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Entering East Berlin in 1989, the air was dark and suffused with smog. Unlike the west, the Communist east had no environmental controls not on factories nor on the tinny Trabant cars that put out toxic emissions.

The news of Donald Trump dismantling environmental protections got me remembering that cold day in 1989 when I crossed from free West Berlin to the Communist east.

And saw an unexpected contrast.

The air.

The west was clean and bright, the east darker and suffused with smog.

You wouldnt think it possible for pollution to blanket just half of a city, but that was Berlin.Because of policy.

Unlike the west, the Communist east had no environmental controls not on factories nor on the tinny Trabant cars that put out toxic emissions.

I had rushed to Berlin in November of 1989 when the first reports came of the wall opening a literal crack in the iron curtain of Communism.

It wasn't wide open yet East Germans had been allowed to visit the west a few times, but soldiers with gunspatrolled the top of the wall. And it was an ordeal for westerners to go east.

I finally got papers and transited through four sets of guards at Checkpoint Charlie. It was like going back to 1949, buildingsstill scarred with World War II damage. Signs of Communism's economic failure were everywhere, with long lines at stores and gas stations.

And then there was the polluted air.

Id have thought the west side, with its traffic and skyscrapers, would have been more polluted. But in a democracy, the people have a voice and demand livability.

By contrast, the Communist leaders were totalitarians who tossed aside bothersome environmental standards in a single-minded push for growth.

The impact went beyond smog in East Berlin. Six months after the wall fell, The New York Times reported that Eastern Europe's environment was "ravaged."

"Corrosive soot," theTimes said, "has fouled water and soil, and in blackened industrial cities the air is laced with heavy metals and chemicals. In a world ruled by production targets, there was no pressure to clean up."

Things were similar across much of the Soviet bloc, so bad that it was a big driver of the historic 1989 protests that swept away Communism itself.

I remember that as I planned my trip, I searched for names of the first groups challenging power and one of them was in Bulgaria, and based on the word glasnost, for freedom.The group called itself Eco-Glasnost because what first drove people there to rise up was the ruined environment.

I don't doubt that President Trump thinks his rollback of environmental regulations and carbon standards will help create jobs. And who here doesnt celebrate the way Americas free-market capitalism has been one of historys greatest economic engines?

But one reason for its success is balance.

If pollution had been left uncontrolled in West Germany, would it have been as prosperous?

That day in 1989 showed me clearly that successful economies factor in livability.

And that prosperity comes not just from prioritizing jobs, but theenvironment, too.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7370

On Twitter: @MarkPatinkin

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Mark Patinkin: Communist East Berlin showed that Trump's environmental rollback comes with a price - The Providence Journal

With all that has happened over the past few days, its incredible to suggest that despite the threat to Treasury there is still a much wider and deeper problem. There are few with the insight that the Institute of Race Relations Anthea Jeffery holds, and what she unpacks in the piece below is most likely the final piece in the ANCs jigsaw puzzle. And the key to her summation goes back to the 1950s when she says the ANC was in effect captured by the SACP, which also highlights why President Jacob Zuma went to them firstwith the news he wants to fire Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Jeffery says the end goal is to ultimately create a Communist state, and its all being achieved under the auspices of the National Democratic Revolution. Another brilliant piece of analysis. Stuart Lowman

UPDATE:Cape Messenger editor Donwald Pressly asked Jeffery how SACP deputy secretary general Solly Mapailas press conference on Thursday fitted in with her analysis. He appeared to signal SACP unhappiness with the axing of Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas. Also the SACP also has a special meeting in April to decide on the road forward with the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance

This is what Dr Jeffery had to say:I think this is just a minor blip.The SACP put Zuma into the ANC presidency in 2007 to help advance the NDR, but now they are concerned that his obvious flaws and close ties to the Guptas are so reducing support for the ANC that the horse theyve successfully ridden into power for two decades might now not win.Hence, theyd like to hold him in check, so as not to turn the electorate still more against the ANC.If they think the ANC has become too hopelessly tarnished, they might perhaps want to distance themselves from the party and they might even seriously consider standing for election in their own right.

But in the end the ANC brand that theyve so assiduously built up for so long is too important for them to jettison, especially as their own electoral support would be very limited. Plus the ANCs growing emphasis on radical economic transformation is exactly what they want. So I expect theyll remain in close alliance with the ANC, no matter how much they might criticise Zuma now (effectively, for weakening the brand). Their key aim will be to influence the succession in favour of someone who can help ensure an ANC victory in 2019 (if necessary, with the help of a deal with the EFF) and who will then continue moving towards the socialist/communist end goal without evoking the public anger that Zuma has unleashed.

By Anthea Jeffery*

President Jacob Zumas peremptoryrecall of finance minister Pravin Gordhan from an investment roadshow in London shows how little Mr Zuma cares about the economy or the plight of the poor.

The president is clearly reckless as to how much his vendetta against Mr Gordhan undermines the countrys growth prospects, pushes up the costs of servicing R2.2 trillion in public debt, or brings closer a ratings downgrade to junk status.

Yet South Africas growth prospects are already very poor. As Africa Confidential reports, South Africa is one of the slowest growing states on the African continent, with a projected growth rate in 2017 of 1.1% of GDP. This is far below the growth rates projected for Ethiopia (8.9%), Cote dIvoire (8.0%), Ghana (7.5%), Tanzania (7.1%), Senegal (6.8%), and Rwanda (6.0%).

Most South Africans are of course rational beings who find it difficult to believe that the government could deliberately undermine the economy and hurt the poor and disadvantaged. Mr Zumas recent conduct shows that his faction of the ANC, at least, has no such concerns.

If the president can act so recklessly against Mr Gordhan at so critical a moment for foreign investor confidence, then expropriation without compensation whether supposedly within the Constitution as now written, or following a constitutional amendment cannot be ruled out.

However, the real problem is much wider and deeper than what Mr Zuma has done this week. Ever since it was captured by the SACP in the 1950s, the ANC has effectively been the junior partner in an alliance aimed at the gradual crippling of the capitalist economy in pursuit of a socialist and then communist order. This is being achieved under the rubric of the national democratic revolution (NDR), to which the ANC plans to recommit itself in December this year and which the SACP openly describes as offering the most direct path to communism.

The ANC has long downplayed this objective, for it knows that any open acknowledgement of this goal would greatly weaken its popular support. Most South Africans have no wish to adopt the flawed ideology and centralised controls that so signally failed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Rather, they want to retain the political and economic freedoms that the ending of apartheid ushered in.

To disguise their real goals, the ANC and its communist allies have long been masters of propaganda: the constant repetition of a narrative which includes key elements of truth that give it credibility, but which nevertheless profoundly distorts reality. This narrative shifts according to the needs of the time, but it always includes a careful choice of culprits to help deflect attention from the ANCs own agency.

In the ten years (1984 to 1994) of the ANCs peoples war against its black rivals, the key culprits in the narrative were initially Inkatha warlords and impis in KwaZulu/Natal and later a sinister Third Force made up of Inkatha and the South African Police. Both Inkatha and the police were of course to blame for many of the killings in this period. However, the narrative was also utterly misleading in obscuring the ANCs own major role in the deaths of some 20,500 black civilians.

Once the peoples war had brought the ANC to power in 1994, political violence came to an end and the narrative shifted once again. To increase the states control, weaken the economy, and prepare the way for ever more racial scapegoating, the narrative then targeted the commercial farming sector, the mines, the banks, the private health care sector, the supposedly white-owned media, and the many businesses (which despite the huge sums put into BEE and the practical obstacles to its success) had reportedly been dragging their feet on transformation.

Now that ANC/SACP policies have done so much to reduce growth, increase unemployment, and frustrate hopes of a better life for the poor, the ruling party is gearing up to fetter the economy still more firmly. It now wants radical economic transformation to change the structure of the economy. It is also seeking to push the BEE ownership requirement up from 25% to 51%, and is increasingly echoing EFF calls for the nationalisation of land and other assets.

Not surprisingly, the dominant narrative has now shifted once again. Its current targets have expanded from the specific sectors listed above to include racism, colonialism, and white monopoly capitalism. Increasingly, these factors are identified as the key reasons for economic malaise and worsening destitution. Moreover, as so often in the past, there are many commentators outside the ANC who uncritically endorse and echo this narrative and seek to punish those who step outside its limits.

This narrative is helping to prepare the way for ever more state ownership and control. It is also damaging the economy in other ways, by raising racial tensions and eroding the social trust vital to investment. At the same time, it is calculated to play a particularly useful role in demonising the DA and shoring up the ANCs failing support in the run-up to the 2019 general election.

What Mr Zuma has done in recalling Mr Gordhan from London is so obviously damaging that many South Africans will rally to the finance ministers defence. They might even persuade Mr Zuma not to go ahead with his proposed cabinet reshuffle. But the wider threat to the country from the ANC/SACP alliance and its NDR objectives generates little opposition because it is still so little understood.

The current narrative is thus likely to continue unchecked. So too will the impetus towards the radical economic interventions which the narrative legitimates. In time, the weakening of property rights and increased racial scapegoating will help to marginalise or drive out the established middle class. This in turn will greatly weaken the new middle class. It will also (if all goes to plan) culminate in a proletarian dictatorship under the incontestable control of the ANC/SACP alliance. This, as the ANC coyly puts it in its draft Strategy & Tactics document for 2017, will help to usher in a higher form of human civilisation.

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The wider threat still overlooked all roads lead to Communism - BizNews

Unlike the Soviet Unionwhich collapsed and split into over a dozen non-communist nations, or China, whose leaders maintain the rule and ideology of the Communist Party but introduced capitalist markets and allow interaction with the outside world, North Korea has remained an isolated totalitarian state, coming in and out of news headlines as it menacingly brandishes nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Somehave argued that North Korea isnt exactly communist, as the country removed all references to communism and Karl Marx from its constitution in the 2000s, and because it follows a program of extreme nationalism and implicitdynastic succession. In lieu of Marxism, the official ideology is the so-called Juche Idea, a Chinese-derived name that is usually translated as self-reliance but may be better understood as a version of dialectical materialism that claims to place people, not productive relations, at the center of historical evolution.

But in terms of leadership, society, and its strictly controlled command economy, North Korea resembles and surpass the archetypal authoritarian socialist regimes that existed in the Cold War. Moreover, the state owes its ideological foundations and very existence to communism and communist powers.

In the 1940s, the Soviet Union sent specialists to help Kim consolidate powerand establish a communist regime. They also trained and sent thousands of agents to destabilize U.S.-led efforts to establish a democracy in South Korea. To gain power, Kim used the same formula as nearly every budding communist dictator when he purged counter-revolutionaries withthe Concentrated Guidance Campaign. Some 800,000 North Koreans fled to the south, and the state labeled family members of individuals who fled to South Korea as counter-revolutionaries.

In a style almost exactly mimicking Stalin, Kim Il-Sung erected a cult of personality around himself, purging the Korean Workers Party of all dissent and banishingdesignated class enemies into a network of gulagsthe infamous kwanliso.

In all, the Kim Il Sung regime is believed to have murdered between 710,000 and 3.5 million people, according to researchers, while experts estimate that some 200,000 North Koreans are currently imprisoned in a system of labor campsof that, 50,000 to 70,000 are Christians. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans were forced to flee the country, with most going to China.

Kim Il Sung, in particular, targeted Korean Christians. We have executed all Protestant and Catholic church cadre members and all other vicious religious elements have been sent to concentration camps, he once proclaimed in 1962. Their beliefs got in the way of the regimes propaganda campaign effectively proclaiming Kim as effectively a living god. In practice, North Koreas Juche promotes bizarre forms of ethnic nationalism, describing the Kim family as saviors of the Korean race.

Soviet-style plans were initially implemented, including the seizure of private property as well as the seizure of national industries. By 1950, Kim was obsessed with unifying North and South Korea before he received substantial help from Soviet advisors, who helped draw up invasion plans and gave military equipment. Later, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong deployed 300,000 troops to North Korea during the Korean War.

North Korean soldiers march with a portrait of founder Kim Il-Sung on the anniversary of his birth on April 15, 2012. North Korea may launch missiles on April 15, 2013. (Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images)

Officially, the country says it isnt communistbut it behaves justlike it is. The country is an anomalyit could be more accurately described as a communist-inspired monarchy, as some experts have said. The communist Workers Party of Korea is thefounding and ruling political party of North Koreausing an emblem thats an adaptation of the communist hammer and sickle, along with a Korean writing brush. In 2010, the party removed a sentence about its goals of building a communist society. In 2012, it claimed that Juche isnow the only guiding idea of the party as Juche can be used to keep the Kim familysstranglehold on power.

Andrei Lankov, of NK News, says the ruling communist Korean Workers Party effectively runs on a Marxist-Leninist model:

North Korea might be the only place on the face of the earth where these basic principles, once developed by Joseph Stalin around 1930, are still implemented consistently. Admittedly, the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism has been replaced by the same truth of Juche, and many elements of the system have been redesigned. Nonetheless, this is still the closest approximation to the once common model, a living fossil of a sort.

The promotion of communism and Marxism-Leninism seemingly started to disappear after Kim Il Sungs death in 1994. By 2009, references to the word communism had been dropped from North Koreas constitution while pictures of Marx and Lenin were removed from public areas. Kim Il Sung and son Kim Jong Il were frequently displayed next to them, while both Kims are credited with writing huge numbers of books on Marxist theory.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Juche ideology became the primary doctrine, as the Kim dynasty is much more than just an authoritarian political regime. It holds itself to be the ultimate source of power, virtue, spiritual wisdom and truth for its citizens, the DailyNK writes.

North Koreans visit the Mansu Hill in Pyongyang before statues of late President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il on the first anniversary of leader Kim Jong-Ils death on Dec. 17, 2012. (KNS/AFP/Getty Images)

Another deviation from typically Marxist states is the North Korean Songbun caste system, which was adopted by the communist Workers Party in the late 1950s. It amounted to being essentially a massive purge of North Koreas society to create five social classes. This system was established in the late 1950s and came into full power somewhere around 1967. It divides the population into groups, according to the actions and status of their paternal ancestor (and themselves, depending on their age) during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War, according to NK News.In theory, there are no classes in communist societiesbut granulated class hierarchies have developed in both the Soviet Union and China. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, has a fantastically complex hierarchy, where top-level communists enjoy the greatest privileges.

The Organisation Guidance Department of the Communist party controlled the Songbun system, with many experts believing it to have been the true center of power in the 1960s, when North Korean authorities began classifying every citizen as an enemy or a supporter.

A man walks past a screen showing a TV news on North Koreas missile firing, in Tokyo on March 6, 2017. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

But it still retains hallmarks typical of communist states, including the imagery and obsession withideology. Propaganda pieces of the Kim family arepainted in a communist socialist realist style. Blood red banners and interior design are commonplace. Kim Jong Un has sported a Mao Zedong-style suit, while the party recently granted him the title of chairman, akin to Mao.Hes also the chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea and the Central Military Commissions, which are communist in origin.

North Koreas apparatus of repression is decidedly Stalinist in nature.

Every newspaper, book, and magazine is authorized by the government to promote Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Il, and Kim Jong-Un, and North Koreans are forbidden from listening to foreign broadcasters or reading foreign publications.

North Korea also has its own gulag system, with some 150,000 to 200,000 people estimated to be imprisoned currently.Forced labor, starvation, forced abortions, executions, torture, beatings, and more are commonplace. Children born to parents in the camps remain there for the remainder of their lives, as part of the Songbun caste system. Citizens are kept in the dark and are unable to leave, much like inthe Soviet Union before its fall. And from 1948 until 1987, the Kim Il Sung regime is believed to have murdered between 710,000 and 3.5 million people, University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel said.

In 2014, the United Nations investigated Kim Jong Uns regime for committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocidealso hallmarks of communist regimes. Torture, mass starvation, and mass killings are commonplace in North Korean camps.

Even now as I speak here today there are still babies being born in the camps, public executions like that of my mother and brother happening in the camp, and dying from beatings and starvations, camp survivor Shin Dong-Hyuk said in 2014, referring to another report on the alleged genocide.

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Examining North Korea's Communist Foundations - The Epoch Times

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'Communism for Kids,' the New Book for Revolutionary Youngsters - teleSUR English

Capitalism is inherently unfair and will produce a world full of sad and disgusting inequalities, but Communism is also doomed to fail, a leading scientist claims to have proved using the laws of physics.

Professor Adrian Bejan told The Independent he was so excited by the huge implications of his theory that he kept having to pinch himself.

A former member of the Romanian national basketball team, he is now an expert in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at Duke University in the US, having written 30 books and more than 600 scientific papers.

He now claims to have shown that physics can essentially explain economics.

Inequality has been seen as a factor in the election of Donald Trump as US President and in the UK referendum vote in favour of Brexit.

According to Oxfam, the richest eight men own the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of the world's population.

Professor Bejan said it was possible to explain how such inequality can develop by demonstrating that wealth moves around in a society like water in a river basin using the laws of physics.

In a natural environment, water flows from small tributaries into larger and larger streams.

And, according to Professor Bejans theory, the same is true of money.

So, in a free market system, wealth will naturally flow from the poorest in the small tributaries to the richest in the wide rivers.

Using this analogy, Communism is comparable to an attempt to restrict the flow of water to a network of equally sized concrete channels, which Professor Bejan said would inevitably be overcome by the forces of nature.

But, just as humans do sometimes harness rivers to produce energy or divert them around cities, it is possible to alter the flow of money in society, he added.

And this is exactly what is being done by liberal democracies around the world with measures such as free education and healthcare, anti-trust regulations designed to prevent large corporations abusing their power, and the rule of law.

I want to see less inequality in the distribution of wealth. I get not just sad, but disgusted by it, Professor Bejan said.

My urge is kind of synonymous with trying to make all the channels in the river basin one size.

But he said his desire for everyone to have the same amount of money was futile.

For the flow to thrive, it must have freedom, so one does not make a river basin out of channels built in cement, he said.

The small channels are flowing because of the big channels, the big channels are flowing because of the small channels.

If the whole flows the best that it can, then everybody is empowered to flow and the access of everybody is maximised to the big flow.

Yes, people do redirect river channels for hydro-electric plants or to make the river flow around a city, but the basin is not affected to such an extent so the basin revolts against the human intervention.

Any such heavy handed intervention in an economy would be soon overturned by the river.

This is why it has always been difficult to deal with the unequal distribution of wealth, Professor Bejan said.

But difficult doesnt mean impossible.

What is incumbent upon the governing person or society as a whole is to be aware of the natural tendency of the movement and then to use the flow in order to endow the flow with better features for everyone riding about in that flow.

Simply allowing an entirely free market devoid of any human interference would see a Wild West distribution with no rule of law to curtail the unequal distribution of wealth, he warned.

That is where you find a striking discrepancy between the ultra-rich and the very poor, he said.

The rule of law is constantly morphing. Thats the great invention of the West and it has this effect of keeping an unequal distribution of everything in the area in check.

It is very important for people to know first of all why it is difficult to implement what is actually a common urge, which is to basically live together happily.

The physics explains why experiments such as Communism were doomed to fail and why socialism is a difficult project.

In an academic paper in the Journal of Applied Physics, Professor Bejan sets out the physics behind his theory.

One main point is that wealth and any kind of movement, a defining part of life, are essentially synonymous.

Movement requires some kind of power which can come from fuel for machines, solar power or food for animals.

A graph in the paper shows that the amount of fuel consumed by a country is directly proportional to its gross domestic product.

And since all movement on Earth is hierarchical like a river basin or a tree with smaller and smaller branches, a human lung or traffic in a city and movement and wealth are synonymous, then wealth must also be hierarchical or iniquitous.

However Professor Jeremy Baumberg, director of the NanoPhotonic Centres at Cambridge University, was distinctly unimpressed.

It seems to me an extremely poorly written paper, conflating many ideas in a rather unrigorous mishmash," he said.

I do not believe it even has a new theory, so not seeing the huge implications.

And, displaying the contempt many scientists have forclaims made bythe current US President,Professor Frank Close, an Oxford University physicist, said: 'Huge seems to be a favourite Trumpism so perhaps not the best claim to be making these days.

I suggest the authors be invited to make a prediction whose failure would be able to refute their theory. Otherwise its not good physics.

Original post:
Capitalism inevitably creates a 'sad' unfair world, physicist says he has proved - The Independent