Thanks Billy Wharton for a very thought provoking article.

The current self-destruction of American capitalism certainly warrants a knee jerk reaction to the alternate system of socialism, but it would only move the nation from one “ism” to another.

Capitalism has proven to be the best system for the creative imagination, innovation, and economic growth, but it is fraught with many excesses. This though does not justify throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The only answer to the reckless greed of capitalism is a public determination for more fairness by way of more democracy.

Yes, this current financial fiasco is about the greed of capitalism, but it is also about the lack of true participatory democracy to provide for the common good and to protect the weak from the powerful. The powerful have always been able to look out for themselves. However, the U.S. does not need a heavy shift to socialism (health care being one major exception) but a change in national values

Simply put, Americans have become too materialistic, too preoccupied, too selfish and intellectually lazy to make democracy work for the common good. So the American people have allowed the greed of capitalism to rule. Thus the chickens have come home to roost.

Also the U.S. has a massive build-up of the military industrial complex that encourages unilateral confrontations, it is highly profitable and it is backed up in the public eye with unusually good paying jobs. Hopefully, lack of national funds will bring sanity to this issue.

In turn, the institutions of financial capitalism have proven to be incapable of diligent moral scrutiny in their quest for quick labor free phantom wealth, not real wealth. It must be questioned as to whether government regulation can ever curb such abuses and thus a certain degree of socialism in the financial sector may be in order.

In turn, the corporate media conglomerates can never be expected to question the oppressive rule of corporate power. It is all about increasing TV ratings with trash programs in lieu of elevating the public social consciousness. A healthy democracy requires a diligent “civic press”, but to corporate sponsors, this goes against the grain of an uncaring and unconscious consumer way of life.

In turn, a true national wisdom can only come from a healthy democracy. The world needs wisdom for the survival of the human species. However, modern technology, economic growth, and military power will never lead to wisdom. A national wisdom can only come from the spiritual dynamics of democracy that is meant to embrace opposing viewpoints and to synthesize a fair solution for the common good. It is all about the spiritual nature of humankind, the ability for personal transformation and spiritual discernment to compel a new national conversation and increasing national introspection. For humankind, this is the natural path to peace, truth and wisdom.

Americans must recognize that a materialistic consumer culture has become the enemy of spirituality and democracy itself. America has failed to recognize that democracy is as much an exercise of the human spirit as in the practice of religion, but without the threat of theocracy. But even institutional religion in the U.S. has pretty much divorced itself from spirituality in order to control the faithful and to benefit from the gospel of prosperity.

In summary, to transcend the dominate culture of capitalism, there needs to be political freedom, freedom from corporate domination and the power of wealth. Presently, the U.S. Congress is not sufficiently free to think great democratic thoughts because we the people have not demanded that the Congress be free from corporate power.

A renewed democracy is America’s challenge for the 21st Century.

First, you can thank Rush and Co. for the hype about socialism. Are you aware that people in this country are stockpiling weapons in their basements because of the fear and hate this issue has sparked?

Secondly, the people calling people and things "socialist" generally don't know the meaning of the word. It's another hate word. Same as "liberal". This is just another GOP fear campaign.

Obama a socialist? We should be so fortunate. I wouldn't have voted for Kucinich in the primaries and Nader in the general election if Obama was a socialist.

The conservatives and their lower-income bracket lackeys fear socialism because they don't want the people having that collective power. The elites want to rule over all of us with their middle-class guardsmen protecting them from the wrath of a populist uprising.

I would suggest that anyone here seriously interested in learning about socialism, to read the daily World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) at www.wsws.org.
The WSWS has informed it's readers about Obama and the Democratic party for the last several years!
Here a link to the latest article on Obama from WSWS:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/pers-m14.shtml

Obama at the Business Roundtable
14 March 2009
Tom Eley

"On Thursday, President Barack Obama spoke before the Business Roundtable, an organization of leading corporate CEOs. Obama used the opportunity to deliver a paean to American capitalism.

The speech, delivered in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, had an air of provocation against the American people about it. Not a few of the CEOs assembled at the conference have overseen the ruination of their own corporations. Collectively, they bear responsibility for the economic collapse and the impoverishment of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions the world over.

..."

the socialists like the author should skip the obvious and concentrate on reasons no existed government so far, riding on populist agenda could take up civilization to the next level - the soviet bloc being the first case - to help; it's never the ideas but the implementation / edweg

Only an incredibly ideologically backwards country like the current USA would think that Obama is "socialist"! We need a major party that really is socialist (i.e. for the nationalization of the means of production and distribution)!

Perhaps Obama can play the role of Gorbachov as the US follows the Soviet Union into collapse. Who would have dreamt during the Cold War that both superpowers would collapse as a function of their own internal stupidity and corruption? And only 20 years apart from one another.

Obama a "socialist"?

It is to laugh.

I wish!

· Yr Obd't Servant

The U.S. government is a capitalist government

The government of the United States is a capitalist government, and all its actions—its taxation policies, its war and foreign policies, its foreign-aid programs, even its social-welfare programs—are all policies on behalf of the capitalist class, not the people. Reforms that have been achieved have never been the result of the capitalist politicians' and parties' good will. All have been the result of independent struggles by the working class and its allies. Such reforms included ending (some) child labor, the right of Black people and women to vote, civil rights, the right to form unions, and the right to free, public education.

Workers Should Own and Control Industry

Workers should own, control and manage all the basic industry of the country. These assets—energy-generating systems, mines, mills, factories, healthcare services, transportation, giant agribusiness farms, construction companies, etc.,.—should be taken from private ownership and profit-making and put to public use under the ownership and control of the working class. Then production could serve human needs instead of private profits.

We need a workers' government

The socialist program advocates that the workers control the government of the country. The first priority of a workers' government is to disarm the current military establishment, especially its nuclear arsenal, whose sole purpose is to protect capitalists’ property, and establish workers' ownership and control of all public property.

In a socialist planned economy the vast wealth and resources of the United States would immediately be put toward the social welfare of the world's working people. The resources now hoarded by the capitalist class could, if liberated, feed, clothe and shelter all the world's people.

The resources now put toward the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex can be turned into vast public works for the advancement of science in the interest of human health (such as mobilizing science to cure cancer, heart disease, and AIDS), and saving the environment from the ravages wrought by the capitalist system for profit.

The prerequisite for the protection of a healthy environment is a social revolution to end capitalist production and institute socialist production—a planned economy to serve human needs.

The Obscenity of Poverty in the Midst of Plenty

There is no logical reason for homelessness, hunger, illiteracy or poverty in the United States, or, in fact, anywhere in the world today. But there is another kind of logic at work in the creation of the gross inequalities in capitalist society: the logic of the capitalist system of production for profit.

Humankind has already developed the ability, technology, and the know-how to solve all the problems of homelessness, poverty, and hunger!

The only thing that prevents these solutions from being enacted is the system of production for profit instead of human need. The capitalist system threatens human advancement. It threatens the survival of the human species. It threatens the survival of the planet earth as a hospitable environment for the human species, as well as millions of animal and plant species.

Once the capitalist system is abolished by the united actions of the working people of the world, once human society is organized around the principle of meeting human needs through human solidarity, there will be a granite-hard basis for the true flowering of humankind. Then, real human history, free of its fetters, can begin. That is our goal.

Looking back at US history, at the battles between labor and the "Captains of Industry," at Roosevelt's modest advances at providing for the overall welfare of the American people, and at the final (or near final) victory of Capital over labor and the environment and the national need, etc., it is sad that the term "socialism" can be so easily used as a pejorative, it is in such disrepute.

Where is our collective memory? Do modern Americans not give a whit about the 8 hour day, child labor, women's rights, safe working conditions, discrimination, collective bargaining, decent wages, or a middleclass way of life? Had the "Robber Barons" won in the nineteenth century none of these benefits would be as widespread. Had not Roosevelt's pragmatic reforms and Truman's GI Bill of Rights existed the immense middleclass we saw in the fifties would never have materialized.

I'm not even a Socialist. I'm a simple run of the mill pragmatic progressive who usually votes Democratic. Socialism, after all, is merely a theory. It is not evil, it is not anti human rights, and it may even work, and probably does in some places. Agree or disagree - the word should never have become a pejorative. But because it is, and it facilely falls out of the lips or Republicans and Libertarians who probably don't even know what Socialism is, it proves, or demonstrates, rather, the enormous victory the Captains of Industry, and their modern acolytes, have had. What, as Thomas Frank once asked, is the matter with Kansas?

Will the current economic crisis bring the myth makers down? I should hope so. But will greed also disappear from the face of the earth? That is the real question we have to ask. And there is only one way of containing greed. Through law and regulation.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/updating-the-militarization-and-annexation-of-north-america/ <–The capitalists are gonna unite USA, Mexico and Canada into a corporate machine of plunder and death. I told the pizza and cake-slaves that live around my house to vote for an alternative party and not for Democrats and Republicans. but they thought i was crazy

wow! who'd a tho't WaPo would ever post a positive article about socialism? my gawd, one article makes more sense about bank "nationalization", health care, foreign policy, obama, etc., than a year's worth of WaPo's usual bullshit.
maybe they are seeing some light b/c the capitalism they shill for is destroying their business? it's main advertisers, the ones for whom the msm works, lockheed martin and boeing in WaPo's case, will not be pleased.

This article inspires the question of relativism, something we have to master anyway, in our daily lives. Political relativism makes most USans think a shift one inch to the left risks falling into a great socialist cesspool, while objectively they've already fallen into a deep capitalist cesspool. But why care about relativistic distortions when you can gain a false sense of balance within a relativistic frame? Your spaceship is moving ten lightyears per second straight for the sun. If you're walking foward in the cabin or backwards, well, that's a big difference from your point of view. If the elite establishment steals one or two years of your productive life to shore up their institutions of oppression what's the big deal? They are after all the dispensers of the jobs aren't they?

Let's use the capitalist crisis to establish a coalition between the TRUE left, i.e. we progressives who advocate for 100% human fulfillment, and the socialists who are more in the political center advocating for partial human fulfillment, since the socialists are now getting some attention from the Washington Post (heh heh). At least both camps disagree with private instruments of mass exploitation. And both agree on human fulfillment in most areas (too bad not all areas). We progressives insist however that the socialists allow for independence of local communities from regional and national bureaucracies, the cathedrals. Until the socialists can explain how the Social Security and Medicare programs managed to resist corruption all this time, we're going with the assumption that they will be corrupted tomorrow, following a long line of "incorruptible" institutions over the cliff.

This doesn't mean progressives reject Medicare for All. We support it as a reasonable step in the right direction. But with eyes wide open.

"Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat -- one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committed to free-market policies."

Thats the holy truth.

President Obama and official DC are as much about Green Zonism as anything:

From The Vassals Handbook
Lesson ten – the glory of the Green Zone

Some call it the God Zone, others with equal appreciation call it the Genghis Zone in honor of that great liberator of olden time Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu Khan who liberated Iraq from the Iraqis nearly 800 years prior to George Bush the Second when his invading legions overran the Middle East.

Whatever you call it, the Gravy Zone or the Grand Zone or simply the GZ, the Green Zone shines like a beacon that we might all live in the GZ someday, if we work hard enough and get lucky. That's the story anyway. Originally the Baghdad headquarters of the US occupation of Iraq, today the Green Zone means the Good Life. If you’re in the Zone, the Green Zone, you’ve got it made. Everyone there that I care to know makes six figures easy. Oh sure, you wind up dodging an incoming bomb or two on many a night, but with blast walls screening off ground attacks from the Red Zone – anywhere beyond the Green Zone – you feel safe enough. What’s life without a few bombs thrown about from time to time? ...

http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/lesson-ten-the-glory-of-the-green-zone/

Why choose between a dictatorship of capital or one of the state? Why not choose decentralized direct democracy? What was once logistically difficult, technology has made easy.

Wharton sez: "The first clear indication that Obama is not, in fact, a socialist, is the way his administration is avoiding structural changes to the financial system."

***
What should be getting thrown at Wall Street is 7 trillion regulations, not the same number of your grandchildren's dollars. And that should be just step one of a full system overhaul.

I was a former SP-USA member, but got disillusioned by the infighting at the Pennsylvania chapter, but the SP-USA is more functional in other states.

One would thing that Mr. Wharton would have at least given their website address; here it is:

http://www.sp-usa.org/

---USAn---

That's the problem, too. The Socialist Party is not anywhere near to being the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs.

Boring...I got about half-way through and my mind was wandering. Until he can get to the point quickly and capture readers attention he will remain in obscurity along with his party.

ONLY REAL-SOCIALISM CAN GET US OUT OF THIS HELL, NOT DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS !!

HOWEVER: In order for socialism ideology to succeed in this world, socialists parties in this world have to rise to power, transform the media, convert the media ideology from capitalist, free market ideology toward socialism, spread socialism propaganda to the masses, and anti-capitalism propaganda. In other words, socialism has to become a ‘mainstream politically correct ideology’ in the eyes of the masses.

You guys just have to realize something. What i mean is that right now in most countries the mainstream political economy and philosophy is free-markets, businesses, credit cards, banks and individualist-capitalism, while socialism and communism are still despised and rejected by the majority of average world citizens, socialism and communism are still in diapers as alternative politically uncorrect ideologies.

Another good thing to push socialism and communism forward to become a mainstream ideology and a demanded ideology by the masses is that socialism has to suceed at least in a couple of countries like in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba their populations have to accept it, love it, and be happy with socialism, so that other countries populations demand socialism in their own country.

So that US citizens having a hard time with paying their privatized services and devalued dollars, have to be aware and realize how socialism is increasing the living standards in other countries like Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina etc., and connect the dots, of how socialism would increase the living standars of the american population.

Because we all know that capitalism is making americans poorer (at least this stage of capitalism which is neoliberalism)

I am shocked. Shocked! That Billy Wharton praises Conyers' single payer plan. Not that there's anything wrong with it. But it's not socialist: with single payer, the health care system remains private, it's only that the government pays.

If you want socialized medicine, go to Great Britain, where the hospitals are public and the doctors are public employees...and they live longer than Americans, even though they spend half what the US does per capita.

No arguement from my side. The American (U.S.) public is so deeply indoctrinated that it has no capacity for understanding truth. According to studies I've read, the U.S. is one of the most religously fundamental nations (close to that of Saudi Arabia) in the world. Hence, the likes of Limbaugh and his ilk.

obama is a very dangerous man

he is a shill who was brought forward and endowed by wall street

look at his appointees

the few that past muster - most don't even pay their taxes - are all from wall street

all from wall street - does that tell you something folks

he is a bald faced liar - his campaign promises have shriveled up faster than a slug on a hot tarmac

he has ramped up bush's bailouts from 700 b to at least - the latest figure - 7 trillion - with undefined liabilities for the derivative markets which could exceed 100 trillion dollars very easily

even in debased dollars that is a lot of money

this year we the people paid 400 billion dollars in interest on the old deficit

so we have a bank crisis, some argue a bank created crisis, that we all agree was a result of out of control bankers running scams through collusion with rating agencies that gave their toxic "financial products" triple a ratings which they sold to the world thereby ruining entire countries and millions of people's wealth

the solution that obama champions is to give, in total secrecy, these banks 7 trillion dollars in this thing called a bailout, which no one understands and none of the corporate media talking heads can explain

where does the government get the money to give to the banks - why they get the money from the banks - at interest

huh

i thought they were broke

well they are

then how do we get money from them

well they don't actually have any but the "money" what they loan the treasury is just a computer transfer

no money involved - except we start paying interest on this computer blip from the moment the computer makes the transfer

it is a concept - nothing more

the banks scam the people - they get a bailout from the people - which is a computer blip from the fed to the treasury - then the treasury gives the blip back to the bank as a handout

what a scam

meanwhile back at the whitehouse we have a president about whom we know nothing

here are some obamafacts:

he started out in his first job working for henry kissinger - nwo shill and war criminal

he spent his whole working career in the bowels of the foundations - rockefeller and ford tax free wealth repositories

you really need to know nothing more

what is tragic is how he has played the american people and used their hopes for a better life against them/us

when i see his plan to raise an army of 1 million obama acolytes who are being asked to take down license plates of anyone they see with an anti-obama caption on the fenders....

they plan to send these fascist children door to door to find out who supports obama and who doesn't

obama plans to make military service mandatory for EVERYONE

starting with children 18-24

but will include seniors and adults in phase 2

a force as large or larger than the entire military

we are truly in deep shit in this country at this time and we need to rethink the whole obama psyop before we are inundated with brown shirts for obama

consider - fascism in italy an germany started as ground up movements

Jim Shea

All of this talk about "socialism" is straw-man scare talk by republicans. Americans voters have been so indoctrinated by such talk that they react like Pavlov's dogs to the word, even if it is totally meaningless and inapplicable. The American voter reacts fearfully when Obama is called a "redistributionist" even while the American economic system has for many years been redistributing the nation's wealth upward. Jeffferson was right! Democracy cannot exist with an ignorant electorate.

Exactly right.