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  SHAKEDOWN SOCIALISM

  It's failed in the USSR... Now it's moved to the USA

  Unions, Pitchforks, Collective Greed,

  The Fallacy of Economic Equality,

  and other Optical Illusions of "Redistributive Justice"

  By Oleg Atbashian

  who saw the worst of both worlds and lived to tell the tale.

  ***

  Second edition, improved and expanded

  First edition published by Greenleaf Press, 2010

  Copyright © Oleg Atbashian 2009, 2010, 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  About the Author

  Oleg Atbashian is a writer and graphic artist from the former USSR. Born and raised in Ukraine, he grew up believing in Communism and at one time worked as a propaganda artist, creating visual agitprop for the local Party committee in a Siberian town. He became disillusioned with the corruption and the hypocrisy of the socialist system and emigrated to the United States in 1994. His writings present a view of America and the world through the prism of his Soviet experience. He is the creator of ThePeoplesCube.com, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as "a Stalinist version of The Onion." His essays and satires have been translated into many languages and his graphics reproduced in various publications around the world.

  About "Shakedown Socialism"

  "Oleg Atbashian has written a timely warning for Americans about the collectivists among us and their plans for the future. I hope everyone reads this book."

  - David Horowitz, the Author of Uncivil Wars (2003); The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006); Indoctrination U. (2008); and most recently One Party Classroom (2009)

  "Brightly written and filled with entertaining and illuminating illustrations, Oleg Atbashian's Shakedown Socialism is a clear and eye-opening guide to exactly what is wrong with socialism and state control of the means of production, and how it kills both the economy and human initiative. Atbashian saw it all up close in the Soviet Union, and now he sees Barack Obama making the same mistakes - and sounds this clarion call for economic sanity, before it's too late. Shakedown Socialism is an essential and inspiring guide to the virtues of the free market."

  Robert Spencer, the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad

  Pamela Geller: "Ayn Rand saw it coming: 'When government controls are introduced into a free economy, they create economic dislocations, hardships and problems, which - if the controls are not repealed - necessitate further controls, which necessitate still further controls, etc.' In his brilliant, witty, and wonderfully illustrated Shakedown Socialism, Oleg Atbashian - who grew up in the Soviet Union, shows how that process is happening in Obama's America today, and explains why that is putting us on the road to ruin. Shakedown Socialism is an enlightening, sobering, and wonderfully clear explanation of why statism kills - and thus also of why and how Barack Obama is killing the American economy. Oleg quotes Putin saying that when the Soviets made the state's role absolute, the U.S.S.R. became completely economically uncompetitive, and no one wants to see that repeated. No one except Obama, that is. This book shows why Obama's statist economic policies are a looming disaster for America and for the spirit of the free human individual."

  Pamela Geller, the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America, as well as a prominent blogger at Atlas Shrugs

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD By Scott Wheeler

  PREFACE by the author

  INTRODUCTION: The six contradictions of socialism in America

  Chapter 1. Lenin: Trade Unions are the School of Communism

  Chapter 2. Incoming: Forced Inequality and Economic Injustice

  Chapter 3. Unions: A Study in Collective Greed and Selfishness

  Chapter 4. Rigging the Economy in the Name of "Justice"

  Chapter 5. Want a Crisis? Impose "Fairness"

  Chapter 6. The Fallacy of "Economic Equality"

  Chapter 7. Joyriding the Gravy Train of Inequality

  SUMMARY: Reclaiming the Moral High Ground

  APPENDIX. Obama the Pitchfork Operator: Remake of the Soviet Classic

  About "Shakedown Socialism"

  Foreword

  By Scott Wheeler

  Is socialism coming to a municipality near you? Before you answer, consider that in 2016, nearly sixty percent of voters in the U.S. who identify as Democrats have a favorable opinion of socialism. Fortunately, author Oleg Atbashian has written a very timely antidote.

  Shakedown Socialism is a look at the past failures of socialism as seen and experienced by Mr. Atbashian himself, and a look into what he sees as America’s future if President Obama’s plans succeed.

  Socialism always looks far more glamorous from a distance. Indeed, many academicians in the U.S. have flirted with socialism by saying something like, “socialism is good in theory; the reason it has failed is that it hasn’t been implemented correctly.” Those are dangerous words to Mr. Atbashian, who fled to the United States to escape the imposition of those “good ideas.”

  Mr. Atbashian takes readers through the details that led to his awakening and realization that the state must change truth frequently to maintain order, and must use coercive tactics to keep up the image of devotion to the state. Shakedown Socialism should be required reading on every college campus.

  Preface

  Growing up in the USSR, where the only permitted sources of information were textbooks and the official media, I believed that the Soviet Union was the most advanced society, while all other countries lived in poverty and oppression, devoid of the sun of Marxism-Leninism. I wanted them to become more like the USSR for their own good, and couldn't wait to grow up and live in the communist future, not worrying about money.

  With years, as I began to encounter boundaries to intellectual inquiry, coupled with rampant hypocrisy and corruption, I initially attributed it to the wrong, dogmatic interpretation of Marxism by the ruling elites. Next came the realization that Marxism was not the solution, but the cause of the dysfunctional system, and that the communist utopia was only a dead-end exit in humanity's long and stressful journey towards progress. I took on activism, joined political underground, collected signatures in defense of dissidents, and wrote articles and short stories that satirized socialism and the self-delusional Soviet regime. Most of it was never published.

  I moved to the United States in 1994, hoping to forget about politics and enjoy life in a country that was ruled by reason and common sense, whose citizens were appreciative of constitutional rights, the rule of law, and the prosperity of free market capitalism. But what I found was a society deeply infected by the leftist disease of "progressivism" that was jeopardizing real societal progress. So I started writing again, this time in English.

  The result is this book, as well as many more essays, political parodies, and cartoons, published in various media inAmerica and around the world. Most of it is collected at my satirical website ThePeoplesCube.com - a spoof of "progressive" ideology, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as "a Stalinist version of the Onion."

  Oleg Atbashian

  INTRODUCTION:

  The six contradictions of socialism in America

  I have seen the future and ran away.

  At first the move to America from the former USSR made me feel as though I had made a jump in time, from the stagnant depraved past into a distant dynamic future. There was an abundance of commonly available futuristic contraptions, machines, and appliances that made everyday existence easier and more enjoyable. Less obvious but just as exciting was the media's openness: I no longer needed to read between the lines to know what was happening.
Most importantly, there was honesty, dignity, and respect in relations among people.

  Today I'm feeling like a time traveler again. Only this time the productive, honest and self-reliant America is vanishing in the past, as we are quickly approaching the all too familiar future of equal poverty, one-party rule, media mooching, government looting, bureaucratic corruption, rigged elections, underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder.

  It was nice living in America before it changed the course towards the so-called "progress," which, according to my compass, is pointing backward. All of a sudden I find myself playing the role of a comrade from the "future," helping my new compatriots to navigate the quagmire ahead.

  Deprived of free political speech, Soviets had developed a culture of underground political jokes. I used to remember thousands of them. Here's one of my favorites, dealing with the discrepancy between the official narrative and the everyday reality:

  The six contradictions of socialism in the USSR

  There is no unemployment - yet no one is working.

  No one is working - yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.

  The factory quotas are fulfilled - yet the stores have nothing to sell.

  The stores have nothing to sell - yet people's homes are full of stuff.

  People's homes are full of stuff - yet no one is happy.

  No one is happy - yet the voting is always unanimous.

  Already in America I discovered that most of my old Soviet jokes didn't work in translation.

  It wasn't so much the language difference as the fact that Americans had no first-hand knowledge of a totalitarian government, ideological uniformity, and shameless propaganda. But that is changing. The more America "progresses" back to the Soviet model, the more translatable the old Soviet jokes become.

  Let's see how we can rewrite this one into a new American joke.

  The six contradictions of socialism in the USA

  America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.

  Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.

  They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.

  Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.

  The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

  They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

  There's more where it came from - or, rather, where we're going.

  CHAPTER 1

  Lenin: Trade Unions are the School of Communism

  The recent "card-check" debates in the US Congress reminded me of my own experiences with trade unions in the USSR, where organized labor was part of the official establishment and union membership was mandatory. It also reminded me of how that system's seemingly magnanimous goals - fairness, economic equality, and social justice - in real life brought forth a rigged game of wholesale corruption, forced inequality, and grotesque injustice.

  Years later, the same Orwellian misnomers are catching up with me in America . One of them is called the "Employee Free Choice Act" - legislation that deprives workers of free choice by replacing private balloting with publicly signed cards in the presence of pushy union organizers. Bad as it is, card check is only a means to a larger end. Proponents of "redistributive justice" would love nothing more than use a forced expansion of labor unions as a vehicle to deliver America straight into a utopian swamp, where they will gain extraordinary powers while the rest of the nation will be doomed to repeat the Soviet scenario of slow death caused by social, economic, and moral decay.

  Defeating the card-check bill alone will not affect the ideology that has spawned it - just as curing a symptom of a disease will not remove the infection. It is the ideology, therefore, that we must address and learn to recognize in its various manifestations.

  No matter where I worked in the USSR, I was always a union member without so much as a formal notice - starting with the student union in college and then on to whatever union was assigned to the state-run enterprise that hired me, regardless of the job description. The only indicators of this one-sided relationship were the monthly union dues, automatically deducted from my measly wages. It was like paying alimony for a fling I never had. To be fair, in the early 80s, I did go on a union-subsidized one-week tour of Uzbekistan - mostly because a friend knew someone at the union office who owed him a favor. But that was it.

  Every time I visited a union office in theUSSR, I saw the same prominently displayed poster, "Trade unions are the school of communism - V.I. Lenin." At the time it seemed like a sweeping exaggeration, similar to other Lenin gems like "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country," which any student of arithmetic could reformulate as "Soviet power is communism minus the electrification." But recent events in American politics have made me wonder whether the union movement might actually be all that Lenin's quote implies and more - a school, a workshop, and a gateway to communism.

  Ideologically, both unionists and communists share the slogan of "economic equality and justice" - two incompatible concepts, given that just rewards make people economically unequal, while forced economic equality leads to great injustice. The pursuit of these contradictory goals in real life results in a dreary outcome. Since absolute equality is unattainable for reasons we will discuss later, forcing it on a society only replaces natural inequality with forced inequality. In this sense, the difference between the two movements is in their radius: communists fancy a forced "economic equality and justice" for all, while the unions limit it to the select group composed of their members.

  Strategically, both movements work toward their goals by divorcing wages from labor productivity, stifling the free market, and expropriating and redistributing wealth - all the while blaming the resulting failures and misery on the capitalist "enemy." This can put even non-communist union members in a state of mind that makes them ripe for Marxist propaganda. We can see why Lenin considered communism to be the final destination of the union movement.

  In theory, unions become workshops of communism only when they go beyond their original legitimate purpose of collective bargaining and taking care of work-related issues (safety, training, etc.), and turn into collectivist pressure groups that engage in class warfare. In practice, however, there is hardly a union in existence that hasn't become a tool in wealth redistribution schemes that use the "common good" as an excuse for voter fraud, coercion, intimidation, and diverting membership fees to support anti-business policies.

  The ultimate result of the unions engaging in class warfare was exemplified by the misery of unionized workers in theUSSR, whose fleeting desire to be "free from the shackles of capitalist exploitation" led them into permanent slavery at the hands of the state-run economy.

  As soon as the factories were turned over to the workers, union perks were reduced to little red flags with Lenin portraits, badges, and honorary titles like "The collective of communist labor." In American terms, that roughly translates into awarding a "Best carmaker of the month" bumper sticker to an auto worker who can't afford a car.

  Union perks mean nothing when there is nothing left to redistribute. The Soviets learned it the hard way. The American unions don't seem to be able learn from the mistakes of others. They refuse to admit that their current perks can only exist in a free and competitive economy that ensures growth and generates wealth - also known as "capitalist exploitation" in the lingo of the champions of "redistributive justice." By promoting a state-regulated economy and undermining private businesses whose employees they claim to represent, the unions objectively undercut the workers, who must pay for it with lost jobs and incomes. Setting up the capitalist economy for destruction in this manner qualifies the unions as "a school of communism."

  This is not an anti-union argument. To call it anti-un
ion, one has to believe that a union's main purpose is to siphon the nation's wealth to its members. Or that the unions were created to provide logistical support to leftist radicals in their struggle for power.

  My argument is quite the opposite: since such overreaching by the unions is self-destructive and ultimately hurts the workers, ridding the unions of inappropriate functions and alliances would benefit everyone - the society, the workers, and even the unions themselves.

  HIGH NOON: 4 June, 1989

  Election poster issued by Solidarity

  Independent Trade Union;

  Tomasz Sarnecki, Poland, 1989

  The workers are not herd animals, nor are they a separate biological species with a different set of interests. They are as human as anyone else who possesses a mind and free will, and therefore their long-term interests are not different than the rest of humanity. And since the interests of humanity lie with liberty, property rights, and the rule of law, this is what the unions should stand for.

  The shining example of this is Poland 's Solidarnosc, an independent union that spearheaded the overthrow of the oppressive communist regime in 1989. Another example can be found in the struggling labor unions of Iran, who oppose the corrupt and oppressive theocracy of the mullahs and could use a little more international solidarity right now, as their leaders suffer beatings, imprisonment, and persecution at the hands of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards.

  Too often, however, unions have blindly taken the opposite side and supported state-enforced redistribution of wealth, forgetting that whenever a government adopts forced economic equality as official policy, unions become redundant and lose not only their political power, but also the very raison d'être. That is exactly what happened to the unions in theUSSR.