SOCIALISM KEEPS GETTING VILIFIED

Jesus was the best known SOCIALIST

REPUBLICANS FILL THEIR MOUTHS WHEN DENOUNCING SOCIALISM

I will explain it one more time, and will probably do so again and again. Suffice it to say that I don’t consider myself a socialist, so if you are going off on a rant about that you are dead on the water. But I do realize that some areas of our economy and our government have to, need to, ought to be in the public domain. To do otherwise is to invite lack of competition, abuses, price gouging and worse: economic blackmail.

When you talk about what in economics is known as “NATURAL MONOPOLIES” then these are activities and companies that have to be in the public trust. A good example of this is public utilities. Electric companies, telephone and cable, water and sewers are but some of the obvious examples. The reasons are kind of obvious in these cases: can you imagine 20 power companies running 20 sets of wires in the streets and alleys of our country? Can you picture 5 water and sewer outfits all providing the same service? You could have constant street and pavement repairs and digging. The possibilities for chaos are astounding. What if all roads and highways were privately owned?

But then there are other endeavors that have to be in the public trust as well. Why is that, you might ask? We have to appeal to the better angel in all of us to answer that one. I think that most of us agree that it is unethical to make a profit out of people’s misery; it is downright immoral to make an obscene profit; and that would be the case if you have the whole health care system in private hands. Sprinkle in the way we administer health care through private insurance companies and the result is that we spend more than 17% of our GDP in this area. Sadly, insurance companies exist and they don’t provide any significant improvement or produce anything other than unadulterated profit; they are parasites and are holding the public hostage to their need to make a profit and their built in greed.

The question still lingers: are we, as Americans, as a nation, receiving any benefits or are we better off to have insurance companies or drug manufacturers in the mix? The answer is obviously no. These are all endeavors that other countries have corrected by implementing some kind of socialist model. Oddly enough, these countries are getting a lot more for their investment and the cost of health care to its citizens is less than half of that which we have in America…and yes they are getting much better care than we are…Canada for example with all its flaws has a system that costs them a hell of a lot less and yet they have a much longer life expectancy than we do. That is why when White House Spokesman Gibbs says that us on the “professional left” will not be happy unless we have Canadian health care he is right…we are not going to be happy until we see the insurance companies out of business and our health care costs go down more than half…we don’t mind it either that everyone then would have it nor do we mind that they will not put outrageous price tags on life-saving procedures.

Other things come to mind like our safety nets…Social Security and unemployment benefits. More than once Republicans have attempted to privatize Social Security. This was one of Bush’s most infamous attempts at a give away to his Wall Street cronies. Some Wall Street types were salivating at the prospect of this happening and were conjuring up Madoff style Ponzi schemes that would have evaporated the retirement piggy banks of middle class citizens. Americans mobilized and stood steadfast against this and it was not even brought to consideration. The reason: could you imagine what would have happened if all of our country’s seniors had their retirement funds invested in the Stock Market when it went precipitously down? I can answer that one for you because I had a 401K and a pension that both disappeared overnight in September of 2008; and so would have billions of our senior’s dough.

So, Republicans, listen up; you can’t continue to disparage the word SOCIALISM anymore because people in general are learning what the word means and they are not scared of it neither are they scared of the word LIBERAL or PROGRESSIVE. That kind of bullshit is no longer a weapon in your speech arsenal.

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/vietnam/electrical-wires-vietnam.