The Next Big Thing From The Official Who Predicted Communism's Demise

Townhall.com ^ | January 4, 2013 | Jerry Bowyer

[pgkdan]

bump!

[catfish1957]

Was this before or after we were $17T in debt?

[Cyber Liberty]

The first rule of organizations is that first-rate executives hire first-rate executives. President Reagan was a first-rate executive and he brought in a varsity team: Bill Casey, at the CIA, Cap Weinberger at defense, Jeanne Kirkpatrick at UN and they hired first rate executives themselves.

{sigh} There were giants in those days.

[expat2]

Have you been to Roxbury, in Boston?

[Longbow1969]

Kind of ironic, isn’t it? The article predicts a booming, world-wide middle class.

Much of the world, namely large parts of Asia, may boom while American declines. Obama is simply doing everything possible to prevent us from taking advantage of this huge new pool of consumers. The world may very well just pass us by. In not so many years America's entrepreneur's and producers may simple leave for places that offer better opportunity. This is already happening to some extent, the trend will probably rapidly increase.

[Sherman Logan]

When I see a chief executive who’s buried in paperwork at ten o’clock every night, that guy doesn’t have a grip on it. The CEO should be sitting there with his feet up on the desk thinking, figuring out strategically what to do next.

I once saw this idea explained as the difference between officers and noncoms in the military.

It's the noncom's job to implement decisions that have been made, it's the officer's job to decide what needs to be done next.

If the officer is micro-managing the implementation of decisions he's already made, he can't do the job he really needs to do.

[ScottinVA]

The boom won’t happen everywhere; it will happen in the parts of the world which embrace freedom

Right... This is one the USA will be sitting out... freedom isn't "in" anymore.

[TheRhinelander]

Noooooooo! ...and I never will either!

[what's up]

Much of the world, namely large parts of Asia, may boom while American declines

This is going on as we speak.

Remember how the Dems decried a "uni-polar world" after the Berlin Wall fell? They couldn't stand it that we were now the sole superpower.

Well, we've got the "bi-polar world" now again under Dear Leader. He's doing everything he can to put the brakes on us while the rest of the world races forward.

[livius]

You’re still in the NE corridor, the Boston burbs and a place where people from NYC and Boston have vacation homes.

Go to Upstate NY and it’s a wasteland; go to the Northern Midwest, and you’ll only see the big cities and their immediate suburbs. But even a lot of these, including Detroit, are at about 50% of their former populations, and once you get beyond the MW cities, you’re not going to see much of anything for over a thousand miles.

There were never huge population centers in most places outside of the NE corridor and the West Coast, but now the wide open spaces probably haven’t been this wide open in at least 60 years.

[TheRhinelander]

Sounds perfect to me. People bug me.

[NeoCaveman]

There were giants in those days.

Indeed.

[SaraJohnson]

Great interview! Thanks.

[khelus]

Shame that the fall of the USSR is still being touted as “communism’s demise” when it was anything but. Russia is currently being ruled by a man who believes that the fall of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, and he is working fast to recreate the USSR albeit in his own image (he’s currently calling it the Eurasian Union).
Red China took on the mantle of communism after the USSR fell, with the help of US liberals, and
the European Union continued in its quest to build equally-totalitarian social “democracy”.
And of course, Islamic socialism (based on Nazism) was allowed to metastasize into the monster it is today. No, this fight is not over by a long shot, and there are traitors to the USA’s version of republicanism aplenty.>

Excellent observations.

[SamuraiScot]

None of his books are at my public library, or in it’s network system.

The reviews on amazon are decidedly mixed.

For what all that’s worth.

So far, it sounds like a ringing endorsement. . . That is to say, I believe the best explanation is that Herb is really, really smart and a great patriot, and the sources you mention are largely really, really ignorant, and are too neurotic and angry to love their country.

I watched his DVD, The Siege of Western Civilization. It's excellent.

[Sherman Logan]

Russia is not particularly democratic or rule of law based, but it’s also not particularly Communist.

IMO China is no longer Communist in any particularly logical meaning of the term. Their present system actually has a lot more in common with their 3000 year history of government by mandarins, with the Party members as the new mandarins.

And it’s just silly to call European social democracy “totalitarian.” I’m no fan of the system, and I don’t think its sustainable, but it isn’t totalitarian.

Not every undesirable form of government is Communist.

[lentulusgracchus]

The middle class threatens his bizarre Marxist ideology, which is not based on rising prosperity but on the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

Perhaps that explains his enthusiasm for Islamism and jihadism: He recognizes in Islam and jihad, in common with Winston Churchill, one of the great engines of impoverishment in world history.

I think that in everything he does, Obama consciously fosters and accentuates poverty, by design.

[LucianOfSamasota]

Until we asked ‘can the Soviet Economy be sustained?’, nobody was looking in that direction.

Are the Russians looking in this direction concerning the US?

[Armando Guerra]

Hard for me to read articles like this. How I miss the Gipper and how far we have fallen from being that shining city upon the hill.

[livius]

That’s called “miserification.” You make them miserable so that then they’re ready to accept anything you say.

That’s one of the reasons that all Communist takeovers have first killed the people who were actually helping the poor. This was true in Latin America (where the Sendero Luminoso, FARC, etc. always attacked aid workers, particularly those from Catholic or local groups) and in Europe as well. When the Communists took over in Spain, some of the first people they put to death were the priests, religious and laypeople who were running schools and cooperative programs in poor neighborhoods.