Also at a time when capitalism is on the skids to oblivion and many people can see through the fog (the lies of the New York Times) that we are being dragged down the dangerous, pot-holed and bumpy, curvy, short road to perdition... and we aren't on a joy ride, either.
Be it a war or creating an image for a President, the New York Times is doing what it does best: disorienting and confusing the American people with outright lies, dis-information and mis-information.
What I find very interesting is in the second article declaring Barack Obama not to be a “socialist;” but, rather, a “social democrat;” as if this is some kind of undisputed fact like the unfounded, misinformed statement that the United States has never had a Socialist Party.
This is what passes for journalism from the most preeminent newspaper publisher in the world?
I find it very strange that no one, including the New York Times, seems to be able to take Barack Obama’s word for what he calls himself: a pragmatist.
It is like no one wants to believe what Barack Obama wrote in his own essay submitted for exclusive publication to “Foreign Affairs Magazine;” the July/August 2007 Issue. Barack Obama’s essay carried the title he created: Renewing American Leadership…
< http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62636/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership >
This is the one and only piece of Obama’s own writing where he clearly articulates in his own words his world view and vision.
What Obama has written in this article makes immediately clear without any ambiguities that Barack Obama is neither a “socialist” nor a “social democrat.”
Clearly, Obama is from the Wall Street crowd of “pragmatists” who believe that you do whatever needs to be done to advance the corporate agenda always within the imperialist framework in quest of maximum corporate profits--- shunting aside, sometimes killing, any obstacles in the way of attaining maximum corporate profits.
The New York Times allows everyone except socialists to voice their opinions on what socialism is; and what socialism is not.
Not often, but once in awhile, the New York Times publishes the views of social democrats… although the editors at the New York Times don’t seem to appreciate the social democratic views expressed by Canada’s Jack Layton any more than the socialist views of Tony Benn.
A suggestion to the New York Times: Why not invite Barack Obama to write an essay defining himself and expounding on his world view by insisting that he state specifically what his world outlook is? Then, and only then, will we all know the answer to this much sought after question which must be of some importance since so many people want to know what Obama is; after all, it is only logical that people, not only the American people; but, people from all over the world, want to know the answer to this question because their futures’ will largely be determined by what Barack Obama and his Administration do in the hours, days, months and years ahead.
Many people, including those who most enthusiastically supported Barack Obama, are asking: Where’s the change?
Apparently, bailing out the banks and Wall Street wasn’t the change most people had in mind.
It is quite possible that people were swayed to support Barack Obama--- and now are willing to “Give Obama a chance” because so many people tried to define who Barack Obama is in so many different ways.
Maybe, just maybe, if we all hear from Barack Obama himself as to how he defines himself in terms of his world view, people can then reassess whether they are comfortable “giving Obama a chance.”
Let’s find out who Barack Obama really is from Barack Obama.
Is Barack Obama the kind of man someone representing a large constituency with a gripe can sit down and talk to, believing legitimate problems can be resolved; because, if so, I would like to talk to the guy to find out if there isn’t something that can be done about re-negotiating these “Compacts” creating the Indian Gaming Industry which has left two-million American workers employed in smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages without any rights or protections under state or federal labor laws to endure the most extreme “at-will hiring, at-will firing” situation in the country, and without access to health care to boot.
I like the idea of Barack Obama that contracts are always re-negotiable based upon the circumstances... "Compacts" are contracts.
Certainly if auto contracts can be re-opened for re-negotiation there isn't any legitimate reason not to reopen the "Compacts" creating the Indian Gaming Industry to provide casino workers with the same rights and protections all other working people rely on in the United States.
As we can all see, the mobsters running the Indian Gaming Industry aren't that much different from the C.E.O.'s at A.I.G. or General Motors or Ford... and Bernie Madoff ran with them all to make deposits in the Cayman Islands.
I suppose if no one else wants to talk to Obama about what constitutes a living minimum wage based upon real cost of living factors and peace, I could talk to President Obama about these things, too.
In less than fifteen minutes I could probably convince President Obama why we need a “people’s bailout” which includes a moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions as well as the need to extend unemployment benefits from time of joblessness to reemployment.
I could probably make a pretty darn good argument to President Obama as to why we need 800 public health care centers scattered across the United States instead of financing over 800 U.S. military bases on foreign soil now dotting the globe.
I wouldn’t mind talking to the guy about the benefits of socialism over capitalism, either; after all, Frank Marshall Davis--- a leading African-American Communist journalist and activist--- was his mentor for years.
Maybe President Obama would be willing to let journalists from the New York Times take in such a democratic endeavor; I know I would be all for it.
I can envision the headlines squeezed onto the obituary page of the New York Times: “Obama denies being a closet communist but meets with pissed off socialist worker.”
The New York Times likes to boast that it is the leading voice in the world for democracy.
Now that the editors at the New York Times have established that socialism is the most significant political trend in the United States and it is acknowledged that Marxists provide the main ideological critique of capitalism; isn’t it time for the New York Times to set aside space for a column for socialists to voice their views and concerns on a daily basis in response to current events, issues, problems and their solutions?
I wonder if I should wait for a phone call from the editors at the New York Times?
Alan L. Maki
Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council
**************
New York Times
April 10, 2009, 10:30 pm
Weekend Opinionator: A Different Sort of Red America
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/weekend-opinionator-a-different-sort-of-red-america/
By Tobin Harshaw
Perhaps the most telling line in the Oxford English Dictionary’s (O.E.D.) definition of “socialism” is this one:
“The range of application of the term is broad.”
That’s something to bear in mind as we consider a much-discussed poll, released by Rasmussen on Thursday, that found that “Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.” For the record, here is the primary O.E.D. definition:
A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement. Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.
As for Rasmussen’s definition, well, there isn’t one: “The question posed by Rasmussen Reports did not define either capitalism or socialism.”
‘Socialism’ rises in the polls — but do Americans even know what it means?
But the pollsters did point out an anomaly: “It is interesting to compare the new results to an earlier survey in which 70% of Americans prefer a free-market economy. The fact that a ‘free-market economy’ attracts substantially more support than ‘capitalism’ may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets.”
So, has the nation really drifted that far to the left, or are we simply struggling with our semantics? Plenty of folks in the blogosphere were happy to answer that question.
Steve Benen, the Political Animal, is pleased, but also sees a shifting in the lexicon.
In terms of interpreting these results, the numbers certainly aren’t what I expected, and it’s hard to know why respondents answered as they did. Perhaps “capitalism” lost some of its appeal when our economy collapsed. Maybe a lot of people heard the media connect Obama and “socialism,” and since they like the president, they figure socialism can’t be that bad. In a similar vein, if right-wing blowhards like Limbaugh keep screaming that socialism is manifestly evil, there may be some who assume the economic model must have merit.
But I was especially intrigued by the 27% who weren’t sure which was better. Talk about a sign of the times — more than one in four aren’t quite sure whether capitalism or socialism is the superior system.
Mark Thompson at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen feels his fellow conservatives have nobody to blame but themselves. “When you falsely complain that every single thing your opponents try to do is socialism and absurdly hold your bloviating, unpopular selves up as bastions of capitalism, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when people start thinking socialism doesn’t look so bad, and capitalism doesn’t look so good,” he writes. “Let the record also reflect that I, personally, remain firmly with the 53 percent; I just don’t blame the other 47 percent for thinking otherwise.”
Matt Yglesias of Think Progress feels that times have changed enough that “socialism” is “good branding”:
The whole idea is that we should put society first rather than capital, or money.
That sounds good! But in the United States we never had a Socialist Party so “socialism” was primarily associated with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was not at all good. But to people under 30, there’s less of that old resonance. And saying that Obama, who’s popular, is a “socialist” may simply tend to make people have warmer feelings toward the word “socialism.”
The New Republic’s John Judis seems to think the poll’s younger respondents have a better fix on things than the O.E.D.:
According to the poll, 53 percent of Americans think capitalism is preferable to socialism, while 20 percent say socialism is preferable. And among those trustworthy adults under thirty, 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are weighing the alternatives. What, you might ask, does this all mean? I don’t think it’s a vote for Soviet-style socialism. While Cold War conservatives did their best to identify socialism, and European social democracy, with Soviet or Cuban communism, the identification doesn’t seem to have survived the Cold War itself.
Instead, what those 30 percent of under-thirties probably mean by “socialism” is a much greater degree of government–and public–control of private corporations and of the market. That would put the United States closer, say, to Sweden, France, or Germany, but would not put it anywhere near the old Soviet Union, which tried to abolish the market itself. Most of all, I imagine, it’s an expression of extreme disillusionment with the magic of the market as preached by Republicans and some Democrats as well.
It’s also, I think, not an incorrect understanding of socialism. As a political philosophy, socialism predated Marx as any reader of “The Communist Manifesto” or of “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” is aware. In America, too, there were Christian socialists like Walter Rauschenbusch, who was an important influence on Martin Luther King, and prairie socialists in Kansas or Oklahoma who never envisioned giving up their farms for socialism. The point that runs through all these many varieties was not collectivism, but instead the subjection of large banks and businesses to social priorities: “people before profits,” as Bill Clinton said in 1992. And that’s what those 20 percent of Americans in the Rasmussen Poll seem to be opting for.
McQ at QandO, however, sees this youthful exuberance as little more than naïveté:
As you’ll note, the older someone is, the more likely they are to understand what socialism is and how it is inferior to captialism. The under 30 crowd, with no wisdom and little practical experience outside of academia - not to mention having not yet [completely] traded their utopian fantasies for the best practical system which has been shown to work - have a large group who either believe socialism is better or just aren’t with it enough to have an opinion.
Once past 30, and having put a few years under their belt in the real world, suddenly the utopian scales begin to fall from their eyes and they have a bit of an epiphany. As for those over 40 being so strongly for capitalism, most of them remember the old USSR and how well socialism worked there.
While Dr. Steven Taylor at PoliBlog thinks we should ignore the whole thing: “Given that it is manifestly clear from recent political rhetoric that people in general have no idea what an appropriate definition of either of these terms is, it is impossible to ably interpret these results. Further, if we assume that part of the question did include the issue of which is ‘better’ we would have to know what that meant to the respondents as well. ‘Better’ at doing what?”
Others on the right, however, are alarmed. TigerHawk blames the tax code:
The percentage who approve of capitalism in this poll (53%) is very close to the percentage of the population that pays (or belongs to a family that pays) any federal income tax (as of 2006, 59%). Indeed, since the top 50% paid more than 97% of all federal income collected in 2006, it is safe to say that the proportion who support capitalism, as opposed to socialism, is almost identical in size to the percentage of Americans who earn enough actual income to pay material income taxes. While the correlation between the two groups is not perfect — no doubt there are Hollywood types, professors, and United States Representatives who both pay income taxes and profess to be socialists — it is almost certainly high. Again, it should not surprise us that the beneficiaries of socialism would support it, and the people who pay for it would prefer a system that allows them to keep more of what they produce.
And, as Kathy at Comments From Left Field points out, steveegg at Sister Toldjah blames the schools: “The worse news is that those under 30 are almost evenly divided, with 37% saying capitalism is better, 33% saying socialism is better, and 30% unsure of what they think. It is not a coincidence that the radicals of the late 1960s were entering the decision-level positions of the education establishment 30 years ago.”
Susan Duclos of Wake Up America, however, urges her compatriots to see the glass as 53 percent full:
Rasmussen headlines with “Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism.”
In that results piece it shows that 53 percent of American’s prefer capitalism over socialism, with only 20 percent thinking socialism is preferable and 27 percent that are not sure what they believe.
Amazing they would headline with the word “just” in there when it clearly shows the majority, 53 percent, favors capitalism with a 33 percent different between the two opposite ends of the spectrum.
I don’t even count the “unsure” totals because even if you divide it straight down the middle you still have 33 percent more favoring capitalism …
Many think 53 percent is not a large enough number, but considering socialism only gets a solid 20 percent support, I say the numbers are very good indeed and people shouldn’t focus on those who are “unsure” because when capitalism is called “free market economy” that 53 percent rises considerably to 70 percent.
Dr. Helen Smith, a.k.a. Mrs. Instapundit, manages to agree with both Duclos and steveegg: “Frankly, I am amazed that so many people think that capitalism is better. That’s a good sign. Also, I wonder if most Americans, especially the younger ones could even give an adequate definition of socialism and capitalism. Perhaps they just hear the buzzword, Socialism, and say that is better, like some kind of trained parrot. No surprise there, with what they learn in many schools.”
But Jesse Taylor at Pandagon thinks that while education is a red herring, one of the right’s favorite events of the last half-century actually kicked off the trend:
What element of modern primary and secondary pedagogy over the past, say, 20 years has led our youth to believe that socialism is awesome? Actually, nothing. The real secret is that the Berlin Wall fell, which paved the way for conservatives to call everything Democrats have proposed in the interim socialism (this isn’t to say that they weren’t doing that before, but it became much easier for them to say it without the Giant Socialist Enemy Beast forcing us to duck and cover under our desks every day). I came up in a world where “socialism” was defined in popular parlance as “liberalism”. Bill Clinton, effectively a liberal Republican, was a socialist. Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, is a socialist. There’s an actual socialist in the Senate, and yet all the Democrats in the Senate (except Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh)? Socialists.
The main people responsible for the embrace of “socialism” are the pro-capitalist conservatives who’ve so diluted its meaning that it’s okay to embrace socialism, because the majority party in the country and our tremendously popular president are socialists.
So, amid all this partisan bickering and sophistic solipsism, enter the éminence grise of Marxist historians. Writing at The Guardian (and commenting on a real crisis rather than a methodically questionable poll), Eric Hobsbawm raises a question: “Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?”
The basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.
We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s …
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
Nobody seriously thinks of returning to the socialist systems of the Soviet type - not only because of their political faults, but also because of the increasing sluggishness and inefficiency of their economies - though this should not lead us to underestimate their impressive social and educational achievements. On the other hand, until the global free market imploded last year, even the social-democratic or other moderate left parties in the rich countries of northern capitalism and Australasia had committed themselves more and more to the success of free-market capitalism. Indeed, between the fall of the USSR and now I can think of no such party or leader denouncing capitalism as unacceptable. None were more committed to it than New Labour. In their economic policies both Tony Blair and (until October 2008) Gordon Brown could be described without real exaggeration as Thatcher in trousers. The same is true of the Democratic party in the US.
Well, that’s not very cheery. And why is it a problem primarily for the left?
You may say that’s all over now. We’re free to return to the mixed economy. The old toolbox of Labour is available again - everything up to nationalisation - so let’s just go and use the tools once again, which Labour should never have put away. But that suggests we know what to do with them. We don’t. For one thing, we don’t know how to overcome the present crisis. None of the world’s governments, central banks or international financial institutions know: they are all like a blind man trying to get out of a maze by tapping the walls with different kinds of sticks in the hope of finding the way out. For another, we underestimate how addicted governments and decision-makers still are to the free-market snorts that have made them feel so good for decades …
A progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end.
Lovely thought, that, but it does bring up the question of what “end” we’re looking for, and we’re hardly likely to find social consensus there — call it a contradiction of Marxism. In any case, Barbara O’Brien of the Mahablog anticipates a few other criticisms Hobsbawm is likely to engender and attempts to nip them in the bud.
The True Believers of both sides will argue no, no, no, pure Marxism/Free Market Capitalism has never been tried. But “pure” anything has never been tried. That’s the reality of our human condition. Any endeavor that requires human input is never pure. It will suffer some degree of corruption. Put together people, money, and power, and corruption is a certainty. That’s why any workable, sustainable model factors in corruption and makes some provision to keep it to a minimum.
That’s what the Marxists and the Ayn Rand culties cannot understand… There has to be a way to reign in the power, to diffuse it, to oversee it and make it accountable to other power. That’s one reason the public and private sector need each other — to keep each other semi-honest.
Nicholas John Mead has similar predictions on how Hobsbawm will be received: “Many of the comments that follow his piece however take issue with his assertion that socialism has failed. The communist brand of ’socialism’ practiced in Russia wasn’t socialism at all - more a vicious state centralised authoritarianism that had little to do with true socialist ideals. The same could be said however for the type of neo-liberal capitalism we have today which has strayed so far from the principles and ideals of pure capitalism as outlined by founders such as Adam Smith that it’s almost unfair to say that capitalism has failed also.”
Another British blogger, Karl Naylor, thinks Britain might be primed for the revolution.
In many ways, Britain under New Labour has been a feeble old body politic artificially hooked up to a life support machine through the injection of capital, migrants, indeed of life from elsewhere whilst its internal organs have started to pack up.
The cosmetic changes after 1997 did nothing to reform what had been going wrong with Britain: relying on London as the dynamo sucking international capital and injecting it back out across the rest of a lame deindustrialised candyfloss economy and listless acres of legoland …
The way in which Britain has deluded itself that even if it is not an economic and political powerhouse of the global economy it can be a Global Player, with Lilliputan figures like [Foreign Secretary David] Miliband ‘positively’ demanding NATO expansion into Eastern Europe in the face of Big Bully Russia.
Where New Labour commissars, Liberal mandarins and the British Council have desperately sought to emphasise that Britain’s “cultural power” makes it fit to strut about on the World Stage and pontificate about how great it is and why the world should buy into its stupid universe of pop royalty dreck and BBC costume dramas.
The harder the crash, the better it might be for Britain. It might finally wake up to the reality of its shrunken economy, decaying political system, and overextended strategical posture and try to live within its means, as well as to just stop pontificating about the superiority of its supposedly higher ‘values’.
And O’Brien, for her part, thinks that liberals in the United States might be in a stronger position than their British counterparts.
Hobsbawm talks about recent British history, New Labour and Thatcherism. But similar things go on here (is it the almost-common language?). Our Right has effectively taken itself out of the conversation (even though it won’t shut up) because it can’t let go of its old ideologies and aphorisms that don’t work any more. I’m not sure if what passes for a “Left” here is fully cognizant of the new reality, either.
But unlike the Right, the current Left has no one economic model that we all put on an altar and worship. At least some among us are looking hard at the current reality and thinking through solutions that might work in the real world, as opposed to solutions that make good sound bites and look good on a bumper sticker.
So there you have it: the worse the crash the better off we are, good riddance to the altar of free-market capitalism, and we’re now following blind men in mazes. The stock market may be rallying, but it doesn’t seem helping us shape the economy, or the socio-economic ideologies of tomorrow.
**************************
New York Times
Opinionator
March 10, 2009, 12:45 pm
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/obama-is-a-social-democrat-not-a-socialist/
Obama is a Social Democrat, Not a Socialist
By Eric Etheridge
Yesterday at Balkinization, Andrew Koppelman published a lengthy post on the issue of whether Barack Obama is a socialist, the charge that many are now hurling at him. Via a long historical review of left political responses to capitalism, Koppelman argues that “Obama properly belongs in a specific anti-socialist movement on the left, Social Democracy, which accepts a capitalist economy but demands a strong state to moderate its failures and excesses.”
Social Democracy aims to deploy the state for two central purposes. One is to correct capitalism’s operational failures, where capitalism wastes wealth instead of producing it. The current market collapse is an example: many well-functioning businesses that were competently producing goods and services have been destroyed, in a spreading cycle of depression. Obama’s stimulus measures and bank bailouts aim to stop this downward spiral.
The other big aim of Social Democracy – and this is what the accusation of “socialism” is really about - is to ameliorate the market’s distributive consequences by spreading around the wealth that capitalism produces. That was Obama’s big theme in his campaign, before the economic crisis hit, and it is embodied in his tax and health care reforms. The second aim of Social Democracy is more controversial than the first. Bush and McCain were both willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the recession from becoming a depression, but neither had any interest in redistributing wealth.
Having fixed Obama’s position vis-a-vis the market and government, Koppelman then tries to do the same for Obama’s opponents:
So the real question isn’t socialism, because Obama isn’t a socialist. The question is Social Democracy. And to see what this question involves, we have to contemplate the alternative – a government that gives the market its head, and does not intervene to ameliorate its systemic or distributive consequences. That minimal government is what is implied by the denunciation of any government intervention as “socialism.”
Who is drawn to this vision of minimal government? In contemporary American politics, its proponents fall into two broad camps. . . .
One view holds that whatever an unregulated market produces is appropriate. There is no external standard to judge what the market produces. It is itself the standard for distributive justice. Those who take this position understand that an unregulated market will produce booms and busts, and will leave some people impoverished. But they can live with that. It’s a heartless view, and the most one can say by way of excuse is that its proponents are so enchanted with the market’s undoubted virtues that they find it hard to focus on anything else. Call them Market Fetishists. . . .
Not all opponents of Social Democracy are Market Fetishists, though. Some of them care about the same things that Social Democrats care about. They want all Americans to have a decent standard of living. They don’t like children going without health care, or urban schools falling apart, or people starving. But they think that these conditions can be ameliorated without massive government programs. . . . Call them Sentimental Fools.
The Republican Party today, at least with respect to economic policy, is a coalition of Market Fetishists and Sentimental Fools. Bush was an incoherent combination of both. . . . A notable mongrel is Bush’s prescription drug insurance plan, which was straight Social Democracy, but which as administered, in Market Fetishist fashion, told its beneficiaries to navigate through complex insurance markets with no help from the state. . . .
There is a legitimate place for a conservative party that is suspicious of social programs. Social Democracy has characteristic pathologies of its own: programs become entrenched beyond their usefulness, develop rent-seeking constituents, and so can become a wasteful and counterproductive burden on the economy. So its measures need shrewd and skeptical critics. The hypothesis that this or that area of the economy ought to be returned to market control is always worth considering. Who mourns the abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board, which artificially raised airfares for years? Who can responsibly support farm subsidies? But these criticisms amount to tinkering with the Social Democrat program rather than abolishing it.
The Market Fetishists dare not allow their views to be fully understood, because the consequences would be so cruel that most of the country would not stand for them. That is why they need the Sentimental Fools to cloak them with a patina of reasonableness. To the extent that the Sentimental Fools shrink from dismantling the regulatory state, the Republican party is as “socialist” as Obama. They are simply haggling about how much regulation is appropriate. To whatever extent Obama is a socialist, we are all socialists now.
************
Alan L. Maki
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell phone: 651-587-5541
E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net
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