Constitution takes hit from Supreme Court
Citing unapproved treaty is 'act of most fundamental reordering of legal system'
By Bob Unruh
The fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution possibly have been shoved one step closer to irrelevance by the U.S. Supreme Court, which yesterday cited as support for its opinion an international treaty that has not been adopted in the U.S.
The issue is raising alarms for those who have been fighting the trend toward adopting "international" standards for American jurisprudence rather than relying on a strict application of the Constitution.
"It is bad enough for the Supreme Court to engage in judicial activism," said Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "It is far worse when the justices employ international law in support of their far-reaching edicts.
Don't underestimate the globalists. "The Beast on the East River" presents a frightening exposé of the United Nations' global power grab and its ruthless attempt to control U.S. education, law, gun ownership, taxation, and reproductive rights.
"We have not ratified the U.N. child's rights treaty – its provisions should not be finding their way into Supreme Court decisions," he said.
Roger Kiska, legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund who is based in Europe, said the Supreme Court's use of an unadopted precedent "completely overlooks the checks and balances system that is established by the U.S. Constitution."
It's not the first time the court has done it, and, "It's never amounted to any good," he said in a telephone interview from his base of operations in Europe. "It leans toward social radicalism."
He said there are reasons why the U.S. never adopted the U.N. convention, citing a recent case in Sweden in which a child was taken away from his home because his parents were homeschooling him, and other issues.
The child, Domenic Johanssen, has been in the custody of social services agents for almost a year now as his parents have fought unsuccessfully for his return home.
"That is a prime example of what can happen when the Convention on the Rights of the Child is used as a sword rather than as a shield," Kiska said.
(Story continues below)
The Graham v. Florida decision dealt with whether young people can be sentenced to life prison terms if they haven't killed the victims of their crimes. The issue arose in the case of Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. He now is 23 and is in a Florida prison – for life.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who frequently swings to the liberal side of the court, said such life sentences are not allowed.
"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a non-homicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Kennedy's majority opinion said. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."
Wrote Kennedy:
We also note, as petitioner and his amici emphasize, that Article 37(a) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Nov. 20, 1989, 1577 U. N. T. S. 3 (entered into force Sept. 2, 1990), ratified by every nation except the United States and Somalia, prohibits the imposition of 'life imprisonment without possibility of release . . . for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age.'
Kennedy's opinion continued:
The court has treated the laws and practices of other nations and international agreements as relevant to the Eighth Amendment not because those norms are binding or controlling but because the judgment of the world's nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency demonstrates that the court's rationale has respected reasoning to support it.
Jordan Sekulow, director of international operations for the American Center for Law and Justice, told WND the first danger is citing U.N. precedents at all.
Then comes the citation of international concepts that have not been adopted in the U.S.
"When they're citing laws that have not been adopted, they are creating new legal ground," he warned.
"It's great that all these other countries have adopted the laws, but until we've actually implemented it, it should have no impact whatsoever on our Supreme Court," he said.
He warned that such activism will lead the U.S. into trouble.
Other nations' courts already have been busy creating "new human rights" such as the "right" to "health care," he said.
"You can see that line of reasoning in cases," he said.
Farris, who had filed a brief in the Graham case on behalf of members of Congress, said, "There is simply no place for international law or practice in interpreting the American Constitution. International law has its place in deciding truly international cases – but a case involving juvenile offenders in Florida is a domestic case through and through.
"It was plainly gratuitous for the majority to employ international law in this context," he said.
Farris also is involved in Parental Rights, an organization urging a U.S. Constitution amendment to protect the rights of parents and families.
The amendment plan already has the support of seven members of the U.S. Senate and more than 130 in the House.
The brief filed by Farris was a response to arguments from Amnesty International, which sought the inclusion of international opinion in the Supreme Court ruling.
In claiming the U.S. was the only nation with such penalties, Amnesty had offered to the court "a hodgepodge of letters and e-mails supposedly on file in Amnesty's offices. Such 'evidence' would not be admissible in a traffic court; it is shocking that the Supreme Court relies on such data to make constitutional decisions," Farris said.
"Our brief demonstrated that the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (the U.N.'s official monitoring body) had found that dozens of nations were in violation of the juvenile sentencing standards of the U.N. child's rights treaty. It is simply fiction to say that the United States is the only nation which authorizes such sentences," he said.
Farris told WND that references to the Constitution still will remain foundational in Supreme Court opinions. But he said essentially what will happen is that there will be "new content" ascribed to the original document.
"I think that it is an act of the most fundamental reordering of the legal system," he told WND.
The Parental Rights organization is working in support of a plan submitted by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., whose S. Res. 519 is urging President Obama to refrain from sending the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child to the U.S. Senate for a ratification vote.
"S. Res. 519 seeks to put the Senate of the United States on record that American law and only American law should govern our families and our juvenile courts," Farris said. "I hope that every American who believes that we should remain a self-governing nation will call their senators today to urge them to become a co-sponsor of S. Res. 519."
The proposal expresses "the sense of the Senate that the primary safeguard for the well-being and protection of children is the family, and that the primary safeguards for the legal rights of children in the United States are the Constitutions of the United States and the several states, and that, because the use of international treaties to govern policy in the United States on families and children is contrary to principles of self-government and federalism."
DeMint's proposal explains Professor Geraldine Van Bueren, the author of the principal textbook on the international rights of the child and a participant in the drafting of the convention, has described the "'best interest of the child standard' in the treaty as 'provid[ing] decision and policy makers with the authority to substitute their own decisions for either the child's or the parents.'"
The U.N. already has ruled the United Kingdom in violation of the convention for allowing parents to opt their own children out of a sex education course and determined both Indonesia and Egypt out of compliance because of the way those nations structured their national budgets.
A year ago, the HSLDA reported Graham Badman generated a report reviewed by the U.K. government that stated the UNCRC "gives children and young people over 40 substantive rights which include the right to express their views freely, the right to be heard in any legal or administrative matters that affect them and the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas."
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Why Do We Ignore History?
A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.
Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”
The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that, of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.
Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”
The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that, of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
Feds Try To Control What We Eat
Feds tell court they can decide what you eat
By Bob Unruh
Attorneys for the federal government have argued in a lawsuit pending in federal court in Iowa that individuals have no "fundamental right" to obtain what food they choose.
The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.
"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds," states the document signed by U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose, assistant Martha Fagg and Roger Gural, trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish," the government has argued.
WND has reported several times on fed crackdowns on producers of raw milk for friends and neighbors, including the recent case when agents arrived to inspect a private property belonging to Dan Allgyer in Pennsylvania at 5 a.m.
The incident was followed by a report a few days later that documented a proposal pending in Congress that critics say would do for the nation's food supply what the new health-care reform law has done for health-care resources.
"S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the U.S.," critiqued Steve Green on the Food Freedom blog. "It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money."
The plan is sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who explains the legislation "is a critical step toward equipping the FDA with the authorities and funding it needs to regulate what is now a global marketplace for food, drugs, devices and cosmetics."
Now it's statism on our plate! Mark Levin's manifesto – 'Liberty and Tyranny' – provides the antidote to its growing stranglehold
His website explains, "The legislation requires foreign and domestic food facilities to have safety plans in place to prevent food hazards before they occur, increases the frequency of inspections. Additionally, it provides strong, flexible enforcement tools, including mandatory recall. Most importantly, this bill generates the resources to support FDA food-safety activities."
The proposal cleared the U.S. House last year but has been languishing in the Senate because of a full calendar of projects. It creates a long list of new requirements for food-producing entities to meet the demands of the secretary of agriculture. It is expected to be the subject of discussion in coming days.
The Iowa case alleges the federal restrictions on raw milk are a violation of the U.S. Constitution, according to a report at Natural News.
The federal attorneys want the case dismissed.
"The interest claimed by plaintiffs could be framed more narrowly as a right to 'provide themselves and their families with the foods of their own choice,'" the government document states. But the attorneys say that right doesn't exist.
"The FDA essentially believes that nobody has the right to choose what to eat or drink," said the Natural News site, which explains it covers topics that allow individuals to make positive changes in their health, environmental sensitivity and consumer choices.
"You are only 'allowed' to eat or drink what the FDA gives you permission to. There is no inherent right or God-given right to consume any foods from nature without the FDA's consent."
The Natural News report continued, "The state, in other words, may override your food decisions and deny you free access to the foods and beverages you wish to consume. And the state may do this for completely unscientific reasons – even just political reasons – all at their whim."
The report cited an increasing level of frustration on the part of the federal government because of tactics including buying "cow shares" in which a consumer drinks milk from a cow he partly owns, or "buying clubs."
"This arrangement drives the FDA absolutely batty because it bypasses their authority and allows free people to engage in the free sales of raw dairy products produced on small family farms," Natural News said.
The report blames the aggressive campaign against raw milk on large commercial dairy interests, "because it threatens the commercial milk business."
The reason cannot be safety, the report said, since a report from the Weston A. Price Foundation revealed that from 1980 to 2005 there were 10 times more illnesses from pasteurized milk than from raw milk.
The federal government attorneys say the FDA's goal is to prevent disease, and that's why the "ban on the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk" was adopted.
The attorneys conceded that states ordinarily are expected to regulate intrastate activity but noted, "it is within HHS's authority … to institute an intrastate ban as well."
Natural News reported the ban could be seen as violating the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which leaves to states all powers not specifically designated in the Constitution for the federal body.
In fact, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, lawmakers there have adopted a bill, with the governor's support, that would allow farmers to sell raw milk directly to consumers.
The move puts Wisconsin in position to be the 20th state to allow direct sales of raw milk. Another handful of states allow retail sales.
By Bob Unruh
Attorneys for the federal government have argued in a lawsuit pending in federal court in Iowa that individuals have no "fundamental right" to obtain what food they choose.
The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.
"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds," states the document signed by U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose, assistant Martha Fagg and Roger Gural, trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish," the government has argued.
WND has reported several times on fed crackdowns on producers of raw milk for friends and neighbors, including the recent case when agents arrived to inspect a private property belonging to Dan Allgyer in Pennsylvania at 5 a.m.
The incident was followed by a report a few days later that documented a proposal pending in Congress that critics say would do for the nation's food supply what the new health-care reform law has done for health-care resources.
"S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the U.S.," critiqued Steve Green on the Food Freedom blog. "It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money."
The plan is sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who explains the legislation "is a critical step toward equipping the FDA with the authorities and funding it needs to regulate what is now a global marketplace for food, drugs, devices and cosmetics."
Now it's statism on our plate! Mark Levin's manifesto – 'Liberty and Tyranny' – provides the antidote to its growing stranglehold
His website explains, "The legislation requires foreign and domestic food facilities to have safety plans in place to prevent food hazards before they occur, increases the frequency of inspections. Additionally, it provides strong, flexible enforcement tools, including mandatory recall. Most importantly, this bill generates the resources to support FDA food-safety activities."
The proposal cleared the U.S. House last year but has been languishing in the Senate because of a full calendar of projects. It creates a long list of new requirements for food-producing entities to meet the demands of the secretary of agriculture. It is expected to be the subject of discussion in coming days.
The Iowa case alleges the federal restrictions on raw milk are a violation of the U.S. Constitution, according to a report at Natural News.
The federal attorneys want the case dismissed.
"The interest claimed by plaintiffs could be framed more narrowly as a right to 'provide themselves and their families with the foods of their own choice,'" the government document states. But the attorneys say that right doesn't exist.
"The FDA essentially believes that nobody has the right to choose what to eat or drink," said the Natural News site, which explains it covers topics that allow individuals to make positive changes in their health, environmental sensitivity and consumer choices.
"You are only 'allowed' to eat or drink what the FDA gives you permission to. There is no inherent right or God-given right to consume any foods from nature without the FDA's consent."
The Natural News report continued, "The state, in other words, may override your food decisions and deny you free access to the foods and beverages you wish to consume. And the state may do this for completely unscientific reasons – even just political reasons – all at their whim."
The report cited an increasing level of frustration on the part of the federal government because of tactics including buying "cow shares" in which a consumer drinks milk from a cow he partly owns, or "buying clubs."
"This arrangement drives the FDA absolutely batty because it bypasses their authority and allows free people to engage in the free sales of raw dairy products produced on small family farms," Natural News said.
The report blames the aggressive campaign against raw milk on large commercial dairy interests, "because it threatens the commercial milk business."
The reason cannot be safety, the report said, since a report from the Weston A. Price Foundation revealed that from 1980 to 2005 there were 10 times more illnesses from pasteurized milk than from raw milk.
The federal government attorneys say the FDA's goal is to prevent disease, and that's why the "ban on the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk" was adopted.
The attorneys conceded that states ordinarily are expected to regulate intrastate activity but noted, "it is within HHS's authority … to institute an intrastate ban as well."
Natural News reported the ban could be seen as violating the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which leaves to states all powers not specifically designated in the Constitution for the federal body.
In fact, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, lawmakers there have adopted a bill, with the governor's support, that would allow farmers to sell raw milk directly to consumers.
The move puts Wisconsin in position to be the 20th state to allow direct sales of raw milk. Another handful of states allow retail sales.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Slimeball Waxman Hides Bill
HENRY WAXMAN’S SNEAK ATTACK ON DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS
Last week and over the weekend, the Internet was buzzing about a heretofore undetected provision Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., had slipped into the Wall Street financial reform bill that the House passed in December – a provision critics warned could devastate the nutritional supplement industry with excessive regulations, driving up the costs of supplements or removing them from the market altogether.
“The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) …includes language going far beyond finance,” the Alliance for Natural Health-USA, a D.C.-based health freedom advocacy group, stated in an April 27 report, with the warning: “This language could be used for an end run around the Dietary Supplement Health and Safety Act (DSHEA), the legislation that governs dietary supplement regulation by the FDA.”
DSHEA was passed by Congress in 1994 in response to public outrage over a series of FDA armed raids on health food stores and alternative medicine clinics; it’s the landmark law designed to protect access to dietary supplements and to information about these products.
The Waxman provision does not affect DSHEA. It has nothing to do with lending institutions or financial matters, nor does it refer to the Food and Drug Administration, the agency tasked with regulating dietary supplements. Instead, it deals with the Federal Trade Commission, an agency set up in 1914 to protect the public from allegedly deceptive advertising and “anti-competition” business practices.
“A direct attack on supplements would take the form of an amendment to DSHEA, since that legislation governs FDA regulation of supplements,” ANH-USA explains. “In this case, Waxman has left DSHEA alone, and has instead inserted language in the Wall St. ‘reform’ bill that gives the Federal Trade Commission important new powers that could be used to circumvent key supplement protections in DSHEA.”
Last week and over the weekend, the Internet was buzzing about a heretofore undetected provision Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., had slipped into the Wall Street financial reform bill that the House passed in December – a provision critics warned could devastate the nutritional supplement industry with excessive regulations, driving up the costs of supplements or removing them from the market altogether.
“The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) …includes language going far beyond finance,” the Alliance for Natural Health-USA, a D.C.-based health freedom advocacy group, stated in an April 27 report, with the warning: “This language could be used for an end run around the Dietary Supplement Health and Safety Act (DSHEA), the legislation that governs dietary supplement regulation by the FDA.”
DSHEA was passed by Congress in 1994 in response to public outrage over a series of FDA armed raids on health food stores and alternative medicine clinics; it’s the landmark law designed to protect access to dietary supplements and to information about these products.
The Waxman provision does not affect DSHEA. It has nothing to do with lending institutions or financial matters, nor does it refer to the Food and Drug Administration, the agency tasked with regulating dietary supplements. Instead, it deals with the Federal Trade Commission, an agency set up in 1914 to protect the public from allegedly deceptive advertising and “anti-competition” business practices.
“A direct attack on supplements would take the form of an amendment to DSHEA, since that legislation governs FDA regulation of supplements,” ANH-USA explains. “In this case, Waxman has left DSHEA alone, and has instead inserted language in the Wall St. ‘reform’ bill that gives the Federal Trade Commission important new powers that could be used to circumvent key supplement protections in DSHEA.”
Repeal Obamacare NOW!
The Road to Repeal is Well Under Way
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama's health care plan. Well, the nation's post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats' other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.
This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees' and retirees' health care coverage all together.
Then the Obama administration's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3) 14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”
Facing this onslaught of reality, the Obama administration has swooped into full spin mode, devoting the Weekly Presidential Address to explaining the "real benefits" Obamacare is "already delivering" to Americans. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius then sent letters to House and Senate leaders touting her "progress" in implementing the law. And then last night White House aides Nancy-Ann DeParle and Stephanie Cutter briefed the House Democratic Caucus on the "tangible benefits" of the law. The sales pitch for all three events were the same: 1) "adults" age 26 and younger can be added to their parents' plan (never mind that this drives up their parents' health care costs); 2) new high-risk pools for Americans with pre-existing conditions (never mind that 19 states have rejected working with HHS since Obamacare massively underfunded the pools); 3) supplementing insurance for early retirees (never mind that the Medicare Advantage cuts and tax changes mentioned above are a big reason why seniors will need supplemental coverage).
Democrats know that Americans simply are not buying what they are selling. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) tells Politico: "It's just like trying to explain the Encyclopedia Britannica." And John Spratt (D-SC) adds: "You need to know what you're talking about and this is extremely complex. It's really difficult to remember, 'was this in this bill, or was this in the bill Senate side.'" Maybe Spratt should have figured out what was and wasn't in the bill before he voted for it.
Since the left can't even figure out what is in the bill they are trying to defend, the latest Rasmussen Reports shows that 63% of likely voters now believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 56% now favor repeal. Not waiting for this November's elections to change the leadership in Congress, states are leading the way on the road to repeal. According to The Washington Post 33 states have mounted legal and legislative challenges to the new law. Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Goldwater Institute, tells the Post: "This is going to be a long, protracted war of attrition and we haven't even seen the first wave of regulations yet. ... The initial challenges to McCain-Feingold were rejected. But since then, litigators found the vulnerabilities. Likewise, here I think you're going to see a thousand flowers bloom in terms of lawsuits. I'm hoping that this will die a death of a thousand cuts."
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama's health care plan. Well, the nation's post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats' other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.
This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees' and retirees' health care coverage all together.
Then the Obama administration's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3) 14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”
Facing this onslaught of reality, the Obama administration has swooped into full spin mode, devoting the Weekly Presidential Address to explaining the "real benefits" Obamacare is "already delivering" to Americans. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius then sent letters to House and Senate leaders touting her "progress" in implementing the law. And then last night White House aides Nancy-Ann DeParle and Stephanie Cutter briefed the House Democratic Caucus on the "tangible benefits" of the law. The sales pitch for all three events were the same: 1) "adults" age 26 and younger can be added to their parents' plan (never mind that this drives up their parents' health care costs); 2) new high-risk pools for Americans with pre-existing conditions (never mind that 19 states have rejected working with HHS since Obamacare massively underfunded the pools); 3) supplementing insurance for early retirees (never mind that the Medicare Advantage cuts and tax changes mentioned above are a big reason why seniors will need supplemental coverage).
Democrats know that Americans simply are not buying what they are selling. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) tells Politico: "It's just like trying to explain the Encyclopedia Britannica." And John Spratt (D-SC) adds: "You need to know what you're talking about and this is extremely complex. It's really difficult to remember, 'was this in this bill, or was this in the bill Senate side.'" Maybe Spratt should have figured out what was and wasn't in the bill before he voted for it.
Since the left can't even figure out what is in the bill they are trying to defend, the latest Rasmussen Reports shows that 63% of likely voters now believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 56% now favor repeal. Not waiting for this November's elections to change the leadership in Congress, states are leading the way on the road to repeal. According to The Washington Post 33 states have mounted legal and legislative challenges to the new law. Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Goldwater Institute, tells the Post: "This is going to be a long, protracted war of attrition and we haven't even seen the first wave of regulations yet. ... The initial challenges to McCain-Feingold were rejected. But since then, litigators found the vulnerabilities. Likewise, here I think you're going to see a thousand flowers bloom in terms of lawsuits. I'm hoping that this will die a death of a thousand cuts."
Michelle Obama's Self-Righteous Lies
Michelle Obama: Food Profiteer Turned Food Cop
By Michelle Malkin
May 12, 2010
Let me summarize first lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity agenda: Shed as I say, not as I gain. While she crusades for organic foods and puts government pressure on corporations to stop marketing fast food and junk food to children, Mrs. Obama herself profited from the very same processed food industry she now demonizes.
In June 2005, a few months after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, Mrs. Obama hustled a seat on the corporate Board of Directors of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. Despite zero experience, the food-processing company put her on its audit and nominating and corporate governance committees. For her on-the-job training and the privilege of putting her name and face on their literature, the company forked over $45,000 in 2005 and $51,200 in 2006 to Mrs. Obama -- as well as 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72,000 for each year.
The chairman of the TreeHouse Foods board, Sam K. Reed, was a top executive at Kellogg's and Keebler Foods, home of that great menace to children, the Keebler Elf. Before that, he headed up Mother's Cake and Cookie Company. The conglomerate sells cheese sauces, Cremora non-dairy creamer, instant soup, puddings and powdered soft drink mixes. Hardly the stuff of Mrs. Obama's new vision of nutritional paradise. TreeHouse is also a leading supplier of pickles used in the burgers of evil fast food chain McDonald's -- exactly the kind of corporate restaurants Mrs. Obama is now targeting in her war on urban "food deserts."
The corporation-bashing Mrs. Obama would have continued raking in her TreeHouse cash if it hadn't been for her husband's pesky pledge to pander to Big Labor and swear off Wal-Mart. The retail giant, you see, happened to be TreeHouse's biggest customer. And Wal-Mart is to Big Labor as sunshine is to Dracula.
In May 2007, Obama told AFL-CIO workers in Trenton, N.J., that Wal-Mart was dead to him. "I won't shop there," he pledged, with an eye toward embarrassing then-chief rival Hillary Clinton, who had served on Wal-Mart's board from 1986-1992. The AFL-CIO has waged relentless attacks on Wal-Mart, dubbing it the "Poster Store for Greed." That, by extension, would make Mrs. Obama -- all-too-happy recipient of a Wal-Mart dependent compensation package worth more than $100,000 in 2008, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records -- a Poster Child for Ancillary Avarice.
Candidate Obama shrugged off his wife's conflict of interest. "Michelle and I have to live in the world and pay taxes and pay for our kids and save for retirement," Obama explained to Crain's Chicago Business magazine before his White House bid. Political expediency, alas, required that the candidate's wife step down when the issue reared its head after Obama's Wal-Mart bashing during the presidential campaign cycle. True to form, Mrs. Obama turned the decision into an ostentatious display of self-sacrifice:
"As my campaign commitments continue to ramp up, it is becoming more difficult for me to provide the type of focus I would like on my professional responsibilities," said Chicago's Joan of Arc in a resignation statement eight days after her husband declared his boycott of the stores stocked with food items processed and distributed by her TreeHouse colleagues. "My priorities, particularly at this important time, are ensuring that our young daughters feel a sense of comfort and normalcy in this process, and that I can support my husband in his presidential campaign to bring much needed change to this country."
She saw no conflict then. And she sees no conflict now in wielding her East Wing clout to restrict the advertising free speech of the food industry that lined her pocketbook with big, fat paychecks. The Obama White House is on an insatiable control binge. No private space has been left behind -- not your grocery aisles, not your children's TV shows, not even your refrigerator.
Give the first lady this: She has an uncanny knack for wrapping her self-interests in the mantle of self-sacrifice and public service. It's the Obama way.
By Michelle Malkin
May 12, 2010
Let me summarize first lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity agenda: Shed as I say, not as I gain. While she crusades for organic foods and puts government pressure on corporations to stop marketing fast food and junk food to children, Mrs. Obama herself profited from the very same processed food industry she now demonizes.
In June 2005, a few months after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, Mrs. Obama hustled a seat on the corporate Board of Directors of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. Despite zero experience, the food-processing company put her on its audit and nominating and corporate governance committees. For her on-the-job training and the privilege of putting her name and face on their literature, the company forked over $45,000 in 2005 and $51,200 in 2006 to Mrs. Obama -- as well as 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72,000 for each year.
The chairman of the TreeHouse Foods board, Sam K. Reed, was a top executive at Kellogg's and Keebler Foods, home of that great menace to children, the Keebler Elf. Before that, he headed up Mother's Cake and Cookie Company. The conglomerate sells cheese sauces, Cremora non-dairy creamer, instant soup, puddings and powdered soft drink mixes. Hardly the stuff of Mrs. Obama's new vision of nutritional paradise. TreeHouse is also a leading supplier of pickles used in the burgers of evil fast food chain McDonald's -- exactly the kind of corporate restaurants Mrs. Obama is now targeting in her war on urban "food deserts."
The corporation-bashing Mrs. Obama would have continued raking in her TreeHouse cash if it hadn't been for her husband's pesky pledge to pander to Big Labor and swear off Wal-Mart. The retail giant, you see, happened to be TreeHouse's biggest customer. And Wal-Mart is to Big Labor as sunshine is to Dracula.
In May 2007, Obama told AFL-CIO workers in Trenton, N.J., that Wal-Mart was dead to him. "I won't shop there," he pledged, with an eye toward embarrassing then-chief rival Hillary Clinton, who had served on Wal-Mart's board from 1986-1992. The AFL-CIO has waged relentless attacks on Wal-Mart, dubbing it the "Poster Store for Greed." That, by extension, would make Mrs. Obama -- all-too-happy recipient of a Wal-Mart dependent compensation package worth more than $100,000 in 2008, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records -- a Poster Child for Ancillary Avarice.
Candidate Obama shrugged off his wife's conflict of interest. "Michelle and I have to live in the world and pay taxes and pay for our kids and save for retirement," Obama explained to Crain's Chicago Business magazine before his White House bid. Political expediency, alas, required that the candidate's wife step down when the issue reared its head after Obama's Wal-Mart bashing during the presidential campaign cycle. True to form, Mrs. Obama turned the decision into an ostentatious display of self-sacrifice:
"As my campaign commitments continue to ramp up, it is becoming more difficult for me to provide the type of focus I would like on my professional responsibilities," said Chicago's Joan of Arc in a resignation statement eight days after her husband declared his boycott of the stores stocked with food items processed and distributed by her TreeHouse colleagues. "My priorities, particularly at this important time, are ensuring that our young daughters feel a sense of comfort and normalcy in this process, and that I can support my husband in his presidential campaign to bring much needed change to this country."
She saw no conflict then. And she sees no conflict now in wielding her East Wing clout to restrict the advertising free speech of the food industry that lined her pocketbook with big, fat paychecks. The Obama White House is on an insatiable control binge. No private space has been left behind -- not your grocery aisles, not your children's TV shows, not even your refrigerator.
Give the first lady this: She has an uncanny knack for wrapping her self-interests in the mantle of self-sacrifice and public service. It's the Obama way.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
A Call To Arms
A Call To Arms
The Obama administration, inspired by Saul Alinsky and the president’s friends and advisors, former underground Weatherman bombers and assassins Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, is intent upon revolutionary extension of socialist statism. They must be stopped if the United States is to survive.
Read More...
Summoning Our Inner Hero
By Jeff Lukens
Rarely does the concern of the middle-class reach a point where they start protesting the government en masse. The passage of ObamaCare and the impending financial ruin of our country is now one of those times.
Despite immense opposition, Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress forced through a health care bill, not to improve people’s health care but to expand the power of the state over them. It is the height of arrogance. As ObamaCare moves closer to reality, we know the resulting intrusion of government in our lives will not allow us to continue to live as we have before.
We know the government can’t keep running huge deficits and think there will be no consequences. We know the federal and many state budgets are already broke, and that hard times are coming. We know that Obama is deliberately trying to drive the country off a cliff with debt our grandchildren can never repay. And we know that when we speak out against this madness, they will malign us and likely smear us as racists.
Until recently, many have avoided speaking publicly about politics, and we now know that must change too. We could never live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while liberals dismantle the country. We need heroic action, and we know we are the ones who must be the heroes. Each of us need to reach deep and summon what may not come naturally, and bring out the hero that resides inside.
A hero is someone motivated to act beyond his or her own self-interest. It’s that person faced with an overwhelming challenge or moral dilemma who acts for the greater good. He or she acts in the interest of duty, honor, and country.
Think of the iconic hero Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) in the movie “Casablanca.” In it, he is a world-weary American in a lawless town. As lost love and horrendous world events spiral beyond his control, he is faced with the uncomfortable necessity of standing up for good. At first Rick shrugs, “I’m not interested in the politics. The problems of the world are not in my department. I’m a saloon keeper.” His response is typical of many of us today.
Rick eventually comes to the realization that he can no longer run away from himself in drink and self-pity. He knows the only way to move forward is bravely to act on the side of good. His inner hero emerges. At great risk, and some sorrow, Rick puts the courageous underground Nazi resistance leader and his wife on the plane to Lisbon so they can continue their movement.
With the daily assault by progressives on our values, we know that all we hold dear about this county they oppose. Like Rick, we know we too must get off the bench and strive for what is right. And we know we must do it soon.
We know we must fight back now before ObamaCare takes effect, not years from now when the benefits become embedded. We know the massive expansion of the federal government into personal health care will drive health insurance providers out of business and force employers to dump their workers on to the government plan.
Obama thinks he can initially hide the negative effects, hooking us on new benefits until they become entrenched, and putting off the reduced care, the cost overruns, and the tax hikes that are sure to come so we will not make the connection between this horrible legislation and the resulting economic carnage. Like so much about this man, this deception is nefarious and dishonest.
But his plan may be backfiring. Suddenly, the steady encroachment of socialism these many decades is very noticeable by tens of millions of ordinary people who care deeply about their county, and they are taking to the streets.
We must start now at working to repeal this health care debacle and remove Obama and his cronies from office. And we must get out of our comfort zone and do what we may have never done before. We must be sure to vote. And we must peacefully do the tasks of manning picket lines at rallies, encouraging our family and friends to get involved, working the phones lines and canvassing precincts to elect conservatives, and more. In short, we must become heroes for the republic.
The cancer of progressivism didn’t start with Barack Obama and his corrupt Congress, but we can see to it that it ends with them. We must never forget the outrage we felt that Sunday in March when these people forced this legislative monstrosity upon us. Let that outrage spur your inner hero on.
The Obama administration, inspired by Saul Alinsky and the president’s friends and advisors, former underground Weatherman bombers and assassins Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, is intent upon revolutionary extension of socialist statism. They must be stopped if the United States is to survive.
Read More...
Summoning Our Inner Hero
By Jeff Lukens
Rarely does the concern of the middle-class reach a point where they start protesting the government en masse. The passage of ObamaCare and the impending financial ruin of our country is now one of those times.
Despite immense opposition, Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress forced through a health care bill, not to improve people’s health care but to expand the power of the state over them. It is the height of arrogance. As ObamaCare moves closer to reality, we know the resulting intrusion of government in our lives will not allow us to continue to live as we have before.
We know the government can’t keep running huge deficits and think there will be no consequences. We know the federal and many state budgets are already broke, and that hard times are coming. We know that Obama is deliberately trying to drive the country off a cliff with debt our grandchildren can never repay. And we know that when we speak out against this madness, they will malign us and likely smear us as racists.
Until recently, many have avoided speaking publicly about politics, and we now know that must change too. We could never live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while liberals dismantle the country. We need heroic action, and we know we are the ones who must be the heroes. Each of us need to reach deep and summon what may not come naturally, and bring out the hero that resides inside.
A hero is someone motivated to act beyond his or her own self-interest. It’s that person faced with an overwhelming challenge or moral dilemma who acts for the greater good. He or she acts in the interest of duty, honor, and country.
Think of the iconic hero Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) in the movie “Casablanca.” In it, he is a world-weary American in a lawless town. As lost love and horrendous world events spiral beyond his control, he is faced with the uncomfortable necessity of standing up for good. At first Rick shrugs, “I’m not interested in the politics. The problems of the world are not in my department. I’m a saloon keeper.” His response is typical of many of us today.
Rick eventually comes to the realization that he can no longer run away from himself in drink and self-pity. He knows the only way to move forward is bravely to act on the side of good. His inner hero emerges. At great risk, and some sorrow, Rick puts the courageous underground Nazi resistance leader and his wife on the plane to Lisbon so they can continue their movement.
With the daily assault by progressives on our values, we know that all we hold dear about this county they oppose. Like Rick, we know we too must get off the bench and strive for what is right. And we know we must do it soon.
We know we must fight back now before ObamaCare takes effect, not years from now when the benefits become embedded. We know the massive expansion of the federal government into personal health care will drive health insurance providers out of business and force employers to dump their workers on to the government plan.
Obama thinks he can initially hide the negative effects, hooking us on new benefits until they become entrenched, and putting off the reduced care, the cost overruns, and the tax hikes that are sure to come so we will not make the connection between this horrible legislation and the resulting economic carnage. Like so much about this man, this deception is nefarious and dishonest.
But his plan may be backfiring. Suddenly, the steady encroachment of socialism these many decades is very noticeable by tens of millions of ordinary people who care deeply about their county, and they are taking to the streets.
We must start now at working to repeal this health care debacle and remove Obama and his cronies from office. And we must get out of our comfort zone and do what we may have never done before. We must be sure to vote. And we must peacefully do the tasks of manning picket lines at rallies, encouraging our family and friends to get involved, working the phones lines and canvassing precincts to elect conservatives, and more. In short, we must become heroes for the republic.
The cancer of progressivism didn’t start with Barack Obama and his corrupt Congress, but we can see to it that it ends with them. We must never forget the outrage we felt that Sunday in March when these people forced this legislative monstrosity upon us. Let that outrage spur your inner hero on.
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