State Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs admitted voters’ feelings on Israel helped propel Mamdani buddies to three House primary victories, including firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier and former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who upset incumbent Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, respectively.

Both Espaillat and Goldman backed the Jewish state — which may have motivated young activist liberals with pro-Palestinian views who have staunchly opposed Israeli military action in Gaza.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://nypost.com/2026/06/29/us-news/dem-leader-experts-admit-what-fueled-nys-socialist-surge-and-it-wasnt-affordability-pledge/?fbclid=IwY2xjawSvxb5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEetN87z7leZhalAE2aNz0M94RpiC_wykKxRuILgJbXMN8dYiQR_afF3yrEjfo_aem_odFFJqD7Rg7No9HFAk6nWQ

The post Dem leader, experts admit what fueled NYC’s socialist surge — and it wasn’t ‘affordability’ pledge first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

How did Venezuela fall from prosperity so quickly? How did socialist policies affect the nation’s economy? Is there any hope for its future?

Jorge Galicia, a refugee from Venezuela and outreach fellow at The Fund for American Studies, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to answer these questions and describe what it was like to grow up in Venezuela.

Also on today’s show, we cover these stories:

—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls on the United Nations to remove Russia from its Security Council.
—Twitter offers entrepreneur Elon Musk a seat on its board of directors after he becomes the social media company’s largest shareholder.
—Individuals who live in Palm Springs, California, and identify as transgender or nonbinary are eligible to receive up to $900 a month.

Read the lightly edited transcript.

Virginia Allen: Two decades ago, Venezuela was a thriving country. Today, Freedom House ranks it not free and The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranks it 176, coming in just above North Korea. The question is, what happened in Venezuela? How did it get to this point? Well, here with us today to answer that question is a Venezuelan refugee and an outreach fellow at The Fund for American Studies, Jorge Galicia.

Jorge, thank you so much for being here.

Jorge Galicia: No, thank you, Virginia. Thank you for the invitation, it’s an honor.

Allen: I would love to begin by just asking you to share a little bit of your own background. You actually grew up in Venezuela. What do you remember from living there? What was your childhood like in Venezuela?

Galicia: Yeah, that’s a good question. I only arrived here to the [United] States like three years ago. So almost my entire life, I spent it there in Venezuela. I experienced the whole transition.

When I was a child, my childhood in Venezuela was pretty normal, pretty happy, to be honest. I grew up having the latest versions of my favorite video games, good birthday parties every year when I was a child. I could say I had a regular middle-class life when I was a child in Venezuela.

But then in the year 2014, probably that’s the year when we saw this huge transition in my life, that things totally change. I started to see a lot of different problems in Venezuela.

For example, in my house, we stopped having constant water supply; scarcity of food, you needed to do huge lines to get just a piece of bread; electricity started to fail constantly; internet connection started to fail constantly. Every single aspect of life, of living in Venezuela, started to decline.

I went from being a happy kid of a middle-class family to being basically poor. At some point I even stopped eating as much as I was used to eating because we didn’t have enough money to afford a lot of food. The scarcity in Venezuela was that big that it was really hard at some point to get what you’re required.

In the year 2017, I actually stopped eating meat for a long period of time. We substitute it with grains and other different stuff that we could afford. But meat, all kind of meat, was unavailable for me for that whole year.

Allen: Prior to 2014, you had never experienced hunger or your family really struggling to make ends meet?

Galicia: No, yeah. Before that year, honestly, neither me or my family imagined that something like that could ever happen to us because, as I said, we had a pretty decent life. We had our problems, as everybody else, but no, no, we had a good house and my mom’s income was pretty good.

I was a kid, but we never struggled that much until 2014. After this year, this is when the crisis actually hit us. Because I believe even before that year a lot of people were already suffering, but in our case, this was the year when everything went south. Yes, I went from being a happy middle-class boy to being poor, basically.

Allen: Take us back. What was happening in Venezuela at that time in the early 2000s? As you got into 2012, ’13, ’14, what was going on in your country?

Galicia: Yeah, well, 2014 for me was the year of the collapse, but the reason of that was happening decades ago when Hugo Chavez actually took power.

When he was in power, he managed to confiscate thousands of private industries within Venezuela. He confiscated the industry … that used to provide water, he confiscated the industry that used to provide electricity for Venezuela, and stuff like that. He did [that] during all these years before.

A lot of people actually saw this coming, it was no surprise for a lot of people. But, well, the consequences of this politics didn’t arrive, at least for my family, until 2014.

This is exactly what I’ve been doing with The Fund for American Studies, with TFAS. I’ve been traveling to college campuses to give a historical review and to give an answer to that question of how Venezuela became what it is today. How did we go from being one of the richest places on earth, basically, to one of the poorest nowadays?

Yeah, this is thanks to socialist policies promoted by Hugo Chavez, but not only by Hugo Chavez, because before Hugh Chavez we started to play a little bit with these socialist policies.

This is something that the American audience needs to also understand, because a lot of progressive people here say something like, “No, we want to do democratic socialism. We don’t want to do the kind of authoritarian socialism Hugo Chavez did.”

But, well, guess what? In Venezuela, at least in ’75, this is when the oil industry in Venezuela was nationalized, this was our major first step into socialism that we ever gave and this was under a vibrant democracy.

This was already democratic socialism somehow. This move already paved the way to what we have today. It is not accurate to say that the decline in Venezuela started with Hugo Chavez. It started, actually, decades before.

Allen: What were the promises that Chavez and the other government officials were making to the Venezuelan people?

Galicia: Well, the main promise, I would say, was equality for all Venezuelans. He promised that everybody could have exactly the same results in life, which is unnatural, of course.

His campaigns were fueled by creating hatred against the rich class, the top 1%. He made them believe that the reason why they were poor was because there was this rich sector of the society that was taking advantage of them. A lot of people, unfortunately, believed this message, so he created a lot of divisions within the country.

So yes, he said that by confiscating private properties and private businesses of these top 1%, Venezuelans were somehow going to improve their life. Of course, this was never the case.

Allen: As things started to decline, what were you experiencing on a day-to-day basis in Venezuela? Were you ever fearful for your own safety? Were your friends fearful? What were the conversations like that you were having with friends and family in the country as things were declining?

Galicia: Yeah, no. Of course, when this happened, I was still a teenager, but me and my family did see where the country was heading to. I was extremely worried, even despite the fact that I was a teenager. I was so worried about my future.

Actually, that’s the reason why, in the year 2014, when I started to experience all of this chaos around my life and I started to see the decline of my quality, this is the year when I actually decided to step in and go into political activism.

I joined the student movement of my university and I also joined a political party named Vente Venezuela, which is a classical liberal political party, because I knew that the reason why my life was not doing so good was because of all of these socialist policies.

I decided to step in and try to fight again for recovering our democracy, recovering our republic, our freedoms, because Venezuela, even though it wasn’t perfect, we used to have a much better country and I wanted that to be the case again.

But yes, because I saw all of these declines in my lifestyle, I decided to step in. This actually brought me also some consequences, because as you know, we have a dictatorship there. [Venezuelan dictator Nicolas] Maduro does not tolerate really well dissidence. And well, in the year 2017, I got in trouble with police because of my activism.

Actually, one of my best friends, I don’t know, I cannot say his name for security reasons, but he was captured by police. In the middle of the night, they broke into his house without a warrant, without any kind of legality or due process, and they took him away.

When this happened, I panicked because he and I were part of the same team. I knew that if the police knew about his location, they probably knew about mine as well so I needed to disappear. I went into hiding, I spent a long period of time hiding at some religious place in Venezuela. It was a pretty dramatic situation in my life. Again, this is all thanks to all of the consequences that we suffered because of implementing these policies.

Allen: Do you know what happened to your friend?

Galicia: Oh, yeah. Well, after three months, my friend was, thankfully, thanks God, released from prison. He spent almost three months in prison. Later, when he was released, he was under probation. He needed to go to court every eight days to sign some crazy paper.

But then, I think two years after those events, he managed to escape the country. He escaped through the border to Colombia and now he’s living a good life, I would say, in Uruguay, in South America. I’m happy for him that he’s already free.

Allen: Yeah.

Galicia: Yeah.

Allen: Oh, it’s good to hear that he’s safe. What was your journey to America? How did you ultimately come to the [United] States and what was that journey like?

Galicia: After my friend was released, people need to understand that in this year, 2017, there were millions of people in the streets of Venezuela protesting and demanding freedom.

Even though I was, of course, persecuted—and my friend actually confirmed to me when we managed to meet again, after these events, that the police did ask, my name did show up in the so-called investigations.

But after he was released, I just decided to resume my ordinary life in Venezuela because there were millions of people doing exactly the same. I knew I was never a high-profile leader or something like that, so the police never spent a lot of time just looking for one guy when there were millions on the streets of Venezuela doing exactly the same.

However, I did decide to stay away from all of the activism because I really didn’t want to go through the same all over again, especially because I was worried about my family, especially my mom. She’s really overprotective and she almost lost her mind during this period of time.

But, well, thanks to this decision in the year 2018, I managed to finish my law degree in Venezuela. After that, I applied to participate in a leadership program named Project Arizona, which is a project being held at Arizona State University. Thanks God, I was selected to do that. Well, thanks to this, I was able to leave Venezuela and come here.

I was actually supposed to go back to Venezuela, but in the year 2019, thanks to the appearance and the ascension of Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, everybody was talking about Venezuela during this year, it’s a little bit similar to what’s going on right now with Ukraine.

I started to receive also a lot of attention in Arizona, media invitations to speak about what’s going on, the students groups at ASU wanted to know more, so I resumed my activism while I was here in the states. I know for a fact that if I return to Venezuela under these circumstances my life is going to be in danger and I decided to claim asylum.

Allen: Is your family still in Venezuela?

Galicia: Half of them are. Yeah, my mom is still there, my grandma, my cousins, my uncle. Yeah, half of them are. My dad and sisters, they live here in Miami, but my mom, my grandma, almost everybody else is still there.

Allen: OK. As you travel around and speak to college students on campuses and various locations, what is your response to young people, or really any American, who might say, “Well, but what happened in Venezuela isn’t representative of socialism in its pure form. You can’t really claim that’s socialism”? What do you say to that?

Galicia: Well, I believe that what’s going on in Venezuela is the most pure version of socialism we have, well, probably surpassed by Cuba, of course, but in our Western Hemisphere, I don’t think we have seen a better example of socialism than the one we saw in Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez literally confiscated thousands of private industries within Venezuela. Well, even before Hugo Chavez, we nationalized our oil industry, it is almost completely operated by the state.

You have to understand that more than 90% of our revenues as a country come from the oil industry, so the government was already controlling more than 90% of all of our revenue as a nation.

Yes, Venezuela is a really good example of socialism and it is a really good example to explain why socialism actually doesn’t work.

A lot of people like to talk about, I don’t know, Norway or Sweden, but these are not actual examples of socialists. Actually, you have free market principles operating in the economies of all of these great countries. Even they actually have sometime freer economies than the United States itself at some cases.

It is not true to say that Venezuela is not a real example of socialism, I’m sorry, but Hugo Chavez claimed to be a socialist and everything he did was inspired by the Marxist doctrine, and now we’re paying the consequences.

Allen: What is the end goal of socialism?

Galicia: Well, that depends on who you ask. A lot of people who actually believe in this doctrine might say that they want to create a much equalitarian society. But I am not entirely convinced that people, especially politicians, that promote this doctrine actually believe in this.

I believe that many of these people, what they really want to is to control society, to gain unlimited power, and to gain just status and position. I believe this is all they want.

Because, look, in Venezuela, do you believe that this chaos was because of failure because they didn’t know what they were doing? I don’t think you can. How [can] you manage to fail that constantly every single year and get these horrible results?

If you really have good intentions, at some point you might say, like, “Hey, I think we’re doing something wrong. We better change this or that,” but no, they just went further into the system. I think their goal was actually to make us poorer so they can control society easier.

For example, in the year 2017, we had this problem because we were inviting society to join protesters, to join the demonstrations, but the problem is the majority of Venezuelans were so miserable, so poor, that they couldn’t afford to spend a single day in going into a demonstration against the government or doing any kind of activism, because they needed to spend that day doing a huge line to get, I don’t know, a piece of bread.

Or sometimes if the regime finds out that you are supporting demonstrations, they are going to stop delivering, I don’t know, some medicine or something. I mean, they make you dependent on government, so they can control you.

I feel like this was the end goal of Maduro and Hugo Chavez, at the end, they wanted to control us in the easiest way possible.

Allen: Do you ever worry that what you saw happen so rapidly in Venezuela could happen in other Western countries, even in the United States?

Galicia: Yeah. This is what I talk about in these presentations that I’m giving. It’s not like I feel like the United States is condemned to be exactly like Venezuela, but I do see a lot of similarities.

The biggest one I find is the levels of spending here in America and how hard it is for this country to actually try to bring back fiscal responsibility, to try to eventually balance the budget. I feel in Venezuela we struggle a lot with this same issue, especially during ’75.

In ’75, this is when the oil industry was nationalized, Venezuela started to receive a bunch of new resources. I mean, the government had started to receive a bunch of new resources because of the nationalization. They started to spend like crazy, creating social programs, subsidies, all kinds of different stuff—free college for everybody, health care free for everybody.

I mean, at some point Venezuela was called “Venezuela Saudi” for all of the revenue and all of the expenses that we were having during this time.

Well, during these five years, ’75 until the ’80s, Venezuelans were used to this idea of living out of government assistance. But then when we started to see a decline in the oil prices, … this is when our problems began, because the government didn’t find a way to stop spending as much as they were used to.

They started to bring money out of nowhere, borrow more money out of the international market, raise taxes. The vibrant Venezuela economy that we used to have basically came to an end and started to decline during the ’80s.

Again, what we’re seeing right now in Venezuela is just a continuation process from the ’80s until today, because we never found a way to actually say we cannot afford this living anymore, because it was politically not viable to just cut spending.

Actually, at some point in ’89, Carlos Andrés Pérez, a president of Venezuela, he did try to make some reforms that were actually pointing in the good direction. He tried to cut a lot of the subsidies and reduce a lot of the social programs, but the backlash from the population was so big that thousands of Venezuelans went to the street to protest, to rally against the government, to loot private businesses.

The chaos was so big that even the police was participating with looters, so the government was forced to send military forces and a lot of people died. It was a really horrible scenario. Again, this is all because people really got used to this idea of just extending the hand and receiving something out of government.

I’m fearful that something like that might be already happening here. We hear a lot of Republicans complaining about the levels of the spending and the deficit and that’s OK, but whenever they reach power, they realize that, well, it is not that simple just to start cutting things here and there because when they control the federal government, the spending keeps rising, the deficit keeps rising.

I don’t know, I’m fearful that we might be already in that point where this is just a snowball that we can no longer stop and when is going to be the end, right?

Allen: Yeah. What do you think of President Joe Biden’s approach to the Maduro regime?

Galicia: Well, I’m extremely worried about that situation. Venezuelans were really hopeful about seeing some sort of liberation process under the Trump administration. All of the sanctions we saw, all of the diplomatic pressure we saw, actually, we saw some minor results.

Some members of the regime abandoned Maduro, some members of the military also abandoned Maduro. Of course, it was not near enough, but we were experiencing change, some kind of changes within Venezuela.

But now it feels like all of the is hard rhetoric against the dictatorship in Venezuela is now completely gone. We don’t see the same pressure that we were seeing before under the Trump administration.

Now, all of these talks that we are seeing between Washington and Caracas to try to lift sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry is something that completely, if that ever happens, my heart is going to be broken, because I know that we’re not going to get rid of Maduro anytime soon without American support. If he starts … receiving revenue coming from these oil industries, he’s going to be, again, stronger than ever.

This money is not going to go to, I don’t know, to regular Venezuelans to help them improve their ordinary life. This is just going to go to the military to acquire new equipment, to make it easier to repress society even further. …

I’m deeply concerned. I mean, I hope that we don’t see any kind of new deal within the American states and the Venezuela dictatorship, because I feel that’s going to be the end for our cause.

My dream is to return to Venezuela. Even though I love America, I love all of the experiences I having right here in this beautiful country, I don’t feel yet like this is actually my home. My home is still there in Venezuela and I want to be able to eventually return. I don’t feel like I’m heading to a situation where that’s going to be possible with this new administration.

Allen: Hmm. How can we follow your work, Jorge? You are on the forefront of this issue and we want to keep up with what you’re doing.

Galicia: Well, yeah, you can always follow me on social media. That’s going to be @jorgegalicia95 on Twitter and Instagram.

Listen, if you have a request, if you are in need of some speaker to speak about these very same issues, I’m available. This is my work with The Fund for American Studies. They are going to send me whenever I’m requested, basically for free. They’re going to cover all the expenses of my travel and fees or whatever. All you need to do is find me an audience and a good place to speak and a projector, stuff like this, and that’s going to be it.

I’m more than happy to contribute with debate whenever you need me. Of course, I usually speak at colleges, but I could speak anywhere where [this] kind of message is needed. So, yeah.

Allen: Excellent. Jorge, thank you so much for your time, we truly appreciate it.

Galicia: Yeah. Thank you, Virginia. It was an honor.

Source: https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/06/how-socialist-policies-destroyed-his-home-country-of-venezuela/

The post How Socialist Policies Destroyed His Home Country of Venezuela first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“I had COVID-19 in May. My doctor tells me I’m better protected than any vaccine. What law gives this president the authority to tell my employer (an airline) to fire me next month if I don’t get vaccinated?” That question was posed this weekend while we waited for a delayed flight.

There is no law. President Joe Biden’s mendacious mandate is merely an unprecedented executive power grab. This is the kind of government coercion and socialist tyranny we explain in our book, “We Didn’t Fight for Socialism: America’s Veterans Speak Up.”

In it, we warn how government control over the lives of citizens is the ultimate goal of socialist regimes. The freedoms in our Bill of Rights and the individual liberty that is the cornerstone of our Constitution are anathema to socialists. Freedom and liberty are the antithesis of government coercion and control. When the elected officials and bureaucrats who run the government work for the people, socialist tyranny is impossible.

We also describe how socialists use “emergency situations” to take control over the lives of citizens. In 2008, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is (it’s) an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” His use of the word “you” was wrong. He meant “we.”

Apparently, then-Vice President Biden understood. He and the leftist ideologues now pulling his strings took Emanuel’s advice. COVID-19 gave them the “serious crisis” they craved.

Once government gains control over any aspect of individual citizens’ lives, it does not easily surrender such power. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, in an interview with Dinesh D’Souza on Oct. 17, stated the left has “declared war” on the very idea of citizenship.

According to our Constitution, elected officials serve at the pleasure of our citizens. But to Biden and his “progressive” minions, individual citizens are but mindless chess pieces to be manipulated by government.

Emanuel admitted a crisis allows government to do things it otherwise could not do. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a president might well have been impeached for insisting employers fire pilots, flight attendants, police officers, firemen, truck drivers and heroic first responders, et al, for “violating” an unconstitutional mandate.

But, like all his socialist predecessors, Biden unleashed a powerful propaganda campaign to deceive, distort, divide and destroy opponents with fear. His pliant allies in the so-called mainstream media aided this strategy. That’s why he used an executive order instead of congressional legislation to impose his “fire them” rule.

Sadly, it’s not over yet. Our book also warns about the terrible history of socialist tyrants’ unrelenting pursuit of government control even when results are disastrous. This is most likely the case with Biden’s vaccine mandate. Today, businesses are shutting down because they cannot attract or keep a sufficient number of employees while Biden’s mandate is wreaking havoc on our already faltering economy by causing irreplaceable personnel to quit or be fired.

This is unconscionable. Americans cannot be fired for their religion, skin color, age, medical condition or sexual orientation, but Biden orders them fired for refusing the so-called COVID inoculation. This is socialist tyranny.

Oliver L. North is a combat-decorated U.S. Marine, No.1 bestselling author, founder and CEO of Fidelis Publishing LLC and Fidelis Media LLC. David Goetsch is a Marine Corps veteran, member of the Florida Veteran’s Hall of Fame, professor of business, Christian counselor, and author of 77 books.

Source: https://www.yankton.net/opinion/editorials/article_bdadf342-3860-11ec-8bd1-77fbcea83759.html

The post Biden’s Mandate Madness Is Socialist Tyranny first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

We’ve just returned from a wonderful and uplifting Feast of Tabernacles.  Some came down with the virus at our Panama City Beach location. Many have sought out treatments early, not waiting to be hospitalized and added to the statistics the media doles out with such drama.  Now we know dozens who have suffered only the mildest of ailments before returning to normality, and for that we’re very grateful.  Others have been less fortunate.

It came to my attention during the Feast of Tabernacles that some church of God groups never go near world events.  That would be involvement in “this world’s politics.”  But reading some of the scriptures my Dad did very successfully in public, “this world’s politics” has delved into areas of personal decision where it has no business.  Every big brand name, perhaps due to cooperation with powers they need to oblige, is on board with whatever the agencies put out.

We never expected that it would be the CDC that would curtail freedoms.  If the entities that the masses employ refused involvement it wouldn’t be much of an issue.  Unfortunately ALL the big names are on board with guidelines issued from on high, and good luck trying to bypass the red tape.

Some places are worse than the United States, even places like California and New York.  The authorities don’t take kindly to backtalk.  The social media giants are banning all discussion that disputes the universal propaganda.  By all means, make your own decisions.  But don’t let the media, the corporations or the unaccountable agencies bully you into anything.  There’s discussion of the whole mess in the monthly letter, arriving shortly.

Many of us are not confident that the election was on the up and up.  The media would lose its collective mind if they were forced to admit the truth.  They want us divided, apparently.  They pretend that those who got vaccinated are furious at those who didn’t.  They want shame and punishment administered to anybody still arguing.  The media is through trying to convince us of anything.  They think the time has come for firings and refusal of service to those putting up any resistance.

In Australia they’re breaking heads, gently of course.  Firing upon crowds with rubber bullets has become acceptable in Sydney and Melbourne.  The lock-downs are in force, and the division is in the streets.  Doubtful the mainstream news will show any of this, but it’s happening.

Socialism is being foisted upon a naïve population here in the United States.  The government is paying people to stay home.  So much so that help wanted signs are everywhere you go.  Even fast food has become slow, with signs about the labor shortage.

Meanwhile the scenes at our southern border are too disgusting to view.  They sent out a spokesman to lead us to believe that the latest influx was returned to Haiti.  But he wasn’t telling the whole truth.  Many have been transported to American cities and towns, as if we didn’t have enough trouble.  There are reports of some eighty thousand, from South America and all over the world, walking toward the southern border.

Not since Jimmy Carter has America been so humiliated on the world scene.  For some reason we just gave all of Afghanistan to the terrorists.  So we can expect for that ugly sect to bomb and destroy targets in the Western world.  We’d hate to know what’s actually transpiring in Afghanistan in the absence of any civilized authority.  We couldn’t sleep if we knew.

Four American generals have gone on the record, under oath, and thrown the pretender under the bus.  All said they recommended leaving 2500 troops to manage the withdrawal, which the world now knows turned into deadly chaos.  The pretender still has that confused look on his face.  He said he never heard anything like that.  This doesn’t happen.  The Pentagon doesn’t dispute the President, unless of course he’s Donald Trump.  But now it’s their fall guy.  It’s all his fault, they’ll claim.  His reputation isn’t exactly squeaky clean, and now it seems that he’ll be blamed for every debacle in progress.  It suits his handlers fine.  The guilt won’t live forever.

It looks as though the governing forces are going for broke against our best interests, scolding us all the while.  It’s unclear they could have done more damage if they were trying, and some of us think they were.  American citizens are being punished, chased around and cursed while our borders are wide open and the third world is pouring in.  The people being placed within our midst are, in many cases, totally unfamiliar with our polite society.  Some are antagonistic toward us as a people, and resent our prosperity.  Others are just as mad as we are about the deadly mistakes made in our name.

You never know if things are going straight downhill, or if there will be another revival of the American spirit.  Will all the Western nations give up freedom and wait for instructions?  Not all of us!  God gave us FREEDOM, and chances are we won’t relinquish it willingly.

Mark

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 1 October 2021 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, U.S. President Joe Biden advocated nothing less than the kind of social democracy that most of America’s European partners have long taken for granted. United opposition from congressional Republicans may prevent him from realizing that dream. But merely by introducing the blandly named but far-reaching American Families Plan, Biden has compelled two profound questions: Why has America been so “exceptional” in this regard until now, and what has changed now to make the unthinkable so very possible?

First, some nomenclatural clarity. “Social democracy” is not “democratic socialism,” even if many professed partisans of the latter seem to really want the former. Democratic socialism is socialism—the public ownership or effective control of economic resources—with a human face. Social democracy allows markets to flourish but uses tax and spending policies to finance the kinds of social goods promised in the American Families Plan—free universal education, child support, family and medical leave, and access to health care (which Biden has promised to enhance in a separate bill). The plan would achieve many of these goods through tax credits rather than the direct subsidies used in much of Northern Europe—a distinctively American twist on the social democratic formula.

Why has the United States lacked social democracy? Progressive thinkers from the time of the historian Charles Beard have argued that the U.S. plutocracy has used control over the nation’s politics to maintain their privileges and thwart efforts at reform. In his recent history of populism, The People, No, the economist Thomas Frank asserts that the same business class that crushed the populist revolt of the late 19th century also limited Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms and guided the late 20th-century Democratic Party into the shallows of the Third Way, embracing limited government and the hegemony of markets.

More recently, thinkers on the left have attributed the American exception to race rather than class. In The Sum of Us, the policy analyst Heather McGhee describes the workings of a zero-sum paradigm that has impelled poor white people to deprive themselves of social goods lest those goods also benefit Black people and thus threaten the racial hierarchy that keeps them on top. McGhee cites one study that imputes America’s low tax rates to white racism and concludes: “Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.”

Recent history gives credence to both hypotheses. In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, conservatives, and above all Ronald Reagan, perfected a conjuring trick that blurred the distinction between government spending and helping poor Black people, whom Reagan was wont to call “welfare queens.” If government was good for poor Black people, it was bad for white people—maybe even for poor white people. The class theory seems equally convincing: One need only think of the tens of millions of dollars that the quintessentially plutocratic Koch brothers have poured into the cause of “limited government.”

The shortcoming of both these explanations is that they assume that people cannot sincerely hold the views they hold, especially if they appear to be inimical to their own material interests. Ergo, Americans have been duped into opposing social democracy. An earlier generation of thinkers, including such Progressives as Walter Weyl and Herbert Croly (authors of The New Democracy and The Promise of American Life, respectively), traced American resistance to an activist state to a Jeffersonian tradition of individual autonomy that had persisted (thanks, in no small part, to corporate power) despite the vast changes in the U.S. economy. The limited state spoke to Americans’ deepest values.

In this respect, in fact, the United States has always been different from Europe. In a 2001 paper exploring why the United States doesn’t have a European-style welfare state, a group of Harvard economists traced the gap in social spending to the very birth of the welfare state around 1870. Only the catastrophe of the Great Depression compelled Americans to accept the need for large-scale state intervention—though even then the gap with Europe remained large. (Nevertheless, the authors do anticipate McGhee’s argument, asserting that “America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”)

The final element to the America exception is success. One of the chief reasons why the energy for reform unleashed by the New Deal died out after World War II, dooming Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, is that Americans felt that they were doing just fine on their own. Hourly manufacturing wages tripled between 1940 and 1960. Inequality shrank (thanks in part to high marginal taxes). Economic theories preoccupied with the allocation of scarce resources lost traction in what John Kenneth Galbraith called the “age of affluence” in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society.

In short, American resistance to social democracy was baked into the national culture, the economy, and the racial and class systems. What, then, has happened to weaken those mighty foundations?

Certainly, revelations about systemic police abuse of Black people, and the terrible sufferings of poor and especially Black people during the pandemic, have done something to undermine the zero-sum paradigm. But how much? Half the country still voted for Donald Trump. And Biden has carefully avoided race-specific economic plans and for that matter programs targeted only at the poor, in order to avoid what may have been the tragic flaw of Johnson’s Great Society, which, in effect, set middle-class benefactors against poor and Black beneficiaries of the welfare state.

There is also gratifying evidence that a once-monolithic owning class has been fragmented. For every billionaire holding his nose and voting for Trump in order to keep his taxes low there is a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates demanding higher taxes in order to provide more government services. But the weakening grip of the plutocracy feels like a dependent variable of something else.

That something lies in the realm of belief. The free market goose stopped laying golden eggs for the middle class about 45 years ago when incomes stopped growing. It took a full generation for that economic fact to even begin producing changes at the level of belief; the tech boom of the 1990s further delayed that moment of reckoning. Economic libertarianism began to hit the wall when President George W. Bush, fresh from his reelection, proposed to partly privatize Social Security, allowing ordinary Americans to play the market with their retirement money. This was the Rubicon that the free-market purists, led by Newt Gingrich, had been waiting to cross. And the plan flopped. Asked to choose between security and the so-called freedom of the marketplace, ordinary Americans chose security.

Trump understood that, at least intuitively. Alone among the Republican candidates in 2016, he offered security rather than freedom to a public increasingly worried about the brittleness of their standing, economic as well as social. Trump promised to protect Americans from market forces as well as from immigrants and terrorists, to preserve Social Security and Medicare, and bring Wall Street malefactors to book. He never did touch those entitlements, and he quickly assented to massive state spending to ward off the worst economic consequences of the pandemic. But he left most Americans far less secure than he found them.

Donald Trump’s immense popularity is proof positive that the United States has not conquered the demons of race; nor have we tamed the overclass. Yet neither, it seems, posed quite the insuperable barrier to a more just society that critics on the left imagined. The Reagan switcheroo has stopped working. Americans no longer regard “us” as self-sufficient and only “them” as needy; thanks to a combination of long-standing precarity and the COVID-19 crisis, everyone is hurting or only a little bit of bad luck away from real misfortune. The neo-Jeffersonian ideology that once allowed the American Medical Association to stave off Medicare by depicting doctors as endangered small-business owners, or conservatives to mock subsidized child care as Swedish-style socialism, is in full and perhaps permanent retreat. That ideology has proved remarkably robust; Croly predicted its demise more than a century ago. In a recent poll, two-thirds of respondents endorsed Biden’s startlingly bold plans both on physical infrastructure and on social spending. If they pass in a form even remotely similar to what he has proposed, the American exception will finally end.

Of course, a future Republican Congress, and a future Republican president, could undo what a Democratic Congress and President have done. The United States is very far from the kind of social consensus that made it possible for Europeans to forge a welfare state in the years after World War II. But universal social benefits turn out to be quite sticky. Dwight Eisenhower made no attempt to roll back Social Security; even Ronald Reagan kept his hands off Medicare. People grow very fond of these cushions against life’s shocks.

It is very strange to think that at a moment when liberal democracy seems to be in retreat all over the world, very much including at home, the United States is on the verge of embarking on the most radical experiment in government activism since at least the 1930s. Yet it’s no contradiction. Now, as then, economic failure has compelled the world’s democracies to prove, as Biden repeated before Congress, that they can deliver the safety and the prosperity that their citizens crave. Perhaps, though it is dangerous to think so, our deepest hopes will be realized.

James Traub is a nonresident fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and a columnist at Foreign Policy, and author of the book What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of A Noble Idea.

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/america-is-becoming-a-social-democracy/

The post America Is Becoming a Social Democracy first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Now that incalculable damage has been visited upon the entire western world and wannabe dictators have abused the citizens of the States they govern…now that thousands of businesses have been forced to declare bankruptcy or simply close for good…after people have been banned from social media platforms for having swallowed “conspiracy theories” and tried to alert others…might the truth finally be gaining some traction?

It’s starting to look like China is calling all the shots here in the United States.  Celebrities are making fools of themselves apologizing for saying anything with which the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) disagrees.  Like for instance, Taiwan is a country.  That could hurt your income big time, pal.  They don’t mind accusing Americans and the United States of every conceivable thought crime.  It’s in their financial interests.  Many, if not most of us, are NOT watching athletes taking a knee or raising their fists to signal racial something or other.  Their owners, managers and teammates could care less how it affects the American audience.

The sports franchises have figured out that the audience in China is much, much larger and the money to be made is out of this world.  They dare not say anything that might offend the masters of their financial future.  It used to be a crime to sell out your country for personal profit.  Now it’s business as usual.  The NBA and the NFL don’t mind abusing the American audience, claiming we’re all full of privilege, born racist or whatever may be the current mainstream “logic.”  In the long run, they don’t need us.  Who cares if they’re playing to empty stadiums.  The communists don’t mind.

What about the virus?  Was it not created intentionally?  Why does the top bio-weapons expert in China work at the Wuhan lab?  Why are they studying bat diseases in the first place?  Why are we STILL subsidizing this with our tax dollars?  To add insult to injury, the diminutive M. D. has finally, inadvertently admitted he’s not so sure the virus sprang from nature!  He probably hated himself while walking out of the hearing where he was nailed down on that.  After several heated public exchanges with Rand Paul where he dodged around and then went on fake news programs to wonder what’s wrong with that guy, the genius has finally admitted that he’s not so sure the virus is “natural.”

Not only that, it was AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS funding weird, dangerous “experiments” in China.  That part isn’t, and never was, in dispute.  What’s the meaning of that?  What on earth!?!

So the brilliant little doctor has gone from being the world’s foremost expert on how to avoid contracting this Chinese concoction to trying to convince us that he wasn’t responsible for funding it.  But he’s not given up lecturing us about masks and lock-downs.  No, no.  Some of these governors, you know who they are, are still keeping the charade alive based on his pronouncements, even though ALL of them have violated their own orders and been caught repeatedly.

Do we really love our entertainment so much that we can’t be bothered to notice when the communists in China commit a crime of the Coronavirus magnitude?  If you believe in any of the information the mainstream forbids, you know of the business connections between the imposter’s son and Chinese officials.  Maybe you’re not crazy after all.  Whatever the next move is, assuming Western civilization survives this one, will be explained to the satisfaction of no one by the redhead and subservient media.

How long must we pretend that our worst enemies are “friendly?”  They may have instigated the destruction of our currency, all while shaking hands and backstabbing.  Speaking of the dilution of the dollar, the White House is releasing its budget today.  SIX TRILLION DOLLARS?  That pretty well blows past the two trillion that blew our minds and the profligate allocations since.  It’s as if every individual is becoming dependent on checks from the Treasury, and they’ll brainwash your kids for you too.  It’s part of the curriculum to inform the little tykes of their inherent racism while they’re learning to count.

We fervently hope that God hasn’t just given us over to the socialist, and likely fraudulent, destruction underway.  It’s starting to look that way, but be reminded that it’s looked that way before, and there just might be surprises ahead.  Say a prayer.

Mark

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 28 May 2021 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

For years, we’ve been on a slow steady path toward the same communist society as China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and other repressive regimes have. Many in academia, media, and politics have worked to indoctrinate our young people and others with the idea that socialism is compassionate and makes everyone’s outcome in life equal through legislation.

As Lenin once stated, “The goal of socialism is communism.” Socialism inevitably leads to communism. People are continually stripped of their rights until all that remains is a tyrannical, totalitarian regime with total control over the people.

Socialism uses “political correctness” to attack basic moral discernment and force everyone to be the same. This has come along with the normalization and legalization of all manner of anti-theist and profane speech, sexual perversions, demonic art, pornography, and drug use.

This flies in the face of anyone who believes in God and aspires to a higher moral plane. This is done with the goal to marginalize and eventually get rid of anyone who disagrees with them.

Our younger generations have been the ones to view socialism most favorably and participating in protests and riots aimed at destroying our cultural heritage. Meanwhile, many in our society have come to support the idea that the government should provide health care, education, guaranteed income, and perhaps eventually the entire cost of living.

Perhaps knowingly or unknowingly, we’re gradually trading our traditions and freedoms for a system that controls people. Socialism and communism claim ownership over all property and people. Big tech, media, Hollywood, billionaires, and politicians should all take note.

This has all come to a head with the results of the 2020 presidential election with the credible allegations of election fraud. The nation that stands to gain the most from the results of the election is China. Also Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Communist China has ruthlessly ruled for over 70 years, resulting in the unnatural deaths of at least 65 million people.

America is in a battle between good and evil. Communism teaches people to replace belief in God with atheism and materialism and as a result, good and evil have been inverted. Righteousness is cast as wickedness and vice as compassion.

I didn’t vote for President Trump because I liked him. I voted for him because he was and is the only person I can think of that would stand in the way of a movement designed to tear down and destroy our nation. One that is the greatest on Earth, and one that so many people sacrificed for and died for over the years to make it that way, and one that I love and hold very dear. May God bless Donald Trump and the United States of America.

Bill Fullen Sr. lives in Galveston.

Source: https://www.galvnews.com/opinion/guest_columns/article_09a3a693-7a07-513a-ad1c-39d5518b1cf5.html

The post US passing through socialism on way to communism first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Socialism is the 1st Stage Towards Communism – Filmed April 1969 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“You’re way more likely to drown.”  The LA Times just published an article about summer and the dreaded virus.  They interviewed a series of experts in molecular microbiology, immunology, and quote from the all-knowing, all-seeing, ever sensing CDC.  Their own projections show there is a much greater chance you’ll drown than contract the disease in water.  They estimated 10 drownings per day, and it’s a wonder swimming hasn’t been outlawed all together to “keep everyone safe.”  The CDC says there is “no evidence” that you can pick up the sickness from pools, hot tubs, spas, or water play areas.  But as we all know and believe, “more research is needed.”  Isn’t it always?

A USC professor of all things contagious says, “I can’t say it’s absolutely 100% zero risk, but I can tell you it would never cross my mind to get COVID 19 from a swimming pool or the ocean.”  The head of UCLA’s Department of Epidemiology says, “There is no data that somebody got infected this way.”  The point is made that the virus can’t live for long outside the body.  “You’d probably have to drink the entire lake…”

Maybe this nonsense has been a blessing in disguise.  At least we know now that we live in a land where local officials are taking their behavioral tips from some famous historical dictators.  New York Mayor de Blasio says he’ll drag you out of the ocean if you so much as dip a toe!  Now that is something we can’t wait to see!

What we’re experiencing is an exercise in authoritarianism.  Hopefully people are taking note.  You might have seen the incident at the New Jersey gym where troopers showed up, determined that sensible protocols were being followed, came outside and told the assembled crowd to have a nice day amid chants of USA!  USA!  After the cameras were gone and the crowd dispersed, the troopers returned and started putting people in handcuffs, just to keep everyone safe.  Apparently their superiors weren’t amused.

Who would have thought for one minute that real criminals would take advantage of a situation where lots of people are wearing masks?  They are considerate, protecting themselves and everyone else!  Just good citizens doing their part to slow the spread, until a gun is produced and they demand all the money!

No one noticed when they fled.  Security cameras couldn’t see anything to recognize and the witnesses were all wearing the same disguise!  Another benefit is that if the enterprising criminal signals extra virtue by wearing latex gloves, that means NO FINGERPRINTS!  They let thousands of robbers, carjackers, and dope-peddlers out of prison, so they wouldn’t get sick.  It would be better if you got robbed or killed than for the convicts to get sick, just so you know.  It’s Utopia now.

Santa Ana, California is reporting a marked increase (only 50% so far) in hold-ups.  “It’s the norm,” one official said.  “We’re seeing more and more suspects wearing the mask and using that to their benefit.”  The gall of criminals using the kung-flu to their benefit!  First it got them out jail, and then provided them with a disguise mandated by law!  How do you beat that?  Santa Ana police said some of the increase in crime since the lock-down started may be attributed to the release of inmates.  Isn’t it great when criminals can just blend in with gloves and face-coverings? Let freedom ring!

This place is looking more like an authoritarian socialist dictatorship, run by a legion of local officials who have special privileges.  No, they don’t have to follow the rules they keep making up and changing.  The law (state constitutions) apparently allows them to issue orders that relieve us all of the national Constitutional protections we thought we had.

Just put on your mask, or maybe a hazmat suit, and traipse carefully to the mailbox to pick up your government check.  Isn’t authoritarian socialism great?  Or is freedom of speech illegal too?  It is on nearly all the social media outlets.  Better not spread “disinformation,” and that would be anything that disagrees with doctors or scientists, despite their incredible record of failure and fraud.  Yes, the attitude is still not good.  We’re praying to a Higher Authority than the little dictators in masks, while they wreck everything the United States stands for.  We’re going to observe the Sabbath tomorrow, and Pentecost next week, hopefully without disturbance.

Mark

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 22 May 2020 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

It’s come to this: Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is now sending a good chunk of the nation’s gold to Iran in exchange for help propping up the decrepit oil industry.

At least nine tons of gold, worth about $500 million, flew off to Iran last month, government officials told Bloomberg News. That leaves the crisis-plagued nation with a scant $6.2 billion in hard-currency assets, the lowest amount in three decades.

For decades, Venezuela’s oil industry thrived. But under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the government took over — and began milking it for fast cash while firing expert workers and managers and slashing spending on maintenance, repairs, and other vital capital investment.

As a result, everything’s breaking down and output has crashed — even as global oil prices have also collapsed during the pandemic, further squeezing revenues.

Because Maduro won’t allow safe private investment, he has to turn to his “allies” in Tehran — except the regime there insists on hard payment for its expertise. No honor among thieves, y’know.

Nor is oil the only industry in collapse: Reliable electricity, health care, and even food are increasingly rare in Venezuela thanks to the Chávez-Maduro regime’s “Bolivarian socialism.”

For years, Sen. Bernie Sanders and lefties around the globe cheered the Chávez-Maduro socialist approach to industry and the economy. But now those economics are forcing Maduro to loot his country’s last reserves to buy help from a pack of theocratic terrorists.

Source: https://nypost.com/2020/05/03/venezuelas-sending-its-gold-reserves-to-iran-where-socialism-leads/

The post Venezuela’s sending its gold reserves to Iran: This is where socialism leads first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.