Mediaboss Marketing

Research shows that the political ideology of communism restricts innovation, todays panacea for economic growth and long-term prosperity.

In broad strokes, the communist tenets of state ownership of business and property with strict government supervision lead to a risk-averse culture working in an environment that discourages ambition and creativity. This could not be further from the building blocks that innovation needs to thrive.

The 2017 International Intellectual Property Index, recently published by the Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ranks the current bastion of communism, China No. 27 and formerly communist Russia No. 23behind the smaller economies of Malaysia, Mexico, and Turkey, for example.

The report associates stronger intellectual property (IP) protection regimes with more innovative economies and conversely, weak IP protection as hindering long-term strategic innovation and development.

A robust national IP environment correlates strongly with a wide range of macroeconomic indicators that fall under the umbrella of innovation and creativity, according to the GIPC report.

The leading countries in IP strength are free market, capitalist economies such as the United States and United Kingdom. First-world democratic countries of Europe and Asia also rank highly.

Ma Guangyuan,Independent Chinese economist

The report states that Russias protectionist moveslocal production, procurement, and manufacturingwork to restrict IP rights. Russia also suffers from persistently high levels of software piracy.

For China, the report singles out historically high levels of IP infringement.

China and Russia are the usual suspects of cyberespionage. Theft of IP, the infrastructure for innovation, is one way these nations heavily influenced by communism try to stay competitive globally.

Melbourne, Australia-based agency 2thinknow has been ranking the worlds most innovative cities for the past 10 years. In its latest rankings published Feb. 23, the most innovative city in a communist country, Beijing, ranks No. 30, and Moscow ranks No. 43.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), not a single Chinese university ranks among the worlds top 30 in terms of most-cited scientific publications.

Universities are breeding grounds for young, innovative minds. Within their walls, ideas are born and debated, companies are formed, and research is conducted. They are key components of a healthy innovation ecosystem.

Harvard Business School professor William Kirby wrote about the strict limitations within Chinese universities on what faculty could discuss with students.

Faculty could not talk about any past failures of the communist party. They could not talk about the advantages of separation between the judicial and executive arms of the government, Kirby stated in an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2015.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these strictures on campus discourse and the learning environment, Kirby wrote.

Protestors shout slogans during a rally against a pro-Beijing official who was appointed as chairman of Hong Kong Universitys (HKU) governing council, in Hong Kong on Jan. 3, 2016. Fears are growing over political interference in the citys education system. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images)

Communism is known for its corruption and cronyism. A Science editorial noted that the bulk of the Chinese governments R&D budget is allocated due to political connection rather than merit based on the judgment of independent review panels.

McKinseys 2014 report The China Effect on Global Innovation noted that the impact of innovation on Chinas economic growth declined to the lowest level since about 1980.

China has a massive consumer market and a government willing to invest huge sums of moneynearly US$200 billion on R&D in 2014and its universities graduate more than 1.2 million engineers each year.

Garry Kasparov,former world chess champion

Clearly, China has so much potential, but it is the United States that has taken the lead in technological dominance.

The country [China] has yet to make an internal-combustion engine that could be exported and lags behind developed countries in sciences ranging from biotechnology to materials, according to McKinsey.

While almost all western technology giants have R&D labs in China, the bulk of what they do is local adaptation rather than developing next generation technologies and products, wrote Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang in a 2016 article in the HBR. Gupta and Wang are co-authors of the book Getting China and India Right.

Excessive government involvement often leads to waste and excessoverbuilding and overcapacity. Chinas real estate bubble and steel mills are two such examples.

Lately, the Chinese government has been trying to spur an onslaught of startups by providing them with generous subsidies. But it doesnt have the savvy to pick winners and losers. Instead, a more efficient use of capital comes from knowledgeable and discerning venture capitalists. Most startups are meant to fail after all.

Why China Cant Innovate, a 2014 article in the HBR co-authored by Kirby, noted that the Chinese Communist Party requires one of its representatives to be associated with every company of more than 50 employees. Larger firms must have a Party cell, whose leader reports directly to the Party at the municipal or provincial level.

These requirements compromise the proprietary nature of a firms strategic direction, operations, and competitive advantage, thus constraining normal competitive behavior, not to mention the incentives that drive founders to grow their own businesses, according to the article.

The system of parallel governance constrains the flow of ideas. Chinas innovation largely comes through creative adaptation, which can mean a lot of things including foreign acquisitions, partnerships, but also cybertheft.

Communism is against private ownership of property. This puts a damper on innovation.

The key to whether China can become a country of innovation is tied to the respect of property rights and the rule of law, wrote Ma Guangyuan, an independent economist in China.

In his blog, Ma cites renowned U.S. investor William Bernsteins writings, which discuss property rights as being the most important of four factors needed for rapid economic growth. Guangyang wrote, Entrepreneurs live in constant fear of punishment, due to the questionable business practices in China, an environment that leads them to lose trust in a viable long-term economic future.

Capital flight out of China is one symptom of the problem; another is the preference of wealthy Chinese to send their children overseas for higher education. The loss of entrepreneurs like Li Ka-shing and Cao Dewang is a sign that greener pastures lie abroad.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Russian, wrote: Communism as a political ideology is as bankrupt as ever.

In his blog, he went on to say: It is no coincidence that the values of the American century are also the values of innovation and exploration. Individual freedom, risk-taking, investment, opportunity, ambition, and sacrifice. Religious and secular dictatorships cannot compete with these values and so they attack the systems founded upon them.

The authors of the HBR article Why China Cant Innovate recognize the nearly limitless capability of the Chinese individual, however, the political environment in China acts like a choke collar on innovation.

The problem, we think, is not the innovative or intellectual capacity of the Chinese people, which is boundless, but the political world in which their schools, universities, and businesses need to operate, which is very much bounded, they wrote.

Follow Rahul on Twitter @RV_ETBiz

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been compiled and its ideology still persists. Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged.

See the entire series of articles here.

Originally posted here:
How Communism Stifles Innovation - The Epoch Times

In the Hollywood hit comedy starring Daniel Brhl, a son goes to extraordinary lengths to try to convince his sick mother that she is still living in the hardline socialist state - despite the fact that the Berlin Wall has fallen and the regime is no more.

At the Alexa-Senioren-Residenz in Dresden the same principle applies. And dementia sufferers have shown progress in remembering things - and generally enjoying life more - in a part of the home given over to the German Democratic Republic.

There is a shop there selling products from the lost socialist Atlantis. Films and TV shows from the time when it was Soviet Russia's closest ally are screened in a room where pictures of former DDR rulers are on display.

GETTY

When home director Gunter Wolfram saw people "remembering things from the past when they couldn't remember their own name" he expanded the experiment.

Old objects from East Germany - such as a bread slicer, original wall hangings, a Communist-manufactured tape recorder and piles of old newspapers and magazines - now give those who grew up under Communism and grew old under capitalism a boost that no drugs can achieve.

GETTY

We got the idea to set up an area of the home in the style of the GDR

Gunter Wolfram

One carer at the home said: "Suddenly, amazing things are happening. Residents who barely could remember their names suddenly began talking about the brands of toothpaste from their youth, the petrol they put in their mopeds and the sorts of gherkins they used to buy."

Director Wolfram went on: "We got the idea to set up an area of the home in the style of the GDR. There is now, thanks to flea markets and e-Bay, an electric mixer from the GDR, GDR furniture, GDR cleaning fluids and much else besides.

"Since we started this therapy space, the number of applications for people to come and live here has rocketed."

Therapist Alicia Schppe and her team oversee the residents in this recreated piece of East Germany.

"Since it started, many have started to feed themselves again for the first time, can go to the loo unaided again and no longer lie around in bed all day."

View original post here:
Care home experiments has OAPs believe they are still living in Communist East Germany - Express.co.uk

by Danny Haiphong

Feeling not a bit ridiculous, so-called progressives carry signs depicting the right-wing billionaire Donald Trump under a hammer and sickle flag. TheDemocratic Party and its loyal white liberal base have spearheaded adangerous Neo-McCarthyist campaign that pits anyone who doesn't align with the Democratic Party line a dupe of the Russian government. The truth is, Trump is a (ruling) classmate of Clinton. Its a war within the One Percent.

Donald Trump is a lot of things, but a communist is not one of them. Yet signs sporting the communist symbol of the hammer and sickle have been spotted in protests against Trump across the country. These signscould be seen at the Women's March in Washington D.C. the day after the inauguration as well as the most recent "Not my President" rallies in a number of US cities. White liberals have been the primary messengers of the false connection between Trump and communism. Behind them is the Democratic Party, whose loss in the Presidential elections has intensified only intensified their anti-Russia narrative.

Many left groups and activists have become energized by the election of Donald Trump. Anarchist and socialist formations have taken to the streets in opposition to the Trump Administration. Trump's proposals to build a wall on the US-Mexico border and create an even more Wall Street-friendly regulatory apparatus are indeed affronts to anarchist and socialist principles. But so too should the Democratic Party's claim that Russia meddled in the elections in favor of Donald Trump. TheDemocratic Party and its loyal white liberal base have failed to provide convincing evidence that links Trump to Russia. Instead, these forces have spearheaded adangerous Neo-McCarthyist campaign that pits anyone who doesn't align with the Democratic Party line a dupe of the Russian government.

The neo-McCarthyism of white liberals and their friends in the Democratic Party is completely detached from reality, as most lies are. Those who link Russia to communism ignore the fact that Russia has not been under a socialist, Marxist-oriented planned economy since 1991. It was in the Western-backed destruction of the Soviet Union where the US was caught meddling in the so-called "democratic" elections held in 1996 in favor of Boris Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin's reign, poverty exploded andlife expectancy for men decreased fiveyears all in the name of "shock therapy."

The US and Western-backed destabilization of the Soviet Union allowed global capitalism to spread its misery unfettered from pesky socialism. Russia came under the control of oligarchs concerned only for their own enrichment and that of its billionaire partners in the West. The transition of power to Vladimir Putin in the 21st century led to a number of reforms that curbed the disastrous looting of the nation by the oligarchic bandits. Putin and his allies vowed to build an independent, capitalist Russia that was capable of determining its own affairs free from US and Western domination. Such an orientation placed Putin in direct confrontation with US imperialism's plans for unipolar global hegemony.

It is this context that white liberals and the Democrats work hard to ignore. The Democratic Party's loss to Donald Trump has laid bare US imperialism's existential crisis. Anti-communist, anti-Russia narratives provide a useful distraction from the symptoms of the crisis. These symptoms include a stagnate capitalist infrastructure with nothing to offer but joblessness and poverty, an increasingly repressive state apparatus built on the racial oppression of Black Americans and the surveillance of all Americans, and endless warfare that produces nothing but chaos. Trump took advantage of the vacuum left by these unpopular policies; but to acknowledge this means to acknowledge the bankruptcy of the system.

Furthermore, Trump as an individual is the antithesis of communism. Communismisdefined as the final stageof economicdevelopment. The basis of communism is a classless global society made possibleby economic conditions of abundance made possible by a worker-controlled socialist state. Under communism, the state has "withered away" -- or in other words become gradually irrelevant to the needs of humanity. The state is rooted in the formation of class society where a separate body mediating the conflict between classes is necessary to maintain the power of the oppressing class. Without classes, there is no need for such a formation to exist.

Donald Trump is a member of the capitalist ruling class. Communists worldwide have struggledto overthrow this class for well over a century. Trump accumulated his fortune from the exploitation of labor's surplus value, which is true of any billionaire. His class position alone makes him an enemy of communists. By this logic, Trump should be a friend of the ruling class. However, Trump has come under fire, and not just from Democrats. Leading Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsay Graham and billionaires like the Koch Brothers have all voiced their opposition to Trump.

Ruling class antipathy towards Trump is rooted both in the anti-communism of the past and the crisis of the present. John McCain and Lindsay Graham insist, without proof, that Trump is an agent of Russia. A section of the billionaire capitalist class has other concerns, such as the viability of an Administration that openly targets the extremely profitable undocumented labor force. The capitalists aligned with the Democratic and Republican Party establishments view Trump as a blemish and a stain on the political legitimacy of the system. Trumps very presence in the White House is a reflection of a broader economic crisis of the system.

Trump and his administration must be opposed by the left on every front when it comes to its attacks on working people both here and abroad. The fact is,even if such opposition must intensify, the corporate assault on working people was a staple of prior administrations. Trump's bigotry may not becoded like prior administrations, but it certainly isn't new. What is new is the revival of McCarthyism and anti-communism brought to us bythe so-called "progressive" wing of the US capitalist state.

The arbiters ofneo-McCarthyism have significant institutional power. Ask Michael Flynn, Trump's former National Security Advisor. Flynn was dismissed not too long after US intelligence caught him having a mere discussion with Russia's Ambassador to the US. While Flynn was dangerous in his own right for his position on Iran, his ouster provides no cause for celebration. Flynn's forced removal reveals that in many cases the Neo-McCarthyist faction of the establishment can determine policy without the aid of the executive branch.

The Neo-McCarthyist agenda of the ruling class cannot be defeated merely by forcing Trump into an early exit from the Oval Office. Only the independent organization expressed by the oppressed and working class masses can push back against the forces peddling the false connection between Trump, Russia, and communism. The popular struggle against this false connection will reveal the decrepit state of imperialism and the true character of communism. Communism was embraced by Black revolutionaries such as Assata Shakur, W.E.B. DuBois, and Harry Haywood. In order to follow their example in a manner applicable to the current period, we must refuse to align with the ruling class forces seeking to bury Trump with anti-communist and anti-Russia lies.

See the original post:
Contrary to White Liberal Opinion, Donald Trump is no Communist - Black Agenda Report

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Speaking at an event to mark Memorial Day for the Victims of Communism on Saturday, the populist leader noted the left wing ideologyemerged in the 20th century as an intellectual product of the West [but] in the end it was we Central Europeans who were forced to live under this originally Western idea.

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Orbn underlined that, in the West, communism remained nothing more than a theory, providing tingling intellectual excitement [for] meddlesome global utopians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, prominent figures in Fabian socialism accused of acting as apologists for the Soviet Union.

He recalled how many members of the Western intelligentsia, artists, writers and politicians self-proclaimed progressives praised the genocidal communist dictatorship.

It is difficult to believe that it was not obvious to them that those whom the Soviets regarded as class enemies or as dangerous for any other reason were being deported to slave labour camps.

The Fidesz leader criticised the EU in particular for its failure to condemn the crimes of communism, which he believes can be traced back to the fact that, while an international military court passed judgement on the crimes of Nazism, after the collapse of communism representatives of the free world did not arrive at a similarly strict verdict.

In Central Europe, however, even after a quarter of a century we still remember the nature of tyranny the reminders of which are everywhere.

According toOrbn, it is those reminders which have enabled Hungarians to understand that they can only be free if they never again surrender their sovereignty a reference to his recent vow to stop the EU from withdrawing ever more powers from [its] member-states and centralising them in the Brussels bureaucracy.

Today in Hungary we live in freedom and safety; we have a bright future that we have chosen ourselves unlike communism, in which we had only stifled energies and boarded-over skies, he said.

We can only have a future if it is both free and Hungarian; only a country of free Hungarians has a future.

The number of people killed by communist regimes in the 20th century is estimated at 94 million. Survivingcommunist regimes such as China and North Korea continue to be noted for their use of censorship, political repression, and arbitrary detention often in Soviet-style labour camps to quash dissent.

Go here to see the original:
Hungary's Orbn: EU 'Still Making Excuses for Crimes of Communism' - Breitbart News

JAKARTA (THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - It is largely agreed that the history of a nation helps shape the character and attitude of its citizens. From all the accounts that influence people's minds, horrible events of the past apparently play the most pivotal part.

For Indonesia, the alleged coup attempt on Sept 30, 1965, blamed on the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), is a past horror that has affected people's minds.

Many consider the incident a thorn in the flesh, which is why communism is listed among the subjects to be discussed in the amendment to the Criminal Code (Kitab Undang-undang Hukum Pidana or KUHP), which is now underway.

During the deliberation of the draft revision to the KUHP, both the House of Representatives and the government share the opinion that Marxism-Leninism is a serious threat to the nation's unity and integrity.

The decision to address communism in the bill is said to anticipate a revival of communism in the wake of China's growing presence as an economic force and due to a borderless world that gives Indonesians access to "foreign" ideologies.

This happens despite the fact that China is leading a global campaign for free markets, the antithesis to communism.

Not only have our policymakers ignored this phenomenon, they have also turned a blind eye to other thoughts that could potentially split the nation, such as radical Islamic ideology that wants to form a caliphate in Indonesia.

So serious is the perceived danger that opposition to state ideology constitutes a crime that can be charged under three articles, namely Articles 219 and 220 on the propagation of communism and Marxism-Leninism and Article 221 on attempts to replace Pancasila, the official philosophical principles of the state.

Legislators have argued that these anticommunist provisions are needed to prevent the reoccurrence of another 1965 tragedy, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and led to the stigmatisation of former PKI members, supporters and their families.

The communist phobia is indeed alive in Indonesian politics. One famous example of this paranoia was the massive campaign linking Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to communism when he ran for president in 2014.

Civil groups have ridiculed the idea that communism is the number one ideological threat. However, state institutions, the military and also some Islamic organisations remain steadfast in pushing their phobic narratives.

As part of precautions, the danger of communism and extreme thought must indeed be taken seriously. However, the extra attention against them must not justify oppression and abuse of power, such as happened in the past.

While we agree that democracy is this country's philosophical foundation, measures taken to prevent and counter radical thought must not go against democratic principles. Any legal action taken against the supporters and perpetrators of radicalism should follow the rule of law, or else the democratisation that we have all witnessed will move backwards.

The Jakarta Post is a member of The Straits Times media partner Asia News Network, an alliance of 22 news media entities.

The rest is here:
Alert about revival of communism? Yes, Paranoid? No: The Jakarta Post - The Straits Times