The Ladies in White of Cuba

Freedom: Laura Pollan Toledo was a humble schoolteacher who led Cuba's defiant Ladies in White. She died Friday in Havana. But she left a legacy of untold courage that terrified Cuba's long-communist dictatorship.

As surely as the sun will rise, a day will come when Cuba is free of its 52-year Marxist nightmare. And when its history is written, it's likely to begin with the story of Laura Pollan Toledo, the wife of an arrested dissident who shined a light on the totalitarian nature of the regime for all the world to see.

Pollan was a founder of the Ladies in White, the noted group of dissidents' wives who silently walked in procession, wearing white and carrying gladiolus flowers. They attended Mass together at St. Rita's Church to pray for their husbands' return.

They never made public statements, but the Castro regime understood the power of their silent protest and its global impact. For that, they considered Pollan a threat.

Pollan and the others, mostly wives of 75 dissidents arrested in the Black Spring of 2003, were followed, insulted, harassed, threatened, beaten by mobs and menaced for silently witnessing to the truth about Cuba's lack of human freedom.

Pollan died in a Cuban hospital of dengue fever and a viral infection, in the end at the mercy of Cuba's collapsing state health system, refusing transfer to an elite medical facility as the publicity-nervous regime offered.

It's hard to imagine the courage that Pollan's simple act of witness took, in a regime that considers going to church a threat to the state.

In Castro's island hellhole, praised by the Hollywood and congressional left, free speech is forbidden. Calling for elections brings a knock on the door at midnight. Trying to leave the island brings prison — even death. (READ Cuba's Lady of Valor),

Time To Kill The Welfare State and Embrace Capitalism

Robert Tracinski writes an excellent article about the miserable failure of the welfare state or socialism/communism. Government run economies DO NOT WORK. Let's learn the lesson and embrace what does work - CAPITALISM. Below is Mr. Tracinski's article.

A while back, Peggy Noonan wrote that "unsustainable" is the "word of the decade." She's onto something. From the debates over Social Security and Medicare reform, to the Greek debacle in Europe, to the pensions of state government employees, to the higher-education bubble, we are saddled with institutions that are economically unsustainable. They are doomed to collapse by the ruthless certainty of arithmetic.

What do all of these things have in common? They are manifestations of the modern welfare state--and that is what is unsustainable.

I could rehearse the statistics. Social Security is projected to completely use up its trust fund in 2036 and Medicare in 2024, but both systems are already going into the red because there are no actual assets in those trust funds. As Social Security and Medicare begin to pay out more than they take in from payroll taxes, they are swallowing up the entire federal budget and guaranteeing a steady increase in our already dangerous debt. For some state governments, like California, insolvency is looming. For others, it has already arrived; Illinois hasn't paid its bills for years. And where we're all headed is demonstrated by Greece, where government debt now equals more than 175% of the country's annual economic output, well above the threshold (roughly 100%) where debt starts to become impossible to service.

Everyone has already had plenty of time to absorb these statistics. What most people haven't absorbed yet is the basic economic unsustainability of the welfare state.

The welfare state is taken for granted as the "normal" state of affairs, as if it has always existed. At least, it is assumed that the welfare state has been around for so many decades that the current crisis is just a temporary aberration, a rough patch that we can get through with only minor reforms. But the actual economic history does not bear this out. The welfare state "as we know it"--that is, at its current size--is a product of recent decades. In all of its branches, it has vastly increased just in the past 30 to 40 years. So the current crisis is not some temporary aberration. It is cause and effect. It is a direct consequence of the modern welfare state

Let's take a look at the major branches of the welfare state, particularly the ones that are in crisis. They are: education, government employment, health care, and retirement.

The first two are interconnected. State governments are in crisis, not because of firefighters and policeman, but mostly because of salaries and pensions for public school teachers. Government spending on all levels for public education has more than doubled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation, with no improvement in the system's results.

Something similar has been happening in higher education, mostly through the indirect mechanism of student loans...READ "The Half-Life of the Welfare State" by Robert Tracinski at RealClearMarkets.

Two Anniversaries Highlight America's Philosophic Failures

by Joseph Kellard (The American Individualist)

This month marks 30 years since the Iranian hostage crisis began and 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell.

What must Americans understand about these milestones, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism and the collapse of communism, to understand why these forces continue to threaten our lives and freedoms today?

After three decades, the Iranian regime that initiated war against America on Nov.4, 1979, having stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 American hostages for 444days, has since emerged as the world’s premier sponsor of terrorism, murdering and maiming thousands of Americans from Beirut in 1983 to Afghanistan today. This has happened because our appeasing, timid leaders, both Democrats and Republicans alike, have all along refused to put even a scratch on Iran’s ruling ayatollahs and mullahs.

And two decades after communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and, soon after, Soviet Russia, we are witnessing the resurgence of socialism -- at home. This phenomenon is due, in large part, to the so-called defenders of capitalism, the Republicans-conservatives, who have resigned themselves to accept the welfare state that brought us our now bankrupt Medicare and Social Security systems, rather than mount a principled, moral defense of capitalism.

How essentially did we get to this point?

Note that with the rise of socialism in the early 20th century, age-old religion took a back seat as communists promised unprecedented material prosperity wherever they brutally spread their ideology. Yet, in reality, communism was no more than a secularization of religion. Communism adopted religion’s altruist ethics that commanded men to sacrifice their lives to God’s will and substituted him with demands to sacrifice to society and the state instead. The Berlin Wall came to represent the communism’s universal slave state, crushing its citizens’ fundamental rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, and those who tried to escape to freedom were shot dead, treated like common criminals going over a prison wall.

Long before the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, communism had demonstrated its anti-life impotence and evil, failing miserably to produces any semblance of a “workers paradise” on earth, with widespread poverty and deprivations and mass death -- an estimated 100 million people slaughtered from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China to Castro’s Cuba.

When in 1991 Soviet Russia collapsed, some hailed it as “the end of history,” as if capitalism had triumphed and America faced no other enemies. But there stood religion, both at home and abroad, already filling the void with its promises of paradise in a mystical afterworld. As communism-socialism wasted away, Iran’s Islamic revolution emerged in 1979 as the latest enemy of the West and religion was resurrected in America.

Like the communists, the Islamics watched America become an unprecedented superpower, both economically and militarily, based on fundamental premises antithetical to their own: reason, individualism, individual rights and the selfish pursuit of happiness. Like communism, the religionists preach faith and obedience to something allegedly higher than the individual. While communists extolled sacrifice to an all-powerful proletariat state, the religionists demand submission to an all-powerful god. Thus, to Iran’s ruling clerics -- who properly viewed America as an essentially secularist, this-worldly nation – called her “the Great Satan,” and since the hostage crisis have made “death to America” their mantra.

Meanwhile, at home, Ronald Reagan and his supporters ushered in religious revival, declaring America a nation based on Judeo-Christian values. And although Reagan rightfully identified Soviet Russia as an “evil empire,” he nevertheless held arms negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, who threatened this nation with nuclear annihilation, and Regan did nothing when Iranian-backed terrorists murdered 241 U.S. Marines at barracks in Beirut in 1983.

When the Soviet Union expired, the terrorists lost their main resource. Suddenly, life-long terrorist Yasir Arafat played peaceful with Israel, and the post-Ayatollah Khomeini regime posed as “moderates.” Al Qaeda, however, who proceeded to build on Iran’s Islamic revolution and bombed American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen. Next came September 11, 2001.

The born-again Christian George W. Bush responded by downplaying the terrorists as representing “a fringe form of Islamic extremism” who otherwise pervert “a religion of peace.” Thus Bush was unable to identify our enemy as motivated by religion’s essence of faith and force, and so he failed to properly frame the war as Islam vs. Western Civilization. Instead of destroying the enemy, he turned to nation-building campaigns to bring Iraq and Afghanistan “democracy,” that is, mob rule. All the while, Bush allowed those nations to adopt Islam as a cornerstone of their constitutions, and left the Iranian regime still intact to build nuclear weapons. Today the Obama administration, which is holding America’s first open diplomatic talks with the Iranians since the hostage crisis, is pursuing the same appeasing, timid policies.

America is at this point, in part, because conservatives have only offered religion as an answer to communism-socialism and Islamic totalitarianism. Through its support of faith-based welfare programs, expansion of socialized medical programs and bank bailouts, Bush laid the groundwork for the Obama administration to swiftly push for an explicit socialist agenda in finance and automobiles, and now looks to do the same in the medical and energy industries. Meanwhile, Obama makes nice with Palestinian terrorists and socialist like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, as White House communications director Anita Dunn praises communist mass murder Mao Tse-tung.

This week and next, as we watch images of the freedom-lovers who took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall 20 years ago and the Iranian thugs who blindfolded their American hostages 30 years ago, we must recognize that the forces of communism-socialism and Islamic totalitarianism continue to threatened our freedoms and lives. And to weaken and finally stamp them out, we must uncompromisingly champion and practice not faith but reason, not collectivism but individualism, not the all-powerful state but individual rights, not force but voluntary trade, not self-sacrifice but rational selfishness. Nothing less will save this great nation.
READ MORE by Joseph Kellard at The American Individualist

Anita Dunn's Favorite Philosopher is A Mass Murderer

Do you know who The White House Communications Director is? It's a woman called Anita Dunn. Who is her favorite philosopher? She's very proud to tell High School graduates that it's Mao Tse Tung. MAO TSE TUNG! The BIGGEST MASS MURDER in human history. This man was responsible for the death of 70 million people. We only talk of Hitler...but this man was just as evil and what was his political philosophy? Communism/socialism just like Hitler's. So the top official in the White house is a mass murderer admirer.

Frederic Bastiat - A Great Defender of Capitalism and Freedom from Do-Gooders

The purpose of government is to protect the rights of the individual. No more and no less. Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman and author. The quotes below are from "THE LAW" published as a pamphlet in 1850. He said, and is correct that socialism must inevitably degenerate into communism.

"Let Us Try Liberty" by Frederic Bastiat
Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty...

"The Desire to Rule Over Others"
This must be said: There are too many "great" men in the world - legislators, organizers, do-gooders, leaders of the people, fathers of nations, and so on, and so on. Too many persons place themselves above mankind; they make a career of organizing it, patronizing it, and ruling it.

"Proper Legislative Functions"
It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislator...

It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person.

Moore Tries Again To Extol The Virtues of Socialism/Communism

Mr. Moore, the buffoon of the movie world is at it again...inspired by another attempt at debunking the only economic system that has brought health, wealth and happiness to millions of people. I can't wait to see the movie by this charlatan. But he has his admirers and people willing to finance this communist/socialist. Obama must love him. Walter Williams writes the following at CapMag.com.

...Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership and control over the means of production. The distribution of goods and services and their prices are mainly determined by competition in a free market. Under such a system the primary job of government is to protect private property, enforce contracts and ensure rule of law.

...If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House's "Map of Freedom in the World," he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end.

...Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism. Take the financial crisis. One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Banks didn't mind making risky loans and Wall Street buyers didn't mind buying these repackaged loans because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federalgovernment: read bailout by taxpayers. Under a capitalist system, financial institutions would not have been intimidated or encouraged into making risky loans and neither would they have been bailed out if they did so.

Social Security, Medicare and its coverage of prescription drugs have an unfunded liability that exceeds $100 trillion. When those roosters come home to roost, they will make the financial meltdown we've been though look like child's play. READ at CapMag

Mr. Williams concludes that it is capaitalism that has made this country great and the greatest country ever in the history of mankind.

The Union of American Socialist States circa 2009

I found this old front page news story of the conviction of Al Capone but notice below in small letters is a story about the death of Thomas A. Edison. The passing of a giant of an inventor got smaller headlines than the conviction of a crook. But our government's crimes against America are of such proportions that these modern day crooks deserve similar headlines to Capone's. Today's major headline should read:
"The US Government Makes a Sharp Turn to the Left".

We should call our country: Union of American Socialist States

Or the UASS - Classy abbreviation - huh? It's closer to the truth after all. Walter Williams writes about this turn to communism/socialism: weep for our beloved land of the free and brave.

...The government is not saving Main Street--it is confiscating it and nationalizing it. Is it not true that, with the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal government now holds paper on tens of millions of American mortgages? What does granting American citizens "equity positions" and "profits" in companies seized by the government mean, except communism? Who is to run this new communist state--"Hank" Paulson and his Legions of Morale Conditioners? My congressman thinks that this serves "the public interest," but that private enterprise does not.
Why then do we condemn Hugo Chavez for nationalizing oil companies? Why should those companies "resist" his regulations? Is he not simply following the Paulson plan for the "public interest"?

History demonstrates the consequences of such coercions. The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 was caused by a string of obnoxious legislation, and was then cruelly extended by massive government interference. Contrary to prevailing, but long-discredited, opinion, the government did not save us from that mess. It created, and prolonged, it. Twenty years earlier, JP Morgan had ended the panic of 1908 in a few weeks--but bankers in 1929 could not so act. Today, Morgan would have been jailed for the private pooling of assets he arranged.

Is it not true that AIG was told by the Attorney General of New York that it would not be allowed to sell sound assets in order to save the holding company? Who is to blame for the collapse of a huge, and largely sound company, excpet those who forbid its executives from acting? And if this crisis spreads, who will be to blame--those executives who were not allowed to act on their best judgments, or those politicians who wrote the regulations?... (Read Capitalism Magazine)

A Life that Mocks Barack Obama and the Old Idea of "Spreading the Wealth"

Communist adage: Communism won't work until everyone is a communist.
Democratic adage: Nothing will work until we have all your money.

A true American spirit is Herman Cain NOT Obama. Both are successful black men but arrived at totally opposite philosophies regarding America.

I heard the most inspiring speech the other day filled with pure Americana. Forgive me but I am going to paraphrase since I have been unsuccessful in finding Herman Cain's talk. This man is a columnist and radio talk show host now but made his fortune in a variety of endeavors. The following is a paraphrase of his talk about his father, which maybe Obama with his "spreading the wealth" philosophy should listen to and learn from.

'Barack Obama's "prosperity is fair and change we need" message for the cool aid drinkers in Washington...THERE IS NO DEPARTMENT OF HAPPINESS IN WASHINGTON D.C. The Founding Fathers meant that prosperity is the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS not the guarantee.'

'Someone who was not confused about the pursuit of happiness was my father Luther Cain. He walked off the dirt farm he was working on with the clothes on his back. All he had was sweat equity. He had his dreams. One of his dreams was to own his own home for his family. He grew up in a shack with Mom and Dad and ten kids. My father did buy his house. He was not confused about prosperity. He achieved prosperity the old fashioned way - he worked for it. It works. Dad had another dream as part of his journey and that was to be able to be worth in assets one million dollars. Not because he wanted a car or a boat. He wanted a million dollars because he believed in the American dream. In 1982 his net worth was $982,000. Dad got there.'

'The Liberals want to take it away with the Death tax'....(read more about Herman Cain).

If McCain could only dig deep within himself and give a big speech tapping into the fundamental and unique spirit of Americans: Independence, self-directed, proud and hard-working then he would have a chance at awakening the deep felt and hidden American character. So far he has not been up to the task and with Obama promising "to spread the wealth" via communism we are truly at a crossroads as far as a major departure from the vision of our Founding Fathers if this man wins the Presidency. I guess the lessons of the communists and socialists of the 19th and 20th century are lost on a poorly educated populace. Truly a terrible shame and tragedy confronts us.

One thing for sure under an Obama regime: the only thing he and his fellow majority democrats will spread is poverty, misery and the decline of a great nation. Maybe we'll have to learn the lesson again. A government controlled economy can only result in bad things for its citizens. Until we courageously stand up and repudiate the old, trashed ideas of communism, socialism, and fascism there will be no end of wanna be dictators wanting to rule how you live. Limited government as set forth in our constitution is what we most need now - NOT more government!