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Please help me to understand here:
I have been reading some pretty .....interesting things about Obama. That he's trying to socialize America. While I admit I had a good laugh reading all these websites and blogs, etc. I wonder: Is he really trying to socialize America? And if so, is his goal temporary socialization to jump start the nation again?
I have a friend who's always complaining about her situation. She can't pay her rent. She can't afford it. Her job pays her too little. She has mounting bills. She's unhappy, etc, etc, etc etc. I used to feel bad hearing her constantly. Then I began avoiding her phone calls. But I do wonder, why doesn't she join one of the many kibbutz in Israel.
There are these places called kibbutz in which everyone lives almost as if in a communist country. Everyone gets same pay. Everyone is assigned a house depending on the size of the family. Everyone has some work to do. The kibbutz usually has a product that its known for. For example there is one kibbutz that produces baby wipes. That kibbutz is very beautiful with winding paths, a hotel, and a water park that attracts people from afar. Everyone can either eat in their homes or come to the common cafeteria -where the hotelers go as well- and eat there.
I think such a place would ease the burden of my friend. Then when she thinks she can tackle the world again, perhaps in the comfort of this kibbutz, she can learn a skill or work outside of the kibbutz to make extra money and then emerge again anew to make her own capital.
Is that what Obama is attempting with nationalized healthcare, buying all the big businesses, etc? Is that so bad, especially for a country that is already in financial trouble?
4 comments:
My, what right-wing friends you have!
The American right has been crying "Socialist!" at liberals and Democrats since about FDR's time. It's a scare word, designed to raise the specter of Communism. It's a tactic the right can't let go of, even twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They're living in the past. Nowadays, almost all industrialized democracies, including Canada, Israel, and just about all of Europe, is "socialist" by the standards of the American right.
Let's put it this way: If Obama accomplishes every single goal he's articulated, the U.S. won't become even one tenth as socialistic as Israel.
What is true is that Obama is the most liberal president we have had since...um, Nixon (who proposed a health care overhaul so sweeping it makes ObamaCare seem positively libertarian by comparison). What's really odd is that Nixon is also the president most associated with McCarthyism. Yet his presidency seems practically communistic by contemporary right-wing standards. He started the EPA and OSHA, he was the first president to institute affirmative action and to conduct trade relations with Red China, and he enacted wage and price controls in what George Will described as "the largest peacetime intrusion of government into the economy in American history, surpassing even the dreams of the New Dealers."
Obama is the first president to align himself with the Democratic Party's newly minted progressive wing, which in American parlance is called "the left" but outside the United States is practically conservative. The last two Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, actually identified as centrists, but that didn't stop the GOP from depicting them as dangerous radicals. Even a moderate Republican president like Ike was called a Communist agent, back in the day.
So it's hardly surprising the right perceives Obama to be the newest red menace, economic emergency or no. If you actually listen to what the left in this country (the folks over at Daily Kos, for example) is saying, you'll see they perceive Obama to be hardly a liberal at all, but rather a "center-right" conservative. They think the death of the "public option" in the health care package that came out of the Senate is proof of Obama's corporate influence. It's like a different political universe.
Through Google News and the history books I've been reading, what's struck me is how closely the rhetoric now resembles that of the 1930s, when FDR was president. FDR was denounced as turning the U.S. into a socialist country, with his "Social Security" and other massive interventions. At the same time, he was attacked by leftists and populists who felt his reforms were too weak and considered him to be beholden to big business. (He wanted to to pass health care reform but backed off at the objections of the medical establishment.) The following letter, written to FDR by a fan of Father Coughlin (yemach shmo), sounds like something you'd read in Daily Kos today:
"I know the truth and the truth is you have deceived the working man...and favored the big Business and Huge Corporations and let the Poor Working Man go starving, or go to Hell. I loved you and you have betrayed."
For the record, FDR was a far more transformative president than Obama is even trying to be.
So I think we're pretty safe from having the US become the USSR, despite the paranoid delusions of the right-wing currently. In our history, the rhetoric is usually more fiery than the reality.
Kylopod,
Thanks for the historical background!
I must check out the Daily Kos. I used to read it, but then found those "right wing" blogs so much more fascinating.
All things aside though, wouldn't pockets of a temporary kibbutz style revitalization help get the US economy back on track?
I've been posting there since early 2009. Charlie Hall (a frequent commenter on Jewish blogs) got there first. He frequently debates Israel bashers on the site. Here is my best post so far:
Click here
The right, as of late, has been mired in fantasy (Sarah Palin will make a great president), but some of the people at Kos are no better. There are diaries suggesting with a straight face that Democrats should "primary" Obama in 2012 so that a "real" progressive like Dennis Kucinich can take over. Yes, you heard me right. Dennis Kucinich.
I even saw one person propose that Hillary should challenge Obama again in '12. Hillary!
As you might imagine, many of the people on that site never liked Obama in the first place. The favorite presidential candidate on Kos, until he dropped out, was John Edwards.
That's why it's so funny to hear right-wingers talk about how the left worships Obama. I think it's a bit of projection.
Kylopod,
Thanks for the link. I will check it out.
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