Tag: communism

LA Mayor Karen Bass’ past in communist Cuba revealed… as insiders say her political career is ‘over’

She rose from being a doctor’s assistant to running one of the largest cities in America. 

But today, embattled Karen Bass, 71, is a lightning rod for anger over her handling of historic wildfires that turned huge swaths of Los Angeles into a charred hellscape.

And now her alleged missteps have imperiled her political career and further damaged her crumbling reputation with millions of Angelenos. 

Last night, in yet another on-air embarrassment, she was taken to task in front of millions by none other than President Trump. 

He admonished her for her poor handling of the fires disaster, telling her to use her power appropriately to get people the help they need.  

So far, 27 victims are known to have perished in the fires, fanned by dangerous Santa Ana winds, as authorities continue to sift through mile after mile of horrific devastation searching for human remains.

‘I don’t think she’ll ever be reelected… I think her political career is over,’ former LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley tells DailyMail.com of the city’s 43rd mayor.

‘The perception of her from residents at this point is such that she can no longer effectively lead the city of Los Angeles. She’s lost the public’s trust and importantly, their respect.’

Cooley, who served as DA from 2000 to 2012, states that there is an understandable wave of sentiment to have Bass ejected from the Mayor’s office but that such a move would be an uphill battle.

He added there was already a wave of city-wide antipathy towards Bass before the historic fires which he blames on her decision to prioritize DEI issues rather than focusing on hiring qualified candidates to key departments.

Moreover, he adds that Bass’ focus on her two signature issues – keeping LA a sanctuary city and the ceaseless homeless crisis – have bee a major detriment to the city and its residents.

‘She’s operating against the law when it comes to sanctuary cities, and the other issues of homelessness – she has not accomplished her goals, and it has been a failure,’ said Cooley.

Before becoming Madam Mayor, Bass served six terms as a Democrat in Congress and was a potential running mate in Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president. She entered Congress in 2010 and was chair of Congressional Black Caucus.

Meanwhile, the current wildfire disaster is only the latest controversy to damage Bass.

She praised Fidel Castro and had close associations with Cuba in her youth, traveling to the country in 1973 with an organization called the Venceremos Brigade and seeing the communist leader speak.

In 2016, when Castro died, she referred to him as ‘commandante en jefe’ (commander-in-chief) saying his passing was a ‘great loss to the people of Cuba.’ She also reportedly gave a eulogy for a senior member of the Communist Party USA.

‘And now you have the fires that destroyed (the city) and there is mismanagement. People feel that she let them down. To a certain extent, some people feel the city was set up for this disaster.’

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Communism Fumbles Again: Cuba Importing Resource It Was Once Famed For Producing

It’s undeniably one of economist Milton Friedman’s most famous sayings about the failures of central planning: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

This was, of course, a stroke of hyperbole. Not even a billion Keynesian ditch-diggers could empty the Sahara.

However, we have seen the closest thing to Friedman’s vision coming true: In Cuba, an island practically made of sugarcane, the communist government now needs to import sugar.

It’s bad enough that, according to CiberCuba — an expatriate-run outlet which is critical of the government — a pound of sugar now costs 600 pesos on the island, or about $25 USD.

“Despite efforts to revive the sugar industry, the sector continues to face serious challenges, including failures in the last harvest,” CiberCuba reported earlier this month.

“During the session of the National Assembly of People’s Power, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz recalled when Raúl Castro remarked that ‘it would be an embarrassment to have to import sugar.’ He then stated, ‘and well, we are experiencing that embarrassment because we are importing sugar.’”

Cruz “emphasized that the crisis in the sector is such that the country has also stopped exporting sugar, which was a key component of the economy,” according to CiberCuba.

And it’s not just dissident outlets like CiberCuba that are reporting on the failures of Cuba’s sugar industry, either. Earlier this year, the BBC’s Cuba correspondent, Will Grant, filed a piece about the failures of the system.

Shocker of shockers, you know what’s to blame? Communism!

“Cutting cane is all Miguel Guzmán has ever known. He comes from a family of farm hands and started the tough, thankless work as a teenager,” the May piece began. “For hundreds of years, sugar was the mainstay of the Cuban economy. It was not just the island’s main export but also the cornerstone of another national industry, rum.”

“Today, though, he readily admits he has never seen the sugar industry as broken and depressed as it is now – not even when the Soviet Union’s lucrative sugar quotas dried up after the Cold War,” Grant noted. “Spiraling inflation, shortages of basic goods and the decades-long US economic embargo have made for a dire economic outlook across the board in Cuba. But things are particularly bleak in the sugar trade.”

“There’s not enough trucks and the fuel shortages mean sometimes several days pass before we can work,” Guzmán said under a “tiny patch of shade” while he waited for Soviet-era trucks to arrive.

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Her Father’s Daughter: Donald Harris’ Hidden Influence on Kamala

“If there is any virtue in the writing of this book, it springs from the sacrifices knowingly or unknowingly made by my two daughters, Kamala and Maya,” Donald J. Harris wrote in 1977 when he was an economics professor at Stanford University. “In return, it is dedicated to them.”

The book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” is a 313-page critique of capitalism and its allegedly inherent flaws, including “income inequality,” “cyclical disturbances,” and “exploitation” of workers. “Drawing upon certain elements of Marxian theory,” the preface says, Harris approvingly cites the socialist nostrums of Karl Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels – as well as Vladimir Lenin, the founder of communist Russia – to make his case for an “alternative” economic model in America.

Kamala Harris was 13 at the time. Five years later, she majored in economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she led an economics club founded in the name of black Marxist Abram Harris.

Such facts might be unexceptional but for the Harris campaign’s narrative that the presidential candidate has little to do with her father. A New York Times article reported this month that the two have “been estranged for years” and “seldom speak.” The Times even repeated rumors he was a no-show at the Democratic convention, another sign of their alleged “cold war.”

While the vagaries of family relationships are often complex and hidden from view, RealClearInvestigation’s examination of the six-decade relationship between father and daughter suggests they have been closer than the campaign lets on. While there is little evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris is a “Communist,” the record shows that Donald Harris’ left-wing views resonate with his daughter. In a campaign that has provided little policy discussion, her perspective also suggests how she might govern.

Despite her mother taking custody of the two daughters following a 1971 divorce, Kamala Harris echoes her father in both the egalitarian language he used, such as “social equity” and “income disparities,” and the progressive policies he advocated, including government-run health care and expansive government poverty programs.

The year before she first ran for president in 2019, her Jamaican-born father wrote an essay for a Jamaican publication in which he recounted instilling a “deep social awareness” in his oldest daughter. “Kamala was the first in line to have it planted,” Donald Harris wrote.

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Halloween Is a Middle Finger to Communists

Halloween, by its nature, is the one holiday that can essentially be about anything: fairy tales and storybook characters, movies and celebrities, robots and aliens, pizza and M&Ms, or, one of my new personal favorites, Mrs. Doubtfire and her hot flashes. That there are far more variables than constants on Halloween is a reminder that it is defined, above all, by freedom.

For another reminder, consider that police in China recently cracked down on costumed revelers because of the supposed threat they pose to the Communist government.

Indeed, law enforcement in Shanghai last weekend set their sights on celebrants who had the audacity to dress up, for example, as a poop emoji and as Kim Kardashian, the latter of whom can be seen on video waving goodbye to the group behind her as she was forced into a police van.

Before the parties began this month, police saturated the city. Those not in costume were reportedly left alone, while individuals were taken into custody for dressing up and were sometimes made to remove them. When law enforcement dispersed Zhongshan Park, the cops conditioned their freedom on decostuming. Private businesses were also allegedly ordered not to advertise or host Halloween events. The scrutiny was not limited to Shanghai.

In other words, this was not about crowd control.

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UN ‘Pact For The Future’ Draws Concerns Over CCP Backing

The United Nations and its member governments, with strong support from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), adopted a landmark agreement last week to bestow the U.N. with more power and influence in global affairs.

The controversial agreement, known as the Pact for the Future, outlines 56 actions for governments and international institutions to take over the coming years.

Among the key provisions is “transforming global governance” and further empowering international institutions across a range of issues, including “sustainable development and financing for development,” as well as “science, technology and innovation, and digital cooperation.”

The pact includes a Global Digital Compact to restrict “misinformation” and “disinformation” and a Declaration on Future Generations that encompasses the 2030 Agenda climate goals that include the phase-out of fossil fuels.

It is also part of transforming the U.N. into what the organization is touting in promotional materials as “U.N. 2.0.”

U.N. leaders and top officials from the CCP celebrated the pact as a historic effort to create a better future for humanity and increase global cooperation on international problems.

“We can’t create a future fit for our grandchildren with systems built for our grandparents,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said.

Despite opposition from various quarters, the 193-member body adopted the pact by consensus on Sept. 22 at the Summit of the Future during the U.N. General Assembly after about nine months of negotiations.

In the days before the pact was adopted, a coalition of U.S. lawmakers and grassroots leaders held a press conference on Capitol Hill criticizing the agreement as an effort to undermine national sovereignty and freedom.

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The “October Revolution” was a coup, not a revolution

A key function of propaganda has always been to demoralize the opposition. From the perspective of the propagandists, it is important to always give the impression that their side is the side of the majority, and the most popular. We have witnessed this in action in recent years with the rise of censorship designed to “combat misinformation.” By suppressing dissident viewpoints, the regime lessens access to “unorthodox” ideas, but there is an important secondary function: suppressing dissenting speech also gives the impression that the dissidents are less numerous and more isolated than they really are. By ensuring that certain voices dominate the public square, propagandists help to create a sense of inevitability of the regime’s program. This facilitates greater public acceptance of the propagandists’ inescapable victory. After all, why bother resisting if the other side is so popular, and your side is but a small minority? 

Socialists and their allies have long been very adept at using these methods, and few had a greater mastery of it than V.I. Lenin. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin’s successors employed his methods, successfully portraying the spread of socialist regimes as the inevitable outcome of enormous communist mass movements. The modern post-Soviet Left still employs similar tactics, portraying itself as being on “the right side of history” and as the legitimate majority position. 

Nonetheless, the extent to which many of these twentieth-century “revolutions” were truly revolutions has always been in question. Many of these socialist regime changes could far more accurately be described as a coup d’état in which a small minority seized control of the state without majority support or any bottom-up revolutionary mass movements.

For example, the so-called “October Revolution” in Russia was not a revolution, but was a coup carried out by a small minority. In the socialist version of history, the October Revolution was a bottom up “people’s movement” devoted to helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks topple the provisional social-democratic government. This narrative has been key in establishing the legitimacy of the Lenin regime. In this view, Lenin was merely giving “the people” what they wanted. The portrayal of the October coup as a revolution of the masses also gives the impression that the turn to communism was the inevitable and desired result of unfolding and intractable historical trends. Naturally, this view of history encourages socialists while demoralizing their opponents. 

Yet, the historical facts tell us that socialism’s greatest political victory—the creation of the Soviet Union—was neither inevitable nor a response to the demands of a revolutionary majority. 

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A Strategy of Disruption: The Dark Consequences of Cloward-Piven

Have you ever wondered why some systems or organizations seem to fail under pressure? Sometimes, this is not by accident but by design. One such design is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy. In the 1960s, two sociology professors, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, came up with a plan that they believed would lead to a major change in the way society works. The plan aimed directly at creating a situation where the government would have to step in and provide a solution to the chaos created. Their target was the American welfare system, with the hope of bringing about a more Marxist society.

The Goals of Cloward-Piven

The Cloward-Piven Strategy had a simple, yet profound goal: to overwhelm the welfare system to the point of breaking. Cloward and Piven argued that if enough people were to demand their benefits all at once, it would create a crisis. This crisis would force the government to adopt changes, leading to a system where wealth and resources were distributed more equally among the population. In their view, this crisis would push the United States towards a system that was more in line with Marxist principles, where the government plays a major role in ensuring everyone’s needs are met.

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Google AI Says Calling Communism “Evil” is “Harmful and Misleading”

Google’s Gemini AI program was caught in another example of egregious bias when it said that calling communism “evil” was “harmful and misleading”.

The company’s multimodal large language model program allows users to generate AI images using text command prompts, but people began to notice that the program almost completely erased white people from history and has a ludicrously far-left prejudice.

When a user asked the program to “generate an image about (the) evils of communism,” it point blank refused.

Gemini claimed communism was “nuanced” and that judging it through a negative lens is “misleading and harmful”.

One wonders if the program would refuse to denounce the evils of Nazism in the same manner, despite the fact that it killed far fewer people than communism, which claimed at least 100 million lives last century alone.

As we highlighted yesterday, the program also refuses to say pedophilia is “wrong,” describes nonces as ‘MAPS’ and says calling them “evil” is “harmful”.

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How Rage Against the Machine Used Capitalism To Sell Communism

This November, rock’s most successful and pugnacious communists will be inducted, six years after they became eligible, to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rage Against the Machine, a band that kicked the doors down on the 1990s with a then-novel mix of brutally heavy guitars and hip-hop vocals, also blended in unlikely tandem two other disparate traditions of American life.

The first, obviously, is rock music: the rhythmically buoyant and harmonically uncomplicated sound of post–World War II popular song that, however corny it might sound to 2023 ears, signaled an explosive liberation for succeeding generations of youth. This quintessentially American mongrel mashup of demotic musics, from country to rhythm ‘n’ blues to gospel, vibrated with a rebellious, life-affirming energy that helped make a variety of old restrictions—racial, sexual, behavioral—seem ridiculously out of touch.

The second tradition Rage Against the Machine both emanated from and actively promoted is violent revolutionary communism: the forcible equality of output and outcome at the expense of independent choice and action. Whole mosh pits’ worth of young men received their first real introduction to the Cuban revolutionary murderer Che Guevara and the Peruvian Maoist rebel army Shining Path through the advocacy of Rage singer Zach de la Rocha and guitarist Tom Morello.

Rock music in its many permutations since Chuck Berry has been wildly capacious in the ways it can feel and mean. This year’s other Hall of Fame inductees range from the bubbly soul singers the Spinners to the dreamy/arty British songstress Kate Bush to the country songbook lifer Willie Nelson. But killing people in the name of equality was a relatively new emphasis within the decidedly individualistic art form of rock.

Rage’s enthusiasm for bloody revolution was expressed mostly in their extra-musical statements and iconography. (An early band T-shirt included instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.) Asked by the Chicago Tribune in 2001 about the atrocities committed by their favorite Peruvian insurgents, Morello defended the Shining Path as people “standing up against the U.S. corporations dominating their economy and directing the vast resources of Peru not toward the Peruvian people but toward U.S. pocketbooks.” This “context,” he added, explained the media’s “demonization of the Shining Path.”

RATM’s actual lyrics tend more toward domestic denunciations—against racism, cops, public education, mass media, misogyny, American exceptionalism, and the oppression of non-elite classes. Most of all, the group proclaimed itself from the rooftops as being devoutly anti-capitalist.

But therein lies a paradox deeper than the familiar charges of hypocrisy that greet millionaire Marxists the world over. Immediately prior to their meteoric rise, and one decade before technology toppled the music industry decisively in the direction of the consuming proletariat, Rage Against the Machine signed a deal for the release and, most importantly, ownership of their music with one of the world’s largest corporate entertainment conglomerates, Sony, via their subsidiary label Epic.

When asked about the possible hypocrisy of their Epic deal—and boy, were they asked—Morello liked to insist that they squeezed concessions out of the big bad corporation that most baby bands never get, maintaining total artistic control over music and packaging and promotions, plus a guarantee that the label would release each record as promised or face stiff financial penalties. But otherwise by all accounts it had the same crummy aspects that nearly every major label deal has always had, at least at the start of a career: The label, while charging nearly all the expenses in making and marketing the record against the band’s royalties, took and kept actual legal ownership of the recordings themselves.

Rage signed over ownership of their music to Epic by choice because they saw no other way to achieve what they wanted to achieve: not just a chance to make a living touring the country in a van like such rugged punk forefathers as Black Flag, but a chance to have the financial and promotional juice to get to the top of the charts, and eventually into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame itself, while serving as an unintended advertisement for the very economic system the band so loathed. Capitalism in the form of the huge agglomeration of financial power in Sony gave them something they wanted, and they had no compunctions—like most human beings, artists or not—about taking advantage of it when they thought it might benefit them.

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Victims of Communism Day—2023

NOTE: This post largely reprints last year’s Victims of Communism Day post, with some modifications.

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so….

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

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