Tag Archives: Communism

News

Republican senators introduce bill to defund NPR and PBS

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From CNS News. (H/T Michelle Malkin)

Excerpt:

Two Republican senators on Friday introduced a bill to stop taxpayer subsidies to public radio and television.

Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has received nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said with the nation on the brink of bankruptcy, some decisions to cut spending are difficult — but not this one:

“Americans struggling to make ends meet shouldn’t be forced to fund public broadcasting when there are already thousands of choices for educational and entertainment programming on the television, radio and Web,” DeMint said. “President Obama’s own bipartisan debt commission proposed ending these unnecessary subsidies to public broadcasting. NPR boasts that it only gets 2 percent of its funding from taxpayers and PBS gets about 15 percent, so these programs should be able to find a way to stand on their own.”

Coburn called subsidies for public broadcasting “indefensible.” “The federal government has no business picking winners and losers in today’s highly competitive media environment. NPR and CPB will do just fine without largesse from Washington,” Coburn added.

CPB was incorporated as a private, nonprofit corporation under the authority of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and its first taxpayer subsidy in 1969 was $5 million. In the current fiscal year, CPB is slated to receive $430 million from taxpayers, and President Obama recently asked for an increase to $451 million, the senators said.

PBS President Paula Kerger received $632,233 in compensation in 2009, according to the tax forms that nonprofits must file, while NPR President Emeritus Kevin Klose received more than $1.2 million in compensation.

DeMint and Coburn also noted that in 2010, NPR accepted a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundation, backed by liberal financier George Soros, to hire 100 reporters. Additionally, NPR has an endowment of over $200 million, they said in a news release.

These are tough times and we have to cut spending… on liberal propaganda.

News

Do universities discriminate against conservatives?

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From the radically-leftist New York Times. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

[…]The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

And yet all we ever hear from the academic left is how open-minded they all are – how they love to celebrate diversity. What diversity? They’re more bigoted and segregated than the Ku Klux Klan. At least the Klan isn’t taxpayer-funded by the very people who are being discriminated against!

News

Unemployment rate in socialist Spain now above 20%

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Map of Europe
Map of Europe

Here’s the story from Yahoo News.

Excerpt:

Spain announced Friday its jobless rate surged to a 13-year record above 20 percent at the end of 2010, the highest level in the industrialized world, as the economy struggled for air.

It was more bad news for an economy fighting to regain the trust of financial markets and avoid being trapped in a debt quagmire that has engulfed Greece and Ireland and now menaces Portugal.

Another 121,900 people joined Spain’s unemployment queues in the final quarter of the year, pushing the total to 4.697 million people, said the national statistics institute INE.

The resulting unemployment rate was 20.33 percent for the end of the year — easily exceeding Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s target of 19.4 percent.

Spain appears to be stuck in a rut of staggeringly high levels of unemployment.

After posting a jobless rate of 18.83 percent in 2009 and now 20.33 percent in 2010, the government is forecasting 19.3 percent for 2011 and 17.5 percent in 2012.

The Spanish economy, the European Union’s fifth biggest, slumped into recession during the second half of 2008 as the global financial meltdown compounded the collapse of a labour-intensive construction boom

It emerged with tepid growth of just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and 0.2 percent in the second but then stalled with zero growth in the third.

Zapatero has said the fourth quarter will show positive growth which would pick up steam in 2011 but he warned that job creation would be “far from what we need and desire. It will be slow and progressive.”

Remember that Spain elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in April 2004, who is a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which is very similar in policy to Barack Obama and the Democrats.  Let’s see what has happened in Spain. (H/T Spain Economy Watch)

Unemployment:

Spain Unemployment Rate
Spain Unemployment Rate

Private sector employment:

Spain Employment Rate - Private Sector
Spain Employment - Private Sector

Public sector employment:

Spain Employment - Public Sector
Spain Employment - Public Sector

So what do we learn from this?

Well, the public sector doesn’t really sell any products or services, so they don’t really have any customers to please, nor do they have any revenue. They exist by confiscating the wealth of other people (in the private sector) who do have products and services to sell, and do have customers to please. The governments job is to HELP the people in the private sector and not to raise their taxes, or control them, or get in their way except to make sure that they compete fairly and honestly with other people in the private sector. When government oversteps their bounds by raising taxes too high and spending too much, they stop acting like a REFEREE and start acting more like a PARASITE.

You’ll note that Obama is also spending trillions of dollars on government boondoggles – and where is our unemployment rate now?