Showing posts with label Socialist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialist. Show all posts

Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Cuban Delusion: Facts and Obama's Fancy Fallacy.

by Robert Janicki
President Obama has, for some reason only known to himself, decided that now is a good time to reevaluate America's embargo sanctions on Cuba as if he has a better perspective on these sanction then have all the preceding American presidents in the past 50 plus years.  It's as if lifting these sanctions will somehow mystically and magically bring the communist dictatorship in Cuba to see the error of its ways and open up Cuba to a new and democratic nation.  It won't happen and Raul Castro, operational Thug in Chief and speaking for Thug in Chief Emeritus, older brother Fidel, has said there is no way Cuba will discard communism as it political basis.
I agree with Raul and kind of think that 50 years of communism under the Brothers Castro speaks volumes as to whether Cuba will ever move toward a democratic form of government while a Castro or an acolyte is in power.  It's a dictatorship and dictators only relent when faced with death.  Any other economic deterrent or incentive Obama could imagine is simply a delusion.  You cannot make nice with a communist dictatorship, period and that's an historical fact.
But, won't economic trade with Cuba force the Castro dictatorship to open up its society?  Absolutely not and here is why.
Obama claims that American trade will open up Cuba.  What makes Obama believe that something is unique about American trade?  Cuba has been trading, albeit in a very limited means, with over 100 nations around the world and communist Cuba has not changed one iota.  What, exactly, does Obama believe that Cuba has to offer America in trade?  Other than sugar, I can't think of anything that Cuba has that America wants or needs and sugar is readily available on the world market, not to mention that Cuban cane sugar competes with American beet sugar, which will not endear Obama with American beet producers.
There are foreign investments in Cuba that have gone nowhere in 50 plus years of communist Cuba's existence.  What makes Obama believe American businesses will rush to invest in Cuba?
Here's the unspoken reality about trade with Cuba.  Every foreign trade venture in Cuba is run through and by the Cuban government.  Foreign dollars (US$) come in and support the Cuban government desperate for American dollars, since the Cuban peso is valueless or to the extent that the Cuban government sets a fictitious trading value of their peso.  Cuban workers are paid by the government in pesos.  Guess who keeps the US dollars brought in with foreign trade?  You guessed it, the brothers Castro, Cuba's first family of institutionalized criminality.  It's reported that there are around 8,000 political prisoners in Cuba and another 50,000 Cuban 'dissidents' toiling away in "reeducation" camps throughout the Cuban Caribbean paradise.
Every time Obama has tried to make nice with authoritarian dictatorships around the world, his policies have failed miserably.  There is no known reason to believe that a similar rapprochement with Cuba will be anything but another failure.  Saying it will be different for some reason will not make it so.  The economic facts are what they are and they tell us that on an economic basis it will be failure.  One only has to look at a similar situation with Vietnam, which has failed to open up any democratic trappings in their government and economy since trade was established with America. 
The only tangible result from Obama's actions to date has been to alienate the Cuban American population, which I suspect Obama has already written off as Republican supporters and thus of no concern or consequence in his political calculation to lift sanctions on Cuba.  Meanwhile, Obama tries by dint of his own personality and salesmanship to project an aura of action as an example of his hope and change delusion.  
We all know where that's gotten America.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Chalk Up Another One For Enlightened Socialist Thinking

Oil Rich Venezuela To Import Oil

Last week, a document from Venezuela’s state-run energy company PDVSA seen by Reuters News Service showed Venezuela was considering importing crude oil for the first time. “Yes, we are in talks,” Yousfi told Reuters when asked whether Algeria was planning to export crude oil to Venezuela. He declined to provide details.

Miami Herald:
"It turns out that Venezuela’s own production of light crudes has plummeted since the late President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, and the country desperately needs light crudes to blend with its Orinoco Basin extra heavy crude oils, which without, extra heavy crude is too dense to be transported through pipelines to Venezuelan ports and exported abroad.
Venezuela’s oil production, which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s export earnings, should be used in world classrooms as a textbook case of what happens when a populist government starts distributing a country’s wealth in cash subsidies, without investing in maintenance and innovation. Much like happened with Cuba’s once flourishing sugar industry, Venezuela’s Chávez-inspired populism has destroyed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
In 1999, when Chávez took office, PDVSA had 51,000 employees and produced 63 barrels of crude a day per employee. Fifteen years later, PDVSA had 140,000 employees, and produced 20 barrels of crude a day per employee, according to an Aug. 14 report by the France Press news agency.
Venezuela’s net oil exports have plummeted from 3.1 million barrels a day in 1997 to 1.7 million barrels a day in 2013, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates."
There was a popular riddle bandied about the Soviet Union back in communist days that went something like this: Question: if the Soviet Union conquered the Sahara, what would happen? Answer: nothing for 50 years, then a shortage of sand.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

“We the People” Vs. Insane Utopian Zombies

CFP
"If you have come to feel that the inmates are running the asylum, and have the nagging suspicion that you have been, and are being, lied to by your government, entertainment industry, “news” media, politicians, pundits, and darn near everybody else and their cousin, then take heart—you aren’t crazy, they are.
Their insanity is the end result of a long, Byzantine trail of intellectual and spiritual missteps that can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the reason-driven teachings of the philosophes, which in turn led to the philosophical rebuttal of the emotion-driven Romantic movement, and so on through numerous permutations on up to the present day. Connecting the dots between the various associated philosophies, movements, doctrines, and ideologies is no doubt a fascinating journey, but it is not one we shall be embarking on in this article.
Suffice it to say that through centuries of trial and error the left-wing intelligentsia have parlayed a hope-filled optimistic foundation of sanity, morality, Deism, and reason—into a grim, amoral, envious, pessimistic, misogynistic, misanthropic, nihilistic, Godless, senseless mess. No mean feat that. What was bad is now good, and what was good is now bad—this state of affairs is sometimes called the “Luciferian Inversion.”
[Sidebar: It is worth noting that although spiritual experiences can have a great intellectual and/or emotional impact, a true spiritual experience is not an intellectual or emotional construct.]
Be that as it may, it is important to realize that the current Liberal/Progressive agenda is not the result of some fearless search for truth, but the result of a slavish devotion to promoting a predetermined outcome (a collectivist utopia). Clever propaganda and duplicity are zombie collectivism’s stock in trade....."
Read the Whole Post HERE 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Obama the Amateur or a Man with a Plan?

Spellchek

"It’s very disconcerting when you hear more and more conservatives that seem resigned to dismiss ideology as fringe, conspiratorial talk. What do I mean? Simply that many people wish to give Obama a pass on his rigid ideology and just chalk up his errors in governance as inexperience or ignorance. I assume the thinking is that incompetence is more disparaging. Certainly there is resentment in that Obama was re-elected despite a horrific track record in office. Discarding someone as somewhat irrelevant due to their inadequacy is a reaction to that deep disappointment.

Anytime you misjudge an adversary, you are at a disadvantage. Did I just call Obama an adversary? Absolutely, anyone that enacts policies that restrict our rights and confiscate private property is not a friend. The fact is that liberty is an impediment to Obama’s agenda and he will continue to attack it at every opportunity.

Whether it’s healthcare, the economy, energy policy, foreign policy, you name it, the policies that Obama has been implementing pay no heed to what is considered a traditional standard for success. In fact, the opposite must be true. A successful economy is a negative for the President’s agenda. Yes, it’s true. Confiscatory tax policy, a more stringent regulatory environment, income and wealth redistribution schemes, etc., all require a failing economy in order to secure the public support necessary to implement his agenda.

This is why it is folly to simply label Obama an amateur. His belief system that has been molded over his lifetime has given him a very clear thought process as how to achieve his goals. There is nothing remotely conspiratorial in this. His ideology is a paradigm shift in traditional American values and the foundation the Founders put in place. Thus you get his promise of fundamentally transforming America.

Obamacare was always intended to collapse the private healthcare system. It has to in order to shift to a government run system. This is where Obama realized years ago that a step process would be required in order to get to a single payer system. Obama’s energy policy is similar. He promised us skyrocketing energy prices in order to force a change in behavior. In other areas, he practices the Cloward-Piven strategies designed to overwhelm the system and enact change.

What’s been astonishing about the entire progression of his agenda is that you can find either video or audio of Obama throughout the years detailing his plans. There really are no surprises with the guy. Some like to think that Obama has a unique ability to connect with mainstream America and accordingly garner support for his agenda. I’d be more inclined to liken it to a perfect storm.

Clearly, Obama is not a very good public speaker. Just listen to him stammer and stumble if he doesn’t have a teleprompter handy. He has no gift for uniting people as we’ve never seen a more devisive public servant in America. He just has the right combination of ethnicity, skin color, being in the right place at the right time (read beneficiary of a financial crisis), and he has mastered the rhetoric that is very effective on a society in transition. America was ready for Obama, however, I think they were just as ready for a female.

If you’re the person I’ve described, you’re not doing yourself any favors by searching for a profile that fits a President in over his head. Why does it matter? Conventional thinking was that the poor economy would sink Obama regardless of his message demonizing the rich and promoting envy and greed. Obama was never attempting to promote his economic plan as superior to his competitors. You don’t need to put forth a viable alternative if you’re successful at directing blame.

The Obama routine of ceaseless campaigning and refusing to govern is no accident nor it is due to incompetence. It is just an ideologue at work. Obama doesn’t make a move that isn’t calculated to elicit a certain response. It’s allowed him to stay ahead of his detractors as they twist in the wind trying to sell the public even now after his re-election that he isn’t qualified for the gig." 

It’s good to be King.