I HAVE a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son, so I spend a lot of time these days at the playground.
Which is fine. I like playgrounds. I like any place where it's
possible to make monkey noises without anyone thinking less of you.
The one challenging thing about the playground, though, is that you
have to do a lot of resource management. Because there's always some
moment when my daughter and another child decide, more or less
simultaneously, that they want to ride the last open swing.
I have
been hearing a lot of pundits and politicians bemoan “socialized
medicine” and its supposed inefficiencies and inequities. These horror
stories are never accompanied by data, just hearsay and anecdotes from
“a friend of a friend” in Canada or the United Kingdom. Rarely have I
heard from people who have themselves experienced a universal public
health care system. As one of those people, I thought I should speak up.
While living in Finland for three years, I experienced socialized medicine up close and personal. I gave birth to my son there.
If Michael Steele and the Republicans really believe that President
Obama is proposing a socialist health plan, they need to get out
more.
"Any idiot can nationalize a company," the great American socialist
Michael Harrington used to say, disparagingly. For socialists of
Harrington's generation and thereafter -- the socialists and social
democrats who have governed most of Western Europe off and on for the
past 30 years -- nationalizing companies hasn't really been part of
their playbook. To be sure, they long since nationalized a range of
services -- most prominently, health insurance -- that remain in
private hands in the United States.
The
closest we've come to a serious movement that adopted socialism as a
goal was in 1968, and Rudi Dutschke - "Red Rudi" - was a
charismatic leader in that movement in Berlin.
The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to
brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the
late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to
tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the
Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every
American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill
socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that
good.”
Some in the Republican Party are trying to re-dub the Democratic Party as the Democrat Socialist Party.
Nothing like getting out the old encrusted red paintbrush.
But I hope some Democrats don't run from this label.
Running doesn't get you anywhere.
Democrats have been running from the label "liberal" since the days of Michael Dukakis, and that hasn't helped them.
And for those who, like me, are actually Democratic Socialists, it's time to come out and say so.
Today we are caught in a global economic crash and depression, a calamity
affecting every nation connected to the global economy, especially poor nations
lacking economic reserves. But this crisis also puts into play new possibilities
for a democratic surge, perhaps toward economic democracy.
CNBC business analyst Rick Santelli's televised tirade earlier
this year ago against the idea of "loser" homeowners receiving
government assistance turned the cable analyst into an overnight folk
hero, no small feat for this voice of oppressed bond traders everywhere.
Newt Gingrich is right: "It is European
socialism transplanted to Washington." How else to describe an economy
in which the government controls the entire financial center and is now
supplying life support for the auto industry? That's on top of the
existing socialist economy run by the military-industrial complex,
which, thanks to George W. Bush, now absorbs upward of 60 percent of
the non-entitlement federal budget.
