The past two weeks have been interesting; first I encountered a black woman who happens to be a blogger and is a conservative. She goes by the name of Conservative Black Woman posted on Field Negro’s blog in response to a sad and horrible post regarding a young man who was murdered by thugs. As always, right-wingers, specifically cultural conservatives liken to scapegoat the ills of society on lack of morals instead of what creates those ills. Though this issue leads to another blog post, upon reading her blog further, and the fact that I haven’t visited a right-wing or PUMA blaog in months, I finally had to respond to the growing wave of the reactionary line that somehow, Obama and his stimulus bill is Socialist.
First, all the right-wing sites keep referring to that living piece of shit, Dick Morris’s piece, The Obama Presidency’ Here Comes Socialism. I read it and thought it was laughable. A lot like the Newsweek piece. All one has to do is read Obama’s plan and see the glaring similarities to TARP as initiated under Bush was.
In my first attempt to deal with the Obama-as-Socialist myth, I appeared on Conservative Black Woman’s show radio show that airs on Blogtalk Radio.The beginnings of the program started off clear, crisp, and clean until this asinine porch monkey, Constructive Feedback calls in and basically predominates the conversation with conservative rhetoric about absolutely nothing and therefore derailing the whole point of the show. Admittedly, I could have interjected repeatedly while people talked or screamed over people, but I don’t roll like that. After all I hosted a radio show for five years, and that kind of thing makes for bad radio. So I stuck it out as best I could I also admit that I was rusty as hell. But oh well.
To talk about what Socialism isn’t is to talk about what capitalism isn’t; it is not an all-inclusive system that works for everyone “if they work hard enough” so that one can become a part of the elite – the Rockefellers, The Gates’s and others. Socialism is not out to get mom and pop gas station owners or restaurateurs because these people are most likely not at the level of employing tens of thousands of people creating a sort of dependency on them and their end product most likely is sweated out from the mom and pop. We are talking about the owners of businesses that create textiles, processes natural resources and fabricate materials. This kind of work is produces by scores of workers who most likely get paid less than a quarter of the profits made on the product, yet it is those who don’t sweat at all who reap all the benefits.
The Sad and Deluded
Do you want to know who are the paranoid masses of people who tremble and freak over the word, ‘Socialism’ and why they have a tendency to be the first to defend capitalism even though they most likely will never become one or become a member of the ruling 5%? These people are the Hopefuls, the wannabes, and the apologists. They have been lied to for centuries about how the ‘American way of life’ is about freedom and democracy (when in actuality, if you want to run for any office independently, you have to get thousands of written signatures on a petition or PAY a huge amount of money to get on a given ballot. Doesn’t sound like democracy to me) and they have been told that if they work hard enough, they too can ‘make it’. They defend those who ‘have’ as those who ‘worked’ really hard and earned their wealth and now someone who hates them (Marxists) want to take it all away. It’s not about destroying ANYONE who is rich, but those who have gotten rich off of taking what doesn’t belong to them; land, natural resources, someone’s labor, and the principal that no one deserves to own land, and another’s life and should have the power to manipulate those factors.
Socialism 101
If you run into someone who believes that the larger social class, made up of laborers, farmers, nurses, builders, scientists, tech workers, childcare givers, and caretakers of the elderly should be empowered enough to govern themselves; creating a state that looks out for those who in turn invests in it, resulting in socialized medicine, free education, technology that benefits all users, and abolition of a small class of people who own all land and monies via the subjugation of another class on both a national and international scale, then you pretty much describing, in general, communism. But to get to that social state, there needed to have taken place years of social and cultural battles on all fronts ranging from politicizing those of us who are ignored politically - unless it’s time for an election, to fighting for the gains and benefits that workers have fought for in the past two centuries, and rolling back all the rights that women and people of color have fought to have and in turn will push further fort freedom. This period of struggle would be socialism; the implementing of programs to ensure that we as a society would be clearly on the road to a egalitarian state run by us and not what makes up of today’s ruling class. It is the transition state to whatever a given populace is looking for as a healthy and just alternative to what we have today were a social class of people who make up about 5% of our society has exclusive power over the Earths material wealth and can or will do, and has done just about anything to keep that wealth.
What socialism isn’t
Socialism is not Obama's stimulus package which, if anything, it is a band-aid mainly to quell the anger of the general public over the deepening economic crisis. He, like most politicians operate in the interests of that 5 %, the ruling class, and he is desperate to sooth the markets and populace in order to keep order.
He gave a lot of stern talk supposedly aimed at Wall Street saying that the crisis is “The result of a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.” But the stimulus package - or at least the components aimed at aiding the credit system contradicts Obama’s finger waving. The proposed solution via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is to give hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, most of it going to the very banks and corporations that made profits from the policies that brought about the crash of 2008.
The solution, reflects Bush’s rushed deployment commonly known as the bailout just four months ago as the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which transferred $700 billion in taxpayer funds to the banks. This component of the stimulus package theorized to stave off layoffs and closing of businesses didn’t prevent these things from happening after the first bailout – which is why I think we hear more about the green jobs and other ‘progressive ‘ programs that are also part of the stimulus package; the focus on the actual ‘stimulating’ of the coffers of capitalists is diverted to the usual bones to fight over like Planned Parenthood and the supposed attack on religion (that btw I still can’t find in the main points of the bill, but the right-wingers keep harping on this supposed attack on religion in higher learning institutes) that cultural conservatives and cultural liberals are debating over.
The solution is no different than what Bush or any conservative president would propose as well as any Democrat. They are all in the service of the ruling class and in that light, there is nothing remotely Socialist about the stimulus package.
According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, such measures would "effectively do little more than another bailout," he said in a January 10 interview on National Public Radio. "Unless great care is taken, that kind of program is likely to have very little stimulus." The TARP funding for the lords of finances has done nothing to prevent the disaster it was supposed to stop or slow down back in the fall and I doubt that the stimulus plan of Obama will fare any better in stemming the tide of the economic crisis. TARP failed to prevent “Bloody Monday” of January 26 as job cuts were announced from Caterpillar who eliminated almost a fifth of its global workforce. The company already announced already slated 20,000 workers for layoffs. Home Depot, Sprint Nextel, and other companies announced big layoffs that week.
The crisis is being used to implement policies favorable to corporations that could otherwise not be implemented if the exploited class of ordinary people were in charge. Therefore, and again, there is nothing Socialist about Obama or his plan.
Tax breaks as much as $150 billion to businesses to try to induce them to invest are proposed in the package and reflects that very reason why Obama, Bush, and the rest of Washington think that the bailouts will work: on the HOPES that the banks will continue to loan to keep businesses open and hoping that the private sector will stop with the layoffs. Hoping that someone or something will do right by you or do the right thing is saying you have faith in them. Socialists never have faith in capitalists. In fact, to further sooth the right-wing and Wall Street, Obama’s first Washington press conference to announced that he would move to offset the increase in the federal budget deficit resulting from his stimulus plan by shrinking or eliminating an unidentified number of “social programs” and slashing spending for the core components of what remains as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This doesn’t sound like socialism to me.
