In a Communist society, all means of production would be owned and controlled by the state. Communism is theoretically classless and egalitarian. In reality, the ruling class always does very well. Examples would be the former Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea. All have had to introduce some form of capitalism to survive, some more than others. There are no pure Marxist systems in existence today. It simply does not work.

Hitler expelled the Communists from Germany in the early thirties as they were stealing his thunder and his voice. The Fuhrer was very impressed with Mussolini’s fascism and how effective it was, hence the fascist/Nazi alignment during World War II. These deported German Communists hit the U.S. college circuit, joining every major university, until they have now almost completely taken over our education system.

Fascism and Communism are not opposite ends of the spectrum, rather, they are first cousins on the left. Both are secular socialist with power being absolute with no opposition tolerated, especially from God. No natural rights, only that which they choose to dispense.

On Monday, a disenchanted former Antifa member was interviewed on Fox News. He was as confused as so many others. He called Antifa the real fascists. No, they are not fascists. Antifa was and is primarily a global Communist movement using fascist tactics…breaking up meetings, rallies, destroying property, clubbing a few people, etc. They use the moniker ‘anti-fascist’ to keep you confused with no idea as to their real intentions. Democrats don’t speak out because they are close relations…the militant wing of the party doing the dirty work, but keeping enough space between them to distract you. Democrats are not strangers to militant wings, hence the KKK.

To Antifa, anyone that disagrees with them, is not entitled to free speech

They both have all the earmarks of beginning as organized crime. If someone wants free stuff from the government, they vote or support those that promise it. The money is taken from those that do work (oppressors) and gives it to those who won’t work (the oppressed). It’s a social & political contract. Give me power, I give you free stuff and will protect your receivership. Of course, if you give them enough power you will eventually no longer have a vote or a choice in the matter or even the free stuff.

Democrats love to promise what they know is impossible just to sit back and watch the Republicans say no, and then with expressions of righteous indignation explain in a press conference that Republicans just don’t care. Republicans fall for it every time.

Antifa are people that have been indoctrinated that America is an illegitimate country, built on the backs of slaves, racist to its very core where common citizens, especially those of color, have no chance at a decent life. They have been stirred up to a point of hate. They are either ignorant of history or just lying to themselves.

To Antifa, anyone that disagrees with them, is not entitled to free speech. Heck, anyone who disagrees with Democrats is labeled a racist, homophobe, whatever. They both see themselves as the arbiters of morality even while they are assaulting people and killing babies. Conservatives are not fascist. If there are fascists in this country, they will reside in the Democrat Party. What group of politicians works the hardest to control every aspect of commerce and limit freedoms?

…read more

Appeared August 24, 2019.
Credits: CFP

It has been widely reported that in the California Legislature Democrats won supermajorities of two-thirds. This understates their control, which is more like three-fourths of each chamber: 28 of 40 Senate seats (with two vacancies), and 61 of 80 in the Assembly.

At the local level, the GOP’s last redoubt, Democrats advanced, too. Earlier this decade, Republicans filled almost half of California’s 2,500 mayoral and City Council seats, which are officially nonpartisan and hence offer camouflage to candidates from an unpopular party. This election flushed them out of that cover. Republicans now hold only 38% of those positions.

The Democrats’ crushing dominance allows them to use California as a progressive policy laboratory. As a result, the state has the highest welfare numbers (a third of all Americans on welfare live in California), the largest contingent of illegal immigrants, a burgeoning homeless population, onerous regulations on business and private property, mediocre public schools, high income taxes (the highest marginal rate is 13.3%) and sales taxes, a yawning gap between rich and poor, its own summer blend of expensive gasoline, bedraggled and crowded roads to punish people further for driving, and a widely mocked high-speed rail boondoggle.

To risk an analogy, California is to today’s Democrats roughly what South Carolina was to pre-Civil War Democrats: the showcase state, the vanguard of enlightened public policy offering itself for emulation. Yet it’s been a long time since the state produced political figures of obvious national importance such as Earl Warren, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.Pete Wilson, the senator and governor, seems to have been the end of that line. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship was a box-office flop. Jerry Brown, after 16 years in the gubernatorial chair, still wrestled with the mystery of Jerry Brown.

Even so, the state has one declared presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris, and one potential contender, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom. Having moved its primary election up to March 2—Super Tuesday—the state may actually play a significant role in picking the Democratic nominee this time.

One-party California seems to follow more than lead the Democratic policy dance. Yet its example remains instructive—especially its attempts to implement some of the party’s 2020 enthusiasms.

Take infrastructure. Rather than repair freeways or build new ones, Mr. Brown decided to construct the high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Vowing “hard decisions” and “tough calls,” however, his successor announced in February that “the project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long.” The train’s cost, at last estimate, was between $77 billion and $88 billion, four times the funds available. Incredibly, however, Mr. Newsom didn’t cancel the project. He merely postponed it indefinitely, except for the rump railroad between Merced and Bakersfield, for which not a single mile of track has been laid.

Or consider health care. A bill to create a single-payer system in California passed the Democrat-controlled state Senate in June 2017, only to stall in the Democrat-controlled Assembly when Speaker Anthony Rendon confessed that his party had no idea how to raise the $400 billion annually the system is estimated to cost. (The whole state budget amounts to $201.4 billion.) Last month Mr. Newsom endorsed “the long-term goal of single payer” but pointedly didn’t introduce a bill to achieve it. In the long run, liberals used to say, we are all dead. It will be interesting to see which arrives first: the train or the government doctors.

The promises of California’s government programs are too good to be true, but also, apparently, too attractive to resist. Karl Marx called his kind of socialism “scientific,” as opposed to his predecessors’ “utopian” fantasies. California appears to be pioneering a third kind, which might be called “infantile.” Our Democrats strongly suspect their programs won’t work and know they can’t be paid for—but want them anyway. To analyze that perversity, Freud might be more helpful than Marx. At any rate, California’s experience offers cautionary lessons on the way to 2020.

So far, every major Democrat who has declared for the presidency—Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard—has felt obligated at least to genuflect in the direction of Cardinal Bernie.

If in January 2015 you walked up to, say, 50 million American voters and asked them what they thought of when you said, “Bernie Sanders,” 99.9% of them would have replied, “Nothing.” If in early 2018 you had done the same thing with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, same answer—nada.

Today, the two socialists are household names. The Democrat Party belongs to them.
Bernie” is running for president again. In the beauty-contest opinion polls he is only a step behind Barack Obama’s vice president. And by the current standards of America’s political culture, AOC is a star.

Science no longer believes that genes are destiny. But in politics, which no one will confuse with science, it was inevitable that the Democrats’ genetic code on day would bring them to this point—unabashedly the party of the far left.

Both Republicans and Democrats have had to contend with challenges for control from the distant right and left. What primarily has kept these impulses at bay is the reality check of needing to assemble an Electoral College victory out of all the states. When the parties’ nominations have gone well right or left—Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972—they’ve usually lost by huge margins.

Eugene V. Debs was the first Socialist to run for president, in 1900. Debs, who had been a Democrat, helped found the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1935, playwright Clifford Odets wrote a play called “Waiting for Lefty.” His wait is over.

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal is an explicit homage to FDR’s New Deal, and Nancy Pelosi understood exactly what she was doing when she called it a “green dream or whatever.” She knows it isn’t 1935.

The American left went into decline after World War II, as the U.S. economy rebuilt. One can’t overstate the central role that private-sector labor unions—auto, steel, mines—played in keeping the Democrats centered.

Whatever their tensions with industrial capitalism, American union leaders like George Meany, Lane Kirkland and Leonard Woodcock knew their success depended on the private sector’s success. With the private unions’ decline and the rise of public-sector’s success. With the private unions’ decline and the rise of public-sector unions, whose lifeblood is tax revenue, a significant brake on the party’s roll toward socialism disappeared.

The Democrat left re-emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, pushing the party outside political and cultural norms with street protests, antiwar marches and “occupations’ of universities.

Left-wing academics in those years not only began to develop the theories of gender, sex, race and identity that today animate core liberal beliefs, but they also drove out dissenting professors, mostly conservatives, who might have challenged those ideas.

Without a rigorous opposition, these left-wing theories descended into intellectual gobbledygook like “intersectionality.” It is no accident that the Democrat Party is represented today by the Millennial goofiness of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez or the smiling anti-Semite, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Nor is it an accident that the Democrats are embracing ideas untethered to proofs or logic such as the Green New Deal, free college and pre-1960s income-tax rates.

Mr. Obama is a central figure in this story. He held the door open for the socialists with his endless speeches about “the wealthiest” and “the 1%.” Arguably Mr. Obama was our first Pop Marxist president, obsessed with class issues.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat was the best thing that has happened to the Democrat left in the entire postwar period. She stood for what remained of the respectable administrative-state intellectuals who had worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Nudge economics and all that. The left was tired of them.

Mr. sanders was in the right place at the right time. The modern left, the children of the new, no-standards university system, went gaga for Bernie’s comic-book socialism. “Medicare for All!” Bernie shouted across the land. They sent him $25 online donations by the millions. And still do.

The U.S. today has a labor shortage. The workers of the U.S. can’t unite because they’ve got to go to work.

What we have here is artisanal socialism, free-riding luxuriously on capitalism’s manifest success. In New Hampshire Monday, Kamala Harris said, “I am not a democratic socialist.” She should take a political DNA test. I’ll bet she is, or soon will be.

Appeared in the February 20, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

Bernie Sanders said Tuesday he’s running for President again, and we trust this time no one will sell his chances short. Having come close to winning the Democratic nomination in 2016, the Vermont socialist should get the scrutiny he dodged last time.

Among 2020 contenders, only Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden rival Mr. Sanders for national name recognition, and only Mr. Biden is beating him in the polls. Mr. Sanders ended 2018 with some $9 million in his Senate campaign fund, another advantage in a crowded field.

But now Mr. Sanders is no longer the solo socialist. He lost to Hillary Clinton but shifted the Democratic Party left. The Democratic field is full of women and minorities now running on his Medicare for All proposal, which would eliminate private health insurance, and the Green New Deal. Mr. Sanders may discover at 77 years o1d that it’s a disadvantage to be white and male among Democrats.

Mr. Sanders has already had to apologize to women who worked for his campaign in 2016 and say they were harassed by male staffers. He can also expect more scrutiny for the dealings of his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, who has been his congressional chief of staff and remains among his most trusted advisers. Her tenure as president of Burlington College in Vermont deserves more attention in particular.

Mrs. Sanders left the school in 2011 with a $200,795 severance. In 2016 the college closed because of what it called the “crushing weight of debt” incurred on Mrs. Sanders’s watch. The college had purchased 32 acres of property from the Roman Catholic diocese for $10 million in 2010, though it began the year with less than $1.8 million in net assets.

To finance the purchase, the college took out a $6.7 million tax-exempt loan from People’s United Bank and a $3.65 million subordinate loan from the diocese. It soon fell behind on repayments. The diocese eventually lost between $1.6 million and $2 million in principal and interest, according to a request for investigation sent to the U.S. Attorney from Catholic parishioners· in 2016.

The letter was written by Brady Toensing, vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party, and it suggested Mrs. Sanders had committed bank fraud by misleading lenders about Burlington College’s fundraising grants and pledges. To obtain the bank loan, Mrs. Sanders signed documents suggesting the college had secured commitments for at least $2.27 million, but it raised only $676.000 from 2010 through 2014.

Two donors said their pledges had been overstated in loan paperwork, the news website VTDigger.org reported in 2015.

It’s fair to ask if Mr. Sander’s senatorial status enabled this fiasco. The parishioners suggested in their letter that “Ms. Sander’s privileged status as the wife of a powerful United States Senator seems to have inoculated her from the robust underwriting that would have uncovered the apparent fraudulent donation claims she made.

Burlington College’s final president, Carol Moore, asked in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “What bank lends a small, private, unendowed college of that size and financial status an amount that so obviously outweighs its ability to repay?” She added that the bank was ‘in the state of an influential senator –a senator, as it turned out, with bigger ambitions.

The Vermont Educational and Health Buildings Finance Agency, a state entity that issues tax-exempt debt, helped Burlington College secure the bank loan. Its then-board member Tom Pelham said in 2016 that while “I didn’t see, nor did anyone see, nor were there any accusations of strong arming,” he thought that ‘if this had been some other thinly financed entity that was making the presentation, it might have gotten more scrutiny.” Two other board members said Mrs. Sander’s connections weren’t a factor.

Mr. Sander’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. In 2016 a Sanders spokes person told local press the allegations in the parishioners’ letter were “recycled, discredited garbage.” The Sanders camp now says the feds have closed the Burlington College investigation and aren’t filing charges, though prosecutors won’t confirm or deny that claim.

By the way, Burlington College’s financial disclosures show that between 2009 and 2011 the school paid more that $328,000 to enroll students in a woodworking school run by Carina Driscoll, Mrs. Sander’s daughter and Mr. Sander’s stepdaughter. Ms. Moore later described the arrangement as “a Sweetheart deal” and told VTDigger.org the woodworking school was “gouging the college.”

And though Mr. Sanders campaigned in 2016 on the promise of free college, Burlington College’s tuition rose from $14,170 to $22,410 during Mrs. Sander’s seven-year tenure, according to U.S. News & World Report’s data.

Mrs. Sanders would wield significant policy influence in a Sanders White House, as Hillary Clinton did as first lady. At the very least the Burlington failure shows financial incompetence and a tendency toward nepotism. Sounds a lot like socialism.

Appeared in the February 20, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal