The future of reform

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke puts American business on notice: Play along with the President or expect to be "invited" to a struggle session.

The ObamaCare Writedowns: The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked! (Wall Street Journal, MARCH 27, 2010): "Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, 'In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.'. . .

". . . Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment 'appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.'. . . Democrats don't like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet."

"A Struggle session [struggle meeting] was a unique method used by the Mao era Communist Party of China to shape public opinion and to humiliate, to persecute and/or execute political rivals, or so-called class enemies . . . The term refers to class struggle; ostensibly, the session is held ostensibly to benefit the target, by eliminating all traces of counterrevolutionary, reactionary thinking."

What is the future of reform?

Will it come as a surprise when the bad elements of society who will not "confess" (as Toyota executives did, February 2010) become the target of a government-media campaign demanding some form of Community Service or "Rehabilitation Through Labor"?

Rehabilitation through labor means: "To put it in plain language, this method calls for the state to provide bad elements with shelter, make arrangements for them, and provide them with appropriate conditions for labor . . . Thus, rehabilitation through labor involves their supporting themselves through their own labor while at the same time reforming themselves through labor. This indicates the concern and the spirit of responsibility of our socialist state for the live, labor, and future of these people. The state's handling of and arrangements for them are also designed to safeguard against damaging the free, happy, and prosperous lives of the great majority of the laboring people and the socialist order." [page 255, The criminal process in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1963: an introduction, by Jerome Alan Cohen (Harvard University Press, 1968)] 

" . . . But because of the thickness of their exploiting class ideological consciousness and their deeply rooted reactionary standpoint, we must also educate them [i.e., the bad elements] in political ideology. We must explain the truth to them and show them the future of reform. We must organize them to conduct self-examination, self-criticism, mutual analysis, and censure, to develop the two-road struggle in politics and ideology, to admit their guilt and their errors, and to wipe out their reactionary ideology. In the practice of productive labor they gradually establish the determination to reform themselves, to walk the socialist road [as opposed to the capitalist road], and to be laborers in socialist society." [page 256, The criminal process in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1963: an introduction, by Jerome Alan Cohen (Harvard University Press, 1968). From Meng Chao-liang, "Preliminary Accomplishments of the Work of Rehabilitation Through Labor," FCYC, 3:47, 48-49 (1959).]