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Liu Xiaobo, Leader of China, R.I.P. By The Editors

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Liu Xiaobo was, in a sense, the leader of China. He was the country’s foremost proponent of freedom, democracy, and human rights. He thought that Communism was a gross imposition on China and that it could not last indefinitely, if enough Chinese stood up against it.

Liu has now died at 61. Apparently, the cause was liver cancer, plus years of torture and abuse in prison. He died surrounded by state agents, as he had lived much of his life.

He was born in 1955. An intellectual, he became a scholar of literature. In 2008, he was a founder of Charter 08, the democracy movement patterned after Charter 77. Charter 77 was the movement in Czechoslovakia, founded in 1977. It was led by Václav Havel — who would become a major supporter of Liu’s.

Like so many other Chinese democracy leaders, Liu was at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He was then imprisoned for a year and a half. Persisting, he was again imprisoned in 1995. From 1996 to 1999, he was in a “reeducation through labor” camp. Charter 08 was the last straw, and Liu was imprisoned in December of that year.

Never before had the Nobel peace committee given its prize to a Chinese person. In 2010, they did: to Liu Xiaobo. He could not attend the ceremony, of course, being a political prisoner. In 1936, the committee gave the prize to a prisoner of the Nazis, Carl von Ossietzky. Before his death, the Nazis transferred him to a hospital, where he died surrounded by guards (in 1938).

Just the same would happen to Liu Xiaobo, almost 80 years later.

During his years of imprisonment, his wife, Liu Xia, was kept under house arrest — of a particularly brutal kind. She has been denied access to the outside world. (This includes television and the Internet.) Guards have kept her locked in, day and night, as her health has unraveled.

In the United States, there was a peep or two for Liu Xiaobo, but not many. The 2009 Nobel peace laureate, President Obama, did not bestir himself for the 2010 peace laureate. In the Senate, however, Ted Cruz proposed that the area outside the Chinese embassy in Washington be renamed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” In this, he took a page from the Reagan Republicans of the mid 1980s, who renamed the area outside the Soviet embassy “Andrei Sakharov Plaza,” after the leading dissident in the USSR.

Incidentally, Sakharov, too, was a Nobel peace laureate, and denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony.

The “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent. It was then killed in the House by the GOP leadership. No explanation was given.

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Accusations and Rancor as Elite School’s Leader Departs By Kate Taylor

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

The end of the school year at Fieldston Lower, one of two elementary divisions at the elite Ethical Culture Fieldston School, is usually a time of celebration: class picnics on the school’s bucolic 18-acre campus in the Bronx, the fifth-grade graduation in the gym.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/nyregion/ethical-culture-fieldston-school-principal.html

But this year, these events were overshadowed when, on June 1, two weeks before classes ended, the head of the school, Jessica L. Bagby, issued a terse announcement that George Burns, the longtime principal of Fieldston Lower, was retiring.

The news shook many parents and staff members. Mr. Burns had worked there for 18 years and had given no indication that he planned to retire. Almost no one believed that his departure was entirely voluntary.

Some angry parents wrote to Ms. Bagby, demanding an explanation. In a heated meeting, staff members at Fieldston Lower told her and Caryn Seidman-Becker, the chairwoman of Fieldston’s board, that their trust in

Ms. Seidman-Becker and Ms. Bagby, who assumed her position a year ago, declined to discuss with staff members or parents why Mr. Burns had left. And so, in the absence of information, some supplied their own theory — that Ms. Seidman-Becker and some board members want to change the direction of Fieldston, which was founded in the late 19th century by Felix Adler as a free school serving poor children and is now one of New York City’s top private schools.

Ms. Seidman-Becker and Ms. Bagby, who assumed her position a year ago, declined to discuss with staff members or parents why Mr. Burns had left. And so, in the absence of information, some supplied their own theory — that Ms. Seidman-Becker and some board members want to change the direction of Fieldston, which was founded in the late 19th century by Felix Adler as a free school serving poor children and is now one of New York City’s top private schools.

In that largely white and wealthy world, Ethical Culture Fieldston is the most politically liberal of the schools, with an explicit mission to mold students into “ethical individuals who aim to make the world more humane and just.” Its Conversations About Race program, which is mandatory for all fourth and fifth graders, is among the most aggressive attempts by an independent school in New York to confront racial issues.

Mr. Burns, in particular, had made it his goal for Fieldston Lower to reflect the city’s diversity. He had championed Conversations About Race, which has gained national acclaim but has proved controversial among some parents. As part of the program, children are divided into groups by race to discuss their experiences.

In an interview, Ms. Bagby said the school was not backing away from its commitment to diversity and to tackling racial issues. While neither she nor Sarah Danzig Simon, the assistant head of school for institutional advancement, would directly address why Mr. Burns had left, it is clear, based on documents and interviews, that he and Ms. Bagby had a falling out shortly after the beginning of last school year. The dispute comes down to a meeting between them on Oct. 20, of which they have given radically different accounts, and which was later investigated by a member of the school’s board.

Mr. Burns’s version is encapsulated in a bias report he filed in December with the school’s human resources director. At the time, Mr. Burns shared the report with his former assistant, Rama Ndiaye, and she provided it to The New York Times.

According to that account, during the meeting Ms. Bagby mentioned that two parents had contacted her with concerns about the Conversations About Race program. She then asked Mr. Burns, “You know what the problem here is?” When he asked what it was, he wrote, she said something that sounded to him like “the scientists.” He was confused and asked her to repeat herself. At that point she said, apparently referring to the parents who had complained, “It’s the Zionists — the Jews.”

Mr. Burns wrote that he was stunned and told her that there were plenty of Jewish families who supported the program and families of different backgrounds who opposed it. Mr. Burns said she then made an additional comment about “this group of Jewish parents” who were complaining about the program.

In Mr. Burns’s telling, he emailed Ms. Bagby the next morning saying he was disturbed by her comment and wanted to discuss it further. They did not talk until their regularly scheduled meeting the next week, at which he told her that he found the remark as offensive as if she had said, “The problem in the school is the colored people.” He wrote that she ultimately offered a kind of apology — saying, “Well, I’m sorry if that’s what it sounded like to you, but I didn’t mean it that way” — but that he found it belated and unsatisfying.

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Putin’s Dangerous New Ukraine Doctrine Russia tries to absorb breakaway regions while stepping up terror in Kiev and elsewhere. By Adrian Karatnycky

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

‘Sanctions were not discussed at my meeting with President Putin, ” Donald Trump tweeted Sunday. “Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved!” Hours before the two presidents met, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson underlined this tough line on sanctions by appointing Russia hawk Kurt Volker as chief U.S. envoy on Ukraine.

Messrs. Trump and Putin made limited progress on Syria, but Moscow has been intensifying its efforts to destabilize Ukraine. Mr. Putin has been reluctant to deploy large military forces, but fighting in Eastern Ukraine claims five or six lives a week. Of late the Kremlin has escalated its aggression with military attacks on civilian targets, assassinations, cyberattacks to cripple the state and economy, and the economic and partial political integration of the occupied region into Russia.

Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine has boomeranged. His aggression has consolidated popular opinion, with one recent poll showing that 92% of those on territory controlled by Kiev now see themselves as Ukrainians. A decade ago that number stood at 75%. While a portion of this shift is attributable to the absence of data from occupied portions of Ukraine, most of it comes from shifting public attitudes. Mr. Putin is further stymied by Ukraine’s growing military capability and frustrated by signs of its economic recovery, both results of President Petro Poroshenko’s reforms.

For Mr. Putin, this is unacceptable. Russia is paying a large economic price because of Western sanctions. It also faces a growing threat of social discontent in the impoverished parts of Ukraine it controls. With 1.8 million residents internally displaced on Ukraine-controlled soil and 600,000 resettled in Russia, the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk “peoples republics,” known by the acronyms DNR and LNR, have a combined population of more than 3.5 million. Many are retirees dependent on Ukrainian state pension payments. Others are miners and industrial workers whose plants were deeply integrated into the Ukrainian economy.

Mr. Putin’s response has been to step up the aggression. The first five months of 2017 saw a steep increase in attacks on hospitals, schools, factories and other civilian targets, resulting in 44 fatalities. Terrorist bombings and assassinations in Kiev and elsewhere have become commonplace. On June 27 and 28 car bombs killed two colonels from Ukraine’s security service. On June 1 a Russian citizen posing as a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde shot but failed to kill a Chechen volunteer in the Ukrainian militia. In late March an assassin from Russian-annexed Crimea killed a former Russian parliamentarian and Putin critic who had received asylum in Ukraine.

Russia is also accelerating the integration of occupied Donbas into Russia. On Feb. 18, Mr. Putin issued a decree enabling Russian state and private institutions to accept passports and other identity documents issued by the self-styled DNR and LNR. The Russian press widely promoted the view of Luhansk separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky that the decree is a “step along the path of international recognition of our sovereignty.”

The DNR and LNR economies have begun rapidly converting to the Russian ruble. A further step came March 5, with the confiscation by the “republics” of some 40 major privately held Ukrainian companies. These enterprises had provided employment for locals while paying taxes to Kiev and scrupulously withholding them from the renegade authorities.

Although these “nationalizations”—a war crime under the Geneva Conventions—had been accelerated by an unofficial embargo of trade with the region started by Ukrainian civic activists in January, the swiftness of the confiscations suggested they had long been planned. On the day of the takeovers, senior Russian managers appeared at the “nationalized” workplaces to announce they were taking charge.

In mid-March, Kremlin-controlled media publicized the launch of a “Committee for the Integration of the Donbas and Russia” in Russian-annexed Yalta, Crimea. The Russian media trumpeted a call there by Mr. Plotnitsky for a referendum on the accession of the LNR to Russia. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Ethics for the D.C. Ethicists Walter Shaub’s exit is the grandstanding of a pious political operator: Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

We interrupt this week’s Don Jr. loop to tell a tale of a real ethics scandal. It’s one perpetrated not by the Trump administration, but by the man atop Washington’s ethics-industrial complex: Walter Shaub.

If you’ve never heard of Mr. Shaub, you soon will. He is resigning as director of the Office of Government Ethics—effective next week—so that he can continue more publicly the war he’s been waging against the administration internally since last fall. Unquestioning media outlets are providing him a big podium for his accusations, so it’s worth noting some facts.

Mr. Shaub was already playing the indignant watchdog on Sunday, as he explained his resignation on ABC’s “This Week.” He complained that the White House was consistently “challenging OGE’s authority to carry out its routine and most basic functions.” Understanding those “functions” is critical to realizing the Shaub drama is so much grandstanding.

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president.

Only weeks after the election, as speculation swirled about how Mr. Trump would handle the ethical complexity of his business dealings while president, Mr. Shaub was already trolling, posting a series of sarcastic tweets about divestiture to the Office of Government Ethics’ official account. When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance. So much for the “help” part.

The best insight into Mr. Shaub’s methods can be seen in the long fallout from Kellyanne Conway’s bone-headed February attempt to defend Ivanka Trump by calling on Americans to buy her clothing line. Deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, who leads the internal ethics team, reached out within minutes to reassure Mr. Shaub the situation would be reviewed. Mr. Shaub nonetheless waited only four days before dropping a public letter essentially demanding action against Ms. Conway.

In a Feb. 28 response to Mr. Shaub, Mr. Passantino noted that some of the OGE’s ethics regulations do not apply to White House staff. He nonetheless immediately reassured Mr. Shaub that a separate regulation did hold them to some of the same standards and that he had reschooled Ms. Conway in them. CONTINUE AT SITE

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China’s Empty Nobel Chair Liu Xiaobo dies in Beijing’s custody, an example to the world.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel laureate, died on Thursday, only weeks after he was moved to hospital from a prison cell. The Chinese government bears responsibility for failing to competently diagnose and treat his liver cancer. To Beijing’s shame, the only other Peace Prize winner to die in custody was Carl von Ossietzky, a prisoner of Nazi Germany who won in 1935 and died in 1938.

Liu played a pivotal role in the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, helping to negotiate the peaceful departure of the last students to occupy the square. He kept the spirit of that movement alive in 2008 when he helped to write Charter 08, a democracy manifesto. Shortly thereafter he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “subversion.”

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on the life and death of the Nobel Laureate, and what it portends for China’s future. Photo Credit: Getty Images.

China’s rulers have worked hard to make sure their citizens learned little about Liu’s ideas. That fear of one man’s courage testifies to the illegitimacy of their power. Liu could have played an important role in China’s transition to democracy, but his example will serve as an inspiration to future generations.

Beijing has used the fruits of economic reforms started by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to prolong authoritarian rule far longer than most thought possible. But its obsession with social control is hampering further moves toward a free-market economy. The resulting tensions are building and increase the risk of instability.

At the Nobel prize ceremony in 2010, Liu was represented by an empty chair. His death is a reminder of the world’s obligation to keep attention on China’s rights abuses. Without political reform, China will continue to use its growing economic and military clout to spread its authoritarian model. Pressuring Beijing to free the imprisoned human-rights lawyers who have taken up Liu’s freedom fight would serve the interest of China’s people, as well as the rules-based international order that its undemocratic government seeks to subvert.

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Introducing MAGAnomics The Trump agenda for achieving 3% economic growth.By Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

If the Trump administration has one overarching goal, it’s to Make America Great Again. But what does this mean? It means we are promoting MAGAnomics—and that means sustained 3% economic growth.

For most of our nation’s modern history, a healthy American economy meant one that grew at roughly 3.5%. That was the average growth rate between the late 1940s and 2007. Since then, it has hardly topped 2%.

The difference between those two growth rates is staggering. If the American economy had grown at only 2% between the end of World War II and 2000, average household income would have been roughly $26,000 instead of $50,000.
Over the next 10 years, 3% growth instead of 2% will yield a nominal gross domestic product that is $16 trillion larger, federal government revenues $2.9 trillion greater, and wages and salaries of American workers $7 trillion higher.

For merely suggesting that we can get back to that level, the administration has been criticized as unrealistic. That’s fine with us. We heard the same pessimism 40 years ago, when the country was mired in “stagflation” and “malaise.” But Ronald Reagan dared to challenge that thinking and steered us to a boom that many people thought unachievable. In the 7½ years following the end of the recession in 1982, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. That is what a recovery looks like, and what the American economy is still capable of achieving.

The focus of MAGAnomics is simple: Grow the economy and with it the wealth of, and opportunity for, all Americans. It does that by focusing on fundamental principles that made the U.S. economy the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the planet:

• Tax reform. We need to boost productivity. Fundamental to that is encouraging capital investment. We’ve seen for decades that growth in private-sector jobs correlates to growth in private business investment. When businesses invest in new plants and equipment, they tend to hire more people, who produce more. Lower tax rates and faster cost recovery are two levers that will reduce the cost of capital and thereby help ignite economic growth. And since 70% of business income goes to wages, the benefits flow to workers as well.

• Curbing unnecessary regulation. Much like commonsense tax reform, rolling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations will reduce the cost of doing business. When regulations increase costs, they decrease returns, leaving less capital to invest. If they are too burdensome, they discourage any investment at all, as businesses choose to forgo opportunities. This is important to all business, but especially to capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Overly zealous environmental regulations have played a role in pushing many U.S. businesses overseas. Requiring realistic and fact-based cost-benefit analyses of regulations will help protect both the environment and American jobs.

• Welfare reform. Growth also depends on the size of the workforce. Although the labor pool is aging, we are also seeing people who could be working but are staying home. We badly need them to go back to work. We believe that most want to do this but simply lack the opportunity. Our welfare system often creates disincentives for people to seek work. We intend to change that. We need to reform welfare to ensure it helps those truly in need of it, but does not encourage people to stay home.

• Smart energy strategy. The president’s “all of the above” energy strategy expands the economy’s growth potential. Yes, it puts coal miners back to work. But cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy will also increase investment and employment across dozens of industries, from chemicals to automobiles. By ensuring reliable supplies and stable prices, the president’s energy plan will reduce uncertainty, especially in the manufacturing sector, thereby reducing the risks associated with building new plants and hiring more American workers.

• Rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The president’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure will create immediate job opportunities. More important, it will boost the long-term productivity of American industry. Rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and ports will pay dividends both now and in the future.

• Fair trade for America. The president is right in that the U.S. is frequently abused when it comes to international trade. Ensuring that other nations do not undermine our economy by unduly taxing our products, by dumping products here, or by stealing our intellectual property is essential to our economic future.

• Government spending restraint. When government spends a lot, it takes money away from private investment. And private investment is always a more efficient allocator of capital than government. We will continue to fund critical government functions, including a social safety net that gives people the comfort of knowing they will not be overlooked while encouraging them to be more willing to take chances. But we will watch every dollar to minimize waste. We will, in short, seek to take from you only what government actually needs to function.

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The Donald Trump Jr. emails definitely show collusion. But collusion in what?By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review.

“Collusion” is a hopelessly vague term. Alas, the word has driven the coverage and the debate about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Vladi­mir Putin’s regime. But it is a term nigh useless to investigators, who must think in terms of conspiracy. Collusion can involve any kind of concerted activity, innocent or otherwise. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit a concrete violation of law.

Thus has the collusion question always been two questions: First, was there any? Second, if so, collusion in what?

The first question, to my mind, is no longer open to credible dispute. There plainly was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is firmly established by emails exchanged in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an intermediary acting on behalf of Russian real estate magnate Aras Agalarov. A Putin crony, Agalarov is also a business partner of President Trump.

The emails report that Agalarov had met with Russia’s chief government prosecutor and that the latter offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia.” The intermediary, Rob Goldstone (a publicist for Agalarov’s pop-star son, Emin), told Trump Jr. that the information “would be very useful to your father” and — more significant — that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In a subsequent email, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin Agalarov wanted Trump Jr. to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who would be flying in from Moscow. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting and elaborated that it would include then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as Jared Kushner, Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower. The Russian attorney, whom Goldstone accompanied, was Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is a former regime prosecutor who now represents Putin cronies and lobbies the U.S. government to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a human rights provision enacted to punish Russia for torturing and killing a whistleblower. The act’s undoing is known to be a Putin priority.

Consequently, we now have solid documentary evidence that the Trump campaign, fully aware that Putin’s regime wanted to help Trump and damage Clinton, expressed enthusiasm and granted a meeting to a lawyer sensibly understood to be an emissary of the regime. Top Trump campaign officials attended the meeting with the expectation that they would receive information that could be exploited against Clinton.

That is collusion — concerted activity toward a common purpose. We can argue about whether the collusion amounted to anything, in this intriguing instance or over time. That is under investigation, and deservedly so. To my mind, though, it is no longer credible to claim there is no evidence of a collusive relationship. It is there in black and white.

Now we are on to the real question: Collusion in what? There are two aspects to this question: legal and political.

As a matter of law, mere collusion is not a crime. As noted above, it must rise to a purposeful agreement to carry out a substantive violation of law. It is not a crime to collude with a foreign government, even a hostile one, if the point is to accept information in the nature of opposition research. The suggestion that it might violate campaign law to accept information — as a “thing of value” — would raise significant constitutional questions while trivializing the conduct, which is egregious because of the nature of the relationship, not the money value of the information. To rise to the level of conspiracy, there would need to be proof, for example, that (a) violations of U.S. law were orchestrated by the Russian regime, and ( b) Trump campaign officials knew about them and were complicit in their commission.
At the moment, there is no such evidence. We will have to see what the investigation yields.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. The framers included impeachment in the Constitution in order to address violations not just of law but also of the public trust — transgressions in the nature of abuse of power or that otherwise demonstrate unfitness for office. Among the most profound concerns of our Constitution’s authors was the specter of a president who aligned with a foreign power covertly and against U.S. interests.

Of course, a political remedy is subject to political considerations. On the matter of unsavory relations with Russia (and other regimes, for that matter), we have gotten in the habit of tolerating much that ought not be tolerated, from politicians of both parties. Trump’s relationship with Putin’s regime should not be examined in a vacuum. But that said, it must be examined.

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Poisoning the Minds of America’s Schoolchildren Teaching kids to hate their country’s traditions and institutions.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

For the past 30 years, a Philadelphia-based organization called Need in Deed (NID) has been training elementary and middle-school teachers “to use the classroom to prepare young people for civic responsibility and service to others.” And how, exactly, does NID do this? By training its teachers to engage students in long-term “service projects” whose objective is to: (a) inculcate youngsters with the notion that America is an oppressive wasteland where nonwhite minorities, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even the natural environment are routinely exploited and abused; and (b) turn children into budding political activists and community organizers who seek to fundamentally transform that deeply flawed society.

For example, in one NID project at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, eighth-grade students explored “some of the discriminatory housing forces – practices like redlining, steering, predatory lending and ethnic intimidation – that have influenced the[ir] city’s racial and economic segregation” over the years. As part of their instruction, these students watched an ABC Nightline segment titled “Race in America,” which examined the case of a black family that had fearfully fled their new home in a mostly white section of Philadelphia after neighbors harassed them with racial epithets and threatening letters. After watching the video, the students were asked to express, in writing, their outrage over how the black family had been mistreated.

As part of that same NID project, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey, author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass – a book claiming that black urban poverty is largely a result of massive discrimination in U.S. cities – addressed the students personally. In a subsequent lesson, the youngsters watched a documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, in the words of its producer, “reveals how our social institutions ‘make’ race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.”

Another NID project – designed to introduce young people to purportedly heroic women who have battled the forces of “racism, homophobia, [and] sexism” – required the pupils to read the Kate Schatz book Rad American Women A-Z. The women who are profiled and lionized in Schatz’s book are almost all leftists, and in some cases Marxists or political revolutionaries. Among them:

Angela Davis, a lifelong America-hating Communist, and a former member of the murderous Black Panther Party;
Rachel Carson, a staunch anti-capitalist and the founder of the modern radical environmental movement;
Sonia Sotomayor, a Supreme Court Justice whose worldview is thoroughly steeped in identity politics;
Wangari Maathai, a pro-socialist environmental activist who once charged that “some sadistic [white] scientists” created the AIDS virus “to punish blacks” and, ultimately, “to wipe out the black race”;
Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist and revolutionary who believed that the traditional family structure was oppressive to women;
Dolores Huerta, a longtime socialist, labor leader, and advocate of mass immigration; and
Ella Baker, an influential civil-rights leader and avowed socialist who had ties to the Communist Party USA, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and the Weather Underground.

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The Argument For Privatization Can prosperity and “equality” coexist? Herbert London and Alexander G. Markovsky

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

This is in response of criticism to our article “Economy of Mass Prosperity,” published by the Washington Times in June, which advocates privatization of the nation’s infrastructure.

It is almost a cliché to suggest America is a divided nation. There is a split among many blacks and whites; rich and poor. But the fundamental difference is between those who have learned from history, convinced that socialism is too extreme for the American psyche, and the other that clandestinely believes that socialism, in fact, has already arrived and is making sure that America can no longer live without it.

he socialists declared three primary points:

a. Capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity.

b. Privatizing infrastructure will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth.

c. Privatization will further contribute to economic inequality.

The argument that capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity is so ludicrous that even the arch-foe of capitalism, Karl Marx, disagreed. And Marx did not just disagree, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The bourgeoisie [capitalists] has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, or Gothic cathedrals. The bourgeoisie draws all nations into civilization. It has created enormous cities and thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

Since those words were written 150 years ago, free-market capitalism proved to be an endeavor with no end. It has undergone the Second Industrial Revolution and is in the process of a third, the Digital Revolution, which, with the introduction of advanced technologies, computers and the Internet, continues opening up entirely new vistas creating wealth and prosperity for all.

The concern that privatization will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth ignores the reality. The never-ending toll booth is already here. The infrastructure owners, the state and local governments, have been treating infrastructure as a revenue stream. Being a monopoly, they are in a position to manipulate supply and demand to justify the imperative of constantly raising taxes (property, gasoline and other general local taxes), user fees and tolls, ostensibly for building and maintaining highways while neglecting the assets’ maintenance and repair. The nation’s decaying infrastructure is a direct consequence of the product being sold regardless of quality and costs.

Anyone traveling the New Jersey-Manhattan corridor has experienced the effects of the state monopoly, spending endless hours in traffic and paying exorbitant tolls every few miles.

And there is no greater symbol of government monopolistic power than the Washington Bridge, built in the 1930s with taxpayer money. Its owner, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, charges $15 for each trip, collecting $1.5 billion annually. In any other circumstance, with this revenue it would be easy to warrant constructing another bridge to relieve transportation congestion.

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Trump FBI Pick Poised For Confirmation Christopher Wray impresses even Democratic senators. Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Christopher Wray, President Trump’s nominee to replace James Comey as FBI director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He performed so well that key Democratic members of the committee such as Senator Dianne Feinstein said they were impressed and were inclined to vote for his confirmation. Senator Al Franken, a chronic skeptic of anything coming from the Trump administration, said to the nominee, “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.”

Christopher Wray is eminently qualified for the position of FBI director, based both on his experience as well as his temperament. He served previously as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division during President George W. Bush’s administration. Prior to that, his public service included a stint as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuting individuals who committed a variety of crimes including bank robbery, gun trafficking, kidnapping and arson. Right after graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, who described Mr. Wray as “balanced, thoughtful, deliberative” and “unflappable.”

Mr. Wray has a reputation for a calm demeanor. He avoids the limelight whenever possible. “Chris is a very gentle soul,” says Monique Roth, who served as his senior counsel at the Justice Department. “He’s not one of those grandstanders or ego-driven people. He’s very self-effacing and thoughtful.”

Indeed, Mr. Wray could be considered in one respect the antidote to Comey, who craved the spotlight. However, like Comey, he demonstrated his independence from political pressure while serving in the Bush Department of Justice. He joined Comey and Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director and currently the special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation, in preparing to resign over a controversy involving a proposed domestic surveillance program.

Mr. Wray was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearing whether, as FBI director, he would remain independent of the White House and partisan pressures. He assured the senators on several occasions that his loyalty would be only to the Constitution and the rule of law. He said that he was never asked to pledge his loyalty to the president and that he would not do so in any case. Mr. Wray said he would resign if asked by the president to do something he considered to be “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant” and could not talk the president out of taking that course of action.

“Nobody should mistake my low key demeanor for lack of resolve,” Mr. Wray declared. “Anybody who thinks that I would be pulling punches as the FBI director sure doesn’t know me very well.”

Mr. Wray offered his understanding of the FBI’s role, which is to do fact finding and accumulate evidence on which to base a recommendation whether to prosecute or not. Prosecutors, not the FBI, are responsible for the decision whether to prosecute. When asked whether former FBI Director Comey had acted responsibly in holding the press conference in which he held forth on his views of the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio, Mr. Wray indicated what he would not do as FBI director. He said he would not hold a press conference disclosing derogatory investigatory information regarding an uncharged individual.