America`s Socialist Roots
Posted by Saddat Adutwum | Posted in African Market USA, Law Immigration and You, News, American News, Politics,
The howling hordes hounding Barack Obama over his proposed health care reforms would have us believe that the reforms will somehow turn America into a socialist hell hole where, in the view of one protester, Americans would be compelled to queue for basic everyday things like toilet paper.
But they need not worry, for America (Sara Palin's "real America") took its socialist turn a long time ago. Indeed, modern America, the envy of many a non-American, owes much of its survival and greatness to the many "socialist" interventions that were started by the Federal government at the height of America's so-called Gilded Age (the late 1800s and early 1900s).
Back then, it seemed that unfettered American capitalism, and its attendant concentration of wealth in the hands of an exploitive and oblivious few, was sowing the seeds for the kind of workers' revolution that Karl Marx had predicted would erupt from capitalism's many internal contradictions.
Those socialist interventions might well have prevented that revolution from happening. They started, ironically, with a semi-factual novel, The Jungle, written by the American socialist and journalist, Upton Sinclair, in 1906, about the tumults of early American capitalism. Earlier, in 1891, the Catholic Church had issued its famous encyclical, Rerum novarum, about the "revolutionary change" that had "long been disturbing the nations of the world" and the "rights and duties of capital and labor" in societies increasingly "divided into two classes, separated by a deep chasm".
In America, the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, led the charge against the excesses of capitalism and financed Sinclair's trip to Chicago, then the crucible of incipient American capitalism, to document what one writer would later call "the inferno of exploitation of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century".
At the time, women and children worked like donkeys for little or nothing alongside their overworked and under-paid husbands and fathers. "Wage slavery", it was called.
Along with other progressives of his time (people whom the town hall howlers today would accuse of "socialism"), Sinclair's work influenced the adoption or implementation of a range of laws to curb the excesses of American capitalism, protect the public against the dangers of substandard products from America's raging new factories, and safeguard the health and welfare of the American worker - and even his family.
Many of the US government's current regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, as well as various pieces of "socialist" legislation that have stood the test of time, owe their origins to the crusades of these seemingly subversive "socialists". Damn socialists!
But that was only the beginning. When some thirty years later America found itself in the throes of the Great Depression (characterized by a collapse in production, widespread unemployment, despondency and suicides among capitalists and workers alike), it fell to the "socialist" President Franklin D. Roosevelt to command all the federal government's resources at his disposal to intervene to save America from itself.
Here is a sample of Roosevelt's direct and indirect "socialist" legacy:
*Federal Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance *Unemployment Benefits Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
* Health Insurance for Aged and Disabled (Medicare)
* Grants to States for Medical Assistance Programs (Medicaid)
* State Children's Health Insurance
* Supplemental Security Insurance
He who is without sin should cast the first stone, the Bible tells us. He among the howling town hall hordes who has never benefited from any of these programs, has no relatives who have, and do not themselves plan to benefit from it in the future, should hurl the first stone at Obama the Socialist. Go ahead, do it!
Labor unions, today an indispensable if diminished feature of American industry, were, to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx, also the "hand maiden" of this generation of American socialists. Public education, school feeding programs, and public housing are but a few of other "socialist" policies that today hold American society today like glue.
Without them, America would arguably be a much more hellish place than Obama and his co-conspirators (and everyone before them) could ever hope for. In early 2007, author Michael Lind, on the basis of George W. Bush's support for Medicare drug benefit, cited the Republican president for presiding over "the biggest expansion of socialism in the United States since LBJ."
Two years earlier, the Chairman of the American Conservative Union had been no less charitable when he declared: "Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression". And so if by "socialism", the town hall howlers refer to the magnitude of the Federal government's spending on social programs, then America, to paraphrase Saddam Hussein, had long before Obama been the mother of all socialists.
Wikipedia describes the U.S. Social Security program, for example, as the "largest government program in the world and the single greatest expenditure in the federal budget…."
But like any bloated organism, American socialism - and health care in particular - is sclerotic and in need of a fix. Obama said he could do that. And the American people voted him into office to do exactly that. Those who disagree with his approach - and there may be genuine disagreements in that regard - must do so on the basis of fact and stop this scare-mongering that is more designed to bring down the Brother than to hold up America's virtues - whatever they may be
