The
107-country Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967 prohibits nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons from being placed or used from Earth’s
orbit. What they didn’t count on was the U.S. Air Force’s most simple
weapon ever: a tungsten rod that could hit a city with the explosive
power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. used what they called “Lazy Dog”
bombs. These were simply solid steel pieces, less than two inches long,
fitted with fins. There was no explosive – they were simply dropped by
the hundreds from planes flying above Vietnam.
Lazy Dog projectiles (aka
“kinetic bombardment”) could reach speeds of up to 500 mph as they fell
to the ground and could penetrate nine inches of concrete after being
dropped from as little as 3,000 feet
The idea is like shooting bullets at a target, except instead of
losing velocity as it travels, the projectile is gaining velocity and
energy that will be expended on impact. They were shotgunning a large
swath of jungle, raining bullet-sized death at high speeds.
That’s how Project Thor came to be.
Instead of hundreds of small projectiles from a few thousand feet,
Thor used a large projectile from a few thousand miles above the Earth.
The “rods from god”
idea was a bundle of telephone-pole sized (20 feet long, one foot in
diameter) tungsten rods, dropped from orbit, reaching a speed of up to
ten times the speed of sound.
The rod itself would penetrate hundreds of feet into the Earth,
destroying any potential hardened bunkers or secret underground sites.
More than that, when the rod hits, the explosion would be on par with
the magnitude of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon – but with no fallout.
It would take 15 minutes to destroy a target with such a weapon.
One Quora user who works in the defense aerospace industry
quoted a cost of no less than $10,000 per pound to fire anything into
space. With 20 cubic feet of dense tungsten weighing in at just over
24,000 pounds, the math is easy. Just one of the rods would be
prohibitively expensive. The cost of $230 million dollars per rod was
unimaginable during the Cold War.
Like lawn darts, but with global repercussions.
These days, not so much. The Bush Administration even considered revisiting the idea
to hit underground nuclear sites in rogue nations in the years
following 9/11. Interestingly enough, the cost of a single Minuteman III
ICBM was $7 million in 1962, when it was first introduced ($57 million
adjusted for inflation).
The trouble with a nuclear payload is that it isn’t designed to
penetrate deep into the surface. And the fallout from a nuclear device
can be devastating to surrounding, potentially friendly areas.
“Someone dropped a penny from the Empire State Building again.”
A core takeaway from the concept of weapons like Project Thor’s is
that hypersonic weapons pack a significant punch and might be the future
of global warfare.
School
District 51 Board of Education members voted unanimously Tuesday to add
a $26 million premium to the $118.5 million bond measure that voters
approved this month to fund a new middle school, district-wide repairs
and technology upgrades.
Chief Operations Officer Phil Onofrio told board members that market buyers would not accept a bond at face value.
"The
market will not accept non-premium bonds at this point, because
premiums give bond buyers protection against increases in interest
rates," Onofrio said.
Onofrio said at minimum, the board must authorize $17 million in premiums in order to sell the bonds.
But
by issuing the maximum premium and in addition to accrued interest, it
would bring the bond total up to $150 million while still staying in the
parameters of the ballot language, Onofrio said.
Board members also unanimously voted to use the additional $26 million to first pay off the debt on R-5 High School.
The
premium will impact property taxes by about $3 a year, Onofrio said,
bringing the average annual cost of both the bond measure and mill levy
override on a $200,000 home to $113. The school district initially
estimated both measures would cost the owner of a $200,000 home $118 per
year.
Board members said they wanted to include the community on how to spend any remaining bond money.
"I
think the hard work about this bond and mill is just starting and I
think we have to be very deliberate and very open about what we're going
to spend this money on and why," said Board President John Williams.
"We need to walk forward pretty deliberately and openly about what we're
doing if we don't want to have to wait 20 more years to build another
school."
Board member Tom
Parrish said the board must be concrete and deliberate about how it
spends any bond money above the items listed in the ballot measure.
"I
think at some point because of the additional revenue that is coming
out of this we have to look to the community to ask what should we do
with it," Parrish said.
Board
members brought up ideas including a new elementary school in Fruita,
all-day kindergarten and replacing Grand Junction High School.
Board member Doug Levinson echoed the need to involve the community in any decisions on capital projects.
"Before
we do anything we're going to make sure we have buy-in from the
community," Levinson said after the meeting. "If we do anything that
compromises the trust people have put in us, we've screwed ourselves for
15 years and we can't do that. And I think everyone's pretty adamant
about that."
The biggest traitor in Washington D.C. might be none
other than Senator John McCain. Disturbing information continues to
emerge about his direct ties to Muslim terrorists and the London bomber,
and how he’s owned and funded by Saudi terrorists and George Soros.
Ever since Trump got into office, McCain has done everything in his
power to subvert the President of the United States, which is a federal
crime. As McCain continues to garner the sympathy of many Americans who
still falsely believe he’s a Vietnam “war hero,” it’s time that we
finally set the record straight about the unbelievable things McCain did
during his time in the military, before McCain dies and nauseating
tributes are made about his “service” in Vietnam.
It’s important to note that due to McCain’s familial ties to high
ranking Naval commanders during his time in service (his father and
grandfather were both four-star admirals), the majority of McCain’s
massive catastrophes and scandals in the Navy were completely buried,
and his military records sealed.
We reported several weeks ago
how John McCain was solely responsible for the horrifying atrocity
aboard the USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier on July 31 1967, where
McCain’s cocky maneuver of doing a “wet start” of his plane would go on
to kill 134 sailors, in the deadliest loss of life the Navy has ever
seen. But because of McCain’s daddy being a 4-star admiral, the entire
incident was buried, and the Navy never officially put blame on anyone
for the tragedy. Astonishingly, McCain would not only be allowed to
continue serving in the Navy, but would go on to be responsible for the
deaths of numerous other men, in a scandal that has been successfully
buried for decades.
USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier
Three months after the bloody tragedy on the USS Forrestal Aircraft
Carrier, John McCain was sent on a bombing mission over Hanoi in October
of 1967 when he was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese,
where he’s go on to be a prisoner of war until 1973. After being
released from captivity, McCain would use his POW story and veteran
status to rise to political prominence, where his image as a “Vietnam
war hero” would go on to propel him to be elected as a United States
Senator.
John “Songbird” McCain is welcomed back as a hero by President Nixon
But a “hero” is the last thing that John McCain was or will ever be.
What most people don’t know is the massive government scandal that
McCain helped hide, as he’d go on for decades to tirelessly work to bury
stunning information about American prisoners over in Vietnam who
unlike him, didn’t return home. Using his position as a senator, McCain
would be behind the scenes quietly pushing and sponsoring federal laws
that would keep the most damning information about our POWs buried
through classified documents.
The secrets that John McCain has sought to hide about Vietnam
POWs are massive. Despite sworn testimony by two Defense Secretaries of
“the men left behind” in Vietnam, McCain continued to push the massive
lie that there were no survivors, much to the horror of POW families who
were frantic to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones.
Enormous amounts of government documents indicate that hundreds of
prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when President Nixon signed
the peace treaty in January of 1973. Only 591 in Hanoi were released,
among them, Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
After the war, President Nixon promised the Vietnamese a $3.25
billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political
conditions.” But there was a catch to this promise, where Nixon had
included that Congress would have to approve these funds; approval that
never happened. Furious that the American government had double-crossed
them, Nanoi decided to keep the remaining hundreds of American
prisoners, because their ransom money (post war provisions) never came.
CIA whistleblowers said that the government wanted to keep these
missing men a secret, because as more years passed, it became more and
more difficult for the government to admit that it knew about the
prisoners that were left behind. Years later, CIA officials admitted
that their intel indicated that the remaining POWs were eventually
executed by the Vietnamese, as they were no longer useful bargaining
chips.
After the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office was publicly shamed by internal
whistleblowers that there were in fact still men in Vietnam being held
as POWs, the pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally
forced the government in 1991 to create the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs,
to investigate these allegations. John Kerry was made chairman of the
board, and McCain became its most pivotal member. In the end, this
committee became part of the debunking machine, and McCain would become paramount to sweeping the entire atrocity of these forgotten POWs under the rug.
But what people don’t know is John McCain’s vital role in keeping
this story about these abandoned POWs hidden from the American public,
as a traitor who completely turned his back on his brothers-in-arms who
had remained in captivity by the Vietnamese.
In the 1990s, legislation was proposed to Congress called “the Truth Bill” that
would’ve provided complete transparency about these prisoners and
missing men. But the Pentagon and McCain bitterly opposed the bill, and
it went nowhere. People were predictably outraged over the bill being
shot down, so in an effort for McCain and crooked Pentagon officials to
cover their asses, the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared several months later.
This bill eventually became law in 1991, but would only create
a bureaucratic maze, making the truth for the families completely
impossible to discover. The provisions of the law explicitly states why
the Pentagon and other agencies are justified for not releasing
information about prisoners held in captivity. Later that year, the
Senate Select Committee was created, and McCain and Kerry would work
together to bury the last renaming evidence on the missing men.
The American Conservative reported on the other ways McCain screwed
over the POWs, by authoring a crippling amendment to the Missing Service
Personnel Act, that stripped away the obligations that commanders were
previously held to of speedily searching for missing men and reporting
these incidents to the Pentagon. The American Conservative reported:
“McCain was also instrumental in
amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened
in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, ‘Any
government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file
of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or
whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in
Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.’ A year later,
in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill,
McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to
the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal
penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to
speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the
Pentagon.”
“About the relaxation of POW/MIA
obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, ‘This
transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to
Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact,
“would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn
military commanders into clerks.'”
“McCain argued that keeping the
criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to
find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument
to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to
conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of
approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live
POWs.”
What’s even more sick is how McCain demonized the two Pentagon
chiefs’ sworn testimonies who testified under oath about the men left
behind, while insisting that all the evidence — to include documents,
witnesses, satellite photos — be completely buried. He would go on to
paint the entire story as an “unpatriotic myth” calling the testimony of
anyone coming forward Vietnam’s POW’s the “bizarre rantings of the MIA
hobbyists.” To this day, McCain regularly vilifies those who try to get
their hands on these classified documents (that he’s worked for decades
to conceal) as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and
“dime-store Rambos.”
Ironically, the very same man who who for decades has been propped up
and hailed a POW war hero and crusader for the interests of other POWs,
is the very same man responsible for their deaths. It’s absolutely sick
how this man, despite his murdering and treasonous and crooked antics
for decades, is to this day regarded as a “hero” in the minds of
millions of Americans. It’s finally time that we set the record straight
on who John “Songbird” McCain truly is before he dies of brain cancer,
and nauseating tributes are made about his “patriotic service” to our
country.
ARCHITECT OF MASS VOTER FRAUD: Hollywood Producer Tells Stunning Story Of How Obama Stole Election In 2008
Obama went out of his way to convince
Americans there was no voter fraud going into the November elections and
that Republicans are making a lot of noise about nothing. This video
shows that he is not only a liar, but quite possibly the architect of
mass voter fraud in America…
“Democrats don’t consider voter
fraud to be bad. They don’t consider breaking laws to be bad, because
they have moral relativity. You’re stupid. They know better than you do
about what’s best for the country. So if they cheat, steal and lie,
they’re doing it for the better of the country.”
This is a stunning story that only proves what the Democrats are capable of when it comes to elections.
Bettina Viviano started her own film production company in 1990
after serving as vice president of production for Steven Spielberg’s
Ambling Entertainment. Her credits included the second and third “Back
to the Future” films, “Cape Fear,” “Land Before Time,” “Schindler’s
List,” “Always,” “Roger Rabbit” and the third “Indiana Jones” film. In
2008, she got a call from one of her clients and best friends who is a
director got a call from someone who worked in the Bill Clinton White
House and worked for Hillary. She asked if Viviano wanted to make a
documentary about voter fraud in the Democratic Primary. Vivian recalls,“My mother was a Hillary supporter, so for whatever reason, I said ‘yes.'” It wasn’t long after she started on the documentary that she recalls,”
Almost immediately we saw the Obama-Saul Alinsky, create chaos, ACORN.
It was possibly…I mean, I am scarred for life. I will never forget it. I
will never forget the death threats, the vandalism, the theft, the
phony documentation, the falsification of documents, you know the
threats…I mean, these people are appalling.”
Bettina Viviano on Barack Obama:“They chose him, I have an email
from Donna Brazile back in 2004. I mean they had chosen him that far
back, and they weren’t going to let her get in their way. He was gonna
be the candidate, no matter what anyone The problem is, you can’t
enforce the laws against the DNC because they’re a private party. And we
tried.”
“We actually thought that since we proved that Obama stole the
election that they would say, ‘Okay, you’ve proved the fraud, we’ll give
it back’, but we were reporting it to the DNC and the Nancy Pelosi’s
and Howard Dean’s who committed the fraud. So we were basically
reporting it to the people who did it. We watched Hillary stepping down
which was all orchestrated.”
The Clintons were the original “birthers,” Viviano told WND in an interview in Los Angeles.
“Everybody who has called this a conspiracy from the Republicans or
the tea party, they need to know who started it – the Democrats,” she
said.
“It was Hillary and Bill, and it percolated up from there,” said
Viviano, who had access to the campaign through a documentary she
produced on the claims of delegates that Obama and the Democratic
National Committee were stealing the nomination from Hillary.
Viviano said that she was on a conference phone call during the
primary season in the spring of 2008 in which she heard Bill Clinton
refer to Obama as ineligible for the presidency.
In the course of the phone conversation with Hillary delegates, she recalled, Bill Clinton spoke of Obama as “the non-citizen.”
“In the world we were in, with [Hillary’s] super-delegates and
delegates, it just was, ‘He’s not legit – that’s the end of it, period,
end of story.’ It wasn’t up for discussion,” Viviano said.
Michele Thomas, a Hillary campaigner from Los Angeles, confirmed to
WND that she learned from “many people who were close to Hillary” that
Obama “was not eligible to be president.”
Thomas led a nationwide petition drive among delegates to force a
vote on Hillary’s nomination at the convention after then-DNC Chairman
Howard Dean announced her name would not be put into nomination and
Obama would be declared the winner by unanimous acclamation.
Viviano said that it was understood that Bill Clinton would
eventually go public with his contention that Obama was ineligible for
the presidency.
“He, I believe, was frothing at the mouth to tell the truth about Obama,” she said.
In the meantime, she recalled, the former president would make ironic
references in public in which he “teetered” on revealing he position.
“He would go on camera,” Viviano said, “and jokingly make comments
about, you know, ‘Is Obama qualified to be president? Well, if he’s 35
and a wink, wink, United States citizen, I guess he’s qualified.’”
She claimed, however, that Bill Clinton’s intention to unequivocally
state to the public that Obama was ineligible was stopped in its tracks
by the murder of a close friend of the Clintons, Arkansas Democratic
Party Chairman Bill Gwatney, just two weeks before the Democratic
National Convention in Denver.
Gwatney was killed Aug. 13, 2008, when a 50-year-old man entered
Democratic Party headquarters in Little Rock and shot him three times.
Police killed the murderer after a chase, and investigators found no
motive.
The Clintons said in a statement that they were “stunned and shaken” by the killing of their “cherished friend and confidante.”
Viviano said a campaign staffer who was close to Hillary, whose name
she requested be withheld for security reasons, told her Gwatney’s
murder was a message to Bill Clinton.
“I was told by this person that that was ‘Shut up, Bill, or you’re next,’” she said.
The campaign adviser, according to Viviano, said that despite the
intimidation and threats, Bill Clinton was prepared to speak out about
Obama’s eligibility
“And then,” Viviano said, paraphrasing the staffer, “they went in and said, ‘OK, it’s your daughter, now, we’ll go after.’
“And then Bill never said anything.”
Others in the campaign who believe Gwatney’s murder was a message to
the Clintons think it had to do with the fact that Gwatney was resisting
an effort by the Obama campaign and the party to intimidate Hillary
delegates into voting for Obama.
But Viviano argues that California delegates also were rebelling, and
she says her source told her the same story two years later.
Since the 2008 campaign, Clinton has insisted publicly that Obama is eligible for the White House.
He weighed in on the issue in an April 2011 interview with ABC’s
“Good Morning America,” when Donald Trump was urging Obama to release
his long-form birth certificate to the public.
“If I were them, I’d be really careful riding that birther horse too much,” Clinton said. “Everyone knows it’s ludicrous.” – WND
Watch Bettina tell Jerome Corsi her story here:
Watch the clips rom the groundbreaking documentary “We Will Not be
Silenced,” and WND investigative reporter Jerome Corsi’s ongoing
investigation of Barack Obama. Democrats explain how massive voter fraud
was committed to ensure a win for Barack Obama:
In the 100 years since
Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and
private property has left a long, murderous trail of destruction
A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Grutas Park, Lithuania.
Photo:
ZUMA PRESS
By
Stephen Kotkin
A century ago this week, communism took over
the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist
movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long
before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the
reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were
different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but
flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.
Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic
condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents,
like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions
that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of
indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I
as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers
for overseas markets.
But a century of communism in power—with
holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the
human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again
and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has
brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since
1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina,
Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at
least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of
demographers.
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass
deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model
established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It
has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of
people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation
as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.
A communal Chinese farm in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward.
Photo:
UIG/Getty Images
For these epic crimes, Lenin and Stalin bear personal
responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim
dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants. But
we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to
kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they
embraced these ideas. Anticapitalism was attractive to them in its own
right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward
countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.
The
communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great
anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.
In
February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his
generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of
St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its
allies. The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced
an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the
elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or
political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had
already happened among political groups in the cities.
That fall,
as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection
involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup
not against the provisional government, which had long since become
moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was
dominated by other, more moderate socialists. The October Revolution
began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left,
whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then
walked out of the soviet.
The Bolsheviks, like many of their
rivals, were devotees of
Karl Marx,
who saw class struggle as the great engine of history. What he
called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced
in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx
envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was
destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism. As he and
his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of
1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of
private property.”
Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks
renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march
Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions
set about trying to live in new ways. No one, however, knew precisely
what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a
characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What
socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not
know, we cannot say.”
But one thing was clear to them: Socialism
could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property
with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois”
parliaments with “people’s power.” In practice, however, scientific
planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time.
As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the
state.
The process set in motion by the communists entailed the
vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest,
internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.” The dispossession
of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who
gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view
outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a
corrective mechanism.
The declared goals of the revolution of
1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy
capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain
those goals.
In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw
upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret
police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the
countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried
out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto
peasant land ownership.
Russian Communist Party supporters participated in a march in Moscow on Defender of the Fatherland Day, Feb. 23.
Photo:
Serebryakov Dmitry/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
With the devastated country on the verge of famine, Lenin
forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution
for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist
purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.
With
Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more
than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily
by 1928. By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the
regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization.
Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible
systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.
Stalin
didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic
Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion. He
threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious
about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to
the rising rural bourgeoisie. He incited class warfare against “kulaks”
(better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for
mass arrests and internal deportations.
Stalin was clear about
his ideological rationale. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak
fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in
“America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet
country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in
industry, but in agriculture.”
And he never backtracked, even
when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet
another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those
few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.
The Soviet Union’s
awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries.
Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese
movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the
Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet
experiment as intrinsic to its success.
Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1952.
Photo:
Lyu Houmin/Visual China Group/Getty Images
His Great Leap Forward, a violent campaign from 1958 to 1962,
was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to
spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work
and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent
slogan of the time.
Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and
joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned
compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of
history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims.
After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist
wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he
declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”
Nor
did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of
overthrowing capitalism. With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol
Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into
the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They
sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.
The
Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted
Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese
minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to
pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.
All
told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the
population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass
executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some
regions, skulls could be found in every pond.
Marx’s class
analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from
“bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements
themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the
international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist
revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.
A Cambodian man prayed
during a ceremony in front of a map of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, March 10, 2002.
Photo:
Andy Eames/Associated Press
From Russia and China to Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba,
communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or
less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and
unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the
prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.
Communism
was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage.
Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40
million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms
of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.
But
as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly
shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the
egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries. Some repudiated the Soviet
Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to
the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps.
Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car
and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective
farms.
But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist
century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them.
Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to
action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive,
unchecked state.
A few socialists began to recognize that there
could be no freedom without markets and private property. When they made
their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather
than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates.
Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market
economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism
persists among some on the left.
It also remains alive, though
hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great
redoubts of the communist century. Both countries continue to distrust
what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property:
Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary
people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life,
civil society and the political sphere.
But anticapitalism also served as a program for an alternative
world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be
realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations,
Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior
West. The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking
their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own
countries on the international stage. This revolutionary struggle
allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission
in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle
Kingdom.
Vladimir Putin’s
resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia
and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent. For its
part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing
promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under
Xi Jinping,
the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional
Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to
the West.
Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we
can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy
endure.
Osama bin Laden in 1988. (WTN PICS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
On the penultimate day of the Obama administration,
less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release
meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office.
“Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final
Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a
two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents
recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan,
compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents
captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made
public to 571.
For anyone who had paid even casual attention to the long-running
debate over the Abbottabad documents—a group that doesn’t include many
journalists—the ODNI announcement was cause for a chuckle. Closing the
book on Osama bin Laden? The final Abbottabad documents?
In the heady days immediately after the May 2 Abbottabad raid,
President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, had described
the intelligence haul brought back from Pakistan by the Navy SEALs and
CIA operatives as extensive enough to fill a “small college library.” A
senior military intelligence official who briefed reporters at the
Pentagon on May 7, 2011, said: “As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired
the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
Why would ODNI think it could get away with such an aggressive lie?
Why would officials there believe that they wouldn’t be asked to
reconcile the fact that they were releasing just 571 documents with the
repeated pronouncements that the Abbottabad collection was the largest
haul of terrorist intelligence ever?
The answer: The self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in
history” had spent more than five years misleading the American people
about the threat from al Qaeda and its offshoots and had paid very
little price for having done so. Republicans volubly disputed the
president’s more laughable claims—the attack on the Benghazi compound
was just a protest gone bad, al Qaeda was on the run, ISIS was the
terrorist junior varsity—but the establishment media, certain that
Obama’s predecessor had consistently exaggerated the threat, showed
little interest in challenging Obama or the intelligence agencies that
often supported his spurious case.
In this context, ODNI’s bet wasn’t a crazy one. No one outside of a
small group of terrorism researchers and intelligence professionals had
paid much attention to the fate of the bin Laden documents. The
likelihood that these ODNI claims would get much scrutiny in the middle
of the frenzy that accompanies a presidential transition was low. ODNI
dismissively swatted away questions about the absurd claims in the
release with absurd claims about the document collection itself: The
unreleased documents weren’t interesting or important, just terrorist
trash of little interest to anyone. The documents being withheld would
do little to enhance our understanding of al Qaeda or the jihadist
threat more generally, they said.
This is what the politicization of intelligence looks like.
* *
In the spring of 2012, with the Republican presidential primaries
nearing an end and shortly before the first anniversary of the
successful raid on bin Laden’s compound, Obama’s National Security
Council hand-picked 17 documents to be provided to the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point for analysis. (Obama’s NSC would later
hold back two of those documents. One of them, laying out the deep ties
between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, would complicate
Obama administration efforts to launch negotiations with the Taliban,
according to an explanation the NSC’s Doug Lute offered to West Point.)
The West Point documents were shared with Obama-friendly journalists.
Their conclusion was the only one possible, given the documents they
were provided: At the time of his death, Osama bin Laden was frustrated
and isolated, a relatively powerless leader of a dying organization. In
the summer and fall of 2012, Obama would use this theme as the main
national security rationale for his reelection: Al Qaeda was alternately
“on the run” or “decimated” or “on the path to defeat.”
In a powerful and comprehensive piece in The Weekly Standard,
editor Stephen Hayes delineates in detail how the Obama Administration
hid almost half a million documents seized from the raid on Osama bin
Laden's compound in order to perpetuate the lie that Al Qaeda was
defeated after bin Laden’s death, thus paving the way for Obama’s 2012
victory.
Hayes begins his odyssey into the Obama Administration’s
duplicity by noting that the day before Obama left the White House,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issue a press release claiming
the administration had declassified enough documents seized in the raid
to “close the book” on bin Laden. The release was even titled, “Closing
the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad
Documents.”
Yet
after the May 2, 2011 raid, Obama’s national security advisor, Tom
Donilon, said the documents seized were extensive enough to fill a
“small college library.” As Hayes points out, “A senior military
intelligence official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on May 7,
2011, said: ‘As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired the single largest
collection of senior terrorist materials ever.’”
Hayes writes,
“Why would ODNI think it could get away with such an aggressive lie? …
In this context, ODNI’s bet wasn’t a crazy one. No one outside of a
small group of terrorism researchers and intelligence professionals had
paid much attention to the fate of the bin Laden documents. The
likelihood that these ODNI claims would get much scrutiny in the middle
of the frenzy that accompanies a presidential transition was low.”
He continues:
In
the spring of 2012, with the Republican presidential primaries nearing
an end and shortly before the first anniversary of the successful raid
on bin Laden’s compound, Obama’s National Security Council hand-picked
17 documents to be provided to the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point for analysis. … The West Point documents were shared with
Obama-friendly journalists. Their conclusion was the only one possible,
given the documents they were provided: At the time of his death, Osama
bin Laden was frustrated and isolated, a relatively powerless leader of a
dying organization. In the summer and fall of 2012, Obama would use
this theme as the main national security rationale for his reelection:
Al Qaeda was alternately “on the run” or “decimated” or “on the path to
defeat.”
On
November 1, 2012, five days before the election, Obama intoned, “Thanks
to the service and sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform, the
war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is winding down. Al Qaeda
has been decimated. Osama bin Laden is dead.” Hayes notes, “The
president would tout the imminent demise of al Qaeda more than two dozen
times between those attacks and Election Day.”
Finally, this
past Wednesday, CIA director Mike Pompeo announced the release of
“nearly 470,000 additional files” from the Abbottabad raid.
Hayes
delineates how the documents show a much closer relationship between al
Qaeda and Iran than had been heretofore assumed. He points out that
Obama in his first term centered on how George W. Bush had allegedly
ruined the war on terror but the second term was focused on making a
deal with the Iranian government. He adds:
In a
manner of speaking, Barack Obama wanted what al Qaeda already had: a
mutually beneficial partnership with Tehran. Revealing to the American
people the truth about Osama bin Laden’s cozy working relationship with
the Iranian government might have fatally undermined that diplomatic
quest, just as the ongoing vitality of al Qaeda, amply testified to in
the bin Laden documents, would have contradicted Obama’s proud claims in
2012 that al Qaeda was “on the run.” So Obama, with the eager
cooperation of some in the intelligence community, bottled up the bin
Laden documents and ran out the clock.
And no, I’m not talking about an autonomous vehicle hitting a wall or
driving off a bridge. Instead, Tesla stock has taken a nose-dive and
crashed. Hopefully, their stocks have an airbag to cushion the blow.
Yikes, that’s reminiscent of a texting-while-driving-in-rush-hour crash.
Tesla’s share price took a dive Thursday morning as
Republicans in Congress revealed they were planning to kill off a US
federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
The proposed House tax bill calls for an immediate repeal of the
$7,500-per-vehicle credit: something that would have an immediate
knock-on impact for Tesla given that it only produces electric cars.
Its share price fell more than seven per cent to about $296 apiece
from Wednesday’s $321. The draft law emerged as the Elon-Musk-led
automaker announced its worst-ever quarter, recording a $671m loss and
admitting it had not met its production target for its new Model 3 car,
producing just 220 of them against its 1,500 target.
The potential removal of these federal tax cuts has a significant influence on consumers.
In Georgia, for example, when the state legislature “cut its $5,000
tax credit” the sale of electric cars decreased from “1,400 a month to
just 100 a month in response.”
In other words, consumers care less about the environment and more
about their wallet. Tesla knows this. Their website even factors in the
federal tax credit in Tesla’s pricing.
The Bill has not went through Congress but “is seen as a blueprint
for the Trump administration’s tax shakeup” for further reform:
Scrapping the leccy car deal will increase US tax
revenues by $4bn, it is estimated. That’s a good saving seeing as the
Republicans are desperate to balance America’s books while cutting the
corporate tax rate.
Under the process the Republicans intend to use to pass their tax
reform bill, it is necessary for the country’s figures to balance – any
cuts have to be met with additional tax income. So far, the plan is
expected to cost the Land of the Free $1.5tr over 10 years.
While their stocks have decreased significantly, Tesla is not the only car company that will suffer.
Companies like Nissan and General Motors have their own electric car.
The latter stated, “Tax credits are an important customer benefit that
can help accelerate the acceptance of electric vehicles. Because General
Motors believes in an all-electric future, we will work with congress
to explore ways to maintain this incentive.”
Or, you know what you could do GM? Stop relying on the federal government as your business model.
They’ve already bailed you out once…now you’re relying on them for marketing and consumer strategy?
Maybe you should invest a bit more money on product and market
research, advertising, etc. instead of expecting a tax credit from other
people’s money to drum up sales.
No one–not a business or an individual–should ever become dependent
on the government; especially not a large corporation like General
Motors.
What is your opinion of electric car companies dependence on tax
credit for sales? If you don’t have a market, can you really expect the
government to create one for you?
