CHECK THIS OUT BY JULIA GORIN AND ED RAMPELL IN NEW ROCKCELLAR MAGAZINE
http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/07/17/is-obama-a-socialist-or-not/
IS HE IS OR IS HE AIN’T A SOCIALIST? READ IT ALL
In the American “campaign season” – which now lasts about 3 AND A HALF YEARS – there is always that One Nasty Issue that ends up shaping the election.
Most times it’s not at all what the American People are interested in: typically it’s a controversial, hot-button-pushing, extremely divisive topic that gets the populace foaming at the mouth, distracting them from the policies and issues that truly should be important. Well, for the upcoming 2012 Presidential Election we have a choice. Is it going to be…
(1) Immigration: “What do we do with all these people who are doing the jobs no one born here wants to do?”
(2) Taxes: “How can a candidate claim to fix our economy when his millions are sheltered in foreign bank accounts?” Or, our pick:
(3) Socialism: “Will we all soon be riding around on pigs instead of in cars? And, will these pigs help to counter our reliance on foreign oil?”
PRO
“For THIS I Left the Soviet Union?!” — by Julia Gorin
I’m from the USSR and I know a socialist when I see one. Before her husband was even inaugurated, Komrade Michelle was already putting me to work via this email:
Julia… Barack and I will join thousands of people all across the country for an extraordinary national day of service. It will take ordinary citizens working together with a common purpose to get this country back on track.
I was reminded of Subotnik (The Saturday) – a ‘volunteer’ program in the Soviet Union, which involved working an extra day of the week a couple times a year. A group of workers was instructed to write a “request” to the government stating they would like to work an extra day, so as to “make our country even better.” And so it was announced: By request of the diligent workers themselves, every worker is now required to volunteer at least two Saturdays a year.
Michelle may have had me confused with Virtual “Julia” that Obama rolled out this year – a prototype in whose life “the government is involved in all aspects:
“It plans, regulates and provides free services,” as Investors Business Daily put it. It’s part of the Obama campaign’s new slogan, “Forward.” Which, funny enough, is an old Socialist slogan.
Next I heard from some of my favorite actors. In one voice on youtube, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore recited: “I pledge to be of service to our president. And all mankind. I was starting to feel right at home! In the USSR, media, artists and entertainers supported the government vision. Which helps explain that White House-NEA conference call “nudging artists to produce works supporting the Obama Administration’s legislative priorities.”
School kids were pledging “allegiance to Barack Hussein Obama” in a song that had the words “we’re all the same.” Sameness of course being a key component of socialist utopias – to negate human distinctions such as talents and interests.
Upon His victory, plans were underway for a national holiday in His honor (see Cuba, North Korea, China, USSR). Meanwhile, He was planning His own army and setting up Organizing for America: citizen volunteers building support for His agenda while earning college credit(!) , and before I knew it… 9/11 was declared a Day of Service.
I was actually up for the idea of a national holiday, but is one day really enough for such a huge American milestone? So as not to diminish the hysterical historical significance of Obama’s victory I thought he should declare a day in his honor and take no fewer than 4 years off. Or, since he likes the Euro-socialist Third-Way, perhaps he could be our first president to go on strike.
Obama has been hailed as “America’s first truly global president” and “a citizen of the world.” A good thing, since technically he doesn’t appear to be a citizen of the United States. The White House is as much on international soil right now as it was under the last communist in the Oval Office (1993-2000). But at least THAT one had the sense to not give his daughter a Russian name like “Sasha.”
Think about this: Would the Nobel Committee really have given Obama the Peace Prize if he weren’t a socialist? Would the UN Human Rights Council – normally reserved for Muslim, socialist and other human-rights-abusing regimes – have given us a seat for the first time ever within four months of Obama’s election, if it didn’t have great “hope” for us? (We won a seat along with Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.)
Sure enough, Obama has found use not only for Fidel Castro’s favorite U.S. president Jimmy Carter, but also for Carter’s security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who promotes a borderless one-world vision. Obama himself has said “the world’s nations are no longer defined by borders,” which explains his fight with Arizona and the Texas law curtailing voter fraud by illegals. (Who would presumably vote for the illegal in the Oval Office.)
Cartoon by Gary McCoy
Much has been written about long-time Obama friend and supporter Bill Ayers – Marxist terrorist-turned-professor. That’s in addition to Obama being raised, educated and befriended by avowed communists including his rabidly anti-American fellow-traveler mother and his communist mentors Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky.
Even conservatives wouldn’t listen to this writer’s warnings about Obama: “I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself,” wrote Professor John C. Drew “The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist [and] expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. – completely divorced from the profit motive – which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.”
Cartoon by William Warren
Now the president is trying to control information as well (much easier in the Soviet Union), tasking his FCC with enforcing “neutrality” on cable news shows and the Internet – that is, the government defines what’s “neutral.” Helen Thomas notes that “Not Even Nixon Tried to Control the Media Like Obama.”
Obama’s regulatory czar Cass Sunstein once called the Internet “anti-democratic,” because “users can filter out information of their own choosing,” World Net Daily reported. (Sunstein, by the way, is among 45 of Obama’s proud socialist “czars.”)
Socialism itself is never complete without Atheism, which is why Sasha and Malia don’t get Christmas presents from their parents, who almost nixed the nativity scene their first Christmas in the White House. That’s in addition to making Georgetown University cover Jesus’ name when Obama spoke there, and trying to make pro-life medical professionals dispense abortion-inducing drugs. (Abortion being a tool for population control that allows the Left to put off those nasty purges.)
The president’s health czar Ezekiel Emanuel – a “bioethicist” nicknamed “Dr. Death” – restricts procedures to those over 40 and more so those over 65. This is who Obama chose to guide Obamacare – the “biggest piece of social legislation since the Great Society,” creating hundreds of new agencies, boards and commissions to decide things for us.
This just in: “Hugo Chavez: Obama is a ‘Good Guy’” (Flashback to Chavez in June 2009: “Hey, Obama has just nationalized General Motors. Comrade Obama!”) Which reminds me: Nicaraguan leader calls Obama’s campaign ‘revolutionary.’
At least he can’t take away our guns. Wait–! – this just in: “Obama To Sign Anti-Gun UN Treaty.” The first thing that the National Socialist Adolf Hitler did, of course, was take away the guns.
~*~*~*
Born in Moscow, Russia, Julia Gorin grew weary of food shortages, low living standards and constant run-ins with the KGB, and at the age of three insisted her parents relocate the family to America. Read her full bio HERE.
CON
“If Obama is a socialist, he’s a lousy one.” – by Ed Rampell
To true socialists, the notion that Barack Obama is a leftist, let alone a socialist, is laughable lunacy!
Malcolm X astutely observed: “Conservatives are the wolves” while “liberals are the foxes who show their teeth… but pretend they’re smiling.” It’s interesting to ponder what Malcolm would have made of this president. If Obama didn’t have an unusual background and was some middle-aged White Anglo Saxon Protestant man from the Midwest named, say, “Whitney Saxon,” it’d be obvious that he’s just another DNC centrist-Democrat pushing middle-of-the-road policies.
It’s widely said a candidate’s first presidential act is choosing a running mate. When tapped to run for vice president, Joe Biden was the third longest serving member of the Senate, sworn in when Nixon was still president. As with his selection of Hillary Clinton (like Biden, another presidential candidate) for secretary of state, Obama mostly stuck with the same old establishment hacks: So much for his promise of “change.”
Cartoon by John Deering
As for “hope:” During Clarence Thomas’ 1991 hearings, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Biden stonewalled Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations, then refused to call three corroborating witnesses, ensuring Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation. In 2002 Biden voted to authorize Bush to attack Iraq. Biden not only voted for the 2005 law making it harder for ordinary people to declare bankruptcy, but with Republicans opposing amendments protecting the elderly and servicemen.
Biden’s home state of Delaware, of course, is a hotbed of credit card and financial services firms. Not coincidentally they’re big Biden campaign donors and companies such as MBNA (now owned by Bank of America) paid Joe’s son Hunter Biden a mint for lobbying or consulting. No socialist would have ever chosen someone with Biden’s record to be his veep.
Nor would any socialist have ever appointed freebooting free traders such as Citigroup’s 126- million-dollar man Robert Rubin to be his economic advisor, Timothy Geithner as his Secretary of the Treasury, and Lawrence Summers director of the White House National Economic Council. These 3 financial-sector shills pushed disastrous deregulatory policies and eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act – effectively causing 2008’s Wall Street meltdown. Obama’s appointments were like putting corporate raiders in charge of the henhouse.
Unsophisticated thinkers and/or Ayn Rand acolytes believe “socialism” simply means government intervention in the economy. But this laissez-faire fantasy is incorrect: From FDR’s New Deal to Bush and Obama’s bailouts of Wall Street and the auto industry, Washington used taxpayer funds to rescue capitalists – often, with no strings attached. While financiers, brokerage firms, etc., got sweetheart deals, common people got sold out, as homeowners were forced underwater, workers faced unemployment and bankruptcy.
Cartoon: Matt Wuerker; Politico
Those hundreds of billions the Obama administration threw at bankers somehow never managed to make their way down to small businesses or homeowners facing foreclosure. Instead of loans, this boondoggle provided bonuses for the very profiteers who’d caused the economic collapse, although none have been held accountable for wrecking the livelihoods and looting the lifesavings of millions.
Obama presided over most of this, and no socialist would have stood for these shameful debacles. Immediately upon seizing state power, socialists would have rounded up the fiscal fiascos and culprits and brought them to justice. Instead of doling out corporate bailouts, the workers’ state would seize the assets of those who caused the economic catastrophe, along with the wealth of those 400 U.S. individuals whose net worth is greater than the bottom 50%-plus of Americans.
Socialists would expropriate the expropriators, radically redistribute these trillions, abolish income inequality and provide employment, free universal healthcare and education through university, expanded essential services and infrastructure for all!
To paraphrase George Orwell, socialism is when the working class rides in the saddle. It means workers own the means of production, participating in running the economy for the 99% — not for the 1%. Anybody who thinks Obama is some sort of socialist, communist or “Mao-bama” has no idea what socialism is.
Billy Wharton – the co-chair Socialist Party USA, former editor of The Socialist and the current editor of the Socialist WebZine doesn’t even want anything to do with Obama as he outlined in the Washington Post and CNN. If even a card-carrying Socialist is embarrassed to be around you, you know your wealth-sharing street-cred is suspect.
When unions rose up in Wisconsin, Obama cowardly and assiduously avoided going there, because centrist Democrats like him are terrified by genuine mass popular uprisings, whereas any real socialist would have marched with Wisconsin’s workers.
Cartoon by Bill Day
Obama may “triangulate” himself out of a job. While he capitulated to a heartless rightwing, his halfhearted efforts, like the too-timid Stimulus Package and the compromised Obamacare failed to end the depression, provide jobs, or succeed in giving free or affordable healthcare to millions. He failed in his campaign promises, while mocking critics to his left.
His mouthpieces say some who voted for him expected too much; that Obama can’t walk on water. However, who ran on “the audacity of hope,” proclaiming “yes, you can,” promising bold “change you can believe in” — not that he’d tinker around the edges and make a few minor improvements?
Now that he’s had a term in office and hasn’t delivered, Obama desperately reaches out for votes and funds from gays, Latinos, etc., with more rhetoric and half measures. But he’ll find that by cuddling up to the 1% instead of the 99%, an unenthusiastic base won’t turn out and vote in the same numbers they did in 2008 — because now Obama is running on a failed track record, not on empty promises and sloganeering he failed to execute.
Cornel West, renowned African American academic and a member of Democratic Socialists of America has called Obama “the Black puppet of Wall Street.” Or, as HBO comic Bill Maher put it (3:56 below): “If Obama is a socialist, he’s a lousy one.”
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