Skip to main content

New England’s Cynical Socialist Conventicle

Those on the right like to joke that New England is slipping into a socialist nirvana, but recently US. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Leon Trotsky of the movement to make New England Venezuela, has added serious notes to the charge.

Kevin Williamson has exploded the Warren menace in a thoughtful piece in National Review titled “Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything.”

“Warren’s proposal,” Williamson writes, is dishonestly called the ‘Accountable Capitalism Act.’ … Under Senator Warren’s proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more. Naturally, their political activities would be restricted, too. Senator Warren’s proposal entails the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less. It is unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, irresponsible, and — not to put too fine a point on it — utterly bonkers.”


Those who were born yesterday and who lived through Stalinism and Nazism with their eyes sewn shut do tend to forget, too conveniently, that nationalization is a revolutionary tool of the left. Both fascism and soviet communism are leftist tools of destruction; Hitler and Stalin were socialists, and both nationalized their industries because both were, at home, proponents of nationalism.  Mussolini was a socialist journalist before he hit upon fascism, and when the fascist fundament began to crack under his feet, he returned to socialism – much too late to save his hide. But it was Mussolini who best described fascism and the socialist state: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state.”

That is the political credo of socialism’s Latin American proponents. Peering over Venezuela, where toilet paper is in short supply and the proletariat lunch at garbage bins, the President of once prosperous Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver who studied politics at the knees of Karl Marx and the late Hugo Chavez, is unimpressed with the bitter fruits of socialism and continues on his merry way. The poor languishing on the streets of Caracas cry out to him in despair “the nationalization of primary industries has destroyed once prosperous Venezuela,” but the cries  do not pierce the walls of  the Palacio de Miraflores. Perhaps Maduro has been distracted by the Peruvian Sun Hall, decorated with gold donated by the government of Peru, or the JoaquĂ­n Crespo Hall, with its four gigantic rock-crystal mirrors.

The horror that is now Venezuela – inflation rate 40,000 percent – began shortly after then President Hugo Chavez nationalized the country’s oil industry.

Only seven years ago, when socialist Venezuela was wobbling on its pins, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vermont) was throwing bouquets at the ruined state. In an essay titled “Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America,” Sanders, lamenting the economic gap in the United States between rich and poor, wrote, “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?”


Venezuela lies in tatters, socialist Ecuador is also suffering from inflation and a protracted recession, and Argentina has long been a corrupt socialist kleptocracy. To vary a phrase of Balzac, behind every Latin American socialist political fortune lies a crime against easily seduced people.


Both Connecticut U.S. Senators, Chris Murphy, up for reelection in November, and Dick Blumenthal, have  lazily tolerated Sanders and Warren. The non-camera shy Blumenthal, whose Connecticut soapboxes outnumber the stars in heaven, should be ashamed to stand on the same podium with Sanders. But he is not. And what Williamson has said of Warren is true also of Murphy and Blumenthal. They are cynical posers: “She knows that this is a go-nowhere proposition, that she will be spared by the Republican legislative majority from the ignominy that would ensue from the wholehearted pursuit of this daft program. It is in reality only a means of staking out for purely strategic reasons the most radical corner for her 2020 run at the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic party in 2018, like the Republican primary electorate in 2016, is out for blood and desirous of confrontation. So Senator Warren is running this red flag up the flagpole to see who salutes.” 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p