning to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, there to breathe free.*

If they can make it to Sweden, they will be paid by the Swedes to live there. Because the Swedes are nice people.

Nice people without a future.

Sweden will soon be so overloaded with migrants that it will sink – financially – beneath the weight.

But apparently the Swedes can’t see that. Or if they can, they are willing to go under rather than stop being nice people.

This is from the Sweden Report:

The past few weeks have been filled with debate about the deaths of migrants crossing over from Africa in search of a better life. Since the coast guard off the European countries are obligated to rescue ships in danger, the smugglers pack people onto unsafe wrecks and send them off to be rescued. Inevitably, some sink before the coast guard reaches them. … Is it Europe’s fault? …

Some argue that these are desperate people fleeing war. … . But when the person has reached safe haven in a peaceful country and yet continues to travel, the argument no longer holds water. For example, the number of people fleeing Gambia is on the rise. So they cross the border to Senegal, a democratic country at relative peace. But instead of stopping there, they choose to travel through Senegal, Mauritania, Algeria, and then get on a dinky boat to reach Europe. Are they still fleeing for their lives at that point?

For the yes-side of the European fault discussion, we have the honey pot aspect. Here is where Sweden plays a major role. Two years ago it became official policy that anyone claiming to be Syrian or Eritrean was owed automatic permanent residency with all welfare perks that come with it. ID is not required; you merely have to make the claim and present a semi-plausible story. It would be hard to come up with a better incentive to the world’s poor seeking a better life. All you have to do is get to Swedish soil, and you’re set for life with a standard of living previously unimagined. …

The number of confirmed deaths on the Mediterranean has quadrupled since 2008. This year is predicted to be a record-breaker, with an estimated million migrants waiting to cross on the African side. The first few months of 2015 has already clocked in 30 times the deaths of the same period in 2014. …

So Europe has a problem … [The solution could be] to increase coast guard presence in the Mediterranean to turn back boats to Africa, while removing the incentives for attempting the journey to begin with. Makes perfect sense to 28 of the 29 EU members.

But of course, the world’s Humanitarian Superpower doesn’t want anything to do with that approach. “Sweden shall fight for establishing legal ways into Europe!” said prime minister Löfven in the parliament EU committee. In other words, the Swedish government wants to open up for asylum application at the embassies and consulates around the world.

Now, combine this with [the fact] that Sweden now considers poverty a de facto grounds for asylum. Basically anybody worse off than a Swede in any way is to be let in, period. …

The rest of Europe wants to shut the door and remove the incentives for risking life and limb crossing the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Sweden wants to open up for everybody in the whole world to apply for asylum, based on their generous criteria where almost everybody gets approved.

There are an estimated 2.5 billion people living in poverty in the world. India alone has a few hundred million living in absolute squalor. Perhaps Löfven should use India as a test balloon and start an airlift of, say, 100 Boeing 747s at 500 each per day. That’s 50,000 poor but happy Indians arriving at Arlanda airport every day to be absorbed by the country of less than 10 million. 

Let’s give it a month. If everything works out, he can go global with this inspiring initiative to end the world’s ills by bringing them all to Sweden.

 

* The author of the article we quote, Caligula, has kindly informed us that this picture, which accompanied his article, is from the Balkan wars of the 1990s with people going to Italy.We apologize to our readers for our error, but will leave the photo in place because as a picture of too many people trying to get on a ship to go away from where they are and get to somewhere better, it is impressive.

A 15-year-old boy, the son of Obama devotees, was visiting the teenage children of one of our editors. He was thin, pale, sensitive, well-mannered and articulate. When invited to stay to dinner his immediate reply was, “No, thank you, I‘m a vegetarian.” He was assured that there were vegetables, salads and fruit on the menu. Rather reluctantly he sat down and spooned some food on to his plate. He explained that he had become vegetarian because he thought it wrong to kill animals for food. He felt very bad about the suffering of animals at the hands of human beings.

“And before you ask,” he went on, “I do not usually wear leather. It’s true that I’m wearing leather shoes today, but I know who produces them. It’s a small group of craftsmen who’re careful to get the leather from a place where the animals are well cared for, roam freely, and are killed humanely. I make sure that none of the things I buy is made by exploited workers.”

He went on to list other concerns of his. People on minimum wages were not being paid enough to live on. Illegal immigrants were unable to get health care. Blacks were perpetually discriminated against in all walks of life. Corporations were the curse of the earth. It was horrible that some people were rich while others were poor. America bullied other nations.

By the time everyone got up from the table, he hadn’t eaten more than two or three mouthfuls.

His hosts wondered if his parents were aware of the heavy burden of guilt and shame they were laying upon on him – no doubt reinforced at his public school – and whether they had noticed how severely he was punishing himself.

The poor kid felt bad about being well housed and provided for. He felt bad about being an American. He felt bad about being white. It seemed that he even felt bad about being a member of the human race.

How many millions of children are there now who are like this boy?

Raising generations that blame and despise themselves and their exceptionally bountiful country is surely the worst crime of the Left in America.

Today we re-discovered a 2012 essay, by the economist Steven Plaut, on the Bolsheviks who took power so disastrously in Russia in 1917.

The essay is titled: Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?

We choose these passages to quote, but the whole thing needs to be read here.

As great believers in Marxist theology, [the Bolsheviks] advocated the imposition by the “proletariat” of urban workers of “its” will upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who constituted the bulk of the population.  Even if the Bolshevik party could seriously be thought to represent the urban “proletariat,” they would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small portion of Russian society. … 

The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests of this minority “class” over the interests of the bulk of Russian society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire). …

The Bolsheviks … claimed to represent “the working class” of urban workers, but never considered it necessary to allow those same members of the “proletariat” a say in what they themselves considered their “class interests” to be.  The communist party leaders claimed to represent the proletariat automatically, supernaturally, by dint of their having studied Marx and Engels.  Under their theology they could automatically divine from the dusty 80 year old writings of Marx what served the interests of the Russian “working class,” without having to ask any actual workers, and in most cases without having to engage in actual work.  Party leaders, led by Lenin and Trotsky, lived bourgeois lives even in the most difficult days of the Russian Civil War, often living in luxurious royal apartments inside the Kremlin (which had been the royal residence before the Revolution).  Soviet leaders were attended by large numbers of servants, and Trotsky himself never went anywhere during the Civil War without both his large flock of servants and a 35-member military band.   Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky in particular) generally had never done a day of honest labor in their lives in any factory or farm; their entire “careers” consisting of political activism.

The Bolsheviks believed that they could divine the answers to what the “workers” collectively needed in much the same way that Church clergy could conjure up the agenda of God, by reading the holy scriptures.   And like other manifestations of theology, the Bolsheviks tended to bicker and break up into small factions over minor questions of belief.  Like in the Church, the factionalism was suppressed by means of the proclamation of official dogma approved by the party’s Pope.  It was the beginning of the thought police system, later perfected by Mao.

In the case of communists, these scriptures meant Marx and Engels, and later Lenin.  The problem of course was that Marx and Engels never spelled out the nitty gritty details of what “workers” would need, and basically had no understanding whatsoever of economics.  They can hardly be excused for this ignorance on grounds of writing before the advent of modern economic understanding, because it was already well on the course of development at that time.

As just one example of the problem, should the price of shoes in a “workers’ state” be high in order to benefit shoe workers producing shoes, or low to benefit workers who are consumers?  And if the representatives of the proletariat cannot make up their minds about the price of shoes, then how the Devil can they decide what constitutes “worker interest” in thousands of other dilemmas.  Asking the workers themselves what they wanted was quickly ruled out by the Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary nonstarter.

The solution of the early Soviet regime was essentially to suppress and terrorize urban workers, not just the peasants. …

In fact, the “alienation” of the “urban workers” by the party had occurred even earlier.  The Bolshevik coup and the storming of the Winter Palace were uprisings of the “working class” only in party mythology.  The bulk of those rising up in support of the Bolsheviks were soldiers in the Czarist or Kerenski armies, who supported the party because of the promise by Lenin to surrender to the Central powers and end all fighting and mobilization of troops.

The Bolshevik banner may have featured the hammer of the urban worker with the sickle of the peasant, but at the time of the Revolution it was little more than a party of disgruntled soldiers and sailors, most from rural background, reluctant to be sent back to the World War I front to defend Russia.  Their opportunistic support for the Bolsheviks largely vanished in thin air as soon as the party tried to mobilize them and send them out to fight the “whites” during the civil war.  Trotsky was forced to recruit ex-czarist officers to serve as commanders in the Red Army.

The main groups of soldiers supporting the party with enthusiasm were non-Russians desiring the end of Russian domination over their native lands, like the brigades of Latvian riflemen who served as Lenin’s praetorian guards.  By 1921, the same Kronstadt sailors who had been critical in bringing the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 were shooting them and organizing a massive mutiny, brutally suppressed by the communists.  The suppression of the rebellion led Whittaker Chambers to label bolshevism a form of fascism … 

Bolshevik thinking in the early days carried strong features of theology.  The Bolsheviks believed that if they were to follow the precepts of Marx to the letter, and pronounce the correct incantations, then magic would take place and socialist revolutions would spring up all over the world like adorable leprechauns.  This voodoo Marxism eventually led to the rise of Stalin and totalitarian “socialism in one country”.  And an ice pick in the skull of Trotsky.

Most Bolshevik leaders had no skills or experience in government administration, management, business, or anything else.  Their only claim to legitimacy was their assertion that they understood the needs of the “proletariat”.  Trotsky believed in command control and central “planning” of the economy until his last breath, and he was hardly alone.  Within days of seizing power in their coup d’etat, the Bolshevik leaders were seeking to impose their “dictatorship of the proletariat”, by which they meant the dictatorship of those party officials, more often than not from middle class backgrounds, claiming to represent the proletariat.  The Russian economy imploded under their rule.  Output of Russian factories and mines in 1921 was only a seventh of what it had been under the Czar in 1913.

Their understanding of foreign powers and diplomacy was even more pathetic than their ignorance of economics, and was also dominated by belief in magic.  During the first years of the Soviet regime, its leaders quite seriously expected communist revolutions to break out all over Europe.  And they were truly surprised when none did, except pathetic attempts – quickly suppressed – to install bolshevism in Germany and Hungary.

Part of their problem was that Marx and Engels were themselves wrong with regard to just about everything.  They were wrong, first and foremost, with regard to the claim that there exists some sort of monolithic “working class” with some sort of uniform set of “class interests.”   Urban workers share no common interest, as the above example involving shoe prices illustrates.   Urban workers indeed were a “class” with a common interest only in the most tautological sense, only in the sense that all those assigned to any “class” would favor increases in the incomes and wealth for all members of that “class.”   By the same token, people with curly hair constitute a “class,” because any proposal to raise incomes for all those with curls would be supported by them.   But regarding any other issue that would arise, the curly headed would have no common interest.  Ditto for urban workers.  And in the exact same sense, there is no capitalist class.  An assembly of the “capitalist class” would similarly be incapable of agreeing over whether shoe prices should be high or low.

And just why were urban “workers” even considered to be politically superior to everyone else in society?  Marx, Engels and the Soviet leadership had great difficulty conceiving of anyone doing productive work unless they were making “things”.  And heavy “things” were more valuable, important, and productive than light “things”.  Certainly producing services was not understood by them as productive labor, explaining why the quality of services of all sorts in the Soviet block remained abysmal all the way down to the fall of communism.

But just what was a “worker”?   Do not bankers and teachers and dentists and engineers and pharmacists work?   In many cases, they work longer hours than factory workers.  Marx and Engels had insisted that urban factory workers must seize political control of society, and they must do so by means of a dictatorship by the party claiming to speak in their name.  In any case, Marx and Engels were pretty sure that peasants did not really provide important “work”.  After all, they just produce food.  So they need not really be part of any revolutionary regime.

Peasant reluctance to deliver food products to the urban “masses” without getting paid was “counter-revolutionary” and could be resolved by starving them to death, terrorizing them, and locking them up in non-productive collective farms.  There food production would prove too low even to feed the peasants themselves, let alone export food to the cities. …

At least in the early stages of the “Revolution”, [the Bolsheviks] were truly captivated by utopian delusions.  The problem of all utopians is that they advocate systems and ideas that can only work with imaginary idyllic humans, but never with real human beings.  When they discover that real human beings refuse to knuckle under and behave according to utopian expectations, the utopianists respond with violent rage.  The greatest strength of capitalism is that it actually works with real human beings, people who are lazy, base, narcissistic, self-indulgent, foul-smelling, mean-spirited, and unsophisticated.  Capitalism does not require idyllic fictional humans in order for it to work.

The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians.  The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists.  The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.

To our suspicious mindset, the term “non-profit” is a red flag, signaling the presence of sentimental claptrap likely to be covering up a crooked scheme.

When the name Clinton is associated with it, our suspicion turns to certainty.

The Clinton Foundation has spawned many a “non-profit initiative”. One of them – acronym CHAI – allows  the charitable Clintons to take care of the health of the human race. Remember, Bill Clinton feels everybody’s pain.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Clinton Foundation and its major health charity have raked in more than $7 million from the U.S. government in recent years …

Those millions are tax dollars of course.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), chaired by Bill Clinton and run by the former president’s long-time associate Ira Magaziner, has received $6,010,898 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) since 2010. CHAI, the biggest arm of the Clinton family’s charitable efforts, accounting for 60 percent of all spending, received $3,193,500 in fiscal years 2010, 2011, and 2012, according to federal contracts, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The organization received an additional $2,817,398 from the CDC in FYs 2013, 2014, and 2015.

The grants, including $200,000 awarded as recently as January, have gone to CHAI’s Global AIDS program, and are filed under “Global Health and Child Survival”.  The CDC is listed as a $1 to $10 million contributor to CHAI, according to its donor list released earlier this month.

Why should a US government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, channel its aid for AIDS through a Clinton charity? 

Why should the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) – which is on that donor list (which itself rewards perusal) – need to do so?

Or the African Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology? Wouldn’t you expect such an institution to be a recipient of charity rather than a giver of it?

The Boston-based health arm of the Clinton Foundation has come under scrutiny for failing to disclose donations from foreign governments — in violation of a pledge Clinton made to the Obama administration before she assumed office as secretary of state.

A Reuters report found that the [Clinton] health initiative stopped making its annual disclosure in 2010 and that “no complete list of donors to the Clintons’ charities has been published” since. The group only recently published a partial donor list, which its spokesperson Maura Daley told Reuters “made up for” CHAI’s “oversight” of failing to meet the disclosure agreement. …

A mere momentary slip on a busy day.

CHAI received hundreds of millions from foreign nations between 2009 and 2014, including: the United Kingdom ($79.7 million), Australia ($58.6 million), Norway ($38.1 million), Canada ($12.1 million), Ireland ($11.7 million), Sweden ($7.2 million), and New Zealand ($1.2 million).

Why should the governments of the UK, Australia, Norway, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and New Zealand – all of which have departments responsible for providing foreign aid – channel their aid for AIDS through a Clinton charity? 

The Boston Globe found that foreign donations “sharply accelerated” to CHAI when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state.

“Government grants, nearly all from foreign countries, doubled to $55.9 million in 2013 from $26.7 million in 2010, according to the records,” the report said.

The Clinton Foundation is a money-sponge, soaking up cash from all over the world. Into what buckets is it squeezed out?  

The health initiative broke off into a nonprofit separate from the Clinton Foundation in 2010, though it is still chaired by Bill and Chelsea Clinton.

The charities have remained intertwined. CHAI received a $2 million cash grant from the Clinton Foundation for “Haiti relief,” according to the group’s 2013 tax filing. It received a $4 million cash grant from the foundation for “program service” in 2012.

CHAI’s chief executive officer and vice chairman, Ira Magaziner … a long time associate of the Clintons … was paid $415,000 in salary and consulting fees from the Clinton Foundation in 2013, according to Politico. Bruce Lindsey, Bill Clinton’s longtime lawyer and chairman of the board of the Clinton Foundation, was the highest paid official at CHAI, paid $398,159 in salary and benefits in 2013 as a board member.

Yet –

CHAI’s website says they are a “frugal” charity that focuses on saving lives, rather than “compensating ourselves excessively”. 

So what exactly are the charitable grants provided by CHAI spent on? How does CHAI “save lives”?

Let’s see. In Ethiopia, for instance –

CHAI’s spokesperson, Maura Daley, said that taxpayer funding to her organization is being provided by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and distributed through the CDC for AIDS work in Ethiopia. … She said the funding is going towards enrolling hospital CEOs in masters programs for hospital management. …

To repeat: the money is “going towards enrolling hospital CEOs in master programs for hospital management”. Wow!

Aside from millions given to the health initiative, the Clinton Foundation itself has received more than $1.4 million in U.S. taxpayer funding from federal agencies and the 2009 stimulus law.

The Clinton Foundation lists several state and federal agencies as financial contributors, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA is listed as contributing between $1,001 and $5,000, as is an agency entitled the “Office of Minority Health and Human Services”. The Free Beacon was unable to determine what this donation referred to, or which federal or state office it came from.

The Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Minority Health (OMH) was unable to locate any donation to the Clinton Foundation. The Office of Minority Health and Human Services, a state agency in Nebraska that recently changed its name to the Office of Health Disparities and Health Equity, said the donation could not have come from their office because they do no solicit or issue funding.

The EPA did not return request for comment.

State agencies in Arkansas have also given financial contributions to the Clinton Foundation, according to the organization’s website.

The Arkansas Minority Health Commission gave between $1,001 and $5,000. Michael Knox, executive director of the Arkansas Minority Health Commission, told the Free Beacon that the donation was for the Clinton Center’s annual “Head of the Class Bash” in June 2011 that paid for “car seat inspections, immunizations and health screenings, and backpacks with school supplies to the children of Arkansas.”

Car seat inspections? Backpacks with school supplies for children? Why should a state agency, established and funded to deal with health care, pay the Clinton Foundation to pay for immunizations and health screenings? Why should it pay the Clinton Foundation to pay for any of these things?   

The Arkansas Energy Office is also listed as donating between $500,001 and $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, though the contribution actually came from spending authorized by the 2009 stimulus law.

Scott Hardin, director of communications for the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, told the Free Beacon that the Clinton Foundation received nearly $800,000 from his office, through a grant funded by the stimulus.

“The Energy Office distributed more than $50 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds a few years ago and the money provided to the Clinton Foundation was part of this effort,” he said.

The grant, amounting to $758,123, was provided to the Clinton Foundation in October 2009, Hardin said.

The funds went to the Clinton Foundation’s Home Energy Affordability Loan (HEAL) program, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings through “energy-efficiency and monitoring strategies.”

“Monitoring strategies”. Wow again.

The project is listed as creating zero jobs.

So no one is actually doing any monitoring? Or even working out “monitoring strategies”?

The Free Beacon found one case where an agency was listed as a Clinton Foundation contributor, even though it has never donated to the organization.

The Arkansas Department of Human Services is currently listed for a donation between $1,000 and $5,000. However, the state agency never paid the Clinton Foundation, and only helped host a conference at the Clinton Center. The state agency nonetheless received a gift receipt from the Clinton Foundation. …

The Clinton Foundation did receive $1,350 from the U.S. taxpayers, but through another federal agency: the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Amy Webb, director of communications for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, told theFree Beacon that her agency helped the Clinton Foundation host an event honoring AmeriCorps in Little Rock, Ark. last year.

It “helped the Clinton Foundation host an event” – an event to honor AmeriCorps. We repeat because we are trying to get our heads round the extent of the Clintons’ benevolence. This particular donation to help the charitable Clinton Foundation was provided by (among others) a Division of Community Service and Non-profit Support, who received it from the Corporation for National and Community Service. –

“Our Division of Community Service and Non-profit Support, along with other local entities, co-hosted an AmeriCorps 20th Anniversary event at the Clinton Center in September 2014,” she said. “Via a grant, the Corporation for National and Community Service provided our agency with $1,350 to help cover costs associated with that event.”

Webb provided an invoice from the Clinton Foundation detailing the $1,350 charge, which she said was for refreshments.

“The money was not a donation to the Clinton Foundation,” Webb said. “In January, we incorrectly received a ‘gift receipt’ for a donation for the money we used for that event, and we notified the foundation of that error.”

In all, state and federal agencies have contributed between $1,402,187 and $1,414,184 directly to the Clinton Foundation.

Together with the health initiative, taxpayers have contributed roughly $7.4 million to Clinton charities.

Which enroll people for courses; inspect car seats – or would if someone actually did the job; devise monitoring strategies – ditto;  and host events with refreshments bought with taxes.

Truly, the charity of the Clintons knows no bounds. Is it their goodness that brings those tears to your eyes? Or what?