A Russian writer observes how the present US administration, which he recognizes plainly as Marxist, is intent on implementing the very policies that wrecked the Soviet economy.

Stanislav Mishin writes in Pravda:

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.

While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of “recovery” and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business…in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that’s a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry. …

Read it all here.

This is from an article by Sarah Palin in the National Review (read it all here):

In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security.

Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America. When a riot breaks out in an OPEC nation, or a developing country talks about nationalizing its oil industry, or a petro-dictator threatens to cut off exports, the probability is great that the price of oil will shoot up. Even in friendly nations, business and financial decisions made for local reasons can de stabilize Amer i­ca’s energy market, since the price we pay for foreign oil is subject to rising and falling exchange rates. Decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of energy will reduce the impact of world events on our economy.

In the end, energy independence is not just about the environment or the economy. It’s about freedom and confidence. It’s about building a more secure and peaceful America, an America in which our energy needs will not be subject to the whims of nature, currency speculators, or madmen in possession of vast oil reserves. …

To Sarah Palin freedom is a high ideal, perhaps the highest. To Obama it is not. On the contrary, he is a collectivist. No argument for freedom will move him.

Yesterday the Fox News star Glenn Beck, in the course of a gripping solo performance, showed a video clip of Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, telling school children that one of her favorite philosophers, one whom she ‘turns to most’, was Mao Tse Tung, and recommending that they take his advice.

She joins a long line of Western admirers of Mao and Maoism: the sort of people Lenin called ‘useful idiots’.

What sort of man was Mao Tse Tung? What did he think, say, and do? What was the ‘philosophy’ of the man Anita Dunn admires? What made Mao so heroic a figure to her, whose opinions are valued by the president of the United States, that she commends him as a mentor to American school children?

Here are passages – some quoted, some summarized – from the biography Mao, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, published in 2005:

During ‘the Great Leap Forward’, Mao enslaved the ‘entire rural population’, took away from them everything they possessed, and demanded ‘a feverpitch’ of work. He organized them into ‘People’s Communes’, to make slave-driving more efficient. He ‘even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers’. His aim was to ‘dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals.’ … ‘Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon. … Undernourishment and overwork quickly reduced tens of millions of peasants to a state where they were simply too enfeebled to work. When he found out that one county was doling out food to those too ill to work, Mao’s response was: “This won’t do. Give them this amount and they don’t work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.”’

Hungry peasants would ‘steal’ their own harvest, and for doing so –

Horrific punishments were widespread: some people [including children] were buried alive, others strangled with ropes, others had their noses cut off. … A child had four fingers chopped off … Two children had wires run through their ears and were then hung up by the wire….

People starved in the cities too … Most urban dwellers could barely survive on the rations they got … People were told to eat ‘food substitutes’. One was a green roe-like substance called chlorella, which grew in urine and contained some protein. After Chou En-lai tasted and approved this disgusting stuff, it soon provided a high proportion of the urban population’s protein.

Nationwide famine started in 1958, peaked in 1960, and lasted until 1961.

People were just driven crazy by hunger. … Some resorted to cannibalism. … One couple strangled and ate their eight-year-old son …

While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit ‘rotting by the ton’ in southeast China in summer-autumn 1959. But the order from above was: ‘Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation’.

Close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, which lasted four years. Mao knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions of people to death. … To the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should … actively welcome dying as a result of their Party’s policy. … ‘Death,’ said Mao, ’is indeed to be rejoiced over. … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.’

When Mao was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: ‘We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.’

In the single year of 1960, ‘22 million people died of hunger. This was the largest number in any one year in any country in the history of the world.’

In that year Mao told his inner circle:

The goal for now was ‘to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought’ round the world. … The resulting propaganda campaign brought the world ‘Maoism’. The idea of promoting China’s experience as a model when the Chinese were dying of starvation in their millions might seem a tall order, but Mao was not perturbed: he had watertight filters on what foreigners could see and hear. … Mao could easily pull the wool over most visitors’ eyes. … [When he] told barefaced lies to France’s Socialist leader (and future president) François Mitterrand during the famine in 1961 (‘I repeat it, in order to be heard: there is no famine in China’), he was widely believed. The future Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau came in 1960 and co-wrote a starry-eyed book, Two Innocents in Red China, which did not say a word about famine. Even the former chief of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Lord Boyd-Orr, was duped. In May 1959, after a trip to China, he opined that food production had risen 50-100 per cent over 1955-8 and that China ‘seems capable of feeding its population well’. Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, a much more gullible figure, asserted after visits in 1960 and 1961 that here had been ‘no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas’, and he certainly did not regard the ‘shortages’ as Mao’s fault, as he urged Mao to hang on to power: ‘China … needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.’

Mao had no problem covering up the famine, and was confident he could promote himself as a credible international leader. For this job he brought in … dependable writer-journalists. …

*

One of these dependable types was Felix Greene (cousin of the novelist Graham Greene), who made documentary films about China for the BBC in the 1950s. Their message was that ‘nobody starves in Communist China’. These words were repeated like a mantra by Western intellectuals of the left to rebuke all criticism of Mao, and to excuse whatever he ‘had to do’ – the torture, the mass murder, the enslavement of the peasants, rumor of which reached the ears of the West even though hands were clasped over them – as if merely to be kept alive was a favor for which the Chinese should be grateful to their master. But even if it could be counted an achievement so great that it would justify everything, it wasn’t true.

Does Anita Dunn know the truth about Mao?

Which would be worse: that she does not know it and commends him, or that she does know it and commends him?

If the first, should she be speaking to American school children?

If the second, should she be speaking for the president?

They know what’s best for us. Stop griping. It’s all for our own good. Who wants liberty when you can be nursed like a child by the government if you’ll only do what you’re told?

David Harsanyi writes at Townhall:

How can Americans be expected to wrestle with the myriad dangers that confront them each day? Insalubrious cereal? Unregulated garage sales? …

You know what we desperately are crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?

Mercifully, as The Washington Post recently reported, many of President Barack Obama’s appointees “have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life … awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.”

If there’s anything Americans are hankering for in their everyday lives, it’s a vast regulatory apparatus. Hey, it’s dangerous out there.

John Hinderaker of Power Line quotes Lawrence Kadish (writing in the Wall Street Journal, October 12):

It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill. …

In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford.

He comments on this – and we agree:

It is hard to overestimate the danger to which the fecklessness of our current leaders in Washington exposes the nation.

But if  Americans are ‘made aware’ of the great danger they are in – and many of them are aware, as witness the tea parties and the 9/12 protest – what can and should they do about it? ‘Demanding accountability’ would not be enough, even if they got it.

Jennifer Rubin writes on the Health Bill:

While there is plenty of buzz about moving toward votes on the floor of the Senate and House, the question remains what it is they’re all going to vote on. The list of “undecided” issues is almost comic — how to pay for it, whether to force Americans to buy insurance they can’t afford, whether to force employers to cover their employees, how to subsidize individuals’ insurance purchases, how to curb rising costs…

What has Obama accomplished by tossing this into the lap of Congress? Well, he’s given everyone plenty of time to decide they can’t decide on much of anything at all …

We guess he tossed it because he too can’t make decisions. Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Iran? …  We’re waiting …

From Power Line:

One would think that at least two lessons would have been learned from the financial crisis: stop pushing loans to people who cannot or will not pay them back and stop offering loans with “flexible underwriting criteria.” Not so. The Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are pushing their most audacious plan yet expanding the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which helped spark the crisis in the first place. …

Read it all here.

Very well worth reading is Scott Johnson of Power Line quoting Paul Rahe quoting Walter Lippmann arguing against collectivism and the augmentation of the power of government:

“Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. . . . The premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men’s lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states. . . .

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men.”

What worried Lippmann the most was the failure of those who considered themselves progressives to “remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion.” He cited “the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority.”

It was, he said, “the gigantic heresy of an apostate generation” to suppose that “there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation, to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers, which compels us to believe that the way of enlightenment in affairs is now to be found by intensifying authority and enlarging its scope.” It is with Lippmann’s warning in mind that we – and Barack Obama’s economic advisors — should contemplate the present discontents.

He signals a pacifist frame of mind to aggressive Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans. He threatens the CIA and protects captured  terrorists. He packs his administration with radical revolutionaries and scofflaws. He’s failed to turn Congress into his echo-chamber. Even in his media hooray-chorus some are choking on the songs he wants them to sing.

When the devoutly left Guardian newspaper admits to being disappointed in him and finds that he is failing at everything, his weakness must be too obvious to be spun into anything else.

But the relief we feel that he has not – or at least not yet – turned America into a collectivist state, does not mitigate our fear of the danger he has put the country into, by loading it with an unimaginable burden of debt, and, in dereliction of his highest duty,  rendering it vulnerable to its foreign enemies.

From Redstate:

If “weak” doesn’t suit your fancy, how about “impotent”? That’s where the left-leaning UK Guardian goes with Steven Hill’s piece, Obama the impotent. Mr. Hill notes that Obama is not accomplishing very much.

A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

The Guardian of course worries that Obama will be unable to socialize our health care system, or cripple the U.S. economy with “green” measures, or otherwise bring the U.S. in line with the more enlightened European Left. While we on the right might be pleasantly relieved to find that Obama is incompetent at accomplishing his agenda, the day will come when we wish we did not have an incompetent president. But as is becoming clear to both friends and enemies, foreign and domestic, that’s what we have.

David Horowitz endorses our warning in the post below about the Left’s intentions for the UN, writing on his website FrontPage magazine:

Neo-communism is a view whose members consider themselves “citizens of the world,” not of America, and who therefore agitate for open borders and want the morally repulsive collection of autocracies, slaveocracies and kleptocracies called “the United Nations” to reign over us and the world.

A neo-communist is someone who believes that America is ruled by corporations who put “profit over people” — and thereby show that they don’t understand either profit or people. A neo-communist is someone who is convinced that race, class, and gender hierarchies make it not only legitimate but necessary to describe America as a “white supremacist” society. Neo-communists believe that a revolution is necessary (if not opportune at the moment), that the Consitution is a disposable document, and that America’s communist and Islamo-fascist enemies (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hizbollah, the PLO and Hamas), are freedom fighters or at least on the right side of the armageddon that faces us.

These are views shared by The Nation magazine, by Commonsense.org, by the Indymedia crowd, by the social justice movement, by the majority of the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus on the Democratic side in Congress, and by tens of thousands of university professors who indoctrinate their students in these pernicious ideologies every day. They are the views held by the leaders of ACORN, the SEIU, AFCSME and other leftwing unions, by radical feminists, by organizations like MALDEF and La Raza, by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights who are working to support the Islamo-fascist agenda in America, by the major Muslim organizations including the Muslim Students Association, CAIR, and the Islamic Circle of North America…

He lists many more in his book Unholy Alliance.

The UN must be destroyed!