"Tienen la fuerza, podrán avasallarnos, pero no se detienen los procesos sociales ni con el crimen ni con la fuerza. La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos".
"They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history."
Whenever I expect reactionaries all over the world to engender a new chapter in the politics of the lowest common denominator, they find a way to thrill me.
Yesterday, for instance, Republicans in the United States added yet another weapon of mass deception to their arsenal; a very old 'ism' with which to concoct a new oxymoron. Another semantic travesti.
As The New York Times columnist Mark Leibovich noted yesterday, though troubling as its identity crisis might be, the Grand Old Party remains lucid enough to resort to a favorite rhetorical ogre: socialism.
The opening words to my first political blog come from Chilean President Salvador Allende’s last speech before his democratically-elected government was thrown out by a right-wing coup d'état. Allende, the first Marxist to become head of state by the vote -not the boot- was a Socialist.
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen coined perhaps one of the wittiest one-liners in U.S. political history when he told Senator Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” I did not befriend President Allende nor serve in any way during his government because I was just starting to figure out the purpose for my genitalia and the soother at the time of his passing. But I have dedicated the latest part of my life to study and analyze his life and accomplishments as well as his personal and political flaws.
What I am trying to say is this: Obama is no Socialist.
Compared to any other ‘Western democracy,’ the U.S. under President Barack Obama is, at best, a center-right government with a concern for public welfare and, at worst, the flip side of a two-party oligarchy firmly committed to sustain corporate welfare by any means necessary. Owning thirty or forty percent of Citibank does not qualify as nationalization of the financial industry. Yes, the government does own a big chunk of this and other banks now. But flushing these institutions with cash with the hopes they will start lending again and regain profitability is, the way I see it, only a sneakier version of corporate welfare. And the blueprint for healthcare reform, another building block in Obama's new economy gospel, looks a lot friendlier to the same old special interest group (insurance companies) than it does to a single-payer, European-style socialized model.
There is a cautionary tale here, however. President Obama vowed to change the failed policies that have brought a great nation to its worst economic, political, and moral decline since the Great Depression. After comparing the Obama Administration budget for FY 2010 with the Obama Campaign platform I found no evidence of a departure. Though ‘perfectible’ to borrow one the President’s favorite euphemisms, the budget is consistent with the agenda and long-term goals of his presidency: jumpstarting the economy while leveling the playing field to curb growing inequalities and reinvigorate social mobility, which has been identified by economists and historians as that nation’s historic engine of growth. That, of course, comes at a price for a privileged few, particularly those who have profited handsomely since the Reagan years.
Obama is no Socialist. The only similarity between the Obama Administration’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” and Salvador Allende’s “Vía chilena al socialismo ("the Chilean Path to Socialism") can be found in Allende’s last speech as a sobering warning. Those who seek power to continue defending their profits and privileges will stop at nothing. Not even something as archaic, romantic, idealistic and powerful as a democratically-elected government.
Salu2
