It’s like the National Journal calling Obama the most liberal Senator(or whatever BS they were spewing). Are they really that vapid? Does Bernie Sanders ring a bell to them? How does the TradMed employ so many stupid people?

“Socialist” is just this week’s Puke talking point….pinko commies….Same old shizzola….because they’ve got nothing else…

Beach is a fool.

As my long term marxist and long term friend said 10 years ago:

“Capitalism won”

Let them celebrate their love of capitalism which is giving everyone but a few tens of thousands americans a royal screwing.

Where are the capitalists now with the ideas to get the economy going with entrepreneurial ideas? Where are all the ones who will be successful in solving the energy crisis because they believe in themselves?

Very good question. I’ve often asked it myself. The best answer I can come up with is that a ’socialist’ is a kind of vampire, the sort that used to inhabit Transylvania. They appear in times of economic stress, when poor people begin to think that the organization of their economy and society is a tad unfair, not to say downright evil. Like the vampire myth, there is nothing to ’socialism’ as it is projected by the Right. It’s just a scare word. If you grew up in the ’50s, you would know just how scary it was and I guess for some people still is. You couldn’t even say the word, for fear you might be contaminated by it.

I am not exaggerating. Some of us remember Joe McCarthy. His spirit lives. We didn’t put enough stakes through his heart when we had a chance.

Capitalism made some winners and everyone else a loser. That’s competition and that’s american as apple pie. Stick with the winners.

His bag was pinko commies and red diaper babies.

Who knew from socialism in the 50s?

bernie sanders

Al Malaki seems to be having a ball tweaking Bush’s nose in public and watching him squirm!

Finally, revenge for all the years of condescension from the world’s dumbest leader…

Forcing Bush to adopt Obama’s position is more fun than sex fer ol Malaki!

A “socialist” is kind of like “activist judge” – it is what they call someone that does something they don’t like. Socialized medicine. Socialist schools. If they can attach a scary label to it, they don’t have to make an actual argument against it.

Actually Pelosi and the Chinese do have something in common. They don’t like people to speak up about the truth.

socialized diseases… ICK

History has save millions of people from ever having to open the dusty cover of Das Kapital and reading some of the most incomprehensible prose ever written.

LOVE Bernie.

Frankly I’m surprised that we don’t have threads at noon (ET) on Fridays blogging along with Brunch with Bernie on the Thom Hartmann Show on Air America. Bernie has shown up just about every friday for the past 5 years and taken calls from listeners.

A ripe opportunity for FDL to get into the conversation with him.

OT but LOVE this. Reuters has picked up on the rejection of McSame’s op-ed by the NYT.

Now how often do we see one news wire report on a story being rejected by another news org?

Said he’d have to use a thinner crayon if they were going to try to read it- and the pictures of a black guy wearing a dunce cap were deemed “unprofessional”.

Bernie is awesome. It’s a treat when they show him on C-Span during Senate debate or during some hearing.

Off topic drive-by for which apologies Ian.

IRAQ: Unrest Surfaces in Fallujah Again

IRAQ: Fallujah Braces for Another Assault

Erdla

And a real Marxist would then note that Capitalism’s internal contradictions are destroying it. Not quite as Marx predicted, but not that far from Marx’s predictions. Russian and Chinese communism never made sense in a Marxist context.

We could use about 50 more Bernies in the Senate.

Equally absurd is the notion that any true communists have influence in Bejing.

oh yes Princcapessa Pelosi….is such a left wing PLUTOCRAT
BWAHAhaha

My friend has given up that battle. He is now retired and writes movie reviews- he does take delight in pointing out that the stock market is turning to jello- but even that joy is subdued as he owns a bit of stock.

and as for the psychotic Sec of State

what a piece of work

‘If they want to rent a bus, show them where they can rent a bus’

The night before presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) left for Afghanistan, Iraq and Western Europe for a tour of US bases overseas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a cable to US missions forbidding them from holding events for presidential candidates or arrange meetings for them.

Rice issued no such cable prior to foreign excursions by presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

That’s great – especially the part where the Times wants McSame to define victory! Thanks for the link.

i suppose we could always live blog it in the comments, but you’d have to remind me as it’s not something i usually listen to.

thank you Erdla.

Oh no!!!! @#^%$#@$%@^#

((( Ian )))

Are new talking point should be in response to this should be just what is wrong with socialism?
Free medical care anyone here against living longer sure you might have healthcare but chances are someone without paid sick days will sneeze on your fast food burgers come flu season/winter.
Reforming crooks seems to deter crime more than the death penalty after all what is Texas the state with the most execution’s crime rate again and whats the crime rate in Norway?
Taxes are lower but what if we look at both personal and national debt and compare debt burdens another 4 years of Bush/McCain and we might see those numbers go higher.
In fact being Socialist is not enough to save our country we need another peace dividend we need to cut military spending big we need to embrace PEACE and go LEFT!

McBush doubling down on his “no fuckin timetables in Iraq” position- just as Iraq is demanding a timetable..Awkward ain’t it?

Once Oxdown goes up I suppose we could do it there.

When I think of Socialism I think of the Scandinavian countries. Cradle to grave social humanity. High taxes but I could handle $7 beer if it gave my family equal opportunity and a great social net.

Dam. Wish I had stayed in Finland in 1980*g*

Well, she also offered to show Michelle where all the great Bargains for shoes are …

Neocon policy: You resist…you die.

and this is PRECISELY ,why i have no compassion for Tony Snow or his other pal….how truly horrible,i really can NOT even imagine,ive only lived through NATURAL DISASTERS…i so very sorry…hangs head in shame

707!…and mebbe the KASBAH heehee

Chris Matthews even commented a little while ago that when everything is added up, the French pay lower taxes than Americans … the silence was deafening …

As a Libertarian Socialist, it’s doubly hard for me to explain to people what I believe in. * sigh *

i wish i stayed in Italy…Berlust scummy and all

If there is a socialist paradise where ya get free margaritas, a free 3,000 square foot house, and free golf, along with a climate just like San Diego then I’m THERE!

Ooooo…me too!!

hey id take well,portioned 2500sf…”g”

I ain’t goin ta no COLD socialist paradise where they don’t have golf courses and think that drinkin an shootin the shit is not serious enough—then I’m NOT there

Lotsa socialist live in places like SWEDEN—-freeze their fuckin asses off!

Surgilicious

Yup.

Oh- I forgot- I don’t want to have to WORK in the socialist paradise either– workers get exploited.

Have you seen those Swedish women … I think the cold winter is a ruse to force them indoors … *g*

Why yes, I am having Peppermint Schnapps Tea … however did you know ? *g*

Well yes I have- socialist health care agrees with them

And Sweden has my friend, Larry’s Corner

It ain’t a timetable, rw. It’s a timehorizon, it’s an aspiration … but it ain’t no effin’ timetable.

I asked Mrs. BC, the family rhetorician about timetable versus timehorizon. She said, “Don’t you even try to drag me into that black hole!”

BC

As Jack Tripper would say, “They’re sooo healthy !!!”

oh please “let there be an END”…………..SOON!!!

3 years ago was not soon enough IMO
still we works with what we gots

The whole thing is HIGHLY aspirational

And it’s causin Clusterfuck to aspirate his lunch!

I’ve set an aspirational time horizon for cleaning my house.

But had the Canadian ambassador arrange fund raisers

Oh. They’ve caught the Butcher of Bosnia…Radovan Karadzic

The American working class has been so brainwashed by the ruling elites that they haven’t a clue about democratic socialism. Socialism in America is only practiced for the rich. Cannibalistic capitalism is what the masses are afforded. If and when Americans ever wake up to the big con the French Revolution will look like a debutante ball.

Ian, The repubs have been trying to put an IST to Obama since he started his campaign whether it be racIST, elitIST, socialIST, or the latest that I saw in the Washington Post opinion page is narcissIST. So far it hasn’t worked but be prepared because communIST is next. Can we deliver dictionaries to the media, please. That’s something that I can support.

How about that happiness survey

No one wants to be a part of the proletariat anymore. They have poor fashion sense.

Try reading the Wealth of Nations!

Bring ‘em all to justice.

Hee hee. I’ve set a time horizon for changing the cat box.

I’ve read it- but I was younger and didn’t fall to sleep as easily..

Marx actually lifted major parts from Smith- including the labor theory of value

ain’t that a scream?

now THAT is the funniest thing i’ve seen all day.

Link here. Justice delayed, but it gives us hope that some day George W . . . . .

Some day they will capture the Chimp in Chief. Can Americans deal with the truth that their former President is a war criminal?

Wonder who thought up that “time horizon” bs for Bush to say? Even an idiot realizes that you can never reach the “horizon.”

a real Marxist would then note that Capitalism’s internal contradictions are destroying it

His predictions weren’t bad considering the first volume of Capital was published in 1867.

“It’s a timeline”

“No it ain’t- it’s a time horizon”

“But is says that yer gonna be out by the end of 2010?”

“Yeah- but that’s just aspirational—–I might have my asp out- I might not”

LOL
“Aspirational Time Horizon”

All i have is a magnet that says “My other house is cleaner.”

Marx was a scholar. The fact that he researched Smith who wrote well before Marx is not surprising.

The question is if and when. Hopefully soon because we are all tanking. I would love to hear Barack come out and said that the reason he said that people are “bitter” is because repubs can only run on guns and religion since they offer nothing else.

New Teddy

Chris Matthews even commented a little while ago that when everything is added up, the French pay lower taxes than Americans … the silence was deafening …

He also asked Trent Lott whether George W. Bush has “grown” as president.

Even Lott, a Republican down to the cellular level – just laughed.

The average American Idol watching, Home Depot, Joe Sixpack…American? Absolutely not.

Conservatives in this country love to vilify anything to the left of them. First, it was the Communists. Then, it was the Socialists. Finally, liberal became an unmentionable word. When you look at it, this is a process that has been going on for nearly a century.

But here’s the thing about socialism. Two of the most popular programs in government are completely socialist in nature: Social Security and Medicare.

So what has happened in this country is that special “American” labels are used. Since we can’t call something “socialist”, we use terms like “federalism” and “universal” to describe what anywhere else in the world would be termed “socialism”. OTOH one of the lesser known aspects of these label wars is that while the Right has dominated in them, they still cut both ways. The term we don’t use (outside of some blogs) to describe conservatives in this country is “fascist”. Again if you were sitting anywhere else in the world and you saw what Republicans have been doing the last 7 1/2 years, you would have no problem describing it as fascism. And the Democrats in Congress? In an international political lexicon, they would be called “fellow travelers”.

But it is part of American exceptionalism that we can not call things what they are but have to invent a different and deceptive language to describe ourselves.

It would be great to have a well-covered trial for Radovan Karadzic, the Butcher of Bosnia. Nightly updates and all that. Sort of as a warm up for the real showdown: will Congress repeal the American Service-Members Protection Act?

Bring ‘em to justice.

Nothing sadder than a fallen Marxist.

The entire country of Russia is pretty sad.

Well he’s not THAT sad- he bought an old house and fixed it up- he rides his bicycle every day- and eats sardines right out of the can. He is writing a book about philosophical theories as exemplified by movies…he sees his girlfriend once a week. I think he’s a happy man.

How about Smartist, suave-ist, cutist, wittiest, Have to say most articulate…All the things McC and McW are not.

That is so good…What about Mc made him laugh?

It’s OK if we don’t have any communists or socialists, neither do the Chinese. They’re all capitalists too.

they should have read Marx, instead of thumping “the Communist Manifesto”. He said that what they were trying to do was impossible. Even granting they even made a sincere effort, which I think it’s safe to say Stalin didn’t, and probably not even Lenin.

But Marx WROTE the communist manifesto

“Capital” is a critique of both Smith’s and Ricardo’s writings. Smith’s theory was based upon a market that was functioning perfectly and he so states. Marx critiqued those works using that same assumption.

But Marx WROTE the communist manifesto

He also made some great films along with Harpo and Chico. And didn’t he say that he would never want to belong to a party that would have him as a member?

Problem is Marx was writing about industrialized nations. Russia had no industry. Lenin and Trotsky both knew that communism in Russia would not succeed if the industrialized nations of Europe did not go that way. They were banking on Germany becoming communist after WWI but it didn’t happen. By the time Stalin took over after Lenin’s death the 5 year plans were a disaster and Stalin opted for a bureaucratic dictatorship. Stalinism is a far cry from socialism or communism.

It was hard to hear over the honking

Socialism or communism are bugaboos because we look at Russia and China and don’t like what we see. We want the right to “make it”. The real problem is hierarchy, the need some people have to see themselves as “better” than the rest. The need is inferiority based as is any behavior that goes outside oneself for fulfillment. It is psychotic as divorced from reality since rich and poor die. Being rich doesn’t add a minute to one’s alloted time.

Marx’s work was more of a critique of capitalism than a blueprint for a new society. His critique was moral: that economic relations should be based on sharing and need, rather than on exploitation. This concept is not unique to Marx and doesn’t even require reading him. It’s more or less ‘do unto others’ or ‘love thy neighbor’.

People who agree with this concept face a moral question: should cooperation and sharing be mandatory? And if so, how would that be arranged?

Thumping, as in, they didn’t really read it, or his other works. According to Marx you MUST go through industrialization first, before you can get to communism.

So is the U.S. of A!

The real socialist countries are the northern European ones. They’re pretty good places overall.

It was pretty close in Germany. Could easily have gone communist. The Russians were their own worst enemies there, in many ways.

It was close in Germany until the fascists won out. Maybe in America, despite tip toeing down that fascist road, Americans will take a different fork in the road.

I am late to this thread but it is indeed one of my favorite topics, “socialism”

the very concept of money is socialism

our fire dept, our police, the roads we drive, the bridges, clean air

there wouldn’t even be property law without socialism

but they don’t want to hear that, the only projects they want to call socialism are those that make them pay their own bills

if the only two people on the planet are you and your wife, you would STILL have socialism

now some social projects are bad, some are good, mostly we should not call any project socialism unless you are not allowed to use that same service from a private company outside of the social project, that would indeed be what we want to avoid

for instance, we have to use money and that is socialism in the pejorative sense

universal health care on the other hand is not forced down a person’s throat, if they want to use the private sector they are welcome to it

and the private sector will be LESS expensive if we have a universal health care program then if we don’t

that’s because the industry will be forced to compete against a system that operates efficiently

Socialism is a government AND economy of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Yep. I think Lenin was a poor choice as leader. Trotsky was a great organizer and writer but I don’t think he’d have made it either. Trotsky’s 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution are great reading if one is a history buff. 1905 is particularly good. It’s too bad the revolt in 1905 didn’t come succeed.

edit – didn’t come succeed

I read that article in the Austin Statesman; the whole thing was totally snarky towards the whole convention and those who attended. However, that wasn’t the total coverage; there was something in the paper every day and most was objective.

And some socialists get to live on the shores of the Caribbean — in Venezuela — which is tropical, like Hawaii. Some socialists, like me, get to live in the beautiful Andes mountains of Venezuela, where the climate is moderate and the milk and cheese is delicious.

Add to that free public education to the Ph.D. level, with monthly stipends for student living expenses, free medical care, government subsidies for cooperative and small business start-up costs, subsidies for home purchases and government-subsidized food markets known as “mercals” for everyone, and government-subsidized restaurants where full course meals cost under a dollar and… oh yes, gas is 14 cents a gallon.

No, Venezuela is not perfect. There is street crime, bad city traffic. a long-entrenched bureaucracy, and not everyone has adequate housing as yet. But Chavez is working on those problems, in the face of a an often violent and frequently destabilizing opposition, which is generously funded by the Bush-Chaney administration.

It is not easy to change a society from capitalist individualism and consumerism to socialist humanism, but that is the goal here. It’s working.

And, if the American public has finally had enough of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest, maybe you folks wouldn’t have to move anywhere to live in a socialist paradise. Si, se peude — if we work at it.

They are social democracies, better than anything the US has come up with, but they are still hierarchies.

‘Liberal ideology insists that a society in which conscious solidarity is the dominating attitude/approach is impossible, because humans are primarily and perpetually motivated by individual material incentives.

‘ … the “Bolivarian Revolution” is challenging the core liberal tenet that narrow self-interest is the immutable human condition… [that] humans can come to value social solidarity if institutions are designed to facilitate and not to penalize cooperation.’

Empirical Study of Venezuelan Cooperatives, Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, Monthly Review, November 2007 http://www.monthlyreview.org/

Front page stories aren’t supposed to be that obviously biased. Cracks like that should be in the columns or editorials.

some of us live in Australia

seriously, having grown up, till age 30, in the UK, conservatives across Europe, the UK included, are more left than any sitting Democrat in the House or Senate with the exception of Kucinich – did you know the UK public voted Marx to be the most influential philosopher of the 20th century?

Australia is not socialist but we chucked Howard out and Rudd is a control freak who loves the tin bells and whistles stuff apart from speaking mandarin and is attempting to recover from the delusion that all of Asia east of the Arabian Sea speak it too

We do have good health care and enjoy the longest average life expectancy after Japan and the seas are warm, surf’s great and the sands are pale gold – corals are beautiful too if we can keep them

Australia is a great country. I had my first shocking taste of socialized medicine there in a Sydney emergency room due to a motorcycle muffler burn incurred in the Cook Islands. It festered and upon arriving in Sydney, went straight to the E.R. where a lovely doctor fixed up my wound, then offered us a cup of tea, which she made.

After she handed me a bottle of antibiotics, I asked her for the bill. She was shocked. “What bill? There are no bills here.” I was astounded. No American doctor had ever made me tea!

perhaps an American doctor does not know how to – I spent four years seconded to the UN from the Australian Public Service (APS) in the USA after three years in Geneva with the OECD, again as an APS employee, but I had to come back – my daughters are here and so is the sun and there is so much work to do even in a country that has not got boxes about socialism, marxism, communism, etc, etc……

but we threw howard out of Parliament and that was a small step