WHAT PUTIN KNOWS: Great nations are destroyed from within.
by Robert Pedersen
Chairman,Westside Republicans
“In the 20 century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute…This lesson cost us dearly, I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated…Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of business people, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.”
Who said this? Milton Friedman? Ronald Reagan? Ron Paul? Margaret Thatcher? No, No, it was Vladimir Putin. That Vladimir Putin -- former head of the KGB, former President and now prime minister of Russia -- warning President Obama and world economic leaders this week at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland.
“We must assess the real situation and write off all hopeless debts and bad assets,” Putin continues to warn, “True this will be an extremely painful and unpleasant process….We [will]…prolong the crisis, unless we clean up our balance sheets.”
“What kind of country are we becoming,” a blogger asks, “when you agree with the ruler of Russia more than your own president?”
So what does Vladimir Putin, this long term communist, know that President Obama doesn’t know? Everything! Everything about real world realities. While Barack Obama was nestling in ivied halls with academic theories, Vladimir Putin wrestled with the Soviet Union’s complete economic and political collapse; a catastrophe brought about by Soviet adherence to ideology over sanity, central government planning over actual market needs, and bureaucratic micromanagement.
Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe was a place where decisions were made by government fiat, without regard to market demands. It was notorious for stores ending up with with faulty products nobody wanted. Clothes seemed to be like the proverbial horse designed by a committee that ended up looking like a giraffe. Shirts with size 14 necks and 36 inch sleeves; with shoulders as broad as a barn, and waist as narrow as a tube sock. The second market, the true market, was in buying items in shops, pulling them apart, and reworking them for real people. Products were shipped by committee too. Take a pair of shoes. The left shoe might end up in Moscow; the right shoe in Minsk. One brand of machine might end up in one factory; and its spare parts in a town hundreds of miles aways. Putin's warning remind us of an old joke, “If you want to learn about Communism, go to the University of Paris. If you want to learn about Capitalism, go to the University of Beijing.
And now, the Chinese have something to say on this matter too. Already our biggest foreign lender, with $1 trillion in U.S. government debt, they warn us not to devalue the dollar through reckless spending.
“To be honest, I’m a little worried,” Premier Wen Jiaboa said on May 29, calling on the United States to “honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese (financial) assets.”
"Chinese assets are very safe," Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner said on June 1st, at Peking University. His attempt to reassure the Chinese about their huge holdings of dollar assets was met with loud derisive laughter.
"If they really wanted a strong dollar, they wouldn't be printing money and running up huge deficits." The Chinese know well that Obama's promise of billions in spending to take over the health care industry and trillions in deficits -- more deficit spending in his first 100 days that all other 43 US Presidents deficit spending combined -- is a path to economic disaster.
“Curious,” one wag commented, “the Chinese have a better grip on how markets work than does President Obama. “Hell Another said, has truly frozen over!” How is it that two sometime pillars of Communist statism – a former KGB Colonel and the Chinese Politburo -- are left to try to shake the capitalist world from running off the rails into cultural and economic suicide?
Do not make the same mistakes; we have been there, they warn; Meaning, do not drag us back into this economic this abyss with you.
What is in America’s future? Government mandating the manufacture of cars that meet federal government ideological mandates for cleaner air, and alternate fuel consumption, but that nobody wants. Vladimir Putin knows all about that. The Soviet Union offered 3 basic models, they picked the color (anyone mention lately, “no black cars in California), and decided when it was your turn – say, every fourteen years or so – to get a new car. The government had decided that steel, and plastic, and metals should be put to other uses – mostly export, to pay off their exorbitant debts.
Is the EPA going to design America's cars? Will auto factories be opened and closed depending on whose congressional district they lie in? 
Sound far fetched? Hasn’t GM – now that the government owns it – been told to build the smallest cars offered in this country yet? Of course, they aren’t foolish. They won’t be offering us “communist cars.” The latest design being shown off in Holland is called the “Common Car.” Just as small, just as mandated – and a lot of alphabet letters in common. Sure, it looks cool -- but try and fit in it.
The President has said he won't manage GM's day to day affairs. Who does he think he's fooling? He's already fired GM's CEO, indicated where a factory plant ought to be located, and promised the mayor of Detroit the GM's headquarters will stay put in downtown Detroit, without the slightest deference to GM's management. Congressional Committees are arguing over which local dealerships GM can close.
A car being designed by a Congressional Committee and dozens of federal agencies -- just imagine that! It's called Central Planning, and Vladimir Putin could tell Barack Obama, it doesn't work. Imagine parking lots full of cars nobody wants; Auto executives desperate to get cars on the market they can sell. It always end up with bureaucrats lining their pockets.
Could it happen? It's all happening now. Take California education. We are spending billions of dollars for one of the lowest ranked test score results in the nation. Over a recent four year period, state education spending went up by 331/3%, even as total school enrollment was declining; yet the scores didn't budge an inch. Where did all the money go? Some of it we know -- to pay off the demands of teacher's unions and to build schools (like the half a billion downtown L.A. Belmont Complex, above) on toxic dumps. Tax money spent on favored projects by faulty contractors; Money flowing into selected congressional and assembly districts: these are bribes by any other name, meant to shore up votes and keep the government hacks in power. Sooner or later, it all end in catastrophe; which is where California is now. How is it the state with the highest income tax, highest sales tax, highest gas tax, highest car license tax, can't pay its bills. Blame it on Central Planning. 
The CEO of GM is fired. Chrysler is forced into a shot-gun marriage with Fiat. America's 200 yer old bankruptcy laws are thwarted. Now they want to mandate your salaries, pensions, compensation – and no, if you guessed that means MORE salaries and compensation, you’d be WRONG.
Run a company, disagree with Washington – well, you’ll soon be looking for a new job. And no, that doesn’t just happen with auto companies.
Don’t like what they’re doing? “ Anyone say, “Domestic Police?” “A Civilian Security Force just as well funded as the military? Here in America?
How deeply do they want to change the culture of America? How about ideological “training camps?” Sure, when you first heard about it, you thought it was a hoax. They’re meant to offer college tuition in exchange for attending. But they’ll decide what courses of study are legitimate. Are you in a panic over global warming? That’ll get you credit. Worried about the “unborn?” Er, not so much. Call them, “re-education camps”
“That is exactly what Obama wants and he is not ashamed to tell you about it! Well, after all,” the Creative Minority Report warns, “you do need to keep the proletariat ... um .... I mean middle class in line.”
President Obama has appointed more “Tsars” that the Russian Empire had in its several hundred year lifetime – And the Washington Politburo will soon be grabbing for more.
Now Hugo Chavez, strong-man of Venezula who has nationalized broad swaths of his countries key economic sectors, over national television, has offered this little gem :
"Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right!"
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