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Remember the photos of Soviet Union department stores with virtually nothing on the display shelves? In the 1970s, while I was serving in the military, we were told about the hardships the Soviet citizens were undergoing at the hands of their Communist government.

Aside from typically abysmal fiscal policy manifested by a command-and-control economy and the huge burden on that economy caused by military spending, the people were helpless to improve their lot. For them to protest or force change meant imprisonment or death.

Not far to the south of us, Venezuela has surpassed the old USSR in mismanagement by a wide margin. Unfortunately, under Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro, the downhill slide is accelerating into perilous territory, that of civil disorder and chaos.

Ironically, Venezuela is reportedly sitting on the largest supply of oil and gas in the world, but is paralyzed in its ability to benefit from it. Foreign oil companies and other businesses have been nationalized (a polite term for stolen by the government) and in so doing has frightened-off any more significant industrial investment. Why should a corporation invest in a country where its assets can be easily seized? It would be stupid to take that risk.

The basic mode of failure is the standard template of socialism which can be summarized by Dame Margaret Thatchers famous quote: The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money. To apply a commonly-used phrase used to describe terminal cases, Venezuela is circling the drain to economic oblivion.

The populist/socialist Hugo Chavez really got the cart rolling by dolling out largess to people he thought would support him and thus keep him in power. But it becomes difficult to support a leader who cannot keep his people in paper toilet paper.

Chavez died March 5, 2013, just when things were becoming tense. His hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has been trying to keep the economy bailed out, and to say that it hasnt been working out is a vast understatement. Conditions have deteriorated to the point of massive demonstrations, marches and rebellious actions by the now-nearly starving citizens.

But everything will probably turn out okay because in 2012 Chavez forbade the ownership of firearms by all citizens, presumably to keep them out of the hands of criminals so to protect the more and more angry (and hungry) citizens.

However, Maduro saw that the police and military forces might not be able to handle the rebellious Venezuelan people, so he did what every self-respecting dictator would do: He formed his own private, armed (non-government) militia to maintain order through force of intimidation or through whatever means necessary.

Now, instead of cutting his losses and returning the government to a democratic form, he will try to hang on until the end and either he is driven from power and killed, or becomes so ruthless that the people simply have no choice but to give up or be exterminated. The former is exactly what happened in Cuba when the Communists under the Castro brothers took over. But guess whose families are well-off, set for life and protected? Yes, its the tyrants.

Note that banning the private ownership of firearms in Venezuela was enacted just before conditions became intolerable. Without the means to defend themselves effectively against a rogue government and its enforcers, the people will suffer dearly.

The United States is the only nation that was founded on the principle of individual liberty. That means the right of men and women to protect their own lives. Our history our heritage is unique in that regard. The people of other countries have not had that experience, so they do not have the liberty mindset in which we were educated emphasis on were.

It is no secret that liberals/socialists in our government were licking their lips at the thought of Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 presidential election. Except for Democrat Party primary nomination shenanigans, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders would have been a suitable substitute. The supreme prize of control of the Supreme Court was lost in that electoral defeat.

Keep an eye on Venezuela and you will be surprised at the number of similarities in the dialogue of the Maduro regime and American liberal talking points, especially regarding class warfare.

Link:
Commentary: Venezuela, a rich country ruined by socialist dictators - Austin American-Statesman

NEW YORK (JTA) The Jewish Sunday school teacher, a black accordion strapped to her shoulders, stands before a photo of a 1927 Jewish protest in Warsaw and introduces her students to an important holiday observed by their ancestors.

It isnt Passover, which has just ended, but another that is approaching in a couple weeks: May Day, the unofficial May 1 holiday celebrating workers rights.

Socialism is the idea that everyone should have what they need, says the teacher, Hannah Temple, as a projector flashes images of a protest sign and Jewish immigrants marching in a labor demonstration. On the walls, multicolored signs declare Jewish communities fight for $15 a minimum wage campaign We are all workers and Remember the Triangle Fire, a reference to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that killed 146 garment workers at a factory and galvanized the labor movement.

Temple teaches the children words to a Yiddish May Day anthem and offers a short primer on early 20th century labor activism.

We need to sleep some, we need to work some, but we need some time thats for us, she says, describing the campaign for an eight-hour workday. She invites the few dozen students and parents in the room to a May Day protest in downtown Manhattan. A few hands go up.

Maybe? she asks. Maybe is great.

The Yiddish sing-along-cum-socialist teach-in is the morning meeting of the Midtown Workmens Circle School, a secular Jewish Sunday school that combines Yiddish language and culture education with progressive social justice organizing. Its one of eight such schools, called shules, in four states serving a total of 300 students aged 5 to 13 teaching them everything from an Eastern European melody for the Four Questions to how to protest on behalf of underpaid fast-food workers. The curriculum ends with a joint bar/bat mitzvah ceremony for the seventh-graders.

Students at the Midtown Workmens Circle School in Manhattan read through a play in Yiddish, April 23, 2017. (Ben Sales/JTA)

Though its more than a century old, the Workmens Circle, a left-wing Eastern European Jewish culture and social justice group, has seen its fundraising and school enrollment grow in recent years. Part of the boost, leaders say, was due to the diametrically opposed presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and US President Donald Trump.

Sanders, says executive director Ann Toback, awakened American Jews to secular, progressive Jewish culture conveyed with a heavy Brooklyn accent. Trump, she adds, sparked Jews on the left to organize in protest.

Workmens Circle made a lapel pin bearing the faces of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump accompanied by the words mensch and putz, respectively. (Josefin Dolsten/JTA)

Workmens Circle isnt shy about its political leanings. Following the presidential election, it made a lapel pin bearing the faces of Sanders and Trump accompanied by the words mensch and putz, respectively.

Before there was Bernie, there was the Workmens Circle, Toback says. Is there a way we can connect to so many of his followers? The values that he based his campaign on are really the inherent values of the Workmens Circle and our movement.

In the five-month period after the election, the group saw its donations double over the same stretch the previous year. It has opened five of its eight Sunday schools in the past three years. The biggest, in Boston, has more than 100 students. In May, the Manhattan school will be hosting a spring open house for the first time.

More people are coming to us looking for I want to engage in social justice activism, says Beth Zasloff, director of the Midtown school. I know that for me, after the election, having a community, having a place to go where I know we can address these issues with our children, felt extremely important.

The Midtown school, like its counterparts, eschews traditional Jewish Sunday school mainstays like learning Hebrew or studying ritual and prayer. Israel isnt a focus. Workmens Circle has partnered in the past both with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a left-wing group that focuses on domestic issues, and Habonim Dror, the left-wing Labor Zionist movement.

Instead, kids take three types of classes: arts and crafts, Yiddish language and history, and culture and social justice. Last Sunday, the three students in the Yiddish class were reading a play, in transliteration, about a robot. The teacher would read a line in Yiddish and translate, which a student repeated.

Beth Zasloff, director of the Midtown Workmens Circle School. (Courtesy of Zasloff/JTA)

The arts and crafts class was making banners for an immigrant rights protest. In the history and culture class, four students prepared for their bar and bat mitzvahs next year. For the ceremony, theyll do a research project on their family history and interview an elderly relative. Later that Sunday, this years bar mitzvah class made presentations on children who were killed in the Holocaust.

One student said knowing Yiddish made her feel like her friends at school who hail each other in the hallways in Bengali. Another said her favorite Workmens Circle experience was participating in the Jan. 21 Womens March in New York City. And for some, the appeal lies in attending a Sunday school that avoids the standard memorization of Hebrew prayers.

This is secular, and Im not super religious in terms of my beliefs about God, says Moxie Strom. So its nice to have something that doesnt focus so much on God said this and God said that.

Illustrative: The Klezmatics at a tribute concert for Sholem Aleichem in Boston, sponsored by the Workmens Circle. (Derek Kouyoumjian/ courtesy Boston Workmens Circle)

The Workmens Circle/Arbeter Ring was founded in 1900 in large part to help Jewish immigrants from Europe succeed in America. Along with advocating for better working conditions, it offered members services like health care and loans. It supported socialism at a time when Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan helped elect a Socialist Party candidate, Meyer London, to Congress.

No longer socialist but still left wing, the Workmens Circle fights for those issues largely on behalf of non-Jewish workers, leading campaigns for immigrant rights or better pay.

And instead of helping Yiddish speakers integrate into America, the organizations cultural mission has flipped, preserving and promoting an old world culture for American Jews. It runs Yiddish language classes for adults and a summer camp for kids, and hosts culinary and holiday events.

You can see this parallel universe in Yiddish

Theres so much culture theyre missing, says Kolya Borodulin, the groups associate director for Yiddish programming, who grew up in Birobidzhan, the Soviet Unions Jewish Autonomous Region. Jewish holidays, traditions described by famous Yiddish authors any contemporary issues you name are reflected in the Yiddish language. So you can see this parallel universe in Yiddish.

Even if they go to eight years of Sunday school, Borodulin says, the students are unlikely to come out speaking proficient Yiddish, or even reading a page in the languages Hebrew script. The schools aim, rather, is to reinforce a cultural and ideological Jewish identity in its students. The aspiration is that years after they leave, they will be able to connect to their Judaism on holidays, in song and on the picket line.

What resonates most with them is the social justice and having a sense of what we believe in, says Debbie Feiner, whose two sons, ages 9 and 12, attend the Midtown school. The older one, she says, understands that when you see some injustice, you need to take action. He cant be a passive bystander, and hell connect that with his Judaism.

A student and teacher play the violin during a presentation on child victims of the Holocaust at the Midtown Workmens Circle School in Manhattan, April 23, 2017. (Ben Sales/JTA)

Read more from the original source:
This Sunday school teaches kids Yiddish -- and socialism - The Times of Israel

If you took a trip to the Deep South of the USA and listened in on a local government meeting, you would probably find that most people in the room would be die-hard Republicans.

The party has dominated that area for years, and there are very few Democrats to offer up any opposition in most southern states.

Aside from Florida, which has swung between the two parties due to its huge cities, there are few areas down there not considered safe for more conservative politicians.

It might not seem out of place in a right-wing area that insults such as socialist, Marxist, or communist are still regularly used to caricature left-wing people and compare their policy ideas with the failed USSR. This I find unacceptable.

Attacking someone by using the name of an ideology as an insult is not constructive in any way. First of all, if you want to achieve anything in an argument at all, blindly insulting people is just likely to make them more angry at you. It is more likely to entrench them in their opinions and make them less likely to come away with an expanded view of how you see a situation. Thats the goal in argument or debate. I think everyone can agree that spending all our time shouting at people, on the internet or elsewhere, is not the most productive use of our time.

Additionally, just boiling your opposition to political views down to using one abstract label is just as damaging. It sends the message that you are minimising your counterparts opinions, and that you probably dont understand them. Socialism, like all ideologies, is a vague concept on how to organise a society, particularly based in this case on the protection of workers and on the state being the most efficient way to distribute things like healthcare. There are many different examples of how it has worked, from Roosevelt in the USA to Soviet Russia. Its too vast an idea to ridicule in a single-sentence, let alone a one-word put-down.

One form of capitalism rules supreme in our society, and because of this dominance, you might think that capitalism has won the Game of Ideologies. Thats not the case. While it is the dominant system, and it does work well in many cases, the rich one per cent who take most of its profits and hold the majority of the power cant be allowed to rest easy while the rest of the population get progressively poorer and more dependent on the super-wealthy.

This does not mean socialist governments always get it right. The USSRs crimes were many and it was a good thing when the oppressive regime was ended in 1991. Socialism in our western context, though, challenges capitalism to do better for workers on zero-hours contracts, the homeless, or the sick. That desire to help people is a noble urge, based on making lives better. It deserves praise, not being rejected with knee-jerk insults.

-- Will Allsopp is a student at King Edward VI School, BUry St Edmunds

Read more:
Why is 'socialism' a dirty word? - Bury Free Press

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

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

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