Lone,
Your arguement as as " faux " as Obama is. Obama is a
socialist, just go to his books and writings and campaign lies!
*******************************************************************************
On Aug 5, 5:41 pm, "\"Lone Wolf\"" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know.
> By Billy Wharton
> Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page B01
>
> The question "Is Obama a socialist?" spread rapidly through a network
> of rightwing blogs, conservative television outlets and alarmist radio
> talk shows and quickly moved into the mainstream. "We Are All
> Socialists Now," declared a Newsweek cover last month.
>
> All this speculation over whether our current president is a socialist
> led me into the sea of business suits, BlackBerrys and self-promoters
> in the studio at Fox Business News. I quickly realized that the
> antagonistic anchor David Asman had little interest in exploring
> socialist ideas on bank nationalization.
>
> For Asman, nationalization was merely a code word for socialism. Using
> logic borrowed from the 1964 thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," he
> portrayed Obama as a secret socialist, so far undercover that not even
> he understood that his policies were de facto socialist. I was merely
> a cudgel to be wielded against the president -- a physical embodiment
> of guilt by association.
>
> The funny thing is, of course, that socialists know that Barack Obama
> is not one of us. Not only is he not a socialist, he may in fact not
> even be a liberal. Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund
> Democrat -- one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly
> committed to free-market policies.
>
> The first clear indication that Obama is not, in fact, a socialist, is
> the way his administration is avoiding structural changes to the
> financial system. Nationalization is simply not in the playbook of
> Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team. They favor costly,
> temporary measures that can easily be dismantled should the economy
> stabilize. Socialists support nationalization and see it as a means of
> creating a banking system that acts like a highly regulated public
> utility. The banks would then cease to be sinkholes for public funds
> or financial versions of casinos and would become essential to
> reenergizing productive sectors of the economy.
>
> The same holds true for health care. A national health insurance
> system as embodied in the single-payer health plan reintroduced in
> legislation this year by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), makes
> perfect sense to us. That bill would provide comprehensive coverage,
> offer a full range of choice of doctors and services and eliminate the
> primary cause of personal bankruptcy -- health-care bills.
>
> Obama's plan would do the opposite. By mandating that every person be
> insured, ObamaCare would give private health insurance companies
> license to systematically underinsure policyholders while cashing in
> on the moral currency of universal coverage. If Obama is a socialist,
> then on health care, he's doing a fairly good job of concealing it.
>
> Issues of war and peace further weaken the commander in chief's
> socialist credentials. Obama announced that all U.S. combat brigades
> will be removed from Iraq by August 2010, but he still intends to
> leave as many as 50,000 troops in Iraq and wishes to expand the war in
> Afghanistan and Pakistan.
>
> A socialist foreign policy would call for the immediate removal of all
> troops. It would seek to follow the proposal made recently by an
> Afghan parliamentarian, which called for the United States to send
> 30,000 scholars or engineers instead of more fighting forces.
>
> Yet the president remains "the world's best salesman of socialism,"
> according to Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. DeMint
> encouraged supporters "to take to the streets to stop America's slide
> into socialism." Despite the fact that billions of dollars of public
> wealth are being transferred to private corporations, Huckabee still
> felt confident in proposing that "Lenin and Stalin would love" Obama's
> bank bailout plan.
>
> Huckabee is clearly no socialist scholar, and I doubt that any of
> Obama's policies will someday appear in the annals of socialist
> history. The president has, however, been assigned the unenviable task
> of salvaging a capitalist system intent on devouring itself. The
> question is whether he can do so without addressing the deep
> inequalities that have become fundamental features of American
> society. So, President Obama, what I want to know is this: Can you
> lend legitimacy to a society in which 5 percent of the population
> controls 85 percent of the wealth? Can you sell a health-care reform
> package that will only end up enriching a private health insurance
> industry? Will you continue to favor military spending over
> infrastructure development and social services?
>
> My guess is that the president will avoid these questions, further
> confirming that he is not a socialist except, perhaps, in the
> imaginations of an odd assortment of conservatives. Yet as the
> unemployment lines grow longer, the food pantries emptier and health
> care scarcer, socialism may be poised for a comeback in America.
>
> Obama a socialist?
> By Scot Lehigh
> Globe Columnist / March 11, 2009
>
> OF ALL THE inane accusations about President Obama, the silliest has
> to be this: The president is a socialist.
>
> Obama's plans are "one big down payment on a new American socialist
> experiment," asserts House minority leader John Boehner. He's "the
> world's best salesman of socialism," says Republican Senator Jim
> DeMint.
>
> "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," declares Mike Huckabee. Sean
> Hannity derides his agenda as "socialism you can believe in." Obama is
> "a radical communist," warns kooky Alan Keyes.
> "Epithets are substituting for thinking," observes Marc Landy,
> professor of political science at Boston College.
>
> Are they ever.
>
> That has long been the case across vast realms of conservative talk
> radio, of course. I recently heard one of our local luminaries who
> regularly accuses Obama of Marxism offering a similar sort of
> indispensable insight on another critical issue: Michelle Obama's
> appearance during her husband's speech to Congress. The first lady's
> face resembled that of a camel, while her body looked like the Liberty
> Bell wrapped in purple, said WTKK's Jay Severin, who, hilariously,
> fancies himself a political polymath leading a rarefied radio
> discussion. (Severin imagines any number of things about himself that
> are at considerable variance with the truth.)
>
> So let's examine the matter. One defining aspect of socialism is state
> ownership, control, or direction of the economy.
>
> By contrast, despite the excuse of a crisis, Obama has resisted calls
> from both left and right to temporarily nationalize teetering banks.
> Similarly, if Obama were a socialist, crypto or otherwise, he would
> surely be proposing government-run healthcare, rather than an
> expansion that builds upon our current hybrid model.
>
> Nor does his agenda compare to the democratic socialism of countries
> like Denmark or Sweden, which have high taxation across a wide swath
> of the population to fund a generous system of social benefits.
>
> "What Obama even in his wildest moments is proposing is way short of
> that," notes Landy.
> What's really causing conservative conniptions is that Obama wants to
> tax top earners more and spend some of that revenue on benefits -
> healthcare, education, tax cuts, etc. - for others. His mortgage plan
> has drawn similar ire.
>
> But if he prevails, the two top income tax rates - 36 and 39.6 percent
> - would still be well below those the country had for much of the last
> six decades. The top rates were 90 percent or more from the mid-1940s
> until the mid-1960s. They remained above 65 percent from the mid-1960s
> until Ronald Reagan's presidency, when they were first cut to the 48
> to 50 percent range and later to 28 percent with a "bubble" bracket
> that taxed some income at 33 percent.
>
> Taxes rose under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. During
> Clinton's presidency, the top rates were set at 36 and 39.6 percent.
> George W. Bush's tax cuts reduced those rates to 33 and 35 percent.
> When those tax cuts expire, Obama favors letting the top rates revert
> to 36 and 39.6 percent.
> That historical perspective gives the lie to the notion that the
> president wants to impose an unprecedented level of taxation. Add in
> his other revenue-raisers, and he would clearly be more progressive
> than Clinton, but well within the tradition of FDR and LBJ.
>
> It's ambitious liberalism, without a doubt. But socialism, with all
> that conjures up? Hardly.
> "For upper-income taxpayers, marginal tax rates on ordinary income
> would return to Clinton-era levels," says Rosanne Altshuler, co-
> director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "Taxes on capital gains
> would be lower or the same as the top capital gains rate under Ronald
> Reagan, while taxes on dividends would be significantly lower than
> under Reagan."
>
> So why do Obama's ideologicial opponents persist in the socialist
> canard?
> Simple: It's far easier to gull people with politically freighted
> terms than it is to argue actual facts.
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