Ronald Reagan was a classic. He broke the back of the Evil Empire and started deregulating an overburdened U.S. economy. It was Ronald Reagan in 1964 that told Americans we face a time for choosing — and if you haven’t watched the entire speech, you’re missing out.

Today marks the 101st anniversary of Reagan’s birth. If you miss him and wish for another like Reagan, join The Heritage Foundation in sharing your thoughts in their new Facebook app:

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My paternal grandfather’s cousin, Yechezkel Pulerevitch, was imprisoned in a Soviet concentration camp for seventeen years for the “crime” of being a Zionist.

After his release, he was eventually alloweed to emigrate to Israel, where he organized former Soviet prisoners to oppose the communist regime and, specifically, its treatment of Jews. That helped create a broader human rights movement that eventually posed a serious threat to the Soviet system.

Yechezkel Pulerevitch (Source: Jerusalem Post)

In 1973, he came to Washington to meet Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) and advocate for the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment–which former dissident Natan Sharansky has called the “first nail in the coffin of the Soviet dictatorship.”

In 1974, Pulerevitch published a memoir of his experiences in the Gulag, entitled Short Stories of the Long Death. The foreword was written by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and the book appeared in several languages.

One story in particular recalls a Hanukkah celebrated in the concentration camp, in the most difficult of circumstances. Its message of resistance is appropriate to the themes of the holiday–now on its eighth and final night–and for a generation that has yet to understand the folly of socialism or to memorialize the horrors of the communist system.

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A Hanukkah Candle in the Concentration Camp

by

Yechezkel Pulerevitch

Where have I seen that face? – I wondered, staring at the old man opposite me, a prisoner with gaunt features and blue-green eyes with a dreamy faraway expression. All around us – Russian prisoners in tattered clothing, bickering at the top of their voices and swearing a blue streak. The old man’s clothing was also in rags. But the face, the face… (more…)

He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

The corporate media is panicking about the debt crisis. The politicians are squabbling over entitlement reforms and tax increases. The capitalist ratings agencies are warning about a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. Americans are worrying about their jobs, their homes, their possessions–everything. The government wants to print more money, and the people can’t find enough money to buy basic goods. We are told to be afraid.

But those of us who have always struggled for social justice, for a truly free and humane society, know there is nothing to fear. FDR was wrong: we need not even fear fear itself! For the imminent collapse of the American economy is not just proof that the critique of capitalism was right all along. It is also an opportunity to replace an oppressive system with a revolutionary one–more efficient and democratic than last century’s attempts.

Lenin in Atlantic City. Source: Vernon Ogrodnek, AP

Comrades! This is our moment. The extraordinary confluence of the debt crisis in the U.S. and the debt crisis in the European Union is the surest sign that the globalized capitalist empire itself is crumbling, defeated by its own internal contradictions. Yes, the Soviet Union fell because it could not match capitalist production. But the United States will fall because it cannot afford capitalist consumption–neither private nor public. (more…)

Useful idiots.  That’s what Vladmir Lenin called western sympathizers of the Soviet cause.  He must have been smiling from his cave in Hell Sunday when he saw the Soviet flag – and Communist Party signs – being carried in honor of May Day.

“Union members, pro-labor groups, and even anarchists” participated, according to Fox41.

A couple of anarchists, dressed as clowns (how fitting), were arrested after they scribbled anti-capitalist slogans on downtown buildings in chalk. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Germany, protesters “threw stones at banks and shops, and in isolated incidents police officers were targeted with bottles and fireworks,” according to published reports.

Chalk, schmalk.  Is that the best these crazies can do?  Put some heart into it!  Make a difference for the cause.  Or are they merely the type of useful idiots that bemused Lenin?

Call me a cynic, but I have a hard time seeing how the average American will sympathize with those who carry the flag of an empire that was bent on destroying the western way of life.  But I suppose that’s a minor detail.

Elsewhere in the United States, AFL-CIO heavy Richard Trumka, began his remarks: “Brothers and Sisters, May Day is our day!”

He, along with other six-figure leaders of the “middle class” rallied their members against government spending reforms.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh to discus the impact of Steve Jobs’ leave at Apple, Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington and Pej’s Chicago Bears.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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Never a better time to ‘Beat the Packers’
Epicenter of Humanity: The playing surface

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The folks who brought us the “Defend Public Education” actions last March in California, Wisconsin, New York and Michigan are planning a new round this year and will be drawing on the “energy” created by the violent, destructive riots in Europe.

The Huffington Post reported last year about college students shutting down major freeways in California.  In Wisconsin, protesters threw “punches and ice chunks” at police after the students were refused entry into an administration building in Madison.

Now, plans are being made for a month of similar actions this year, kicking off March 2^nd.

Some activists have complained that unions are not currently leading the charge because they’ve become too “corporatist.”  But they believe once they make their move, unions will move to “co-opt” the movement.

“Student strikes” will occur in March to fight budget cuts and increased fees for students.  What’s happening in Europe is about to be emulated in America, friends.

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Anne C. Heller’s critically acclaimed and best-selling 2009 book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, is new in paperback (we’re tempted to say that it makes a great Christmas gift, though it’s clear that Rand didn’t believe in the holiday or the altruism that attaches to it!).

Reason’s Nick Gillespie talks with Heller about Rand, whom the biographer says remains the great explicator of capitalism’s virtues and remarkably undervalued by the literary establishment.

“How many novelists of ideas do we have in post-war America?” asks Heller, who says the most surprising thing she learned about Rand during her research was her fearfulness. From double-locking doors to wearing heavy rubber gloves while washing dishes to avoid germs, Heller argues that Rand bore the scars of a Jewish childhood spent in the virulently anti-Semitic confines of czarist Russia and the fledgling Soviet Union.

As Gillespie noted in his review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market, Heller’s biography is a rich, sympathetic treatment of a major cultural figure that simultaneously analyzes and humanizes Rand’s major, continuing influence on 20th- and 21st-century America.

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In 1983, Ronald Reagan infuriated liberals worldwide by accurately labeling the Soviet Union as the evil empire. George W. Bush received a similar reaction following his “axis of evil” speech in which he used the politically incorrect term, evil, to describe the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Although most Americans found it refreshing to hear a politician speak so directly and honestly, the media and the rest of the liberal elites went berserk. Imagine that. It was not that the Kim Jong-il regime kept the people of North Korea in a state of poverty and near starvation that got liberals in a tizzy. Rather, it was that Bush had the audacity to use the word evil to describe it.

The nearly two years of corruption, plunder, and economic destruction—combined with the mockery of the American people and vilification of the private sector—has crystallized for many a realization of a home grown threat more destructive and imminently dangerous to America than any of the substantial external threats we faced over the last century. It’s a threat that has been building quietly for many years but has come to the fore since President Obama was elected. Have you wondered how the radical left managed to capture the reins of power and govern in direct opposition to the will of two thirds of the population?  The answer is the New Axis of Evil. It is the power base of the left (and the Democratic Party).

No doubt, the list can be debated and expanded, but here, at least is a starting point—the dirty dozen if you will, with a few prime examples included.

1. Old Media (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, NY Times)
2. Engorged Public Unions (SEIU, NEA, AFSCME)
3. Global Socialist Elites (Robert McChesney, Andy Stern, George Soros)
4. Liberal “Think” Tanks (Media Matters, Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress)
5. America Hating Academics (Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman )
6. Professional Victims Groups (La Raza, CAIR, NAACP, NOW)
7. Community Disorganizers & Activists (ACORN, Code Pink, ACLU)
8. Environmental Redistributionists (Greenpeace, EDF)
9. Social Justice Preachers (Jeremiah Wright, Reverend Jim Wallis)
10. Progressive Hollywood Elites (Oliver Stone, Sean Penn)
11. Bloated Federal Bureaucracy (DOE, DOA, TSA)
12. Public/Private Colluders (AARP, Government Motors, Goldman Sachs)

It almost goes without saying (but here I’ll say it anyway)—there are many good people scattered among these institutions.

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Yesterday, Andrew Breitbart launched his newest web venture, Big Peace. It will do for national security, what Big Hollywood has done for culture, Big Journalism for the media and Big Government for domestic policy. It has also caused me to climb into the way-back machine.

In 1985, I was an exchange student at a gymnasium (high school) in Bremen, West Germany. It was an anxious time; with renewed leftist terrorist attacks and hijackings throughout Europe. (The TWA airplane which took me to Frankfurt was hijacked about a week later.)  The Middle East was, predictably, tense. The Soviet Union looked as strong as ever. America was coming out of an economic and psychological malaise, but much of Europe, and U.S. political and media elites, were openly worried about a “warmongering” US President who didn’t understand complex foreign policy and might just start a war for kicks.

For those readers under forty, the political debates at the time centered on MX and Minuteman missiles, nuclear disarmament and small dust-ups like the Contras in Nicaragua. One night over dinner, my otherwise gracious German hosts, along with some of their friends, berated me for US foreign policy. Most every problem in the world could somehow be traced back to the U.S. They were particularly incensed about US Government support for the Contra rebels, fighting the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

America should stay out of the affairs of all other countries, I was lectured. It shouldn’t interfere in any of the domestic squabbles in other nations. I replied that I understood that, but the Sandinistas were communist dictators who were supported by the Soviets and Cuba, so it was probable we would be involved.

Support for the Sandinistas from other countries was immaterial, I was told. America should be better and never involve itself in another country’s affairs, they argued.

So, I replied, what about that Berlin Airlift?

Oh, America had to do that, my German hosts replied. That was totally different.

It always is.

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If we are to stop the march of this nation towards socialism, it is imperative that we understand and educate our fellow citizens as to what socialism is like.  This need not be limited to distant readings of history books about the gulags in Russia.  Indeed we get a very gripping modern-day reminder of the horrors of socialism from a recent article in the New York Times on North Korea.

The piece begins:

YANJI, China — Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

Such is the horrifically arbitrary nature of communist regimes.  With the swift stroke of a pen the fruits of one’s labors can be reduced to nothing overnight.

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Today, in 1943, it was announced that a mass grave of Polish prisoners of war was discovered. They were executed by the Soviet military.

We have heard a lot lately about my comments relating Obamacare to the failed socialist policies of the Soviet Union. Liberals and a host of radical leftists have mocked my observation in their blogs and some mainstream news outlets have even poked fun at me. However, the transformation of America is no laughing matter.

The parallels between leftist policies today and those of failed socialist states are undeniable; so much so that even a Russian state-owned news commentator was forced to concede my point:

“Republican Devin Nunes accused the bill of continuing the failed Soviet experiment. He was overly emotional but there is a grain of truth in what he said… Apparently, the socialist experience has proved too tempting to be resisted.” (RIANOVOSTI News, March 22, 2010)

Thanks to increasing regulation, rising taxes and greater centralization of power in Washington America is slowly leaving behind the foundation of its economic strength; namely the entrepreneurial energy that comes from freedom. And while a full-fledged Marxist revolution may not be on the horizon, the transformation of America in the image of European socialism is real and it should be of great concern to us all.

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Today, in 1917, Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, was established.

Over at ICECAP.us Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo has posted an item on a “Russian Bombshell” highly relevant to the ClimateGate scandal. The Russian media first posted the story and now some Brits are loving it.

The long and the short of it is best summarized by the Telegraph’s James Dellingpole: “What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.”

That is, we have yet further evidence that the data is being cooked to make the long-running claim of an increase in global temperatures, and now to diminish the apparent cooling of said temps. As the gang at EU referendum tout, “it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming.”

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Today, in 1991, the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed an agreement officially dissolving the Soviet Union.

On this day of thanks I am grateful for, among many blessings, the unfolding affirmation of that about which we have been warning policymakers, in lurid detail now confirmed: the global warming industry’s aggressive game of Hide the Baloney.

Here are my thoughts on the matter.

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To commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a group of students at Washington University in St. Louis chose to stand up to the tyranny of socialism and bring awareness to its consequences.

The students erected a Soviet gulag on the quad of the University to vividly display the ultimate “solution” to dissidence in socialist societies sparking campus intrigue, discussion, and debate.  Although an officer initially arrived on the scene and found everything was peaceful, undercover video reveals smarmy Washington University administrators continuing to press and make excuses to shut the fake-Gulag down.It took the bureaucracy hours to find an obscure policy to use against the students.

The group responsible has plans to make more gulag demonstrations on campuses around the country.

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Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain that divided the Free World from those in bondage. Only a few short years before, Ronald Reagan famously challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. Two years after the fall of the Wall, the Soviet Union had collapsed.

Can there be a sharper contrast than the hopefulness with which we watched the Berlin wall torn down, and the nightmare we find ourselves in today? Individual freedom was suddenly within reach of half a continent who were enslaved by the utopian dream fabricated by Marx and implemented by Lenin and Stalin. Incredibly, those who still believe in that utopia are running our White House and our Congress. How did we move in twenty short years from defeating the evil empire—not with bullets, but with the immense power that comes from a free people, each acting in their own self interest, outperforming those of the great Soviet collective in every way—to electing Barack Obama, whose policies more resemble those that came out of the failed Soviet state than America?

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The fall of the Berlin Wall marked a resounding victory for freedom and human dignity.  On this day 20 years ago, a long-standing symbol of division and oppression crumbled under the weight of a revolution inspired by leaders whose faith in God and commitment to freedom changed the world.  Years in the making, that movement dismantled the Soviet bloc in a matter of months, erecting in its place a number of young democracies that our nation now counts among its staunchest allies.

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