Free Republic

Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is a familiar name in Venezuela – and some are wondering if a decade-old feud will play a role in the bilateral agenda. The longtime chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil became persona non grata among socialist Chavistas in the late 2000s, when he confronted then President Hugo Chavez as they negotiated compensation arrangements after the oil industry was nationalized. “I don’t know if Tillerson will personalize his relationship with Venezuela or implement an institutional policy,” said Venezuelan analyst Luis Salamanca to FoxNews.com, also pointing out that the U.S. has nothing...

There’s a predictable checklist for meltdowns in socialist countries, and it’s playing out with tragic regularity in Venezuela. Nationalize agriculture? Check. Start government-enforced rationing when the food supply dries up? Check. Seal the border when people try to flee to buy food elsewhere? Check. The next step, and usually one of the last before total collapse, is runaway inflation. That’s what we’re starting to see in Venezuela. Rapid inflation, called hyperinflation by economists when it gets really bad, is one of the deadliest poisons for any economy. The spiral is usually triggered when a government prints too much money to...

Socialism USA Author: Gus Hall (1910-2000), former National Chair First published: Jan 1, 1996 by the Communist Party, USA We Communists believe that socialism is the very best replacement for a capitalist system that has served its purpose, but no longer meets the needs and requirements of the great majority of our people. We believe that socialism USA will be built according to the traditions, history, culture and conditions of the United States. Thus, it will be different from any other socialist society in the world. It will be uniquely American.What will be the goals of our socialist society? A...

The good news is that the Left has noticed what a scam college accreditation is. The bad news: They want the federal government to take it over. "Accreditors are self-regulating membership organizations," Ben Miller, David Bergeron and Carmel Martin write in a report released this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP). "This means that agencies' revenue comes almost entirely from dues and fees paid by the institutions they oversee." "This includes annual sustaining fees, as well as payments for specific functions such as an initial review to judge if an institution meets standards for approval or special visits...

Testifying at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey agreed that it is hard to address the issue of implicit bias in policing when there is no reliable data on the races of the people involved in police actions. “This is one of the most important issues we confront in the FBI — I think we confront as Americans,” Comey told Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) who raised the issue of race and policing. “Every conversation, in my view, about the use of force and race and policing in this country is uninformed.” But Comey plans to change that:...

“The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has provided oversight and recommendations for improvement of police services in a number of cities with consent decrees. This is one of the most effective ways to reduce discrimination in law enforcement and it needs to be beefed up and increased to cover as many of the 18,000-plus local law enforcement jurisdictions.” That was United Nations Rapporteur Maina Kai on July 27, a representative of the U.N. Human Rights Council, who on the tail-end of touring the U.S., endorsed a little-known and yet highly controversial practice by the Justice Department to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The loss of three more police officers in Baton Rouge over the weekend demonstrates the importance of the federal government doing everything it can to help police officers go home at night and be safe, President Barack Obama said Tuesday after meeting with key leaders of his domestic security team. Obama said there is great interest among police departments nationwide in receiving additional training to deal with active-shooter events and to decrease tensions before violence occurs, but that more resources will be necessary. He said many police departments could also use more help purchasing bullet-proof vests. He...

Normally, professors and college administrators see no end to their ever-expanding list of things that are "too important to be left to the free market." Apparently, even they have their limits. When two professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University suggested that universities could share and redistribute their own wealth, Brian C. Mitchell of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) used the Academe blog maintained by the AAUP to dissect the idea. "These professors decry the University of Chicago’s endowment as 'wealth hoarding,' arguing that if the government seized the University's endowment and spread...

In Congo, Hillary Clinton Suggests Government Ownership of Industry Would be a Good Thing Wednesday, August 12, 2009 By Adam Brickley (CNSNews.com) - In a television interview Monday in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that it would be a good thing for the government to take an ownership interest in industry.

Family doctors have criticized the Government for seeking to "nationalize" general practice with plans to extend free GP care to all children. Speakers at the National Association of GPs conference called for a campaign of resistance to plans for a progressive extension of GP medical cards to all children. The Government plans to extend the scheme to children aged under 12 years later this year and to all children shortly after. Limerick GP Charlie Gavin said he signed the contract out of fear. "My fear was my practice would not continue, I had a letter from the Government saying they...

On December 18, 2014, Barack Obama officially began the war on police as he signed an Executive Order establishing the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Since the signing of this Executive Order, 55 Officers have been killed in the line of duty. Yet, this mattered little to Obama who justified his Executive Order as he spoke about “the distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities – the sense that in a country where our basic principle is equality under the law, too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel they...

LetÂ’s take a brief walk into financial reality for a moment.At the time of this writing, the United States governmentÂ’s official debt is nearly $18.1 trillion.Now, letÂ’s look at who the biggest owners of that debt are:1) Taxpayers of the United States.If youÂ’ve held a job in the Land of the Free, 15.3% of your salary has gone to fund Social Security and Medicare.Each of these programs holds massive trust funds that are supposed to pay out beneficiaries, both present and future.Conveniently, the trust funds are required by law to buy US government debt.And given that every single US taxpayer...

Sen. Mike Lee has called on Americans to join him in the effort to abolish the federal Common Core education standards "As a U.S. Senator, I’ve seen the federal government make a mess of everything it touches," the Utah Republican wrote in the email sent out Monday morning. "And if they're allowed to stay, Common Core standards will be the ObamaCare of education," he wrote. "Common Core is the DC takeover of our school system. It will dumb down standards and cheapen the education our children receive." All kids in America "deserve the best education in the world. The only...

A health-care system run and funded by a national government has been caught covering up its waiting lists, leaving patients without care for so long that they have died before they were attended to and, worst of all, perhaps, fudging the numbers in order to make itself and its political masters look more competent. I’m from England, and I’ve seen this movie before. Many American conservatives have responded to the news that the Department of Veterans Affairs is being run precisely as one would have reasonably suspected that the VA was being run by training their fire on the...

No, Putin isn't re-building the third Reich: Chamberlain isn't a historic villain because he did nothing after Hitler seized neighboring German-speaking territories. He's a historic villain because he did nothing after Hitler blamed Christianity for poisoning Europe with weakness, swore to destroy the Jews, build a master race, set fire to the Reichstag, seized all police powers, built concentration camps and THEN invaded German-speaking lands. No, Putin isn't re-building the Soviet Union: He has implemented a flat, low tax rate, struck the authority of local commissars to impose taxes, decriminalized tax disputes, decentralized agriculture and industry, seen the numbers of...

Common Core Architect Now Dumbing Down SAT 10 March 2014 One of the key “architects” of the controversial Common Core national standards announced an overhaul of the SAT that has critics up in arms.... Related articles: Common Core: A Scheme to Rewrite Education Orwellian Nightmare: Data-mining Your Kids Debunking Myth of Common Core Education as “State Led”

Simply put, the new myRA program put forward by Obama is at best a sucker's deal… or worse, it's a first step toward the nationalization of private retirement savings. (Note: If you haven't yet heard of myRA, I'd strongly suggest you read this excellent overview by my colleague Dan Steinhart.)Even before the new myRA program was announced, there had been whispers about the need for the US government to assume some risk for US retirement accounts. That's code for forced conversion of private retirement assets into government bonds.With foreigners not buying as many Treasuries and the Fed tapering, the US...

That's the title of a new book by Fred Jerome, a compilation of essays from these and other noteworthies: This anthology features essays by revolutionary thinkers, activists, and artists-including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, civil rights activist Angela Davis, incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, and economist Rick Wolff- addressing various aspects of a new society and, crucially, how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, living in a society that is truly fair and just. I suppose that's one way to describe their vision. I might ask the question, "fair and just for whom"?...

Vladimir Putin is more than a year into his third term as president of Russia, and he is likely to dominate the country's next decade as he dominated the last—just as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev dominated their own times in the Kremlin. Like Putin or loathe him, he embodies an era. But centuries from now, the history books will barely remember the human rights abuses or oil pipelines in today's coverage of Russia. Mr. Putin will be remembered for one thing only: missing the chance to save his nation from a lingering decline. The United Nations predicts that, by...

The object of the game is to destroy American capitalism by having the government take over everything!  Like it or not, you're already playing... and not winning.