By Thomas E. Brewton
How indicative of his character and beliefs is Senator Obama's having launched one of his political campaigns at the home of his friends Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?
Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers?
Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?
The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:
"Life With the Weathermen: No Regrets for a Love of Explosives"
By Dinitia Smith
"I don't regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers said. "I feel we didn't do enough." Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.
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Posted by Walt as Communism, Presidential Race, Terrorism at 10:16 PM EDT
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By Thomas E. Brewton
Today's clamor for more regulation of financial institutions to prevent another subprime mortgage meltdown is an exercise in self- deception.
Congress, led by Representative Barney Frank, is planning to overhaul regulation of the financial community, and Treasury Secretary Paulson has already proposed a broad program for that purpose.
No doubt, much of what is proposed is needed. But it should be obvious from repeated experience over the decades that regulations alone will not prevent periodic economic booms and busts.
Only by dealing with the root cause will we moderate economic cycles. And that root cause is the ineluctable human tendency to over-expand bank credit when the money supply is artificially enlarged.
Today's proposed subprime mortgage regulations may prevent tomorrow's repetition of that phenomenon, but they will have no restraining impact upon whatever the next speculative bubble may be. Sarbanes- Oxley regulation was instituted after the dot.com bubble-burst and the corporate collapse of Enron, but it had no restraining effect upon the speculative housing bubble, of which subprime lending is merely a symptom, not a cause. Before that, we had the speculative explosion of commercial real estate over-building that ended with the collapse of the savings and loan institutions in the 1980s.
Beginning with our nation's first financial panic in 1819, similar boom-and-bust patterns appear every five to ten years, except in extraordinary circumstances such as wartime.
In one respect, Karl Marx's economic analysis was on the mark.
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Posted by Walt as Communism, Economics at 11:46 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
When the government of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fall was attributed to all kinds of reasons. There was the failed invasion of Afghanistan, the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and, after some desperate efforts by Mikhail Gorbechev, Communism as a guiding principle and economic system simply imploded. That’s the thumbnail version that passes for history, but Michael J. Economides and Donna Marie D’Aleo have another answer and it’s one you may not want to hear.
“In the second half of the 1980s the Soviet leadership came face to face with the problems that arose as a result of the dramatic drop in oil prices, and the necessity of increasing the volume of capital investments in western Siberia’s oil industry. They failed to provide adequate solutions to these problems. The consequences were a rapid decrease in oil production, a collapse of the consumer market, a growing deficit of the most basic consumer goods, and the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union.”
“From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia” by the two authors cited above is not likely to leap on the bestseller lists, but for anyone who takes a serious interest in America’s future and in current world affairs, it is the book to read, not only for its excellent history of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and what replaced it, but for its unique insights regarding the role of energy.
Economides is Editor-in-Chief of Energy Tribune, a magazine for those who understand that (1) energy is the master resource, (2) is the primary force behind the rise of human civilization, and (3) is the grand determinant in geopolitical affairs. From our earliest times when muscle power was the only source to the modern era, energy in its many forms has ruled the affairs of man.
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Posted by Walt as Communism, Economics, Oil Production at 9:25 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals' head-in-the-sand urge to pull troops out of Iraq is nothing new. Western democracies, entranced with liberal Progressivism, have failed repeatedly to preserve social and political stability.
In words that apply to public opinion today, Walter Lippmann, in The Public Philosophy (1954), described his dismay in the summer of 1938, when war in Europe seemed inevitable.
….there was no sure prospect that France and Great Britain would be able to withstand the [German] onslaught that was coming. They were unprepared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed….. I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of [the 20th] century.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, Communism, Cultural Issues, Socialism at 11:54 PM EST
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Washington, DC – The so-called "media reform" movement, which wants to check and dilute the power of conservative media, especially talk radio, includes members of communist groups openly dedicated to America's destruction, Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid discloses in a new column. Kincaid identifies them as members of the Communist Party USA, which was funded by the old Soviet Union, as well as the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group that follows the teachings of history's greatest mass murderer, Mao Tse-tung.
The Kincaid column is a follow-up to his exclusive report on the "National Conference on Media Reform," held in Memphis, Tennessee. The column, "The Communist-influenced 'Media Reform' Movement," and his January 15 special report, "The Plan to Silence Conservatives," are available at http://www.aim.org/.
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Posted by Walt as Biased Media, Communism, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 12:49 PM EST
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by Jim Kouri, CPP
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on the most massive military buildups in history. Part of President Reagan's strategy for winning was to entice the Soviets into a competition it could never even hope to win. A communist economy by its very nature is ill-equipped to compete with a free-market, capitalist system whether it's foreign trade or weapons technology.
And so, slowly the Soviet economy became a basket case due to the communists' desire to exceed America in an enormously expensive arms race.
After the Cold War, with the Soviet threat gone and with Democrat President Bill Clinton in the White House, terms such as "the peace dividend" became commonplace within the Washington Beltway and in the mainstream news media. No longer was the political establishment interested in defense, and the new agenda for the US was domestic.
However, slowly and methodically Russia's steel-eyed leader Vladamir Putin began to rebuild and expand his nation's arsenal and its fighting forces. This new phase in Russia's military buildup has created fear in some quarters in the US that a new arms race exists. Recently the Russians deployed a nuclear ballistic system that their generals made clear could render US anti-missile defense systems ineffective, according to reports in the European news media.
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Posted by Walt as Communism at 6:31 AM EST
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By Alan Caruba
It is not for nothing that Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Republic, is a former member of the KGB. From its earliest days, Soviet Russia maintained a vast army of spies around the world and penetrating the United States remained high on its list of priorities.
In 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Robert Hanssen, a FBI special agent who was a Russian spy, judged to be one of the most damaging moles in U.S. history. As Bill Gertz, a Washington Times reporter, notes in his latest book, “Enemies: How America’s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets—and How We Let It Happen”, “Today, nearly 140 nations and some 35 known and suspected terrorist groups target the United States through espionage, according to intelligence officials.”
“Over the past several decades, foreign agents have penetrated every U.S. national security agency except the Coast Guard. That includes the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Energy Department.”
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Posted by Walt as Communism, Government Corruption, U.S. Political Issues at 6:28 AM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
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Posted by Walt as Communism, U.S. Political Issues at 9:45 PM EDT
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Communist China’s $14.5 billion trade surplus during the month of June set a new record for single month. Exporting goods to the West, chiefly to the United States, has ballooned China’s enormous cash reserve, now topping Japan’s as the world’s largest holder of foreign currency. This makes China most able to finance U.S. indebtedness. This is not a good omen.
The Bush administration recently announced that the projected federal deficit for the current fiscal year will be just short of $300 billion, not as large as originally predicted. President Bush claims this as an accomplishment. The sad truth is that the federal government’s indebtedness during the five years of the Bush presidency has grown to $8.3 trillion from $5.6 trillion. Where does the money come from to finance these enormous short falls? One source is more currency produced by the Federal Reserve, the process known as inflation that steals the value of everyone’s dollars. But another way to cover a deficit is to borrow. And one of the chief lenders to our nation in recent years has been Communist China, a country that has never renounced its intention to defeat the United States.
It begins to look as though China will not have to do militarily what it is being positioned to do economically. What are our leaders doing to get America off this suicidal path? The answer is virtually nothing, except more unconstitutional spending.
Meanwhile our national and financial security is in jeopardy because of our relation with the enemy who has threatened our country with missiles. They already have control of both entrances to the Panama Canal and has made alliances with Cuba and socialist Venezuela, the most anti-US country in South America.
Posted by Walt as China, Communism, Economics at 12:38 AM EDT
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Thomas S. Garlinghouse
Conservatives have long advocated the importance of strong families and deplored efforts, by 
socialists, feminists, and government bureaucrats, to weaken familial ties. Indeed, for many conservatives, the family—the traditional, “nuclear” family—is the fundamental cornerstone of society, an absolutely indispensable form of social organization. As John Mueller of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, has argued, “the basic social unit of society is the family-based household.” Similarly, former secretary of education William Bennett has written, “the nuclear family, defined as a monogamous married couple living with their children, is vital to civilization’s success.”
Leftists, by contrast, have long taken a decidedly jaundiced view of the traditional family. To them, a household consisting of an adult male and female—united in matrimony—and their offspring is an antiquated, repressive institution standing in the way of constructing a “better,” more egalitarian world.
The famous 19th century socialist Robert Owen included the family, along with marriage and private property, in his “triumvirate of evil,” which, he asserted, has “cursed the world ever since the creation of man.” He advocated the public care of children at his utopian community “New Harmony” in Posey County, Indiana. The family, Owen declared, must give way to the “scientific” association of from five hundred to two thousand people. By association, Owen meant that children ought to be transferred from parental to institutionalized care. This was a task heartily embraced by one of Owen’s chief “lieutenants,” William Maclure. He developed a Spartan system of education for the children of “New Harmony,” which consisted of divorcing children from their parents and placing them in communal living arrangements.
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Posted by Walt as Communism at 7:03 AM EDT
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