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Over the past 21 months after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the American right wing universe has been abuzz about President Obama as a Socialist and how he and the Congressional Democrats are delivering Socialism to America. These postulates hold noticeable currency inside the Tea Party crusade egged on by the Fox News Channel anchor Glenn Beck as well as the Libertarian radio host Alex Jones. More recently, Republican Senatorial candidate for the State of Delaware, Christine O’Donnell fired upon her Democratic opponent Chris Coons as a Marxist. The foundation why the right wing believes Obama is a Socialist originates mostly from the advance of Health Care Reform Bill. There is also a touch of paranoia that Obama and the Democrats want to take away the 2nd Amendment Constitutional right to maintain armaments. We shall make evidentwhy neither Obama nor the Democrats are Socialists and how the United States is a considerable distance from Socialism.
Ahead of debunking the amusing allegations of Socialism, it’s imperative to find out what it actually is. There’s a great deal misunderstanding about Socialism is. The perplexity is found both in the capitalist as well as the countries which were nominally “Socialist.” A crash course on Socialism in valuable. The best place to start 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 is actually the passing state separating capitalism and Communism. Socialism happens when the Proletariat or the working class secure State control away from the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. Upon taking over State power, the workers hijack the estates, assets and the wealth of the bourgeoisie and spreads it to the working class masses. From there, the wage earners reorganise society along public and economic lines obliterating class differences and grouping. The factories, offices and workplaces are taken over by the workers themselves who put together work councils to democratically dictate the decision making programmes and rules of the workplace. All forms of private property are eliminated. The Worker’s State is only supposed to last a bunch of generations in order to inhibit 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 differences 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 terminology, no country with the exception of 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 traditional components explained 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.
Beginning with 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 camp and given the land back to the Cuban government. He would have retrieved all naval crew and vessels situated there back home. Within a couple of weeks, the Socialist President would have requested 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 violating the Constitution, breaking international law, war crimes, crimes against humanity and for torture. Afterward, a Socialist President would have there and then terminated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, removed all the troops not only from those countries but would have closed down the more than 750 US military bases assembled all over the world.
The next step the Socialist President would have sent the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to raid the Wall Street places of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Stanley Morgan, AIG, etc to confiscate files and open accounts. Determined by the essentials gathered and a extensive investigation, the Justice Department would have filed criminal charges with the CEOs and Presidents of the Financial sector for insider trading, fraud and racketeering. With conviction by trial, the Justice Department would have demanded the governing judge to impose the highest possible prison sentences and fines. If convicted, the Socialist President would have requested the Treasury Department to arrest all the assets.
If Obama were a Socialist, he would have averted the bankruptcy of GM by converting it into nationalized company which would have equipped electric automobiles, high speed trains which would have in due course turned the company into Green Manufacturing. The Socialist President and Congress would have kicked off colossal scale publicly funded construction activity to rectify the nations disintegrating sub-structure which in turn would have spawned hundreds of thousands of jobs. Finally, Socialism which is in reality egalitarianism would have been effected since January 2009.
At this instant one has to scrutinize 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 previous administration with crimes. The President himself has stated on many occasions that he wants to “aim forward, notreverse.” The Stimulus plan in reality has been to stand by Wall Street and the banks to be out of woods. 2 2ears after the Panic of 2008, profits have grown beyond their pre-recession levels and executive bonus pay off are at uppermost levels. The President has said: “This is America, we aren’t objecting to people for getting rich.” The much maligned Health Care Reform Act passed this year has been denounced as socialist. In reality, the US doesn’t have something comparable to socialized health care relating to the NHS in the UK or the Canada Health Act. The big insurance corporations have not been broken up or disbanded. While Obama has wanted to get in Green jobs and groundwork rebuilding, he has been encumbered by conservative Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. So much for the Democrats being Socialists.
The supreme most conclusive results that Obama can not be a socialist is actually to explore his economic team. Rather than appointing Edward S. Herman as Treasury Secretary, he employed Timothy Geithner. The administration’s economic leaders has consisted of neo-liberal capitalist acolytes such as Larry Summers. A socialist President very likely recruited much of the faculty from the Economics Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which remains a stronghold of Marxist economics in the US if not the entire world. Lastly, the working class of America hasn’t disputed capitalism. The workers have taken over neither the State, the government nor the corporations and banks.
The inescapable fact is that Obama is a capitalist. The Democratic party is a capitalist party. Obama has worked overtime to benefit capitalism. Whithout doubt, Obama has done more to save and repair capitalism than any other President in US history including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While Obama has from time to time made hyperbolic 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 fundamental business of the American people is business. They are deeply akin with supplying, investment, selling, investing and mushrooming in the world!” The United States has always been and remains a capitalist country.
