Socialists Take Over Congress (A GOP Fairy Tale)

[Better Believe It]

Socialists Take Over Congress (A GOP Fairy Tale)
by John Nichols
The Nation
April 12, 2009

Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus, who despite an uncanny naivete regarding matters economic is the ranking Republican on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, is all jittery about the prospect that socialists in Congress are steering the ship of state off the left end of his flat Earth.

Yes, Socialists! In Congress!

Are you red scared? Don't be.

Washington, D.C., is overrun with banking, insurance and investment firm lobbyists – just about all of whom have contributed generously to Bachus and his colleagues on the financial services committee. These guardians of the "free market" devote their every waking hour to assuring that Congress will keep the bailout bucks flowing to Wall Street. So far, they have proven more than a match for those fiscally-responsible Americans who argue that, instead of enriching the speculators, we ought to be cracking down on them.

But this trifling detail has not prevented Bachus from grousing about the socialist threat. .... the unfortunate reality is that there are not 71 socialists in the House, not even 17. Why is this unfortunate?

Two reasons.

First: One does not need to be a socialist to recognize that capitalism has stumbled badly in recent months, and that some of those stumbles resulted from the market absolutism that has held sway in Washington for decades. Had there been a few more socialists in Congress in the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, we might have avoided some of the deregulatory deviations, free-trade fantasies and giveaways to Wall Street that so weakened the real economy of the United States.

A sincere socialist critique of unfettered capitalism is not just useful but necessary, just as a capitalist critique of unfettered socialism can be useful. This is not some radical notion. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with whom President Obama just met, is a socialist. So, too, were a number of the other participants in the recent G-20 summit. Many of the savviest and most fiscally responsible ideas about the current economic crisis -- including notions regarding bank nationalization that have been embraced even by some conservative Republicans in Congress -- were generated by socialists.

Second: A significant socialist presence in the House would reflect the sentiments of the American people. According to a new survey by Rasmussen Reports, a conservative polling group, 20 percent of Americans believe that socialism is a superior system to capitalism. Another 27 percent are not sure whether socialism or capitalism is preferable. (According to Rasmussen, younger Americans are even more inclined toward socialism, with 33 percent of adults under the age of thirty identifying with the "S" word and 30 percent suggesting that they are undecided between socialism and capitalism.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/426339?rel=hp_picks

[louis-t]

1. When do the trials start?