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Over the past 21 months since President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the American right wing culture has been abuzz about President Obama being a Socialist and how he and the Congressional Democrats are imparting Socialism to America. These angles hold influential currency throughout the Tea Party movement egged on by the Fox News Channel moderator Glenn Beck as well as the Libertarian radio host Alex Jones. More recently, Republican Senatorial candidate for the State of Delaware, Christine O’Donnell bombarded her Democratic opponent Chris Coons as a Marxist. The foundation why the right wing believes Obama is a Socialist results mostly from the ratification of Health Care Reform Bill. There is also a contour of paranoia that Obama and the Democrats want to take away the 2nd Amendment Constitutional right to maintain guns. We shall determinewhy neither Obama nor the Democrats are Socialists and how the United States is a long way from Socialism.
Ahead of debunking the droll accusations of Socialism, we will verify what it actually is. There’s extensive bewilderment about Socialism is. The misinterpretation is found both in the capitalist as well as the countries which were nominally “Socialist.” A crash course on Socialism in inescapable. The correct place to begin is at beginning to see what the founders of Socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had to say about it. Socialism, as published in The Communist Manifesto happens to be the cross over state midway capitalism and Communism. Socialism occurs when the Proletariat or the working class commandeer State power away from the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. Upon usurping State power, the workers confiscate the premises, assets and the wealth of the bourgeoisie and spreads it to the working class masses. From there, the workers reorganise society about social and viable lines obliterating class disparities and echelons. The factories, offices and workplaces are taken over by the workers themselves who institute work councils to democratically dictate the decision making policies and principles of the workplace. All forms of private property are eliminated. The Worker’s State is only supposed to carry on a bunch of generations in order to discourage counter-revolution by the bourgeoisie and other social layers that have historically kept the masses down. This is what Marx and Engels referred to as “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” As society is transformed and class disparities eliminated, the State whithers away and then society makes the final transition to Communism. This is the most simplistic and easiest way to define Socialism. By that term, no country except the U.S.S.R between 1922 and 1928 ever had Socialism and therefore no country has ever been truly Communist. The city of Vienna between 1918-34 came closest to Socialism. Therefore, using the canonical formulation specified above, let us first mull over what Obama would have done over the past 21 months as President if he were a Socialist and then compare his actual record.
By his first day in office, the Socialist President would not only have shut down the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp but he would have shut down the naval base and delivered the land back to the Cuban government. He would have removed all naval personnel and ships operating there back home. Within a couple of weeks, the Socialist President would have asked the Department of Justice to convene a Grand Jury seeking indictments of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Robert Gates, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, John Ashcroft, et all for treason, for breaking the Constitution, breaking international law, war crimes, crimes against humanity and for torture. Afterward, a Socialist President would have immediately ceased the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, recalled all the troops not only from those countries but would have closed down the more than 750 US military bases set up all over the world.
The next thing the Socialist President would have sent the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to raid the Wall Street organizations of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Stanley Morgan, AIG, etc to snatch files and check out accounts. From all the facts gathered and a methodical investigation, the Justice Department would have filed criminal charges against the CEOs and Presidents of the Financial sector for insider trading, fraud and racketeering. Upon conviction by trial, the Justice Department would have called for the directing judge to set the complete prison sentences and fines. If convicted, the Socialist President would have requested the Treasury Department to impound all the assets.
If Obama were a Socialist, he would have opposed the bankruptcy of GM by revamping it into nationalized company which would have commissioned electric automobiles, high speed trains which would have in due course turned the company into Green Manufacturing. The Socialist President and Congress would have initiated colossal scale construction projects program to revive the nations decaying underpinning which in turn would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs. Finally, Socialism which is in reality egalitarianism would have been effected since January 2009.
At this juncture we need to analyze what Obama and the Democrats have done since then. Both the President and the Attorney General have refused to investigate let alone charge anyone from the older administration with crimes. The President himself has said on many occasions that he wants to “attend forward, notbackward.” The Stimulus deal in reality has been to revive Wall Street and the banks to be out of woods. A couple years immediately following the Panic of 2008, profits have climbed beyond their pre-recession levels and executive bonus pay have reached highest levels. The President states: “This is America, we aren’t counter to people becoming rich.” The much chided Health Care Reform Act passed this year has been denounced as socialist. In reality, the US doesn’t have anything similar to socialized medical care derived from the NHS in the UK or the Canada Health Act. The insurance providers have not been broken up or disbanded. While Obama has wanted to endow in Green jobs and groundwork rebuilding, he has been disallowed by conservative Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. So much for the Democrats being Socialists.
The crucial substantiation that Obama is not actually a socialist is actually to look into his economic team. Rather than getting Edward S. Herman as Treasury Secretary, he engaged Timothy Geithner. The administration’s economic faction has consisted of neo-liberal capitalist acolytes such as Larry Summers. A socialist President could have recruited much of the faculty from the Economics Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which remains a bastion of Marxist economics in the US if not the entire world. Lastly, the working class of America hasn’t confronted capitalism. The workers have taken over neither the State, the government nor the corporations and banks.
The truth is that Obama is a capitalist. The Democratic party is a capitalist party. Obama has labored extra time to look after capitalism. Unequivocally, Obama has done more to save and rejuvenate capitalism than any other President in US history including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While Obama has from time to time made rhetorical denunciations of Wall Street executives and the banks, he has not done anything to hinder them. President Obama is perhaps the most pro-capitalist President since Calvin Coolidge who famously declared: “After all, the considerable business of the American people is business. They are profoundly obsessed with yielding, investing, selling, investing and burgeoning in the world!” The United States seems to have been and tends to be a capitalist country.
