Posted on 06/02/2008 3:17:47 PM PDT by cardinal4
At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen:
[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
(Excerpt) Read more at artoriuscastus.blogspot.com ...
I will defy until my last breath.
Iron Maiden - The Prisoner
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Tb8Jo11uGo
Inspiration taken from the show The Prisoner, but this is how I feel.
I’m not a prisoner, I’m a free man.
It needs to be posted every couple of years. The part about the teacher’s unions and political parties happened some time ago..
Great song and band. Too bad everything’s come to this.
I believe the total takeover is about to happen. I guess we are going to just watch it happen, then Bit*h.
Heaven help us.
There’s a fix, and it’s a doozy.
But it’s already been done, and it worked.
Perhaps we’ll have to make it work again.
Perhaps. I would have joined the Army years ago, or even now but short, out-of-shape 25 year olds don’t make good soldiers.
Obama is compatible or has already indicated compatibility with about 40 of these 45 goals..
Neither do short, out-of-shape 22 year olds.
Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
yeah, it’s too bad...I was fairly healthy until I was 12, but that’s a long story.
I am 42, just out of range for the draft, should one Islamic nation or another decide to nuke 200,000 US troops. In case they try to draft me anyway, my asthma and DD-214 should sufficiently scare them that I would be more trouble than worth in battle. Those years are over. I’m lucky if I can fake a decent basketball game with soldiers.
Oh BS!!! The average capitalist porker in America is doing just fine. If true conservatives want to feel sorry for someone, how about those working class slobs who keep the country running. Big Business has too much power in America and big business ain’t far behind big government when it comes to tromping on our liberties.
Proles, unite! Raise the minwage! End corporate welfare! Do it in the name of the old timey conservatives who had some common sense.
parsy, who is digging out his Red Flag. (OOps, its the stars and bars...nevermind)
I used to play baseball. Now I get insanely jealous watching guys my age play in the majors.
The dems know all that and are making it happen.
Maybe we should just give Hugo a big wet one with some tongue and all "just get along".
Quite messy also, if I remember correctly, but sometimes something 'must be destroyed in order to save it'.
“The average capitalist porker in America is doing just fine”
At least we now know where you stand!
Maybe you should stay on DU.
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