What do students learn at American universities these days?

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) California division has produced a report titled “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.”

Its important finding is that the majority of teachers at the University of California, being biased to the left, indoctrinate rather than teach; and what they indoctrinate is pro-collectivist anti-American leftism.

We have reason to believe – judging by experience, and information gathered over many years – that this deplorable state of affairs is true of most of the universities of the Western world.

Larry Elder writes about the report at Townhall:

California taxpayers spend $2.8 billion to educate the more than 230,000 students at the 10 campuses that comprise the UC [University of California] system. But the report says the UC system does not help students learn how to think, but rather teaches them what to think.

And what they “learn” is that they are victims – whether of racism, sexism, classism or discrimination because of sexual orientation. Liberal profs, says the report, turn the UC campuses into “a sanctuary for a narrow ideological segment of the spectrum of social and political ideas.”

Nationwide, left-wing professors vastly outnumber conservative professors in the humanities. It isn’t even close.

The report cites several studies, including political scientist Stanley Rothman’s 1999 study: “Whether the question was posed in terms of liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans, the margins favored the former by nearly 5-to-1 in each case, and in some departments the results were overwhelming. For example, in English departments the margin was 88-to-3, and in politics 81-to-2.”

A different 2007 study, says the report, found the 5-to-1 margin between liberal versus conservative professors had become 8-to-1. Almost 20 percent of professors in social sciences and 25 percent of sociology professors self-identifies as “Marxist.”

And things are getting worse. Younger professors tend to be even more liberal than older ones. Among UC Berkeley’s associate and assistant professors, according to one study, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 49-to-1 in all departments – including sciences. When Berkeley associates and assistants replace the older professors as they retire, the extreme 8-to-1 tilt in favor of liberal profession could reach 50-to-1.

The 87-page report looked at course descriptions, books assigned, faculty’s political party registration and self-identification of ideology, and student feedback.

Students are immersed in an education that emphasizes the wrongs done to minorities, women, gays and other groups. Gender, ethnic, religious and sexual orientation grievances are highlighted as representative of an imperial, racist, exploitative capitalist superpower that continues to engage in widespread racism, sexism, homophobia and worldwide domination.

“We wuz wronged” takes center stage over a basic understanding of economics, of the concept of federalism, and of the values that turned a struggling bunch of colonies into a political and economic superpower. Indeed, the very mission statements of many departments on UC campuses stress their commitment to activism for enacting social change, or to bring about social or racial or fill-in-the-blank justice.

Take the UC Berkeley history course that majors in that field must take, “The United States from Settlement to the Civil War.” Its course description states its goals: “to understand how democratic political institutions emerged in the United States in this period in the context of an economy that depended on slave labor and violent land acquisition.”

A conservative professor — if there were any — might offer an alternative version of American history: The British colonies defied the mightiest world power by demanding and then fighting for political and religious freedom. They conceived a radical document, the United States Constitution, born out of armed revolution, where for the first time in human history, the new, imperfect country said: “The people rule. Through our Constitution, which we have amended to ensure equal rights of blacks and women, we grant our government limited, non-intrusive powers. The rest is left to the people and to the states.”

Why does this matter?

After all, students expect professors to give opinions. Surely students aren’t potted plants, and can a) read about other points of view and b) freely disagree with professors without fear of classroom ridicule or lower exam grades.

But the report says many students complain that alternative viewpoints are discouraged, scorned or dismissed, sometimes derisively. Students’ complaints to administrators are ignored.

And this is from PJ Media by Zombie:

A devastating new report issued by the National Association of Scholars …  documented with exquisite and irrefutable detail the extreme liberal bias at the University of California. However, the main problem with the NAS report … is that it’s too overwhelming and too technical to deliver the kind of emotional impact needed to sway public opinion. To drive home the point in a more personal way, the NAS report needed an introductory companion anecdote of a professor frankly confessing the rationale behind what is essentially the “theory of indoctrination.” … Professor Brown stepped into that role, unwitting though he may have been.

Let it be noted that Professor H. Douglas Brown is no wild-eyed extremist; in fact, he’s rather bland and respectable and not the most thrilling of speakers, as you will soon hear. But that’s what made his presentation so disturbing: radical and self-admittedly “subversive” attitudes that affect the future of society are discussed with matter-of-fact nonchalance. The main drawback of Professor Brown’s verbal style (at least from my point of view) is that he often resorts to the academics’ tried-and-true escape hatch, which is to rephrase statements as questions, so as to have plausible deniability if later confronted. Thus, for example, instead of just flatly saying something like “We should indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies,” he asks “Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?” and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes “Yes.”

Read the rest of this illuminating article here.

Yes, the pro-free market quotation we posted yesterday was actually from a speech by Vladimir Putin, the uncrowned Czar of Russia.

We took it from this article by Chuck Norris at Townhall:

President Barack Obama’s March 16 executive order, “National Defense Resources Preparedness” …  is a completely audacious overreach of presidential power, especially enacting peacetime martial law. …

In preparation for war (for example, with Iran) or any other national emergency, the federal government does not have the authority to take over our food and water supply, energy supplies (including oil and natural gas), technology, industry, manufacturing, transportation, health care facilities, etc.

And taking the additional preliminary steps for enacting martial law even during a time of peace is an unprecedented and reckless abuse of executive power. …

This presidential order is another sweeping power grab in a long and dangerous legacy of presidential overreaches. Our Founding Fathers never would have allowed it, and we shouldn’t, either.

As James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” explained, “the operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security.”

(It is no surprise that three early presidents — John Adams, Madison and James Monroe — issued only one executive order each. In modern times, Bill Clinton issued 364, and George W. Bush issued 291. And the king of EOs is President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who issued 3,728.)

Liberals are saying that Obama’s recent EO is merely an update of previous presidential orders. …

Many even are comparing the number of EOs issued by modern presidents as justification for Obama’s recent rash of EOs. But what’s critical with presidential EOs is not only the number of them that each president enacts but also the caliber of the power and edicts invested within each. Not all presidential executive orders are created equal, just as not all punches are the same; some are jabs, and others are packed with explosive and crushing power, damaging our rights and republic. …

Obama’s goal has been stated clearly from the beginning, to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” from within.

If you view President Obama as some benign and benevolent dictator and his “National Defense Resources Preparedness” EO as “routine,” then congratulations; you are drinking the Kool-Aid of this supreme sultan of socialism….

He has perfected the soft-lob political pitch that turns later into a disastrous fastball that creams American citizens and our republic. A perfect example is the Congressional Budget Office’s recently released updated figures that reveal how Obamacare will cost twice as much as the original price tag first soft-lobbed at the American public, from $900 billion to $1.76 trillion between now and 2022.

“National Defense Resources Preparedness” is one more soft-pitched steppingstone allowing the president to test how far he can push the boundaries of his socialistic-dictatorial agenda.

Mr. President, America is a constitutional republic, not a centralized authoritarian state like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Our founders cast a plethora of warnings to any national leader walking in the direction you are.

You won’t listen to America’s founders’ wisdom about the limitations of the federal government, but maybe you’ll heed a warning from a global leader about the perils of state supremacy.

In January 2009, in the same month that you took office, Putin explained the warning in this way during his speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

“Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake. True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent. The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation. In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated. Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.”

Friends and fellow patriots, as a dog returns to its vomit, so our president is repeating the mistakes of the past, but that doesn’t mean we have to as citizens.

Remember that EOs become law 30 days after being published in the Federal Register if they go unchallenged by Congress. So if you don’t like one or all of them, write or call your representatives and the president today to voice your opinion about the assault on your rights and liberties.

Bill Whittle recalls some of the reasons why he and many of us are angry with the gang in power –

An editorial at Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Is Obama Dangerously Close to Totalitarianism?”

Given the president’s end-runs around Congress, his shredding of the Constitution and his assault on the authority of the courts, a second term free of electoral restraints may be a frightening prospect.

May be? It is. Very.

Judge Andrew Napolitano … raised the question …  And while it seems fanciful in light of the safeguards built into our democracy and its institutions, it recognizes the threat posed by the president’s policies and actions if left unchecked.

“I think the president is dangerously close to totalitarianism,” Napolitano opined. “A few months ago he was saying, ‘The Congress doesn’t count, the Congress doesn’t mean anything, I am going to rule by decree and by administrative regulation.’ 

“Now he’s basically saying the Supreme Court doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t review our legislation. That would leave just him as the only branch of government standing.” 

Some would consider this borderline hyperbole. But this is, after all, a president who has said he can’t wait for Congress to act and will govern by executive order and regulations if necessary. He has questioned the Supreme Court’s “unprecedented” review of ObamaCare. …

This is an administration that’s already been found in contempt of court by a federal judge. In February of last year, Louisiana Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman found that the Obama Interior Department was in contempt of his ruling that the offshore oil drilling moratorium, imposed by the administration in 2010, was unconstitutional. After Feldman struck down the initial drilling ban, the Interior Department simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.

Judge Feldman was not amused. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” Feldman said in his ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second moratorium … provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt.”

As for Congress, we see the same dismissive tone. “Whenever Congress refuses to act, Joe and I, we’re going to act,” Obama said in February at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with Vice President Joe Biden off to the side. “In the months to come, wherever we have an opportunity, we’re going to take steps on our own to keep this economy moving.”

When cap-and-trade failed to make it through Congress — a Congress that had specifically denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate so-called greenhouse gases via the Clean Air Act — the Obama administration, with the support of the usual suspects in the media, went ahead, unleashing the EPA to make war on coal and other fossil fuels.

The Democratic Party and its media, above all the New York Times (aka The American Pravda) are really, really keen on establishing a socialist dictatorship of the United States:

In April 2009, Time Magazine ran a piece titled, “EPA’S CO2 Finding: Putting a Gun to Congress’ Head.” The New York Times editorialized that if Congress fails to ram through cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA should ram it down our throats. And that’s what the administration has been doing.

The whole thrust has been the acquisition of power by the federal government centered on the White House. That is the theme of ObamaCare, which is not about health care but about making people as dependent on government benevolence, if we can use that word, as possible. 

Those who stand in the way, whether it be the Supreme Court, Congress or institutions such as the Catholic Church, are to be either ignored when possible, or intimidated and bullied into silence and acquiescence in the proud tradition of President Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky.

What is at stake here is freedom and whether we shall be governed by a document that begins with “we the people” or whether we shall be ruled, in totalitarian fashion, by a bill that says “the secretary shall determine” what our rights and freedoms are.

*

Jillian Becker’s shocking novel

L: A NOVEL HISTORY

which is about the rise of a communist dictator in England is now available on kindle

Read a description of the book here

The way to keep the poor poor, is to keep them dependent on government.

The compassioneers of the Left need to keep the poor poor, or they’d lose not only their pretext for empowering the state to control our lives, and all those voters whom they make dependent on big government, but more dreadfully for them the cause in the name of which they claim moral superiority.

The name of their ideology of forced dependence is Socialism. It’s imposition on a nation is the tried and tested way to create poverty and keep the poor poor.

Capitalism, or what Adam Smith called “the natural order of liberty”, is the tried and tested way to create prosperity and bring people out of poverty.

Whenever socialist states and other tyrannies relent to free markets, their per capita income rises. This has been happening steadily over the last thirty years or so, despite the fervid efforts of Environmentalists and world government fanatics to establish a global socialist economy. The Third World has measurably benefitted.

This is from Townhall by Steve Chapman:

[According to] a new World Bank report, “the data indicate a decline in both the poverty rate and the number of poor in all six regions of the developing world.”

In 1981, 70 percent of those in the developing world subsisted on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 42 percent had to manage with less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent are below $2 a day and 14 percent below $1.

“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time,” write Brookings Institution researchers Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz.

Just as important as the extent of the improvement is the location: everywhere. In the past there has been improvement in a few countries or a continent. Not this time.

China has continued the rapid upward climb it began three decades ago. India, long a laggard, has shaken off its torpor. Latin America has made sharp inroads against poverty. “For the first time since 1981,” says the World Bank, “we have seen less than half the population of sub-Saharan Africa living below $1.25 a day.”

The start of most global trends is hard to pinpoint. This one, however, had its big bang in the early 1970s, in Chile. After a socialist government brought on economic chaos, the military seized power in a bloody coup and soon embarked on a program of drastic reform – privatizing state enterprises, fighting inflation, opening up foreign trade and investment and unshackling markets.

It was the formula offered by economists associated with the University of Chicago, notably Milton Friedman, and it turned Chile into a rare Latin American success. In time, it also facilitated a return to democracy.

Chile was proof that freeing markets and curbing state control could generate broad-based prosperity, which socialist policies could only promise.

If that experiment weren’t sufficient, it got another try on a much bigger scale when China’s Deng Xiaoping abandoned the disastrous policies of Mao Zedong and veered onto the capitalist road. The result was an economic miracle yielding growth rates that averaged 10 percent per year.

The formula was too effective to be ignored. Over the past two decades, poorer nations have dismantled command-and-control methods and given markets greater latitude. Economic growth, not redistribution, has been the surest cure for poverty, and economic freedom has been the key that unlocked the riddle of economic growth.

Over the past 30 years, notes the libertarian Cato Institute in the latest edition of its “Economic Freedom of the World,” the average country’s economic freedom score has risen from 5.53 (on a 10 scale) to 6.64 — a significant improvement that has paid off in higher growth and earnings. The evidence indicates a reliable pattern: the freer the economy the faster the growth. …

The latest cover story in The Economist magazine is: “Cuba hurtles toward capitalism.” Cuba! Even communists eventually have to make peace with reality.

But as they do, the country that has grown to be the richest ever because of its freedom – the USA – is being turned into a socialist welfare state by a leader raised and trained as a communist.

President Obama calls capitalism, the magic formula for prosperity, “You’re-on-your-own economics”, and insists that it doesn’t work.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

“You’re-on-your-own economics” doesn’t work, President Obama asserted Friday, just as the World Bank reported a halving of world poverty due mainly to — you guessed it — you’re-on-your-own economics. …

Perhaps he didn’t try free-market economics himself in the past decade, but all six global regions observed by the World Bank did try it — and the stunning result is that global poverty has been slashed in half … It started with the advent of free markets in Chile in 1975, gained speed with the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, took off with the Asian Tiger states and has been crescendo-ing around the globe ever since. …

Anyone who travels to countries like Peru, Poland, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Hungary, South Africa, Chile, Tanzania and India knows very well that things aren’t what they used to be. Vast middle classes have formed, education is booming, business is up and many of their cities no longer resemble the Third World.

More to the point, people have growing access to jobs, education and a future. Mexico’s rate of illegal immigration has plunged since 2009 as average incomes there approach $7,000 — the threshold that makes staying in Mexico more attractive than living abroad illegally.

Technology has helped; they all have Facebook, cellphones and ATMs to make living more efficient.

The World Bank cites generally stronger political institutions — the kind that enforce one set of laws for all, respect property rights and don’t reward crony capitalists or stacked courts — something Obama might learn from. …

The big Goliath of this revolution is the embrace of free markets. Against the president’s claims that free markets don’t work, note that all six regions of the world are making big progress by embracing markets. …

President Obama’s ambition to keep the poor poor is not limited to turning America into an economically depressed, heavily indebted socialist state; he takes whatever active steps he can to establish a globally centralized control-and-command economy.

He has appointment a new head of the World Bank,  Jim Yong Kim, who will no doubt try to prevent such a report as Steve Chapman sums up ever coming out again: a man in whose dogma such truths need to be suppressed.

This is by Jacob Laksin at Front Page:

Imagine if President Obama appointed radical Noam Chomsky, who has denounced capitalism as a “murderously destructive catastrophe,” to head up a committee on economic growth. That’s less of a stretch than it may seem, considering Obama’s nominee to head the World Bank, current Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim.

Kim’s expertise is in health policy, so little is known about his views on economic development, the World Bank’s primary purpose. What is on the public record, however, is deeply troubling. A case in point is a collection of studies that Kim co-edited in 2000, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. The grim title accurately reflects the book’s radical central premise, namely that capitalism and economic growth is bad for the poor across the world. The introduction, which Kim co-authored with several other academics, states the point bluntly: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

A barefaced lie, as the statistics in the World Bank’s report demonstrate.

In this vein, the authors go on to dismiss “neoliberalism” – the preferred left-wing academic pejorative for free trade and free markets – as a failure, particularly for the world’s poor. “Even where neoliberal policy measures have succeeded in stimulating economic growth, growth’s benefits have not gone to those living in ‘dire poverty,’ one-fourth of the world’s population,” the authors assert.

If economic growth hurts the poor, especially in the Third World, what helps their cause? The book answers that question with a chapter touting what it considers a true success: communist Cuba’s health-care system. As the chapter’s author tells it, Cuba’s health care is supposedly on par with that of the United States, an achievement made “possible because of a govern­mental commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice.” Relying on bogus statistics from the Cuban government and distorting the extreme inequities of Cuban health care, where few of Cuba’s poor can either afford or obtain either medicine or doctors’ treatment, the study is revealing mostly of the ideological extremism of its author. Indeed, it might well have been written by Chomsky, which in fact it was: the author is Aviva Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s eldest daughter. Noam Chomsky himself is quoted in the book’s conclusion, which cites his dismissal of economic growth as “efforts to make people feel helpless.” The book’s authors, including Jim Yong Kim, seem to agree.

They could hardly be more wrong.

(For confirmation of how they could hardly be more wrong, see our post Any old pills?, October 29, 2010.)

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that economic growth raises income levels, which in turn reduces poverty and improves the lot of the global poor. Much of that evidence has been documented by the World Bank, the very institution that Kim has been tapped to lead. Earlier this month, for instance, the World Bank released a report documenting a decline in the poverty rate of the poor in all the regions of the developing world. The finding is especially striking because it comes amidst a global downturn. Economic growth accounts for much of this astounding progress.

He too quotes statistics:

And that progress is truly impressive. In 1990, 52 percent of the population in the developing world lived below the poverty rate of $1.25 a day. That number was halved by 2008, when 22 percent lived below the poverty rate. Progress has been most dramatic in East Asia, particularly China, which has seen the greatest surge in economic growth. In the 1980s, according to the World Bank report, East Asia had the world’s highest poverty rate, with 77 percent of the population living below the poverty rate as recently as 1981. By 2008, that number had plunged to 14 percent. The report points out that in China alone, 662 million people are no longer living poverty. Not only is no one “dying” due to economic growth, but literally millions of lives have been bettered thanks to economic gains.

China may be the most spectacular example of economic growth’s unmatched capacity to improve the lives of the poor, but it is not an exception. Africa, so long associated with extreme poverty, is also making strides on poverty reduction thanks to economic growth. … As a result of sustained economic growth over the past 15 years …

Africa’s success is especially noteworthy because it has not been limited to countries with natural resources, such as South Africa’s diamonds or Nigerian oil. On the contrary, the authors note that poverty has fallen “for both landlocked and coastal countries, for mineral-rich and mineral-poor countries, for countries with favorable and unfavorable agriculture, for countries with different colonizers, and for countries with varying degrees of exposure to the African slave trade. The benefits of growth were so widely distributed that African inequality actually fell substantially.”

Poverty reduction through economic growth is thus one of the great success stories of recent decades. And that work is not done. …  Achieving sustained reduction in poverty will remain the great cause of the 21st century.

Yet it’s hard to see how the World Bank will help that cause if led by an open critic of economic growth like Jim Yong Kim. … It’s hard to see how its reputation will be redeemed by a World Bank president who seems to believe that the greatest danger to the global poor comes from the only proven strategy to improve the quality of their lives.

The Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development (DICED) is, in the words of Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writing at Canada Free Press, an Environmental Constitution of Global Governance.

She traces its history:

The first version of the Covenant was presented to the United Nations in 1995 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. It was hoped that it would become a negotiating document for a global treaty on environmental conservation and sustainable development.

The fourth version of the Covenant, issued on September 22, 2010, was written to control all development tied to the environment, “the highest form of law for all human activity.’

She shows clearly what this terrible instrument is for. It is intended to be a global constitution, superseding all existing constitutions of all countries that have them, including the Constitution of the USA.

All signatory nations, including the U.S., would become centrally planned, socialist countries in which all decisions would be made within the framework of Sustainable Development.

“Sustainable Development” being the darling euphemism of the Left for “Our Control”.

The writers describe the Covenant as a “living document,” a blueprint that will be adopted by all members of the United Nations. They say that global partnership is necessary in order to achieve Sustainable Development, by focusing on “social and economic pillars.” The writers are very careful to avoid the phrase, “one world government.”

But they assert that “proper governance is necessary on all levels, ‘from the local to the global'”, and “Article 3 proposes that the entire globe should be under ‘the protection of international law’“.

Article 11 discusses “equity” and “equitable manner” which are code words for communism.

Article 16 requires that all member nations must adopt environmental conservation into all national decisions.

Article 20 requires that all nations must “mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.” If we ratify this document, we must thus fight a non-existent man-made climate change.

Article 31 requires the eradication of poverty by spreading the wealth from developed nations to developing countries.

If you ask, “Why can’t they get it into their heads that spreading wealth does not cure poverty?”, you’re forgetting that curing poverty is not actually their aim. Whatever would they do without the poor to act in the name of, to weep their crocodile tears over, and to feel superior to?

Article 32 requires recycling.

Article 33 demands that countries calculate “the size of the human population their environment is capable of supporting and to implement measures that prevent the population from exceeding that level”.

People who are allowed to live will be put where The Rulers decide they should be:

Article 33 delineates long-term resettlement and estimating the “carrying capacity of the environment.”

The Rulers will decide arbitrarily how goods and services should be priced:

Article 34 demands the maintenance of an open and non-discriminatory international trading system in which “prices of commodities and raw materials reflect the full direct and indirect social and environmental costs of their extraction, production, transport, marketing, and where appropriate, ultimate disposal.”

It will be one centrally planned economy:

Article 41 requires integrated planning systems, irrespective of administrative boundaries within a country, … to “facilitate allocation of land to the uses that provide the greatest sustainable benefits and to promote the transition to a sustainable and integrated management of land resources.”

The UN will morph into the Global Kremlin. Any “amendments” to the Constitution of the World will be reviewed by the UN Secretary-General – under some new name, of course, such as Secretary-General of the World Communist Party:

Article 71 describes the amendment process, which is submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. UN Secretary-General would review the implementation of this document every five years.

Who are the writers of the Covenant?

The UN Secretariat, international lawyers, and U.S. professors from Cornell, Princeton, Pace University, Middlebury College, George Washington University Law School, Bucknell University, University of Indiana, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Meadville Theological School, University of the Pacific, two General Counsel Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, and two attorneys in private practice.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, who is constantly vigilant for all of us in the cause of freedom, and to whom the free world should gratefully pay attention, sums up their intent:

This Draft Covenant … is obviously intended to be a world constitution for global governance, … to control population growth, re-distribute wealth, force social and “economic equity and justice,” economic control, consumption control, land and water use control, and re-settlement control as a form of social engineering.

Or, even more succinctly and accurately, a form of World Communist Dictatorship.

If Barack Obama is given another four years in power, he will enthusiastically promote this agenda.

We hope a Republican president will appoint John Bolton his Secretary of State, because he is the man we trust – as far as skeptics can trust anyone – to save us from being DICED.

Note:  Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh’s source for her article was Agenda 21 on Steroids by Debbie Coffey, which may be found here.

Socialism, Communism – the terms were used interchangeably in Soviet Russia – is an atrocious ideology. Whether in the National (Nazi) form, or the International (Leninist-Stalinist) form, or even in the milder Western European welfare form, its implementation is a ruinous affliction. Whenever and wherever a collectivist ideology, whatever name it goes by – Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Marxism, Islam, Environmentalism, World Government, People’s Democracy – is implemented, ruin and suffering are brought upon the people.

The Democratic Party, whatever it may have been in the past, is now a collectivist party. It’s leader, President Obama, was raised, educated , and employed (by Alinskyites) as a Communist, and under him the country has been moved to the collectivist left.

But not far enough left to please the ill-educated, uninformed, privileged participants in the “Occupy” movement. Encouraged in their protest against capitalism by the President and other Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, “Occupy” spokesmen call for a communist America.

We have a hunch that these clueless malcontents have absolutely no idea what life under the communist system is like. Our view is shared by Lincoln Brown, who recently visited Cambodia as a member of a Christian mission, and has written a brief description of the suffering of the people when they were under the Communist dictatorship of Pol Pot, and tells how the country has still not recovered from it.

He writes at Townhall:

The legacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can be best experienced at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh.

Now a natinal memorial site and genocide museum Tuol Sleng Prison, or S-21 was originally a high school. The Khmer Rouge transformed it into a secret holding and interrogation facility. Out of approximately 14,000 people that were brought there, only about 12 survived the hell that was S-21.

The rules of life at S-21 are posted on large signs in English and Khmer for visitors to the museum:

You must answer according to my questions. Do not turn them away.

Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

Do not be a fool for you are someone who dares to thwart the revolution.

You must immediately answer my question without wasting time to reflect.

Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.

While getting lashes or electric shocks you must not cry out at all.

Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there are no orders, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom [the Khmer Krom are the indigenous ethnic Khmer people of southern Vietnam] as to hide your true existence as a traitor.

If you do not follow all of the above rules you shall get many lashes or electric shocks.

If you disobey any point of my regulation you shall get either ten lashes or five electric shocks.

At S-21, dorm rooms and class rooms became prison cells and torture chambers whose floors to this day still bear the bloodstains of the victims. Some rooms still contain the metal bed frames and shackles used to hold prisoners during interrogations. Children’s exercise equipment was turned into racks upon which prisoners were hung head down and were repeatedly raised and lowered until they blacked out. They were revived when their heads were dunked in pots of water laced with excrement. The porches and balconies of the buildings were covered in barbed wire, in order to prevent people from flinging themselves out of the doors in suicide attempts.

Some of the rooms at Tuol Sleng are full of pictures of those who went there to die. Photograph after photograph is on display. …

People have painted pictures from their memories from elsewhere in the county. Memories of people dunked repeatedly under water to extract confessions; and of infants taken from their mothers and tossed into the air to be shot by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

One room defies my mind’s ability to process information. It is the same room in which hangs the picture of the soldier shooting babies. The room consists mostly of cabinets, housing bones and skulls of the victims of S-21. It puts one in mind of an anthropology exhibit: the remains of distant ancestors from the prehistoric past. But these remains are the result of the bloody carnage that occurred from 1975 to 1979, and represent only a tiny fraction of the slaughter that took place in Cambodia. …

Under the Khmer Rogue five thousand women and children were shipped to Women’s Island in the center of the Bassac River to be massacred. There were at one time two trees on the island used by the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers would beat infants and children against these trees until they died …  The trees were cut down, but one of them absorbed so much blood from its victims that their blood began to appear in the tree’s newly bitter fruit. The tree eventually developed a permanent curve from the impact of tiny bodies. The women and children were not shot, as so many of the victims from that time were because the Khmer Rouge decided that these victims were not worth wasting the bullets.

Because the Khmer Rouge executed so many government officials, doctors, lawyers and other educated people, Cambodia developed a phobia of higher education. Pol Pot has cast a long shadow over the years, and education and economic development have been a long time in coming. The present generation of young people is the first in years to even consider continuing their education, and most people in Cambodia exist on less than one dollar a day. The deaths of the community leaders and millions of other people in the 1970’s left a vacuum that has proven hard to fill. The country is trying to find its way out of chaos.

In one benighted section of Phnom Penh, children walk barefoot over broken bricks and rubble. Black water trenches filled with human sewage run under the rickety patched-together shacks raised above the flood level on stilts. These homes, which would be considered slightly larger than a backyard storage shed in America may house up to ten people in some cases. When the rainy season comes, the leaky roofs make sleep impossible. The only thing the residents can do is get up and stand in the rain coming through their roofs until the storm passes, and then try to go back to bed. It is poverty on a scale none of us have ever seen. A man relieves himself in a pit as we walk by and the smell of human waste and rotting garbage is overpowering. I feel the bile rise in my throat and ashamed of my reaction to another’s plight, I fight back the urge to retch. How would I feel if someone were to vomit at my front door? The residents of this alley are squatting on government land. They have no [regular supply of] food and no clean water, and rely on the charity of others for enough food to make it though the month. Children in some cases become prostitutes, child soldiers, beggars or street peddlers.

The United States of America … remains the most successful republic in the history of the world. And … the people here, especially those Occupiers who have the gall to portray themselves as poor and oppressed with their laptops and cell phones, demanding you and I foot the bill for their condoms and their college degrees have fared far better than [their] counterparts in other parts of the world. Perhaps it would behoove these protestors to spend some time in these countries in which the ideas of Lenin, Marx and Alinsky found full flower and reached their inevitable bloody conclusions. Perhaps it would benefit them to live under such regimes before they try to establish such a nation …  for the rest of us.

In its February issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article titled: After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

Glenn Beck’s newscast The Blaze reports:

Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion“ as opposed to ”infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.” The authors also do not agree with the term euthanasia for this practice as the best interest of the person who would be killed is not necessarily the primary reason his or her life is being terminated. In other words, it may be in the parents’ best interest to terminate the life, not the newborn’s.

The circumstances, the authors state, where after-birth abortion should be considered acceptable include instances where the newborn would be putting the well-being of the family at risk, even if it had the potential for an “acceptable” life. The authors cite Downs Syndrome as an example, stating that while the quality of life of individuals with Downs is often reported as happy, “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

The editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Professor Julian Savulescu, said that those who object are “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

Regardless of your views on abortion – a subject that even atheists cannot, we have found to our dismay, debate rationally – we invite your reasoned arguments for or against the killing of children if their existence is inconvenient for their parents, or a burden on the welfare state.

If you are for it:

Under what age is a child disposable? 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? Why that age?

How should the child be killed?

Should a child be killed only if it is abnormal? Should all abnormal children be condemned to death? What degree of abnormality would mark him/her for killing?

Should any child who is a burden or nuisance to its parents be destroyed?

Should the parents alone have the right to decide on the child’s elimination? What if they disagree with each other ?

Since the welfare state supports the lives of the people, would it also be right for the state to kill those it no longer chooses to support? If so, on what grounds would this be justified – age, physical health, deformity, mental health, political activity, political opinion, general non-conformism, unpopularity, any?

At what level of government should such a decision be taken, and should it be taken by a single bureaucrat or a committee?

What method of killing should the state use?

Should the organs of parent- or state-condemned children/citizens be regularly harvested for transplant? Should children/citizens be killed in order that their organs may be harvested?

Would it be acceptable for freshly killed people to be eaten? Should human meat be sold by butchers?

Discussion need not be limited to these questions. Any aspect of the topic may be examined.

*

Afterword (March 9, 2012)

Giubilini and Minerva, the authors of the paper advocating that newborns who are a nuisance to a parent or “society” should be killed, have issued this sort-of apology:

We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened. We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media. In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think.

Their suggestion is that reaction to what they wrote is merely emotional: “people … felt offended, outraged, or even threatened”. Such people, they imply, are not capable of the superior detached ratiocination that they themselves and their “intended audience” bring to ethical questions. Yet it is they who did not think out objectively the results of their recommendation if it were to be enacted in law. And what they meant was perfectly clear and not distorted by the media.

Check out the whole article on their weasel-worded apology here.

Communism and Christianity are ideologically identical in a fundamental assumption: that ultimate virtue lies in the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed good of the community.

There are other salient resemblances between them, vivid in their histories; most notably a reach for totalitarian control and the punishing of dissent; but what they similarly do, for the Party or for the Church, is always in the name of their similar communitarian ethic.

The United States of America was founded on an opposite fundamental principle: that the individual is of paramount importance; that each should be free to act in his own best interests provided only that he does not impinge on the freedom of his fellow citizen. Those words are not used in the Constitution, but it is what the Constitution is all about, establishing a rule of law to protect individual liberty. That is what the rule of law is for. Where the individual citizen is free to strive lawfully for his own welfare, the nation as a whole flourishes and prospers. That was what was visualized by the founders, and they were proved right. (The paramountcy of individual freedom does not of course preclude necessary co-operation, to keep foreign enemies of the nation at bay with a strong military, or to provide conveniences that large numbers of citizens need in their particular localities such as street lighting, sewerage, transport. Nor does it exclude voluntary philanthropy.)

The United States of America came to embody the ideal of freedom. But the ideal seems to be fading. President Obama is a Communist by upbringing and choice, and has manifestly tried to turn America towards Communism by means of government-enforced wealth redistribution.

The apparent alternative to Obama at this point in the presidential election year is Rick Santorum. The picture at the top of this article suggests that this ardent Catholic stands more than anything else for Communism’s twin ideology, Christianity.

If that is the case, we need to ask: is there no one who will stand for freedom?

As an answer and antidote to St. Paul who spoke on our front page yesterday, here’s Ayn Rand speaking against self-sacrifice, and against loving everybody: