The Republicans may think that the president is a socialist, but to paraphrase Lloyd Benson all those years ago: I know socialists (happen to consider myself one) and, Mr. President, you’re no socialist.
Read what John Nichols has to say.
The numbers are horrific — highest poverty rates in years — and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.
New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers’ markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.
Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site — including an increase in food stamp allocations — will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.
To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else — and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.
Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.
The Republicans need to find themselves a calendar. After all, it is not the 1930s or the 1960s, Communism is dead and the deregulation mania of the last 30 years has proven not to be worth the cost of an espresso at Starbucks.
And yet, the GOP continues to run against historical boogeymen that most people have little memory of. From Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), in response to an alternative budget being crafted by the Democrats, we get this:
“With this budget, the president and the Democratic majority are attempting, very quickly and rather openly, nothing less than the third and great final wave of government expansion, building on the Great Society and the New Deal.” He referred to the programs of Democratic presidents Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.
So, let me get this straight: Republicans are still runnRunning against the New Deal? I mean, FDR has been dead nearly 65 years. LBJ — the man who won a huge re-election victory on the strength of public support for the Great Society — is dead about 37 years.
The problem is not the New Deal or the Great Society. It is the legacy of the last eight years.
And yet, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindahl, touted as a future Republican presidential candidate, offers this:
“We believe that an endless series of government expansions, bailouts, stimulus packages and bloated budgets will take our country down the very path that European socialism has already stumbled. And we believe that is a dangerous path that would harm the very promise of America.”
And there are these comments, thoughtfully collected by Bill Moyers on his PBS show, Bill Moyers’ Journal on Friday. As Moyers said, “Newt Gingrich, reincarnated once again as himself, sounds as if Obama ate his Contract with America for lunch and coughed it up as ‘European Socialism.'” Gingrich, of course, is not talking about the return of “those great American radicals Eugene V. Debs or Norman Thomas.” It is “Stalin, Marx and Lenin (who) have risen from the grave, stalking our highest officials” — at least according to the GOP and conservative TV.
JIM CRAMER: We’re in real trouble. We’re in real trouble between what is happening in the world economy and our president, who seems to be taking his cues from. Guess who he is taking his cues from? No, not Mao! Not Pancho Villa, although I had lunch with him today. No he’s taking cues from Lenin! And I don’t mean the all we need is love Lenin. I talking about we will take every last dime you have Cramericans Lenin!
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Liberal democrats and the drive-by media are speeding down the highway, implementing Socialism as fast as they can.
FOX & FRIENDS: Some economists say the stimulus plan that President Obama just put into law moves us closer to Socialism.
FOX COMMENTATOR: One small step for fixing the economy or one giant leap towards Socialism in the United States?
PAT BUCHANAN: That is Socialism pure and simple.
Huh?
Moyers used these comments to lead into a segment with Mike Davis, the great socialist historian, who pretty much debunked the entire socialism meme as utter nonsense — Moyers called it “partisan poppycock,” and a word that “lost its meaning long ago.” Davis, in the interview, offers a rather compelling notion of what a vibrant socialism — or at least socialist movement — might create in the United States. He said that
the role of the Left or the Left that needs to exist in this country is not to be to come up with a utopian blueprints and how we’re going to run an entirely alternative society, much less to express nostalgia about authoritative bureaucratic societies, you know, like the Soviet Union or China. It’s really to try and articulate the common sense of the labor movement and social struggles on the ground. So, for instance, you know, where you have the complete collapse of the financial system and where the remedies proposed are above all privileged the creditors and the very people responsible for that, it’s a straightforward enough proposition to say, “Hey, you know, if we’re going to own the banking system, why not make the decisions and make them in alliance with social policy that ensures that housing’s affordable, that school loans are affordable, that small business gets credit?” You know, why not turn the banking system into a public utility? Now, that doesn’t have to be in any sense an anti-capitalist demand. But it’s a radical demand that asks fundamental question about the institution and who holds the economic power. You know, why isn’t the federal government taking a more direct role in decision making?
He cited the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the creation of the Resolution Trust Corporation — which was created to “buy up the abandoned apartments and homes and then (sell) them at fire sale to private interests.”
For a year or two it had the means of resolving much of the housing crisis, you know, in the United States. Why shouldn’t the federal government basically turn that housing stock, into a solution for people’s housing needs? Sell them directly to homeowners at discounts you know, rent them out? In other words, the role of the Left is to ask the deeper questions about who has power, how institutions work, and propose alternatives that seem more common sensical in terms of the direct interest of, you know, of satisfying human needs and equality in this society.
While the Obama administration is pushing what is for the most part a progressive agenda — investing in human needs, modernizing, reforming health care, dealing with climate change — he has not raised fundamental questions about power relations. In fact, on the financial crisis, his ultimate goal is to salvage the status quo, to maintain Wall Street power but to regulate it.
If he succeeds in everything he sets out to do, the lives of average Americans will be better and our politics will be more civil, but the basic power structure that has ruled America will remain unchanged.
That’s why I agree with Davis when he says that
We need more protests. We need more noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties and political leaderships tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets or, you know, in the Civil Rights demonstration.
We need a “radical critique” and a political and economic “imagination that goes beyond selfishness and principles of competition.” And we need people who are willing to stand up and loudly offer it.
Hank Kalet 