……..NOT!

Taking a page out of Borat’s playbook, I introduce you to the smear campaign that the McCain-Palin camp has entrenched themselves in since the last presidential debate. Before the debate started that day, Obama was greeting several well-wishers and someone had a question for him. The man introduced himself as Joe, a hard-working plumber, who had some questions about Obama’s tax plan. No problem for a well-spoken Obama to handle.

When Obama explained to who is now known as “Joe the Plumber” that he thinks “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” This of course makes the Republicans jump all over Obama, telling him that he’s a Socialist, but when, socialists themselves say that Barack Obama is the furthest thing from a Socialist, it can only be construed as a ploy to play on the ignorance of the Republican base.

Quoting from that same Chicago Tribune article:

John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain’s campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven’t forgotten their Cold War rhetoric.

“Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels,” Bachtell said. “It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It’s just a big diversion.”

Further along:

Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University: “Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism. My goodness, he wouldn’t have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism.”

Of course, I don’t believe for a second that Obama is a socialist. Reading up on the pros and cons of spreading the wealth and concentrating it anywhere along the economic classes, I found an article that explains it. Most people will say that it’s bogus because it comes from very-left leaning Huffington Post, but it’s the only article that makes sense to me. In Robert McElvaine’s “‘Spreading the Wealth Around’: Just What Ailing Economy Needs“, he references history in explaining that concentrating the wealth in the higher tax bracket doesn’t work because quote: “An economy based on mass production requires mass consumption, and mass consumption is only possible when income is ’spread around.’”

Further along in Robert’s article:

Tax cuts for the highest income brackets and opposition to labor unions and to any government regulation of the market were the orders of the day under the Republican governments of the 1920s, as they have been under the Republican government of the 2000s.

Those policies accomplished the opposite of “spreading the wealth around.” By 1928, the richest 10 percent of Americans was taking in almost half of the nation’s income. The economy was kept going only by the extension of credit to middle-class buyers. When the credit bubble burst in 1929, the economy collapsed.

Very much the same thing has happened in the present decade. By 2005, income concentration had actually become somewhat greater than it had been just before the 1929 collapse. In 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans took in 22 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent made off with more than 48 percent.

Should anyone still be tempted to think that “spreading the wealth around” has been the problem, consider the following trends:

In 1964 the ratio of executive to employee compensation in the United States was 24:1. In 2005, it was 262:1.

Between 2000 and 2005, median CEO compensation increased by 84 percent, while median worker pay was stagnant, actually falling slightly, by 0.3 percent.

Between 1970 and 2003, the compensation of the top 100 CEOs in the United States increased 83 times faster than did the average wage.

The McCain-Palin camp has had nothing to go on since the the “newness” of the veep’s candidacy wore off. They’ve been trailing big ever since so they went into two-minute drill, down by 21, hail-mary mode, which of course means the “Who is Barack Obama?” and the “He’s a socialist” heaves of desperation. My feelings can be best described by a socialist quoted in the Chicago Tribune article

“The whole point of his policies don’t really represent the political economy of the working class,” said Robert Roman, who edits the newsletter of the roughly 250-member Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Obama’s going to be a person who represents all of us, he’s going to be representing the interest of the capitalists as well as the working people. He’s not really talking about transforming society beyond capitalism.”

Capitalism, in it’s pure form, can not work. The economy is more volatile than a four year-old who’s been drinking soda for the last 48 hours. It needs regulation. If anything, some industries need to be nationalized (the oil industry) and most need to be privatized (alternate energy and the banks). Come on Barack. Give us the change we need.

Tags: barack obama, capitalism, chicago tribune, huffington post, socialism

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Politics, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.