The Berlin Wall Today

Volokh had a couple of posts up commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – here, here, and here for example.

I am too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the idea of the wall, as I learned about it later, made quite an impression on me.? The Communists had voluntarily constructed a physical testament to their citizens’ fevered desire to escape.? And once that wall came down, the beneficent West welcomed the refugees with open arms.? But because I am too young to remember the Berlin Wall, another wall looms larger in my mind.

Today, a sickening parody of the past is unfolding.? A new wall goes up along our border, and the United States is building it.? It builds it not to keep its own rich well-fed citizens trapped inside, but to keep the poor and desperate out.? The Berlin Wall made a sick sort of sense.? The Communists needed to prevent the human material of their social experiments from escaping.? But the wall today is an aimless and demented cruelty, a jeering testament to our nation’s willingness to sacrifice its own prosperity, if only it can make our neighbors a little poorer.? It denies both the citizens inside our borders and those without the best operation of the capitalist system that was once the hope of desperate East Berliners.

Once we demanded that the Soviets tear down their wall.? Today we insist that our neighbors help us seal off our border.? So today, I look forward to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of a different wall, and a time when we will have seen it for the travesty that it is.

The Communist Past of the ‘Green Jobs’ Czar

The following was originally published by and is the sole property of NewsBusters.org and the Media Research Center.

The administration?s ?Green Jobs? czar, Van Jones, has a ?very checkered past? deep-rooted in radical politics, including black nationalism, anarchism, and communism. The broadcast network newscasts have mostly failed to report on Mr. Jones?s past political affiliations which are lock-step with the network?s downplay of coverage regarding President Obama?s associations with the former radical and terrorist William Ayers during the election.

At 6:47 a.m. EDT on the July 10 edition of ?Fox and Friends,? Americans for Prosperity Policy Director Phil Kerpen, told interviewer Brian Kilmeade that Jones is ?somebody who was involved in radical politics in San Francisco, ?who was self-admittedly ?radicalized in jail? and found ?Communism and anarchism.? Kerpen compares Van Jones?s Communist past with his new quest for environmentalism and the creation of green jobs:

I think it?s pretty instructive what his past is…it?s the same sort of philosophy, the idea that government ought to be reordering society in accordance with some utopian vision that failed with communism and socialism, and will fail with this green jobs idea.

In an April 12, 2009 World Net Daily article titled ?Will a ?red? help blacks go green??Aaron Klein reports that Jones himself stated in a 2005 interview his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class ?justice,? and that he was a ?rowdy black nationalist,? and a ?communist.?

Because the administration?s ?czars? do not go through congressional confirmation, and are therefore not scrutinized or vetted, many Americans have no idea who they are or where they come from.

Kudos to Fox News for bringing Van Jones?s controversial past and political ideology to light.

-sam