Archive for the ‘Socialism’ Category

FCC’s O’Rielly: Title II Fight is Capitalism vs. Socialism – Multichannel News

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly minced no words Friday in a speech to an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)summit in Charlotte, N.C., about the forces defending the FCC's Open Internet order, according to a copy of his remarks.

ALEC is a state legislator membership organization that supports limited government and free markets.

O'Rielly voted against the 2015 Open Internet order and its Title II reclassification of ISPs and has associated himself strongly with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to roll back reclassification and rethink the rules.

At the summit, O'Rielly said that "all of the propaganda in the world cannot paper over the fact that these new burdens [the order's general conduct standard and rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization] were not in response to actual marketplace events but hypothetical concerns dreamt up by radical activists."

O'Rielly said the FCC was under pressure "to buckle and acquiesce to the whims of the misinformed screaming for Net Neutrality."

He said that progressive agenda as being pushed throughout the government, that it was being used to get the government to redistribute wealth, and that network neutrality was a subset of a larger movement to "vanquish capitalism and economic liberty."

He also talked about what he said was municipal broadband's "any means necessary" approach to "more and faster broadband."

O'Rielly likened it to Venezuela's offer of low-cost oil, at the price of appeasing a radical government, and asked how that would have worked now that Venezuela appears near collapse in part because it is socialist. He said he supports a reformed universal service subsidy approach to deployment, but "What I am unwilling to do and will never support," he said, "is allowing government-sponsored networks to use their unfair advantages to offer broadband services."

See the original post here:
FCC's O'Rielly: Title II Fight is Capitalism vs. Socialism - Multichannel News

Letter: Socialism is stupid – Times Record News

Wichita 5:28 a.m. CT May 4, 2017

In this photo taken Feb. 28, 2017, Capitol Hill in Washington. Theres an unconventional new president in the White House and Republicans have a lock on Congress, but Washington is still up to its old tricks.Just as occurred repeatedly during the Obama administration, Congress and the White House are days from a government shutdown, engaged in familiar partisan brinkmanship that demonstrates how little has really changed in the capital under President Donald Trump.(Photo: Susan Walsh, AP)

Many universities are graduating a lot of socialist students. It is sad, many young adults go to college to get a higher education and end up getting dumbed down.

Socialism is stupid, yes, it has never paid off. It lets one take from another what is not theirs to take. It stands to reason that when those whoare taken from go bankrupt the whole financial system goes belly up.

We all may struggle financially at one time or another in this life, but that's no reason to install a socialist government.

American free enterprise has created the richest nation on earth. We have an abundance of food, clothing, transportation, etc. We have the fattest poor people on earth.

We must never fall for socialism. It ends up like the morning after a drunken party.

Our system is not perfect, and neither are we, but our system has served us well.

One more thought in closing: Notice what the Bible has to say about those on the right and those on the left: "The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." Ecclesiastes 10:2 New International version (NIV).

This Scripture teaches that those on the right, politically, are wise and those on the left, are fools. Yes, those leftists that oppose President Donald Trump are fools. Of course it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

- Billy Glenn, Lubbock

Read or Share this story: http://wtrne.ws/2pKowtB

Read more:
Letter: Socialism is stupid - Times Record News

Hatch history lesson for Trump: US would have gone ‘straight to socialism’ without the filibuster – CNN

"He apparently hasn't served in a legislative body because had we not had the filibuster rule this country would have been gone a long time ago -- would have gone straight to socialism," the Utah Republican told CNN Tuesday.

Hatch also cautioned Trump against being lulled into thinking the politics of a shutdown would be good for him and other Republicans.

"I think that may be wishful thinking on his part because shutting down the government is not going to work. Republicans always get blamed even though the Democrats are big part of the shutdown and that just doesn't work," Hatch said.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn pushes back on Trump's call for a shutdown: "There have been comments from a number of people from a number of sources of shutdown being a good tactic. I just don't agree."

And the Texas Republican pushed back on Trump call to change the Senate rules.

"The rules have saved us from a lot of really bad policy, even when we were in the minority," Cornyn said.

Trump suggested the US may "need" a shutdown of the federal government in September unless the Senate abolished the filibuster, a tweet which has followed months of frustration for Trump in the Capitol.

Trump's latest comments on Twitter come as the success of the Republican health care bill hangs in the balance in the House -- with House Republican leaders admitting behind closed doors they do not yet have the votes yet to pass one of Trump's signature priorities.

It also follows after Republican and Democratic negotiators agreed on a spending bill that will avert a shutdown and keep the government open, through September -- but leaves out some of the top priorities for the Trump administration, including paying for a border wall and ending federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

Democrats sharply criticized the President's remarks, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said he was "deeply disappointed" by Trump's suggestion.

"The President has been complaining about the lack of bipartisanship in Washington," the New York Democrat said in a statement. "Well, this deal is exactly how Washington should work when it is bipartisan: both parties negotiated and came to an agreement on a piece of legislation that we can each support. It is truly a shame that the President is degrading it because he didn't get 100% of what he wanted."

Sen. Brian Schatz tweeted in response to Trump moments after the comments came out, saying, "The President just called for a government shutdown this fall. No President has ever done anything like this."

Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate health committee, called Trump's comments "dangerous and irresponsible."

"President Trump may not like what he sees in this budget deal, but it's dangerous and irresponsible to respond by calling for a shutdown. Hopefully Republicans in Congress will do for the next budget what they did for this one: ignore President Trump's demands, work with Democrats, and get it done," Murray said in a statement Tuesday.

"Maybe some of the victories we had in this omnibus (spending bill) is maybe getting under the Pesident's skin," said Rep. Joe Crowley, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Tuesday in response to Trump's tweet.

Visit link:
Hatch history lesson for Trump: US would have gone 'straight to socialism' without the filibuster - CNN

The Top 5 Forms of Socialism Denial Rampant In The West – The Federalist

Last week, I argued that denying the disastrous consequences of socialism is the Lefts equivalent of Holocaust denial.

In response, I have been treated to many excellent examples of exactly the kind of denial I was talking about. Heck, the New York Times even obliged by publishing an op-ed on Saturday that hails the moral authority and sense of humanity of American socialists and communists.

These are the same communists who toed Stalins party line, which is made clear when the author (who grew up among socialists of the era) describes the shattering impact on them of Khrushchevs revelations about Stalin. That they can be viewed as a positive contribution to American history, misguided idealists at the worst, is a measure of how deeply socialism denial is entrenched in this country.

So far, I have catalogued five major forms of socialism denial.

How dare you say denying the evils of socialism is like denying the Holocaust? Dont you know that Communists are the sworn enemies of fascism? It was the Soviet Union who really defeated Hitler, and the Soviets were the ones who liberated Auschwitz.

Notice something missing from this argument. Auschwitz was in German-occupied Poland. And who was the ally with whom Hitler divided up Poland? Thats right, it was the Soviet Union, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I dont think the old Soviets deserve any moral credit for helping defeat an evil regime when the Nazis were originally their allies who double-crossed them. And when the Soviets did liberate a country, they imposed the same evils as the Nazis did: mass deportations, torture, summary execution, suppression of free speech, and so on. One form of oppression was switched out for another.

Presenting socialists as the alternative to fascists is an old bit of Soviet propaganda dating back to the 1930s, when Communists and Nazis used to brawl against one another in the streets of Germany. Yes, they were bitter and deadly rivals, but only because they were competing over who got to wear the jackboots.This is the Alien vs. Predator of political contests: whoever wins, we lose.

The connection goes even deeper. The founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, started out as a Communist and a leader of the Italian Socialist Party. When he turned against Communism, he set out to create a new ideology that retained a lot of the same featuresparticularly the ideas of total state control and rule by a party elitebut with a nationalist twist. The result was called national socialism, which the Germans abbreviated to Nazi. Far from socialism and fascism being ideological opposites, one was created out of the other.

But creating confusion about that issue, and presenting themselves as the only alternative to fascism, was a centerpiece of Soviet propaganda, and to this day American leftists buy it hook, line, and sinker.

Take just one example. The leftist folk-song guru and Communist fellow traveler Woody Guthrie used to carry a guitar with the label This Machine Kills Fascists while he supported the war effort in World War II, and its a trope modern leftists still use. If you want to be really cloying and self-important, you can get a decal based on Guthries that you can attach to your Macbook.

The people who use this dont know the actual history behind it. Before he decided his guitar was a machine that killed fascists, Guthrie was using it to record anti-war songs. He only adopted a pro-war message in 1941 after Hitler invaded Russia and the Communists flipped their party line. So he was against fascism, but only if that was okay with Joseph Stalin.

Or consider todays antifacist protesters, who dress all in black, embrace the use of violence and firebombs to shut down their political opponents, and generally look and act exactly like fascists.

Ideologically, socialism and fascism are not opposites. Historically, the conflict between them has been a rivalry between two different enemies of liberty, which is now being repeatedwhether as tragedy or farce depends on how you look at itin the campus clashes between alt-right and antifa brawlers.

This is another socialism denial trope borrowed from Soviet propaganda, but this time its Brezhnev-era propaganda. Whataboutism was a term coined to describe a common Soviet debating tactic. When confronted with the evils of their own regime, they would deflect the question by pointing out a real or imagined evil in the West, usually beginning with But what about.

Whataboutism is still alive and quite well. You say that socialism leads to poverty and mass starvation? Well, what about the plight of the poor and hungry under capitalism? You say socialist countries tend to crack down on dissent, attack peaceful protesters, and jail opposition leadersas they are currently doing in Venezuela? But what about police shootings and mass incarceration in America? (The Black Lives Matter movement is a giant instrument of Whataboutism.) Socialist countries have killed millions of people? Well, what about all of Americas imperialist warmongering, huh? What about that?

Logically, Whataboutism is a version of the Tu Quoque fallacy. Rather than answering an accusation about your own sides wrongdoing, you deflect it by pointing to somebody elses real or imagined wrongdoing. But thats not an answer or an excuse.

When it comes to socialism denial, the most relevant observation is that the evils the Left attributes to capitalism, which are supposed to create a moral equivalence between capitalism and socialism, arent even on the same order of magnitude, and are often in the opposite direction.

Capitalism has produced so much prosperity that the Left had to flip over to environmentalism so they could portray too much prosperity as a problem.

That nostalgic piece in the New York Times, for example, refers unironically to American socialists being motivated by an urgent sense of social injusticea sense so urgent it somehow never applied to, say, the liquidation of the kulaks.

Above all, consider the socialists vaunted concern for poverty. Yet socialism has a record of making rich countries poor, while capitalism has a record of making poor countries rich. The most relevant example today would be Venezuela, which was until fairly recently the wealthiest country in South America. Under the rule of socialists, it has become one of the poorest, despite large reserves of oil. Meanwhile, Chile has gone from being one of the poorest countries in South America a few decades ago to becoming one of the wealthiest, thanks to its embrace of free markets. I should also note that while Venezuela has fallen into dictatorship under socialism, Chile moved away from it under capitalism. Its almost like theres a connection between those two issues.

This is an experiment that has been repeated over and over again: West Berlin versus East Berlin, Hong Kong versus mainland China (before the mainland went semi-capitalist, too). Or look at India after 1991, when it rejected Soviet-inspired socialist economics and finally achieved economic takeoff.

Capitalism has produced so much prosperity that the Left had to flip over to environmentalism so they could portray too much prosperity as a problem. Theres just no comparison between the two systems.

Youll notice that so far Ive used mostly repressive regimes like the Soviets as my examplespartly because so many socialist countries end up as dictatorships, and partly because the American Left is still waxing nostalgic about them. But surely not all socialist regimes are so deadly and oppressive. That leads us to the most common form of socialism denial today.

If you say that socialism is disastrous, youll be treated to rejoinders like this.

Tell people theyre ignoring the disastrous global history of socialism, and they will refute you byignoring the disastrous global history of socialism and looking only at a handful of innocuous Scandinavian countries where things kind of turned out okay.

Well, what else are they going to do? They cant pick Soviet socialism, because that collapsed. They cant pick socialism in Southern European countries like Greece, because that led to a massive financial crisis. They cant pick socialism in India because the Indians themselves rejected it. Ditto for China. And so on for Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia, and hey, did I mention Venezuela? Because people are starving there right now, which might be a little more relevant to our discussion than Denmarks medical system.

Notice, though, that socialism deniers have to pick only one part of these Scandinavian economiesusually health carethat they can portray as socialist. Im actually grateful to Dave Weigel for making the mistake of choosing Denmark as his example. Surely he must remember that this was the example Bernie Sanders chose when we wanted to make the case for socialism in Americaand that Denmarks prime minister responded by insisting, somewhat indignantly, that Denmark is not socialist.

The Scandinavian countries are market economies with welfare states, which is a step short of socialism.

Specifically, he was adamant about the fact that Denmark has a market economy. Why would he want to make sure the rest of the world knows this? Because the absence of markets makes a country a really bad place to do business and crashes the economy.

The Scandinavian countries have elements of socialism, but they are not fully socialist. They are market economies with welfare states, which is a step short of socialism. While they are known for having generous welfare states, they also started out as particularly wealthy, industrious, educated, and orderly societies. So at most they prove that if you already have a highly developed country, you can survive comparatively small doses of socialism.

Even then, Scandinavian welfare states have their fundamental discontents. Living life on the dole might be appealing to a societys least ambitious members, but for its smartest, most talented, and most ambitious members, its a stifling dead end. So Scandinavian countries have long experienced a brain drain, as their most talented young people take off for more capitalist places like Britain or America where they have the chance to make something of themselves. So Scandinavia is another one of these leftist paradises that people are strangely eager to leave.

The fact that the defenders of socialism have to fall back on a handful of standby examples in Scandinavia is just another testament to the fact that socialism has failed everywhere else. Since everybody is supposed to love science so much these days, lets put it this way. This is like a scientist who thoroughly tests his hypothesis and sees it refuted 95 times out of 100. So he ignores those 95 data points and publishes only the five that seem to be consistent with his hypothesis. In science, this is called cherry picking, and youre not supposed to do it. You shouldnt do it in political economy, either.

If the fallacy in the previous form of socialism denial is to cherry-pick only the best, most palatable socialist countries, then this fallacy is to cherry pick the way you measure the success of socialism. The canonical example is the high rate of literacy in Cubawhich sounds great, so long as you forget that this is a country that imprisons librarians. Or maybe you never knew that Cuba arrests people for owning unapproved books and brutally tortures dissidents, because youre surrounded by socialism deniers.

As usual, this has its roots in old Communist propaganda. The Cuban governments whole approach has been to target a very few narrow statistics, like literacy and infant mortality, and do whatever it takes to make sure those statistics look good, no matter the other costs. The regime doesnt have to ensure the actual well-being of its citizens. Actual people can be so desperate to escape that theyre risking their lives on makeshift rafts. But as long as a couple of statistics look good, its a workers paradise.

This is one of the cruelest, most callous forms of socialism denial, because it depends on peoples willingness to turn a blind eye to very real suffering and privation. It asks you to stare at columns of statistics and view them as more important than the lives of real human beings. It offers you the pretense of being especially educated and thoughtful, while requiring you to be totally credulous and look only at the facts an oppressive regime wants you to see.

Somedont want to have to defend impoverished and oppressive regimes like Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, and who can blame them? But rather than ask how socialism could go so bad in those countries, they insist that these are not really socialist. They may look socialist and act socialist and call themselves socialist, but its all an illusion.

Rather than ask how socialism could go so bad in those countries, they insist that these are not really socialist.

That this is an evasion, a form of willful denial, can be seen in the fact that countries tend to slide pretty quickly from being real socialism to suddenly not being real socialism the moment they do something that is embarrassing to the cause. A few years ago, a lot of people, from Sanders on down, were hailing Venezuela as a great example of the achievements of socialism. Now that the Maduro regime is shooting protesters, suddenly its not real socialism.

This is a perfect adaptation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. It goes something like this. A tartan-clad man claims, No Scotsman would put sugar on his porridge. His companion objects, But my uncle Hamish puts sugar on his porridge. The reply: Aye, then he must be no true Scotsman. No matter how many counter-examples you can come up with, they will be dismissed as no true Scotsman.

If youve ever had something like this happen to you, then you are prepared for arguing with socialists, because no matter how many examples you can come up with for the failures of socialism, somehow none of them are ever real socialism.

This is circular reasoning. Socialism declares that its goals are freedom, prosperity, and total equality. If, in practice, it actually results in oppression, poverty, and special privileges for the party elites, then it must not be real socialism. By that standard, socialism can never fail, because if it fails, it is by definition not really socialism. This No True Socialist argument is denial in its purest form: the belief that the unpleasant real-world results of your theory wont exist if you just define them out of existence.

What the Left is trying to define out of existence is a second Holocaust: decades of gulags, killing fields, torture, repression, and poverty inflicted on hundreds of million of people. And its an evil that continues claiming victims today, in part because socialism denial has seeped so deeply into our culture. Its time to stop tolerating it, in the same way we dont tolerate Holocaust denial, and for the same reason: to make sure it wont happen here.

Follow Robert on Twitter.

See the original post:
The Top 5 Forms of Socialism Denial Rampant In The West - The Federalist

Thousands March for Immigrant Rights, Workers’ Rights, and Socialism on May Day 2017 – Seattle Weekly

Manuel Brito was born in Mexico, and for him, this fight is personal. I was brought here when I was five years old, he says. And for many years, I didnt even know I always thought I was an American citizen, really! Until I found out [from] my mom and dad: Oh, no. Youre undocumented.

Today, Brito is a U.S. citizen and an Air Force veteran, and has been a resident of Washington state for the past 52 years. Hes a board member of immigrant-rights group One America and travels around Washington helping undocumented people know their rights and start on a path to citizenship. A lot of people helped me, he says. It was hard. It was hard. It took me five years to even become a resident but now this is an opportunity for me to help those people who are here, undocumented, and teach them that they have rights, too.

Brito, along with thousands of others, rallied in Judkins Park Monday morning under a cold, drizzling rain, then marched to Seattle Center to shout the values Seattle has long been championing especially since November 8. Speaker after speaker, in both English and Spanish, linked workers rights to immigration reform, affordable housing to health care access, and the first General Strike to the contemporary anti-Trump movement. Most importantly, speakers thundered, low-wage workers outnumber the rich and powerful.

This, my friends, right here, is solidarity! cried Leticia Parks, a member of Socialist Alternative as well as MORENA, a relatively new left-wing political party in Mexico. She went on to speak about how Trump-era rhetoric about borders and walls ignores how fluid such things are for corporations and the wealthy: For the one percent there are simply no borders or walls, she said.

Seattles wide array of socialist groups fanned out across the grass, as well as local labor unions, workers rights groups, immigrants rights groups, climate justice groups, and a slew of other activists and organizations representing other left-wing causes. It seemed almost everyone was handing out fliers for meetings, discussions, events and actions. Red May Seattle, for instance, a month-long series of talks and films and forums, asks Seattleites to Take a Vacation from Capitalism by exploring Karl Marx and other anti-capitalist thinkers, and to assume for a month that the market is not the solution to the problems that the market creates.

Protest sign after protest sign championed the rights of all immigrants, documented and undocumented (some local undocumented people, one organizer said quietly, did not attend out of fear that thered be too many police, and possibly immigration agents, at the days events). Among them: No One Is Illegal, No Borders, No Nations, No More Deportations, Ni Una Mas, and the pun-very-much-intended An Injury to Juan is an Injury to Al.

Who works for a living? Who has a job? shouted Nicole Grant, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the M. L. King County Labor Council into the mic. Well then, youve got that power and you know it! Nothing happens without immigrants. Nothing happens without workers. We have all the power in the world.

An activist named Dan who asked his last name not be used said he went to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma recently to support those on hunger strike there to protest their treatment. (A few weeks ago, participants in the strike numbered as high as 750; more recently, according to activists supporting the detainees, at least 50 are continuing the effort by refusing meals and 100 are boycotting high-priced commissary items.) It was really inspiring, Dan said. At one point we were chanting, You are not alone! You are not alone! And we heard the prisoners chanting back. That was really powerful. Dan said he attended the rally and march on Monday primarily to stand in solidarity with my immigrant neighbors in the face of a new wave of attacks from an extremely reactionary administration and believes that mass civil disobedienceand more work stoppages and strikes like this one, and like the massive immigrants rights demonstrations in 2006is necessary to force a change.

Were workers; were the people that make society work, added Riva Sheinkman, an activist holding up one side of a banner co-hosted by the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. And yet the system in which we live treats us as if were completely superfluous! Thats why Im here. The one thing that scares the people that seem to be running the system this way is that the workers [will] stop taking it. I think they should be frightened, because were the people that make this work and without us, it wont.

Protests were expected later in the day at the Youth Detention Center. Photo by Agatha Pacheco

A small group of Pro-Trump marchers gathered at Westlake Center. Photo by Agatha Pacheco

Original post:
Thousands March for Immigrant Rights, Workers' Rights, and Socialism on May Day 2017 - Seattle Weekly