RAMIN MAZAHERI—Everybody’s got a vanguard party. Democracy is not perfect (only God is), but this does not mean there are not varying degrees of perfection which we can analyse and attain. In the West, your modern-era vanguard – after decades of money-grubbing, back-stabbing, standing on daddy’s rich shoulders, and exploiting those who work for them – is the economic 1%. To add journalistic balance: they also got to be the vanguard via the admirable, ethical business practices of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the genius of people like Warren Buffett to support the growth of private, abusive monopolies, and the incredible skills of being phony in public by actors like Ronald Reagan…these are whom have been chosen in the West – via both informal and formal democratic consensus – as their vanguard party.
CHINESE WAY OF LIFE
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Bourgeois constitutionalism in the context of a monarchy is – history, and also today’s newspaper, repeatedly proves – a pact between the monarchy / aristocracy and the bourgeois traders against the 99%. However, even Fairbank admits the 99% wanted no part of this change, because the Chinese imperial system – where a Heavenly Mandate rested upon demonstrably good governance and not mere bloodlines like in Europe – was arguably superior to Western Europe’s “modern” democracy despite being a monarchy, because China ostensibly switched from a pact between the monarchy and the 99% for a pact between the 1% themselves.
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BRUCE DIXON—Cable news coverage never mentions that there are 15 US military bases on Korean soil, housing anywhere from 30 to 40,000 US troops, probably nuclear armed. The largest, Camp Humphreys is in the middle of scandal-ridden expansion plans to hold 40,000 US personnel in that one spot alone, all paid for by South Korean taxpayers, not American ones. South Korean civil society has long resented its American overlords and their military presence.
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ANDRE VLTCHEK—”No one supposes that a theistic ethic is the only way that people can be socialized with respect to action. Earthly rulers have often considered their will as the grounds of law and ethics. The deepest commitment should be to the ruler and hence to advance the ruler’s wishes. But from the Christian point of view, true ethics must transcend obedience to political power. Might does not make right.”
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The Cultural Revolution’s solving of the urban-rural divide
30 minutes readRAMIN MAZAHERI—How do we solve the rural-urban divide? Central economic planning
The socialist way is “central control but not central management”. The capitalist way is “local control and no management (except for market forces) ”…and history repeatedly proves that this puts rural areas at a fundamental disadvantage: There is simply no way to safeguard the rural half without central economic planning – they will always be left behind because helping hillbillies will never turn an immediate profit.