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AMY GOODMAN: Tens of thousands turned out Sunday for the National Puerto Rican Day Parade here in New York. The parade came on the same day when Puerto Rico held a controversial referendum on political status. Ninety-seven percent of those who cast ballots voted in favor of Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state, but just 23 percent of eligible voters took part. Many Puerto Rican opposition groups boycotted the vote. Juan, you have followed this extremely closely. Talk about what happened. The governor, Rossell, has called this a great victory for statehood.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Yes, its actually probably the poorest showing that the pro-statehood party has had in about 50 years, because so few people voted. You have to understand, in Puerto Rico, its normal for 78 to 80 percent of the people to vote in a normal election or plebiscite. Youre talking 23 percent. So the statehood party got a little over 500,000 votes. Back in 2012, during the last plebiscite, statehood got 834,000 votes. So they got 300,000 fewer votes than they did in the 2012 plebiscite. The reality is that with the economic crisis that Puerto Rico is facing right now, the last thing on the minds of the people of Puerto Rico is a vote over statehood that Congressthey know that Congress cannot or will not grant.

So what the governor has said is that hes going to nowbased on this 97 percent vote in favor of statehood, will now elect two United States senators and five congressmen and send them to Congress and demand admission as a state. This is a tactic that Tennessee used in the 19th century to pressure Congress to admit Tennessee as a state. So theyre now going to go through an election of two senators and five congressmen, which will again be boycotted by the other parties, so only the statehood people will vote. And the reality is that the economic crisis of Puerto Rico at this point cannot be resolved just through a statehood process. There has to be a process of real self-determination for the island of Puerto Rico that has not happened yet.

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Puerto Rico Backs Statehood in Referendum Boycotted by Opposition Groups - Democracy Now!

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. (Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Blogs | Jun. 11, 2017

God survived in Russia. Communism did not.

Communist governments dont like religion. They are not even too fond of their own people. Death comes easily and frequently to their citizens.

The global communist body count is estimated to be over 149,469,000 citizens killed or starved to death by their own governments since 1918. That tally does not even include victims of war.

On paper, communism is supposed to be a utopia. An equal share and equal opportunity for everyone! The caveat is that the state has to be in control. People cant be trusted and neither can God. Especially God. Its a given that the Church will be persecuted under communism.

James McCachren, an English Instructor at Halifax Community College in North Carolina contacted me after reading my blog about Fatima as an antidote to relativism, which evolved from communism. He recommended a book with a chapter on miracle stories that occurred during the communist oppression in the Soviet Union (also known as Russia), which existed from 1922 to 1991 until it broke into a Commonwealth of Independent States.

The stories were included in the book Soviet Anti-Religious Campaigns and Persecutions by Dimitry Pospielovsky. With the increase in Christian persecution throughout the world, we can use a few inspirational stories that show who is really in charge.

Incorrupt Bodies

Pospielovsky explains that one of the first efforts of the Soviet communist government was a decree to destroy shrines and public displays of relics. The media propaganda presented shrines as fraudulent, claiming the relics were nothing more than cotton, wool, hair, rotten bones, and dust. At the shrine of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh of the14th century, the monks of St. Sergius-Trinity Monastery documented that when the relics were exposed, there was a perfectly preserved body under decaying vestments.

An angry mob of believers outside the church pulled down a police commander from his horse along with another soldier who had lied to the crowd saying the relics had rotted away. There were other stories similar to this.

At some shrines, however, the bodies actually had decomposed. The Church was charged with duping people. At the trial of Bishop Alexi, the future patriarch of Russia, he stated that the Church did not teach that saints must be immune from decay. It simply happens at times.

Like a Fire

Reported manifestations of the supernatural had occurred in some families hostile to the Church where some members remained faithful. The most common reports of miracles at that time concerned the sudden renovation of a family icon; an old darkened icon with a hardly discernible image, would suddenly, before the very eyes of the communist, begin to shine with fresh colors as if it had just been painted. Conversions often resulted.

Leontii, a Kieve monk who later became a bishop during World War II, reported one of the most amazing stories that was witnessed by thousands. The Sretenskaia church at the Sennoi Marketplace had two gold-plated domes that had become tarnished and looked grey. One autumn evening, someone saw a burning brightness as if the church was on fire. A fire brigade was called in. It was no fire, however. Instead there was a sudden brightening of the domes.

The monk explained: The light shone and moved in patches from place to place on the domes as if tongues of fire. By next morning, there was already a huge crowd in front of the church. The police were helpless. The news reached me by noon. I hopped on a tramway, but a long distance before the church, the tram had to stop because of the crowds. He went the rest of the way on foot and watched the miracle for several hours. The progression of the renovation of the gold plate continued for three days. There arose a mood of unusual general religious euphoria in the city. It was a great moral boost for the believers and a catastrophe for the anti-religious propaganda.

The government had members of the Academy of Sciences claim it was caused by a rare airwave containing a peculiar electric discharge. Yet, witness testimony noted that the gold-plated market billboards were not affected by any such airwave. Several months later the Soviets dynamited the church.

Blood Ran for Days

Bishop Leontii reported another widely known event in the village of Kalinov. A detachment of mounted police had been unable to disperse a large crowd outside a church. Frustrated, one of the retreating officers turned and shot at a nearby large crucifix made of metal. The bullet hit the collarbone and blood gushed forth. The crowd fell to their knees and began praying. The police officers took off.

In the following days, officers came twice to remove the crucifix but they said an inexplicable force would not let them get close. Articles in propaganda newspapers said it was just rusty water that had seeped out of the metal. But the blood ran from the crucifix for several days. People came in processions day and night.

At the very first opportunity, the Soviets destroyed the bleeding crucifix and all the adjacent crosses. Their account was that the priests duped the poor peasants. A government commission produced a report claiming the dark fluid coming out of the bullet hole was not blood.

The newspapers depicted pilgrims as drunkards and illiterate fools. One article claimed: Allegedly the cross simply disappeared after the churchmen and other interested elements had made enough money from the pilgrims. The mass kissing of the crucifix was said to result in several thousand outbreaks of syphilis and mass robberies.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been an upsurge in affiliation with Orthodox Christianity in Russia. Between 1991 and 2008, the share of Russian adults identifying as Orthodox Christian rose from 31% to 72%, according to Pew Research Center.

God survived there. Communism did not.

Continue reading here:
Amazing Miracles That Communism Couldn't Stop - National Catholic Register (blog)

PoliticalCritique.org (blog)

Holding Up a Mirror to Anti-Communism PoliticalCritique.org (blog) The first part of the play reveals the ways in which the StB (the communist secret police) recruited new agents and collaborators. Despite a one-sided image of the regime, one has to appreciate the multi-faceted characters: a wide range of motivations ...

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Holding Up a Mirror to Anti-Communism - PoliticalCritique.org (blog)

-Essay-

BOGOT A theology teacher I knew used to tell me, a mocking grin on his lips, "you're the last communist left," to which I would reply, smiling, "and you're the last evangelist." In today's upside-down world of thieving politicians and self-righteous saints, corrupt and holy men, such concepts as communism have lost their sheen. Others, meanwhile, have gained undeserved respectability.

Especially in our country, where you have to carry out acts of faith in order to feel like you belong, a Colombian version of McCarthyism has reached unexpected heights. There is, it is murmured in the university cafeteria, a renewal of Inquisition methods and fascist tactics that recall the reign of ultra-conservative leader Laureano Gmez in the early 1950s.

Since the not-so-distant days when "communist" was synonymous with being a virtual armed guerrilla, the term has lost its meaning if not grossly misrepresented. The supporters of lvaro Uribe, the conservative Colombian who served as president last decade, (who could equally have back the likes of Gmez or of Spain's General Franco), use the word as an insult.

In these neo-liberal times, our age of so-called post-modernity, a communist seems like the last of a threatened, exotic species. Or is this one of the last expressions of romanticism? Years ago, the communist was inevitably suspect, but also an irreverent soul who sought justice in the midst of social inequalities. The communist was a humanist, standing behind the exploited.

To those who thought liberalism was sinful, being a communist was positively hellish: You were a companion or an incarnation of the devil. In my view, it was once and remains today, synonymous with fighting for progress and intelligence, science, arts and development for all, and against inequalities. The communist agreed with the Cuban poet Jos Mart (who was not a communist) that nobody should beg for their rights. You must fight for them.

Do not expect to profit or prosper from communism today. Its yield is zero: Call it a junk bond. Our times call on everyone to be an individualist, but always, mind you, on the side of Big Brother inanities, constant oversight and the pummeling of majority rights by big interests. Neo-liberalism has given a firm reply to the people's aspirations to a dignified life. A smack in the mouth. More money for the rich, and more poverty for the poor. Or was it the Neo-conservatives who said it? It's really all the same.

They're now calling our patrician president a communist

Communism may have been one of the "big ideas" invented by humanity, but it is now thoroughly discredited by capitalism's friends that it has been turned to trash. Even worse: its meaning has been stripped. Indeed, they're now calling our eminently patrician president a communist this, for a man who like his ultra-conservative predecessor, has privatized, auctioned or practically given away the country to please the International Monetary Fund and friends.

They say communism is a simple idea. But as Bertolt Brecht said, simple things are the hardest to achieve. Or as the Spanish communist Francisco 'Paco' Frutos, put it, no ideal of humanity was so thoroughly "turned into a piece of shit by those who transform ideals into dogmas, temples and churches." Capitalists and pseudo-communists worked together to send it all to the heap.

I suspect our home-grown fascists in Colombia do not want to end the systemic iniquities they have denounced, seeing as they helped create and sustain them, but rather want to hold the system in their dirty hands again, to eliminate more rights and pump the state for all its worth.

Today like yesterday being a communist means striving to build a fairer society, an alternative to the monstrous conditions strangling so many people with its economic, political and media tentacles. It is a system that both God and the devil could inhabit, as Mark Twain would say, the former for the weather and latter for the company to keep.

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The Meaning Of Being Communist Has Been Hung Out To Dry - Worldcrunch

California is widely celebrated as the fount of technical, cultural and political innovation. Now we seem primed to outdo even ourselves, creating a new kind of socialism that, in the end, more resembles feudalism than social democracy.

The new consensus is being pushed by, among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer. The financier now insists that, to reverse our worsening inequality, we must double down on environmental and land-use regulation, and make up for it by boosting subsidies for the struggling poor and middle class. This new progressive synthesis promises not upward mobility and independence, but rather the prospect of turning most Californians into either tax slaves or dependent serfs.

Californias progressive regime of severe land-use controls has helped to make the state among the most unaffordable in the nation, driving homeownership rates to the lowest levels since the 1940s. It has also spurred a steady hegira of middle-aged, middle-class families the kind of tax-burdened people Gov. Jerry Brown now denounces as freeloaders from the state. They may have access to smartphones and virtual reality, but the increasingly propertyless masses seem destined to live in the kind of cramped conditions that their parents and grandparents had escaped decades earlier.

There is some irony in a new kind of socialism blessed by some of the worlds richest people. The new policy framework is driven, in large part, by a desire to assume world leadership on climate-related issues. The biggest losers will be manufacturing, energy and homebuilding workers, who will see their jobs headed to other states and countries.

Under the new socialism, expect more controls over the agribusiness sector, notably the cattle industry, Californias original boom industry, which will be punished for its cows flatulence. Limits on building in the periphery of cities also threaten future growth in construction employment, once the new regulations are fully in place.

Sadly, these steps dont actually do anything for the climate, given the states already low carbon footprint and the fact that the people and firms driven out of the state tend to simply expand their carbon footprints elsewhere in their new homes. But effectiveness is not the motivation here. Instead, combating climate change has become an opportunity for Brown, Steyer and the Sacramento bureaucracy to perform a passion play, where they preen as saviors of the planet, with the unlikable President Donald Trump playing his role as the devil incarnate. In following with this line of reasoning, Bay Area officials and environmental activists are even proposing a campaign to promote meatless meals. Its Gaia meets Lent.

The oligarchs of the Bay Area have a problem: They must square their progressive worldview with their enormous wealth. They certainly are not socialists in the traditional sense. They see their riches not as a result of class advantages, but rather as reflective of their meritocratic superiority. As former TechCrunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein has observed, they embrace massive inequality as both a given and a logical outcome of the new economy.

The nerd estate is definitely not stupid, and like rulers everywhere, they worry about a revolt of the masses, and even the unionization of their companies. Their gambit is to expand the welfare state to keep the hoi polloi in line. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, now favor an income stipend that could prevent mass homelessness and malnutrition.

Unlike its failed predecessor, this new, greener socialism seeks not to weaken, but rather to preserve, the emerging class structure. Brown and his acolytes have slowed upward mobility by environment restrictions that have cramped home production of all kinds, particularly the building of moderate-cost single-family homes on the periphery. All of this, at a time when millennials nationwide, contrary to the assertion of Browns smart growth allies, are beginning to buy cars, homes and move to the suburbs.

In contrast, many in Sacramento appear to have disdain for expanding the California dream of property ownership. The states planners are creating policies that will ultimately lead to the effective socialization of the regulated housing market, as more people are unable to afford housing without subsidies. Increasingly, these efforts are being imposed with little or no public input by increasingly opaque regional agencies.

To these burdens, there are now growing calls for a single-payer health care system which, in principle, is not a terrible idea, but it will include the undocumented, essentially inviting the poor to bring their sick relatives here. The state Senate passed the bill without identifying a funding source to pay the estimated $400 billion annual cost, leading even former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to describe it as snake oil. It may be more like hemlock for Californias middle-income earners, who, even with the cost of private health care removed, would have to fork over an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion a year in new taxes to pay for it.

In the end, we are witnessing the continuation of an evolving class war, pitting the oligarchs and their political allies against the states diminished middle and working classes. It might work politically, as the California electorate itself becomes more dependent on government largesse, but its hard to see how the state makes ends meet in the longer run without confiscating the billions now held by the ruling tech oligarchs.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

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California's descent to socialism Press Enterprise - Press-Enterprise