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Over the past 21 months commencing President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the American right wing society has been abuzz about President Obama being a Socialist and how he and the Congressional Democrats are creating Socialism to America. These references hold sizeable currency with the Tea Party movement egged on by the Fox News Channel host 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 logic why the right wing believes Obama is a Socialist comes mostly from the advance of Health Care Reform Bill. There is also a pattern of paranoia that Obama and the Democrats want to take away the 2nd Amendment Constitutional right to have guns. We shall set forthwhy neither Obama nor the Democrats are Socialists and how the United States is a considerable distance from Socialism.
Ahead of debunking the risible accusations of Socialism, we need to identify and assess what it actually is. There’s extremely much misconception about Socialism is. The lack of knowledge is found both in the capitalist as well as the countries which were nominally “Socialist.” A crash course on Socialism in essential. 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 viewed in The Communist Manifesto is in fact the switch over state separating capitalism and Communism. Socialism is created when the Proletariat or the working class grasp State control away from the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. Upon seizing State power, the workers arrogate the estate, assets and the wealth of the bourgeoisie and spreads it to the working class masses. From there, the workforce reorganise the social order along social and productive lines destroying class disparities and hierarchy. The factories, offices and workplaces are taken over by the workers themselves who build up work councils to democratically effect the thinking procedures and requirements of the workplace. All forms of private property are abolished. The Worker’s State is only supposed to continue for a few of generations in order to suppress 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 variations 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 components addressed above, let us first dissect what Obama would have done over the past 21 months as President if he were a Socialist and then compare his actual record.
Immediately following 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 given back the land back to the Cuban government. He would have recalled all naval members and ships positioned there back home. Within a couple of weeks, the Socialist President would have ordered 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. Furthermore, a Socialist President would have instantly ceased the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, retired all the troops not only from those countries but would have shut down the more than 750 US military bases arranged 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 premises of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Stanley Morgan, AIG, etc to confiscate records and get accounts. From all the data gathered and a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department would have filed criminal accusations against the CEOs and Presidents of the Financial sector for insider trading, fraud and racketeering. Within conviction by trial, the Justice Department would have asked the directing judge to lay on the greatest prison sentences and fines. If convicted, the Socialist President would have asked the Treasury Department to grab hold of all the assets.
If Obama were a Socialist, he would have opposed the bankruptcy of GM by converting it into nationalized company which would have manufactured electric automobiles, high speed trains which would have in due course turned the company into Green Manufacturing. The Socialist President and Congress would have begun large scale construction projects program to revive the nations tumbling support which in turn would have triggered hundreds of thousands of jobs. Finally, Socialism which is in reality egalitarianism would have been effected since January 2009.
At this time we’ve got to browse 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 antecedent authority with crimes. The President himself has stated in many cases that he wants to “see ahead, notrear.” The Stimulus programme in reality has been to greatly benefit Wall Street and the banks to gain. 24 2onths immediately following the Panic of 2008, profits have jumped beyond their pre-recession levels and executive bonus pay off have come to record levels. The President has stated: “This is America, we aren’t averse 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 resembling socialized medicine in connection with the NHS in the UK or the Canada Health Act. The insurance firms have not been divided or disbanded. While Obama has wanted to endow in Green jobs and underpinning restoring, he has been inhibited by conservative Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. So much for the Democrats being Socialists.
The critical explanation that Obama can’t be considered a socialist is to evaluate his economic team. Rather than choosing Edward S. Herman as Treasury Secretary, he delegated Timothy Geithner. The administration’s economic lineup has consisted of neo-liberal capitalist acolytes such as Larry Summers. A socialist President would’ve called up 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 whole 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 real truth is that Obama is a capitalist. The Democratic party is a capitalist party. Obama has worked extra time to renew capitalism. In truth, Obama has done more to save and breathe new life into capitalism than any other President in US history including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While Obama has from time to time made hyperbolic criticisms of Wall Street executives and the banks, he has not done anything to hinder them. President Obama is probably the most pro-capitalist President since Calvin Coolidge who famously declared: “After all, the important business of the American people is business. They are profoundly akin with supplying, having to buy, selling, investing and flourishing in the world!” The United States has always been and is still a capitalist country.