Obama, Socialism, & the Great Republican Lie

[dafame]

Changed the title because I was trying to be a little too creative with the last one and it looked and sounded stupid. I'm shocked nobody said anything..LOL

Lately, due to what has been taking place in the national and state polls for the 2008 Presidential race, there's been a lot of talk about about what a prospective Obama Presidency will look like. Recently, the word that many on the far-right have been using in their summation has been "socialism". Many Reich-Wing political pundits have actually come out and made the claim that Barack Obama is a Socialist and charge that his Presidency would bring about the end of of Capitalism in the U.S.

Well let's examine this claim that Barack Obama is an advocate for the practice of Socialism in America and why this word carries such negative annotations in our society.

What is socialism? Socialism refers to an economic theory of social organization advocating social or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Asking a society whose top 1% controls more wealth than its lower 90% to carry more weight in taxes is not an example of Socialism. Nor is a nation’s government accepting responsibility that the health of its constituents is an inalienable right to be extended to all.

Capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are owned by private persons, and operated for profit and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are predominantly determined through the operation of a free market, rather than by central economic planning.

Capitalism is not bad in concept. It affords any person through the means of "entrepreneurship" (more on this later) the freedom to build a mountain from a mole. However, under the term in which we live, capitalism can be better described by using the term "pimps and ho's" with the elite (or top 1%) being the pimps and the rest of us ho's. Some of us ho's will prosper "because ho's gotta eat too", but by design there will always be a vast disparity between that the top and the bottom. This is why things in this country don't make sense. How does it make sense that the wealthiest nation in the world has the highest rate of poverty as compared against its wealth? How is it that the wealthiest nation in the world ranks 38th in life expectancy as it relates to death of natural cause?

I don't know how many of you watched Bill Maher yesterday but there was an interesting quote cited (I don't remember who made the quote) but it said something like: Capitalism can be viewed as a game of poker where a couple of the players control 90% of the chips. At a certain point the only way that the other players can remain in the game is to borrow. Once the controlling players are either no longer willing or able to lend the game ends.

What the "trickle down" theory suggest to us is that by giving those few players that control 90% of the chips even more chips so they can continue to lend chips out to the struggling players. These players will continue to struggle under this system but the game in theory can be extended a little longer.

There's another quote from Marx that reads: "Capitalism tends to improve manufacturing or technological development efficiencies. As technological innovation becomes more and more streamlined/mechanized, the need for entrepreneurship declines". "Capitalism eventually becomes a bureaucratic process of large corporations and organizations, no longer requiring entrepreneurship. As this happens, capitalism loses its primary driver (the entrepreneur) and dies out".

Capitalism (under the form in which we practice):
A. forsakes the concerns of the MAJORITY (lower 95%) in favor of the MINORITY (upper 5%)
&
B. validates the top 5% and deceives the lower 95% into worshiping an ideal that is good in its definition but evil in its application

What Senator Obama is proposing is not an end of capitalism or "the free market". What's he's proposing is adopting some ideals that one can argue could be related to socialism in nature. What he's talking about is empowering the middle class with more chips SO THE GAME CAN KEEP GOING. But the difference is that by empowering the middle class innovation and "entrepreneurship" can again be sparked in this country and new industries like (Energy Technology) can spring up. What's wrong with that if the system is broken? I won't tell you what's wrong with it but I will tell you why you think it's wrong. It's mainly this: http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...whiteness-clip. It's the reason that the McCain campaign has been harping on the phrase "spreading the wealth" because it taps into this mindset. It's what Tim Wise (noted above) calls the "overseer complex".

The Republican Party has been a perpetrator of this complex that teaches us to protect our ideal of enslaving ourselves to the elite without even knowing that we're doing it. What he talks about is that WE ARE ALL SLAVES under this system but the entire racist movement was designed to divert attention away from the enslavers and give the whites an enemy (blacks) to place blame on as an explanation as to why in spite of their hard work, they didn't seem to be getting ahead.

The Republican Party has demonized anything that goes against this system. The term socialist is now basically a slur not far behind terrorist and is used in a way to describe why America is so much better than every other nation (most of whom practice forms of socialism). We're not talking about a "redistribution of wealth" what we’re talking about is greed. The greed that is destroying our great nation that was founded on the principal that no man had any right over another in his pursuit of the American dream. We're not talking about socialism, what were talking about is the fact that are not living up to the principles that this country was founded upon. What we're talking about is that under these principals everyone's life should hold the same value, regardless to whether you are in the highest tax bracket and can afford the best health insurance that money can buy or if you were born into poverty and thus can't afford to protect your health. Your life.

Republicans (or should I say "My Friends"), you've been fed the wrong dose of medicine. As a result you're suffering from delusions and hearing voices in your head of Fox News correspondents that are telling you that your mission is to protect these ideals. The same ideals that hurt YOU unless you become one of those that are holding most of the chips. But we all know that will never happen. None the less, like a good soldier you march into battle without even knowing who or what you're fighting for.

[Cuchulain]

Brilliant post, dafame. The poor and middle class will never get a fair deal unless we stand together and change the rules. Divide and conquer is an old REICHwing tactic.

I've mentioned Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' in other posts.
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats." - Kevin Philips, Nixon strategist, in 1970 NYT interview
Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's hero, updated the Southern Strategy for Ronnie RAYGUN : "You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". - Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P Lamis

Of course, they have other divide and conquer startegies - guns, religion, abortion, sexuality, fear of terrorists and of course, calling any who disagree with them communists or socialists.

TY for the Tim Wise link. I hadn't heard of him before.

[dafame]

[/quote]TY for the Tim Wise link. I hadn't heard of him before.[/quote]

Thank for the reply Cuchulain. It's good to know that more an more people are starting to wake up to realize what IS, and always HAS been happening. Tim Wise is on to something huh. If Obama is elected it will provide an avenue for more people like Tim to come out and get exposure. This is the type of "TRUTH" dialog that is needed if we are ever to become ONE.

[yodajazz]

Great post Dafame. I see the word ‘socialism’ as being a very general term which often has only relative meaning. But I see the word has become what I call, a loaded code term. It has been programmed into the mind of certain segments to mean bad, without even examining the particulars of a situation. The word in use before was communism. It was programmed into the people to be the same as ‘evil’. But communism did have a specific nations who were advocating a specific form of it, like the Soviet Union, unlike the the general word ‘socialism’. Everything you say is right, from what I can see. Hopefully we work to get people de-programmed to think of specific solutions to specific problems rather than be controlled, by coded loaded trigger terms.

[hippifried]

damn pinkos

[NYBURBS]

These are steps in the direction of socialism, steps that some of us cringe at. Further, this argument that we have had anything close to a true capitalist free market is laughable. There have been enormous controls on the market for the past 80 years or so. Government has also grown exponentially under both parties, and that is counter-productive to a healthy economy.

As for this tax the 1% shit, let's get real. The actual super rich are still not going to pay their fair share as they derive their wealth through methods that involve capital gains, they have always hidden, and will continue to hide, the majority of their wealth from the income tax. Who will get kicked hard are the people pulling in 250,000 or 300,000. Oh wow look at those super elite lol. Move to NY and you will live comfortably off of that but you're not jet setting around the world.

This social nanny state has been growing for years and has it helped us out at all? I'd say no, not at all. It has made the vast majority of us poorer for it and slaves to the tax system.

Want reform? How about less laws penalizing your conduct that is not outwardly harmful towards others, so generations of people are not incarcerated for bullshit, or how about we do away with the IRS and simply reapportion taxes back onto the States and then let them decide what is the fairest way to raise their share. How about we close down all these foreign military bases and quit invading other countries, whether it be in the name of "security", or "freedom", or "humanitarian need". We could then fund a military to safeguard our nation at a small fraction of what we currently fund.

Those are just a few of the things we could do to restore sanity and independence back upon ourselves. We all need to decide if we're going to keep moving down this road of bigger government or escape it.

PS- This isn't an Anti-Obama, Pro McCain message, because that old stooge and the bulk of his party are equally (if not more so) full of shit.

[natina]

In this spellbinding lecture delivered at Mt. Holyoke College in October 2007, Tim Wise explores the related phenomena of institutional racism and white privilege, and how they continue to operate in the United States. Wise explores the problem of white denial dating back generations, and the way in which the concept of whiteness was created in the 1600s, largely as a mechanism for dividing working class persons of European descent from persons of color, for the benefit of elites.

http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...whiteness-clip

[Cuchulain]

The American Dream in relation to Joe the Plumber and Obama:

'...use of the phrase "spread the wealth around." And those were the words the McCain-Palin campaign seized upon. The words are now taken to supply all the evidence anyone needs that Barack Obama was a "socialist" all along, a reckless democrat who would gladly level the deserving rich with the undeserving poor.

The truth is that Obama in Ohio spoke the language of American democracy, which has always included a perception that wealth is a form of power, and that stupendous inequalities of wealth produce an undemocratic inequality of power. His questioner, angry in anticipation that he could not hold onto all of the $300,000 he might hypothetically earn in a year, spoke the language of righteous self-interest; and he cited as his irrefutable authority "the American dream." If I follow that dream, said the Joe of today, hoarding the wealth of the Joe of tomorrow, why should I ever pay a higher tax?

Obama's answer was simple and Christian. Once you have been helped by a tax break to prosper and to grow relatively rich, it seems fair to give others lower down the ladder the same chance that once helped you.

We Americans suffer from a self-imposed immaturity. It goes back to the Reagan years and the dream of unregulated commerce--of great riches to which all eventually will surely rise; of a gambling society in which every citizen always wins his bet against an unbreakable bank. Joe had swallowed that dream. Obama, by contrast, with his suggestion of a small adjustment toward a graduated tax, was explaining the realism of the progressive tax that began with Theodore Roosevelt.

And yet, when Obama evokes a society in which you begin by working for someone else, pass on to work as your own boss, and end by employing others, he is going back further than Theodore Roosevelt. This was a favorite topic with Abraham Lincoln, a politician whose ideas of labor and progress were memorably captured in his Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (September 30, 1859). "The prudent, penniless beginner in the world," said Lincoln, "labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him." That the prosperous employer should assist the beginner was a natural corollary, for Lincoln, of his understanding of non-slave labor. Selfishness or, as he called it, "self-interest" was a symptom of a slavish mind, and incompatible with the high morale of democracy.'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-..._b_136623.html

I think Mr. Bromwich says it pretty well.

[NYBURBS]

Selflessness is the mindset of a moron bent on self-destruction. No rational creature acts without regard to their best interest. That does not mean you harm others or don't care, but let's not get on this sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others bullshit. That is pure evil, an evil that has been spewed by religious zealots, totalitarians, and communists (to name a few) throughout history.

Further, this is quite the manipulation going on here. Someone that makes 250,000 or 300,000 are not the ones "controlling" the wealth. That happens to be a handful of families and their income is exponentially higher than anything you (or that article) refer to. I'd agree that problems arise when too much wealth is located in just a few, but this new found tax plan isn't going to correct that. You know instead of looking for dragons to slay in the various social classes, how about we all pause to ask why anyone should pay 25, 30, 35% of their income to the government. Then pause a little longer and add up all the other fees and taxes we pay to the gov't and think about what exactly we get for all of that.

[Cuchulain]

Ah, I see. You're channeling that old bat Ayn Rand (dammit, you made me say THAT name. Now we have to dig her up and burn her - again). That explains a lot.

Listen, nobody is asking for any great sacrifice. Those that have raked in so much coin under the Bush/Cheney crime family need to start paying their fair share. Do we all pay too much? YOU BETCHA! There's plenty of waste and fraud. No argument there, but there's a cost involved with belonging to a society. You pay the cost to reap the benefits. You owe something to your fellow man, regardless of what the hatchet-faced Ms. Rand claimed. Schools and highways need to be built and kept up, etc, etc, etc.

If your 'dragons' remark meant to accuse me of waging class warfare, my response is that I didn't start it. The class war started long, long ago when some schmuck decided he could get rich by exploiting others and that he was better than them because of it. But some of us do fight back.