** S O C I A L I S M **

[President Decider]

"Socialism" and the battle for your mind.

Right now it's no secret that the Republican party is experiencing the 7 stages of grief.

Since the election they have become a party in a state of denial and now fear. That being said, their primal "fight or flight" instincts have kicked in so they're running around yelling "The sky is falling" to anyone that will listen. So what war are the Repubs mounting now? Well, it's the war for your mind of course. Watch a few of their right-wing TV shows and you'll see what I mean. It's clear their biggest fear right now is that the majority of Americans will pull open the curtain and expose "OZ" for who and what he really is. If Americans actually do this, the empire that they so craftily created for themselves over the past 8 years comes crumbling to the ground.

Conservative hard-liners want the public to fear the "S"-word (Socialism) because once Americans start getting a full understanding of the benefits of a more social (European) style of capitalism they will begin to truely understand the creepy role the right-wingers have played over the past decade in keeping the people misinformed while the system was actually working against the better interests of the vast majority.

Their strategy has always been to create a false choice between what they
percieve as "good vs. evil":

- "GOP-BRAND CAPITALISM", which they equate with patriotism, freedom, self-reliance, keeping your hard earned money, no handouts (especially for 'lazy minorities')

vs

- "SOCIALISM", which is the codeword for an evil empire of unpatriotic immoral big government that interferes in the lives of people and redistributes your hard earned money and tax-dollars to lazy, uneducated people who don't deserve it.

While in reality their objective was to dismantle the New Deal and put in place a predatory form of capitalism that benefits the wealthy which eventually turned canniballistic. Here's what's really amazing in thier sales efforts to gain control of your mind. Right-wingers can't even be intellectually honest about what "SOCIALISM" really means.

The term, state socialism, was related developed to demonstrate the difference between statists and socialists who believe that workers, and not the state, should control the means of production. Elevating the means of production to the state is actually contrary to the philosophies of many socialists and syndicalists. This is the reason why many socialists actually opposed the USSR, because they saw it as an state monopoly oligarchy.

Marxism and socialism is not one and the same, as some folks would wrongly suggest.

State capitalism and state socialism, though, are somewhat related to a degree, because they ultimately elevate the means of production to the corporate or state level. Especially when you have, in the case of the USA, government actively working on behalf of these corporations, usually via the "Iron Triangle" and the "Military - Industrial - (Congressional)" complex - in either system, there is a certain bureaucratic control of the economy.

Fascism, as a note, is a form of state capitalism.

In the USA, we have seen large amounts of money transferred to the military sector, and in the instance of Iraq, we have millions lost in war profiteering (Halliburton). To me, these are perfect examples of state capitalism. The state does not actually control and own these resources, but they are still shuffling money around to protected privately owned industries.

What the Republicans support is not laissez-faire capitalism, but something more akin to crony capitalism where circles of wealth don't really change, they just change hands. Imagine passing a ball in a small circle ... opposed to passing a ball if a infinate straight line were formed.

So this leaves us at our current juncture: A state of reality that the future of Repub sponsored capitalism is pinned to the hopes that the mess they left behind is so big that it will take Obama's administration a couple of years to really fix it, allowing them time to shift the blame; clinging to every morsal of bad news they can find and pin it to President Obama. Hell, you're already seeing it ....

My hope is that the American people won't buy this "bunk" anymore which is why I'm writing this. Mark my words, next election they will claim that it was the socialistic liberal spending spree that prolonged the recession and that they could have ended it in half the time.

President Obama has been masterful thus far and I'm very proud of the way he's going about dealing with this mess of epic proportions. Little did he know that the job would immediately require him to put on a jumpsuit, grab a broom and a bucket and take on the role of a circus rodie who's sole job it is to clean up all the elephant shit after the circus left town (the GOP circus).

[Clio the Leo]

1. Yep, a Repub. friend of mine was spouting that this morning...

.... I did what I always do. Since all of my GOP friends consider themselves to be Christians, I point out two seperate verses in Acts that make it ABUNDANTLY clear that the early Christians were in fact a bunch of communial living socialists. :) (Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-35.)

They never have a response to that. :)

[GeorgeGist]

2. Lest you forget ...

Obama is a Capitalist!

[WinkyDink]

3. It's all Hannity spews for hours daily, on his radio show (I extrapolate from bits over a period of

days).