Right-Wing Hijacks MLK and Civil Rights Movement

While Glenn Beck holds his neo-fascist "Restore America" rally on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" to promote militarism, capitalism and theocracy, we need to remember that MLK's dream was a radical, DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST vision of equality and social justice that called for ending the Vietnam War, slashing military spending and REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH to alleviate the suffering of the poor and create a more just and equal society.

Glenn Beck is con-man and is using religion to promote a neo-fascist corporate agenda that opposes MLK's pro-labor, anti-capitalist legacy.

King's Dream Was Radical Economic Message

Glenn Beck Needs a History Lesson on the Civil Rights Movement

Glenn Beck Has Long History of Racial Mockery--His "Civil Rights" Talk is a Fraud

Glenn Beck's Perverse Revision of King's Dream is Nothing New

Glenn Beck is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.

What is Wrong With Capitalism?

Michael Moore's timely new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story Opens today. Hopefully those who see it will realize that capitalism is a failure and we must create a more democratic (socialist) society. Go see it, take some friends/family and spread the word!

Here's a message from Michael Moore: Tea Bag Nation Ends Today

Sen. Bernie Sanders Responds to Michael Moore: "What is Wrong With Capitalism?"



Alternatives to Capitalism:
Democratic Socialists of America
Socialist Party USA

The Happiest Places to Live? SOCIALIST!

The World's Happiest Places

Where in the world do people feel most content with their lives?

According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries.

Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The U.S. did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.

Let's see...Denmark, Finland, Netherlands..what do these happy Northern European countries have in common?? DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM! Of course people in these countries which provide "free" public healthcare and college tuition, strong labor unions, gay rights, month paid vacations, etc. would be happier than in "the greatest country on earth"--the United States where 15% of the country is unemployed, 45 million + have NO health insurance, 1 in 5 children live in POVERTY, etc....

Yes, Let's Redistribute Wealth!

McCain/Palin and the corporate media elites have been attacking Barack Obama's plan to allow the Bush Tax Cuts on the rich to expire (and return to the 36% rate under Clinton!) by accusing him of being a "socialist" who wants to redistribute wealth. And what is wrong with that? The top 1% earn more income than the bottom 50% and more wealth than the bottom 90% in the United States. Economic inequality is the greatest it has been since the Great Depression! Republicans support redistributing wealth from the bottom UP, but It is time to REDISTRIBUTE wealth from the bottom down!

Progressive Report: The Socialism Scare

Socialist Worker: What's Wrong With Redistributing Wealth?

Barack Obama a Socialist ?

The Right-Wingers are trying to label Barack Obama a SOCIALIST, and now they are trying to link him to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)!

From THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

Socialist Unrealism: Comedy Gold
Joe Conason

It seems like only a few glandular cases are obsessed with the fact that Barack Obama knows Bill Ayers, the vintage '60s "revolutionary" and former mad bomber, with everyone else including the New York Post dismissing the charge as a low blow.

But the Ayers controversy is only the spearhead of a massive Internet campaign by McCain supporters to brand Senator Obama a "socialist," the timing of which is exquisitely (if unintentionally) comic.

It goes like this: Sometime in the distant past, Obama won the endorsement of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or D.S.A.—a rather moderate group of activists by left-wing standards, who have always believed in advancing such radical concepts as universal health care, green technology, union jobs at decent wages, as well as many other worthy ideas that are now boringly mainstream.

The D.S.A. was founded by the late Michael Harrington, a wonderful writer and Jesuit-educated idealist whose great 1962 book, The Other America, inspired President Kennedy to begin the war on poverty. Mike was a close friend of Robert Kennedy and Pat Moynihan. He lived in a Westchester suburb and could scarcely have been more respectable, for a socialist.

So, back to Obama, that socialist. If we unpack the blog post that claims to expose his connections to the D.S.A., very few of the links actually prove what is advertised. The truth is simple and hardly scandalous.

Like many African-American Democrats, Obama was supported by the Democratic left in his community. They had so little familiarity with him, however, that even when the Chicago D.S.A. endorsed him, they repeatedly misspelled his first name.

The same posts note with horror that D.S.A. belongs to the Socialist International, which sounds very sinister but includes many parties that have been staunch American allies for decades, notably the British Labor Party. That's right. Tony Blair belongs to the Socialist International! And yet Blair and George Bush are great pals. Ready for another shocker? The C.I.A., former employer of Larry Johnson, whose No Quarter site is spreading this earnest nonsense, used to give money to socialist parties in Europe, many of which were likewise members of the Socialist International. Not only that, but Bill and Hillary Clinton still have many friends in the Socialist International, including the former heads of government of Italy, Germany, South Africa and Spain, among others, whom they invited to the White House to discuss their shared visions of the human future. Wow. Scary!

But that isn't why this is funny. Calling out Obama as a "socialist" is funny—in the dark sense that may be the only way anything in politics or economics is funny these days—because we are in the midst of a massive nationalization of finance that is sweeping the capitalist world. To my knowledge, the D.S.A. has never proposed anything quite as radical as President Bush's takeover of the nation's largest insurance company, or Senator McCain's desperate debate proposal for the government to buy up bad mortgages and renegotiate rates and principal.

Of course, I never gave much credence to those far-right screeds warning that McCain was a "Manchurian Candidate," but who really knows?
------
DSA National Chair Responds:

This story in various forms has been circulating on the web for at least 18 months. It is hardly surprising that in their panic that they might lose this elections right wingers are desperate to get it take seriously.
It shows how little most people know about socialism and its values that they would think that this centrist politician espouses socialist principles.
The $700 billion bailout which--like Bernie Sanders the independent socialist in the U. S. Senate--DSA opposed, was not a plan to change or even reform the American financial system. It was a plan to preserve it, just like the bailout of the Savings and Loan industry in the 1980's.
American socialists support single payer national health care, an end to the war in Iraq, the right of unions to organize and progressive taxation, to name just a few of the more pressing issues. To learn more about who we are and what we stand for your readers should visit our website: www.dsausa.org
Of course we do feel that people should vote for Obama over McCain, not because he is one of us or is even friendly to us and our positions, but because there is no hope of real change without a president that progressives and social movements can pressure to sign legislation that provides universal, affordable health care; reestablishes unions' ability to organize, reexamines our trade agreements and withdraws our forces from Iraq as quickly as possible.
Frank Llewellyn
National Director
Democratic Socialists of America

Communist Manifesto Turns 160

Tonight the U.S. Senate passed the “revised” Wall Street bailout (“rescue plan”) of American Capitalism, making this article by Barbarah Ehrenreich even more timely: As Karl Marx's epic document marks a big birthday, "free enterprise" seems willing to mark the occasion by dropping dead.

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
October 1, 2008

This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism--a k a "free enterprise"--seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line "Sign on Wall Street yesterday," and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, "JUMP! You Fuckers!"

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.
Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, proactive, fashion: the workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production" and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the past several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the eight-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom.

But all this immiseration--combined with fabulous enrichment at the top--did end up destabilizing the capitalist system, if only because , in the last few years, America's substitute for decent wages has been easy credit. Until about a year ago, we got almost daily messages, by telemarketer and by mail, urging us to consolidate our debts, refinance our homes, transfer our debts from credit card to another and try tasty new mortgages that didn't even require a down payment. All too often, we bit. It sounded so reasonable, for example, not to let our assets just "sit" in our houses but to start spending that money now.

At the other, Learjet, end of the economic spectrum, there was the problem of what to do with too much money. Yes, this can be a problem. Some of the super-rich have to hire consultants to help them spend their money: Where do you get a $20,000 bottle of wine or find a Picasso for the bathroom wall? More seriously, there was the problem of what to invest in. As Chuck Collins of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality has pointed out, huge concentrations of wealth can function like rogue waves, smashing around recklessly in their search for ever higher returns. A lot of these money waves flowed, directly or indirectly, into the dodgy credit schemes that were engulfing the un-rich majority, leaving even the fat cats imperiled by the toxic debts of the subprime class.

Marx's argument was that the coexistence of great wealth for the few and growing poverty for the many is not only morally objectionable, it's also inherently unstable. He may have been wrong about the reasons for the instability, but no one can any longer deny it's there. When the greed of the rich collided with the needs of the poor--for a home, for example--the result was a global credit meltdown.

Obviously, the way to address the crisis is to deal with the poverty and inequality that led to it: bail out people facing foreclosures, increase food stamp allotments, extend unemployment insurance and make a massive job-generating, public investment in infrastructure--and, since medical debts are the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, enact universal health insurance immediately. But not even Obama, whose lawn sign I still proudly display, seems to have the stomach for such a "trickle upwards" approach. He has announced that he won't bother taking the bailout as an opportunity to change the bankruptcy law so that people facing foreclosure can renegotiate their mortgages.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto--although I'm hoping that capitalism survives this one, if only because there's no alternative ready at hand. At the very least, we should get some regulation and serious oversight out of any bailout deal, meaning that, yes, the economy will look a little less like "free enterprise." But one thing we should have learned in the last week, if not the last year, is that, when applied to enterprise, "freedom" can be just another word for someone else's pain.

About Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation

(She is also honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America)

Here's a Socialist perspective on the bailout of American capitalism, by Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the 25 Senators to vote against the bill:
DON'T MAKE WORKING PEOPLE BAIL OUT WALLS STREET

The "Free Market" is Dead

So much for the "free-market" capitalist propaganda usually supported by the American political and media elites.

U.S. BENDS THE RULES OF FREE MARKETS

Conservative Republicans Finally admit "The Free Market Is Dead"

After years of preaching the gospel of "free market" capitalism to other countries, the U.S. is now "nationalizing" U.S. financial industries!

It's amazing how the corporate rich oppose any "government handouts"
for the working class or the poor but love it when the U.S. government (we the taxpayers)
bail them out. Funny how we never have money to insure healthcare for everyone,
or free college education like most European countries, but conservative Republicans
always find money for the military-industrial complex and their corporate financiers.
Why not provide some of this "socialism" for the American working class?

Here's a Democratic Socialist response to the economic crisis from Sen. Bernie Sander's

Read Sen. Bernie Sander's Statement Outlining a progressive response to the crisis HERE.

Watch a Video HERE

Read the Democratic Socialists of America's Economic Justice Agenda

Socialism and Homosex

Doug Ireland has an excellent article in Gay City News on SOCIALISM AND HOMOSEX: An Ohio State Historian Rediscovers an Important Slice of Gay History, presenting some important recent historical research on how the Socialist Party began working to decriminalize homosexuality and support laws prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians in the 1950s, BEFORE former Communist Harry Hay's Mattachine Society. It's an interesting look into the radical roots of gay liberation in the United States.

The Socialist Party USA went on to become the first U.S. political party to nominate a gay candidate for President (David McReynolds) in 1980.

Socialist Senator Makes History

Here's a great article about Senator Elect Bernie Sanders (Vermont) on the BBC Socialist Senator Makes History Too bad we only have ONE socialist in the U.S. Congress, most advanced countries have viable socialist parties! Another reason to move to Vermont--the next best thing to Canada! If you are interested in building a socialist movement in the U.S., check out the Democratic Socialists of America, which Bernie Sanders is a member of. It's not a political party, but is trying to build a progressive Democratic Left in the Democratic Party--make the Democratic Party a REAL DEMOCRATIC Party. There is also a Socialist Party in the U.S., but the two-party system in the U.S. makes it impossible to have a viable third party at this time. As many of you know, I sometimes get so frustrated with the Democratic Party I threaten to join the Socialist Party, but I'm going to give the Democrats another chance and a little more time.