The 25 Points of National Socialism
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By: Frater Nihil
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The 25 Points of National Socialism - Video
In one of his few good decisions (and desperately in search of a positive legacy item), President Obama announced his plan to normalize relations with Cuba. It is a smart gesture of reconciliation that, coupled with free trade, will make a friend of an enemy 90 miles to our south.
We won this not because of the embargo (they could always get any goods they wanted from the same places we get ours: Mexico, Vietnam, China), but because it highlighted that socialism does not work for the people. However, it worked for the Castros, whose net worth tops $1 billion. Just imagine how much they would have if they were not government workers and share the wealth socialists.
This is a good sign and a clear repudiation of the flawed, corrupt and unsustainable socialist ideology. A stark rejection of socialist ideas has happened twice in two months, if you count our mid-term elections.
Fifty years of centralized, command-and-control government rule of the economy, supposedly free health care, and Soviet-style repression have devastated Cubas economy. Maybe the best thing that can happen here is that Obama will realize his policies are sending America that way. If our kids ever needed a test case of socialism and its devastating effects on a once vibrant nation, they need look no further than Cuba. Point made.
Fidel Castros policies are similar to Obamas: He nationalized healthcare. He put severe regulations on his people (czars, EPA, etc.). He used government to go after his political enemies (IRS and Lois Lerner). He blamed his own failings on others, circumventing their free speech (imprisoning a filmmaker after blaming him for Benghazi) and arresting them. He took over large pieces of the economy (ObamaCare commandeered 1/7th of the U.S. economy). Fidel spied on and intimidated journalists (Fox News James Rosen and others wiretapped). Both have scores of untried prisoners rotting away in Cuban jails (Gitmo). Both vilified capitalists and took their property to give to their cronies (Chrysler bail-out putting unions ahead of secured creditors).
Perhaps out of his personal respect for their work, Obama risks legitimizing the Castro brothers. Instead, Mr. Obama must highlight why Cuba failed: socialism doesnt work. Capitalism, entrepreneurship, minimal government, freedom, property rights, free trade and the rule of law must exist for a society to prosper.
Fidel, the founder of the regime, and his younger brother Raul (which is Spanish for Jeb) can claim victory. But to those paying attention, socialism and its derivative communism have failed the citizens every time they have been tried. It is an easy sale: I will take from the "rich" 49 percent and give to the "less fortunate" 51 percent. What happens is the 49 percent leave or stop working as hard to support the 51 percent. Cronyism takes over and runs the economy into the ground. Obama and Democrats, please take notice.
Normalization began with negotiations to free an American government worker sent to Cuba to install the Internet for the Jewish community there. Obama traded several Cubans held in America for Alan Gross and three middle infielders. The State Department is still waiting for MLB Commissioner Bud Seligs approval of the deal, but it seems all but done. Out of habit, the Yankees signed the 65-year-old Alan Gross to a three year, $20 mil deal.
Trying to bring the Internet to Cuba was brilliant. If anything would sound the call for freedom, it would be the introduction of online shopping and porn. They have porn in Russia, but every video stars Vladimir Putin.
Many in the GOP will oppose normalizing relations with Cuba, as some Hispanic Democrat politicians already have. I respect that, but they are living a grudge from the past. Obama and Senators Rand Paul and Jeff Flake are right; we should try something new.
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HART: Capitalism will free Cuba
Barack Obama has made a geopolitical irrelevancy suddenly relevant to American presidential politics. For decades, Cuba has been instructive as a museum of two stark failures: socialism and the U.S. embargo. Now, Cuba has become useful as a clarifier of different Republican flavors of foreign-policy thinking.
The permanent embargo was imposed in 1962 in the hope of achieving, among other things, regime change. Well.
Fidel Castro, 88, has not been seen in public since January and may be even more mentally diminished than anyone including his 83-year-old brother Raul who still adheres to Marxism. Whatever Fidels condition, however, Cuba has been governed by the Castros during 11 U.S. presidencies, and for more years than the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. Regime change even significant regime modification has not happened in Havana.
Some conservative criticisms of Obamas new Cuba policy which includes normalizing diplomatic and commercial relations, to the extent that presidential action can seem reflexive. They look symptomatic of Cold War Nostalgia and 1930s Envy yearnings for the moral clarity of the struggle with the totalitarians. Cubas regime, although totalitarian, no longer matters in international politics. As bankrupt morally as it is economically, the regime is intellectually preposterous and an enticing model only for people who want to live where there are lots of 1950s Chevrolets.
Eleven million Cubans, however, matter. Obamas new policy is defensible if it will improve their political conditions by insinuating into Cuba economic and cultural forces that will be subversive of tyranny.
Sen. Rand Paul, a potential Republican presidential candidate, evidently considers this hope highly probable. He is correct to support giving it a try. But he may not understand how many times such wishes have fathered the thought that commerce can pacify the world. In 1910, 40 peaceful European years after the Franco-Prussian War, Norman Angells book The Great Illusion became an international best-seller by arguing that war between developed industrial countries would be prohibitively expensive, hence futile, hence unlikely. Soon Europe stumbled into what was, essentially, a 30-year war.
Angells theory was an early version of what foreign-policy analyst James Mann calls the Starbucks fallacy, the theory that when people become accustomed to a plurality of coffee choices, they will successfully demand political pluralism. We are sadder but wiser now that this theory has been wounded, if not slain, by facts, two of which are China and Vietnam. Both combine relatively open economic systems with political systems that remain resolutely closed.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential 2016 rival of Pauls, is properly disgusted that Obama, in striking his deal with Cuba, accomplished disgracefully little for the countrys breathtakingly brave democracy advocates. There are two reasons for questioning whether Obama really tried. First, he is generally congruent with, and partly a product of, academic leftism. Hence, he might be tinged with the sentimentalism that has made Cuba a destination for political pilgrims too ideologically blinkered to see the extraordinary sadism of Cubas treatment of its many political prisoners. Second, Obama is so phobic about George W. Bushs miscarried regime change in Iraq, that he cannot embrace, or at least enunciate, a regime change policy toward Cuba. Regime change, however, must be, at bottom, the justification for his new approach.
Cuba Derangement Syndrome (CDS), a recurring fever, accounted for the Bay of Pigs calamity, the most feckless use of U.S. power ever. After this, the Kennedys, President John and Attorney General Robert, continued to encourage harebrained attempts to destabilize Cuba and assassinate its leader.
Today, CDS afflicts those who, like Rubio, charge that U.S. diplomatic relations and economic interactions lead to legitimizing Cubas regime. Americas doctrine about legitimacy has been clear since the Declaration of Independence: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. America has diplomatic and commercial relations with many regimes that are realities even though they flunk our legitimacy test. Twenty-three years after Cuba ceased being a Soviet satellite, there is no compelling, or even coherent, argument for why Cuba, among all the worlds repulsive regimes, should be the object of a U.S. policy whose rationale is to express the obvious U.S. distaste.
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The return of Cuba Derangement Syndrome
A specter is haunting the NBA the specter of socialism. The league already has in place a redistributive model, with wealthy teams paying taxes to help bankroll small-market franchises. But recently, Michele Roberts, the new Players Association executive director, issued a bold opening salvo in her early tenure, speaking in terms that can only be described as Marxist and asserting the singular value of the players. NBA Owners Expendable, ran an ESPN headline in response to Roberts remarks. A leading voice on the sports network wondered if Roberts was leading the players toward the previously unthinkable: a player-owned league. Such a development would be the most bold experiment in socialism in decades, at least.
After years of negotiating, the NBAs economy now resembles a standard postwar Keynesian national model, with a familiar four-bracket marginal progressive tax structure used to redistribute revenue to smaller teams. Its plainly clear in a sports league, if not in a nation, that systems seize and break down when inequality reaches untenable levels. For all our disagreement on such matters at the polls, Americans like the result of rigidly redistributive sports economies. In the NFL, the nations most popular league, nearly 61 percent of total revenue is collected and redistributed about the league, maintaining the relative parity that fans demand. All three big U.S. professional sports leagues have adopted redistributive practices. Even fans of the NBAs coastal goliaths knowif deep, deep downthat Milwaukee has to have a chance to be champion. For all her conservative currency, Ayn Rands ideological absurdity would have been readily apparent were she to have written a sports novel where a dynastic New York team wins 34 trophies in a row. Americans do, in fact, like redistribution.
But if the NBA currently operates according to a sort of Keynesian, redistributive model, Roberts has provoked an imagination of a socialistic league, a revolutionary model that is, strictly speaking, non-capitalist. (It is socialistic in the broad sense of the term, not in the way it gets used to describe welfare-state models, which are, in the final analysis, mostly capitalist economies with socialistic salves to grease the gears, smooth out cyclical troughs and ward off unrest.)
Why dont we have the owners play half the games? challenged Roberts when asked about the roughly 50-50 revenue split among players and owners. A Marxist truism now becomes a joke when considered in the case of the NBA; its the workers who create the value, not the owners. So while, say, the Koch brothers might appear necessary to the functioning of Koch Industries, NBA owners complete and total lack of hoops skill lays bare their superfluousness. No one wants to hear And starting at power forward Donaaaald Sterrrrrliiiing!
Roberts drives the point home: There would be no money if not for the players There. Would. Be. No. Money. Owners are expendable, she suggests: Thirty more owners can come in, and nothing will change. These guys [the players] go? The game will change. So lets stop pretending.
Worker-owned businesses are fairly rare, especially wholly owned, large entities. But a trend toward the model has accompanied a changing attitude toward capitalism, writes University of Maryland professor Gar Alperovitz in the New York Times. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, Alperovitz writes, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism. This third way, first attempted on a large scale by Sweden during the height of its radicalism in the 1970s, might well find a foothold in the wake of the Occupy movement. The Swedish experiment was never permitted to play out; corporate capitalism and nascent neoliberalism were set to dominate for the next few decades, and Swedens plan might not have been birthed at the right historical moment. But Occupy brought to public attention the non-hierarchical, participatory, democratic structures that had been incubated on the left during the last several decades of capitalist triumph and communisms defeat. Many on the left, unsatisfied with what they saw as a false choice between failed models of state socialism and corporate capitalism, explored this third way, neither capitalist nor socialist in their traditional senses. Stepping out into the vacuum of ideas in the wake of the 2007-08 economic crisis and Great Recession, Occupy was a sort of coming-out party for this leftist thought. Following Argentinas own economic disaster in 2001, the fbricas recuperadas movement in Argentina, documented by Naomi Klein and husband Avi Lewis in their 2004 documentary The Take, demonstrated the surprising ease with which workers can supplant capitalist ownership and management.
But the fbricas recuperadas and Occupy movements are not the NBA. An anti- or post-capitalist move by the NBA would bring revolutionary ideas into living rooms, sports bars and playgrounds across the country. It is conceivable that such a remedy for the league might rouse the imagination of Paul family libertarians, Bernie Sanders-wing progressives, and many in the great swath in between. Why cant we all own where we work? Americans might start to ask. Would not a democratic people begin to chafe at democracys antithesis in the workplace?
The eventual effects of that simple notion might do much to cure our current, stubborn ills, both economic and political. Imagine a Koch brothers-less Koch Industries, where employee ownership eliminated that concentration of wealth and influence. Wall Street, allegedly a scene of distributed ownership, is, of course, largely a means for concentrated ownership and control, and employee ownership would begin to erode that power maligned by the left and the right, both Occupy and the Tea Party. President George W. Bush rallied Americans around his ownership society, but ownership is kept from even some of the nations most highly paid employees: professional athletes. The dynamic of owner and employee is still at work in the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball; the players are bought and sold, traded and dismissed in a way that, in the end, differs little from fast food or Wal-Mart workers. They are, in that way, powerless, despite Roberts almost self-evident assertion: There would be no money if not for the players. There would be no money if not for the fry-cook and the cashier, too.
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NBAs socialist revolution: How a new plan could radicalize the league and America
Cuba and The US Normalize Relations, is Socialism Over?
The major news that everyone is talking about is the opening up of relations between the US and Cuba. Obama has announced that there will be economic cooperation between the two countries form...
By: Jason Unruhe
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Cuba and The US Normalize Relations, is Socialism Over? - Video