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By Orville Schell
By Terrance Dean
$10.20
$23
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The twisted minds behind “South Park” have taken notice of the Glenn Beck style of casting doubt and judgment on certain prominent public leaders via guilt-by-association word games, and now Cartman’s taking a page from Beck’s playbook. Is any American elementary school really safe from the scourge of socialism?
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Flickr / a4gpa
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Germany is one of the world’s great welfare states, but the country’s health care system isn’t strictly socialist. Nonetheless, lots of options, tight regulation and universal coverage are helping Germans live longer than Americans. Might the German example offer a way out of America’s health care struggles?
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Are America’s “culture wars” being backed by the NEA? Will President Obama marshal a shadow army of deft performance artists and elementary school teachers to brainwash Americans into a state of mass compliance as he enacts his Socialist Agenda™? The people at Fox News clearly haven’t seen a lot of bad performance art if they really believe their own racket.
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Truthdig editors Robert Scheer, Peter Scheer and Kasia Anderson give their takes on their picks from the week’s crop of news stories, including the rise of radical rhetoric on the right, Obama’s so-called socialism (for Wall Street) and how to shop for new planets to call our future home.
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Newsday
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As some politicians in the U.S. continue to get their gender-respective panties/underwear in a bunch over government spending to help people, “conservative” Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to “save the human race” from global warming with a carbon tax to help cut fossil fuel usage in France.
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With some parents still reluctant to send their children to school Tuesday for fear that President Obama will indoctrinate them with his scary socialist ideals, the White House has attempted to ease the hysteria by releasing the full text of his speech a day early. Now doubters can do a close textual analysis for objectionable content.
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AP / Itsuo Inouye
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Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has ruled for all but 11 months since 1955, but a stunning electoral defeat cut its representation in the Diet by perhaps hundreds of seats. The victor in all this, Yukio Hatoyama, called it a revolution and promised to take Japan from a corporate state to a welfare state.
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Flickr / showbizsuperstar
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In this topsy-turvy world it seems one’s proximity to full-blown communism is directly proportional to one’s success in capitalism. Take Red China’s explosive economic growth, or the unexpected success of semi-socialist Germany and France, which just bid auf Wiedersehen and adieu to the recession.
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house.gov
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Rep. Paul Broun, who once compared Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, now thinks the president is part of a radical “socialistic elite” that may try to declare martial law. Broun’s comments came during what an area newspaper described as a “relatively peaceful” town hall.
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flickr.com
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By Scott Tucker — The current global economic crisis is not just another roller-coaster ride. Many sane and sober observers fear that the international locomotive of corporatism is going off the rails. Is this a necessary crisis of the capitalist system, determined by the self-destruction and self-renovation of a perpetual motion machine?
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Chris Hedges — The president had a fleeting moment to challenge the casino capitalism and financial recklessness of our economic and political elite. He could have orchestrated a state socialism that would have provided a safety net for tens of millions of Americans faced with dislocation and misery.
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Yes, Keith Olbermann and other pundits (paging Anderson Cooper) had a field day with the right wing’s adoption of “tea bagging” as the driving metaphor behind their Tax Day protests. But no, the double entendres didn’t start “on the blogs,” as Bill O’Reilly’s “nice lady” guest Amanda Carpenter suggested on his show.
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By William Pfaff — The globalization of the international economy launched as an accidental policy of the Clinton administration has proved to be a destroyer of people, governments and wealth.
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Susan Jacoby’s lucid new book reminds us that the Hiss case offered a vengeful postwar right a golden opportunity to tar the New Deal as a crypto-communist conspiracy—and why it still matters.
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By Eugene Robinson — Advice to solve the financial crisis before even thinking about health care, energy or education is either misguided or disingenuous. Fortunately, Obama seems to be ignoring all the chatter.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Newt Gingrich is right: “It is European socialism transplanted to Washington.” How else to describe an economy in which the government controls the entire financial center and is now supplying life support for the auto industry?
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The publication of Sontag’s early diaries provides a revelatory look at the self-inventions of the late writer.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The well-off will pay more in taxes. And before the howling on the right gets too loud, consider that we have just gone through a long era involving a far less frank form of redistribution—upward.
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Disagreement abounds on this week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center,” especially when it comes to President Obama’s budget plan and the origins of the economic crisis it’s intended to remedy. Who’s the moderator again? And is Bobby Jindal done for?
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This week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center” finds the full lineup of co-hosts—Matt Miller, Tony Blankley, Arianna Huffington and Robert Scheer—debating the latest developments in the unholy marriage between big banks and the U.S. government, speculating about what might be done about the American auto industry and doing a little on-the-fly analysis of comparative economic systems. Listen and learn.
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Flickr / Johannes Roith
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Bolivian President Evo Morales, himself an Aymara Indian, has won a referendum on a new constitution granting special privileges to Bolivia’s indigenous people. The electorate split along racial lines, with the country’s elite white and mixed-race minorities largely opposing the measure.
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AP photo / Craig Ruttle
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By Chris Hedges — The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite.
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thewe.cc
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Nothing says full of yourself like ordering a Venezuelan mayor to halt construction of a near-complete shopping mall after passing by it in a car. Obviously, President Hugo Chavez has a bit of a ego, though his suggestion to use the facility as a university or hospital, not as a monument to consumption and capitalism, does seem a bit more just.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
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AP photo / Andre Penner
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In a summit that celebrated the absence of the U.S. on its guest list, Latin American leaders met in Brazil to discuss a post-U.S. hegemonic world. The talks, which centered on the “demise” of the capitalist model, also snubbed former colonizing nations Portugal and Spain in a further demonstration of the increasing political autonomy of the region.
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New York Times / Stephen Crowley
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Agreement has been reached between the White House and congressional Democrats to offer the U.S. auto industry a $14 billion emergency package aimed at keeping the Big Three going until spring. Also, in the grand tradition of state socialism, the deal includes a new auto “czar” to oversee the restructuring of Detroit.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don’t blame it on that African-American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House.
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By Ellen Goodman — There was symbolism as well as sadness in the passing of Barack Obama’s grandmother. When we’re young, we think change is a 100-yard dash. As we get older we think it’s a marathon. Eventually we see a relay race.
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Stephen Colbert has figured out John McCain’s new campaign strategy of trying to paint his rival as a socialist: “Clearly the McCain campaign is targeting its most important voter: Joe the McCarthy.”
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By Joe Conason — Wherever John McCain appears on the stump in these waning days of the presidential campaign, he is always accompanied by his imaginary friend “Joe the Plumber,” but it is the specter of Karl Marx that lurks just offstage.
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AP photo / Chris Carlson
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By Robert Scheer — Instead of running with the “European socialist” crowd, as John McCain has claimed, Barack Obama has turned to the same American “free market” elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that group, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning.
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By Eugene Robinson — Colin Powell demonstrated his eponymous “Powell Doctrine” of overwhelming force on Sunday when he endorsed Barack Obama on “Meet the Press.” The general covered all lines of retreat and took no prisoners.
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By David Sirota — In the late 1990s, Washington was in the throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned Rep. Bernie Sanders’ opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that in a few years our country would become the United States’ Socialist Republic.
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By Marie Cocco — So this is how the “ownership society” works. We own all the bad stuff.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Ramy Majouji
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Truthdig’s editor in chief warns against thinking about the economic crisis as an “act of God,” saying “this is man-made” and that the individuals responsible are well known and entirely too influential in the current election.
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Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were always more foul than fish, says Robert Borosage, and the bailout announced by the Treasury secretary over the weekend will mean “private speculators, having driven the stock down, will clean up on the upside.”
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By Joe Conason — Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, “socialized medicine” seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water.
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AP Photo/Francois Mori
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French presidential candidates Segolene Royal (above) and Nicolas Sarkozy are fervently pressing flesh and swapping barbs in the remaining hours before Sunday’s vote. Royal, a socialist, warned that a win for Sarkozy could trigger violence, while front-runner Sarkozy sniffed that his rival’s attack was a byproduct of her lagging status in pre-election polls.
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nytimes.com
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Hugo Chavez announced plans on Monday to nationalize companies in Venezuela’s telecommunications and power industries, saying: “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized.” The recently re-elected president has ramped up efforts to transform Venezuela into a socialist society, while at the same time consolidating his power.
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Amid China’s explosive market-driven growth over the past decade, it’s sometimes hard to remember that it is technically a communist country. A dispute over property rights has brought the issue to the fore.
Truthdig’s Orville Schell examined this schism here.
Posted on Mar 12, 2006
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By Marc Cooper — The election of Socialist pediatrician Michelle Bachelet as president is good news for the people of Chile. Especially given the alternatives.
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Update: Hugo Chavez and the Latin American left picked up an important new ally when, a few weeks ago, peasant leader Evo Morales (shown at right here) was elected as president of Bolivia.
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