Category Archives: Socialism

HEALTH CARE: Socialized Medicine: Why Everyone Should Share the Costs / Al Stefanelli

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“A society will be judged by how it cares for it’s weakest members.”

Understand, I do not begrudge anyone from earning a profit, nor do I have anything personally against the entrepreneurial spirit. We should all do what we can to better ourselves. However, I am of the position that health care is not a privilege, but a right. As well, I reason that we are all morally obligated to ensure that each of us has access to it. That the United States does not have a national health care program is a major moral failure, and what we have in place is little more than a venue for unethical profiteers within the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

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The United States needs a tax-payer funded (single-payer) national health care system. Totally and completely socialized and incurring no costs to anyone beyond what their taxes pay. Those who cannot pay due to disability, unemployment or other circumstances beyond their control should have the same access as those who do.

In my opinion, putting a dollar ahead of the health and welfare of a human being is immoral. National or Socialized medicine should be a no-brainer.

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There should never be any individual who’s life is less important than a number on a profit and loss ledger.

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CAPITALISM: Interview / Richard Wolff on Challenging Capitalism in His New Book, “Occupy the Economy”

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Can we challenge capitalism and prevail, considering that the top one percent control 50% of the available capital and the top five percent some 70% of the nation’s private funds?  Richard Wolff is a closely followed Truthout contributor on economics.  Currently, you can obtain his just-released “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” directly from Truthout.  If you want to know about alternatives to the current destructive course of our economy and how we, as a nation, got to this point, get your copy of “Occupy the Economy” by clicking here.

The following is an interview with Richard Wolff by Truthout staff member Matt Renner.

Matt Renner: In your introduction to the book, you discuss New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “cleanliness” excuse for clearing the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Square. Why do you think so many public officials and right-wing pundits describe the occupiers as “unclean”?

Richard D. Wolff: Their problem has been, and continues to be, that they have no response to Occupy’s basic attack on the inequity and antidemocratic social conditions summarized in the confrontation of, “1 percent against 99 percent.” They know that the vast majority of Americans feel the truth of Occupy’s social criticism, experience it in their lives, and sympathize with protest against and efforts to change a system with such unjust outcomes. So, they can refute little and need instead to distract public opinion from what Occupy focuses on.

One way to do that is to assert the existence of and then condemn some other quality or dimension of Occupy. In Bloomberg’s pathetic example, the best he and his advisers could come up with was a reference to Zuccotti Park as being “unclean” so as to then position the mayor and the police as militant janitors. Everyone who knows even a little about New York City knows that the mayor and the police preside over many filthy subway tunnels, highways, streets, empty lots and abandoned buildings without doing anything to clean them. So, suddenly asserting the importance of cleanliness simply exposed them to the ridicule such a position deserved. I suspect something similar is underway when others, perhaps taking their cue from Bloomberg in New York, decided to follow the cleanliness ploy.

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Socialist Hollande Ousts Sarkozy as French Leader

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(Reuters) – Socialist Francois Hollande swept to victory in France’s presidential election on Sunday in a swing to the left at the heart of Europe that could start a pushback against German-led austerity.

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In Bastille square, flashpoint of the 1789 French Revolution and the left’s traditional rallying point for protests and celebration, activists began partying two hours before the polls closed and a swelling crowd cheered as giant TV screens relayed the results.

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Noam Chomsky: May Day

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Zuccotti Park Press, a project of Adelante Alliance, a Brooklyn-based immigrant advocacy group, is releasing Occupy, a new book by Noam Chomsky, on May Day.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

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Anarchism Is Not What You Think It Is—And There’s a Whole Lot We Can Learn from It

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On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism.  This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012. . . .

The precipitating event that led Kropotkin to embrace anarchism was the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. . . .

He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don’t lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion.

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American Socialism

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. . . [Reactionaries] would have everyone think that capitalism and socialism are diametrically opposed. That isn’t the case. American socialism is based on the idea that we all need a bit of help at times and our social programs were created to fill those needs. We have the aforementioned Medicare and Social Security: programs that are wildly popular on both sides of the aisle. There’s also Unemployment Insurance, which sure comes in handy when your job goes south. Means you get to continue eating and having a roof over your head. . .

[The White-wing] would have you believe that people who take advantage of social programs are forever a drain on our society. They paint a picture of lazy, ne’er-do-wells bereft of ambition, looking for nothing more than the next handout while picking the pockets of the hard-working members of society. . .

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