I don’t know why Republicans keep tip-toeing around the obvious. If I hear one more person say, “Nobody is calling Obama a Marxist (or Socialist)…..I’m just questioning his judgment, honesty”, what-have-you, I think I’ll scream.
Nobody says, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck…I’m not saying it’s a duck…I’m just questioning its judgment and honesty”. No. It’s a damn duck. Everybody knows it.
The evidence that Obama is a Marxist/Socialist is overwhelming. We have him speaking admiringly of “collectivism” in 1995, We have him in his own words, on tape, discussing “redistribution of wealth” favorably in 2001. We have his unguarded, and uncharacteristically honest answer to Joe The Plumber about “spreading the wealth” in 2008.
Capitalists do. not. speak. like. that.
We have him in his own words in his book, Dreams From My Father speaking of his preference for Marxist thinkers in college:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully,” the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
Obama’s interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.”
After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for what he described as “a Ralph Nader offshoot” in Harlem.
“In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia,” Obama wrote in “Dreams,” which he published in 1995. “At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature.”
Obama supporters point out that plenty of Americans flirt with radical ideologies in college, only to join the political mainstream later in life. But Obama, who made a point of noting how “carefully” he chose his friends in college, also chose to launch his political career in the Chicago living room of Ayers, a domestic terrorist who in 2002 proclaimed: “I am a Marxist.”
Ayers also describes himself as a “small c communist”. I guess that small c makes it a lot less scary.
But William Ayers isn’t the only far left/Marxist/Socialist/Communist Obama has associated with throughout the years. Not by a long shot. I made a list of such associations and supporters in my Reds Who Support Obama list, back in May. Here are just a few notables from the list:
Frank Marshall Davis: Obama’s Communist mentor in Hawaii.
Sam Graham-Felsen: Obama’s official blogger, and contributor to The Socialist Viewpoint.
Raila Amolo Odinga: Obama campaigned for his openly Socialist “cousin” in Kenya. Odinga encouraged widespread riots, and genocide when he lost.
Reverend Wright: A firm practitioner of the Marxist Black Liberation Theology:
Obama’s pals from the far left Students For A More Democratic Society belong to a whole class unto themselves. Obama’s longtime associate, Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground came from this group:
Mike Klonsky: best friends with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; started the Small Schools Workshop with Ayers, which Obama funneled almost $2,000,000 to via The Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Klonsky had a blog on Obama’s website, until it was discovered by conservative bloggers, and scrubbed.
Wade Rathke: Founder of ACORN, which Obama worked for, and supported.
Carl Davidson: a former vice president of the Students for a Democratic Society who traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and still praises the dictator today, is another proud radical for Barack Obama, serving faithfully as webmaster for “Progressives for Obama.”
That’s just a partial list of Obama’s Marxist friends. If you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps, what does that tell you about Obama?
Tomorrow, I may delve into his disturbing Muslim extremist associations.
Nice Deb 
Sigh…Assertions, my friend, are not arguments.
I’m a Marxist and a socialist. I’ve lived in Chicago and part of it’s left for decades. Take it from me. Obama doesn’t even come close to either out these. Your problem is not knowing the difference between plain old reformism and Marxism.
And many capitalists DO talk like that. You need to get out more.
Obama is a ‘high road’ industrial policy capitalist and multipolar globalist–just read his Cooper Union speech a while back. Clinton is a garden-variety corporate liberal capitalist, which got her on the board of Walmart for years. And McCain is an unreconstructed neoliberal capitalist–‘state all evil, market all good’–that kind that says ‘We’re in business to make money, not steel, so we’ll gut these plants and speculate in oil futures, and the workers and towns be damned.’ In other words, the ones who ‘cut taxes’ by putting everything on the China Visa card and got us into this mess.
Actually, truth be told, Obama’s brand of capitalism is best for productive businesses, and does least harm to the working class. He’ll help business by increasing demand–50mpg cars, MagLev, light rail, bio-diesel, renewable energy for home heating, and so on. Plus we get the spinoff benefit of new ‘green jobs’ and new wealth creation to do all the above.
But that means Obama’s high road industrial policy, not ‘Casino Capitalism’ speculators who think they’re creating wealth by betting whether the yen goes up or down in an afternoon.
LikeLike
Pingback: The Irascible Chef » MisUnderEstimation of 2008
Actually, truth be told, Obama’s brand of capitalism is best for productive businesses, and does least harm to the working class.
Neat. If Obama’s brand of capitalism is best, why aren’t you a capitalist instead of a Marxist?
LikeLike
Actually, truth be told, Obama’s brand of capitalism is best for productive businesses, and does least harm to the working class. He’ll help business by increasing demand–50mpg cars, MagLev, light rail, bio-diesel, renewable energy for home heating, and so on. Plus we get the spinoff benefit of new ‘green jobs’ and new wealth creation to do all the above.
Does this all happen after or before, “. . . the oceans stop rising and the planet begins to heal itself”?
BTW- Give me your computer. Mine sucks, I’m disabled and I need it more than you.
LikeLike
or better yet you make too much money let’s spread it around over here…it’s the patriotic thing to do…eyeroll
LikeLike
Since when does embracing policies that stop the redistribution of wealth upwards make one a communist?
While I agree that one can find evidence of Obama’s search to come to terms with Communist thought, I see no embrace of Marxism nor Leninist-Stalinism. He misses the key symptoms. Where’s his commitment to material dialectics? Hegelian thought? The Revolutionary Vanguard? Atheism? Rejection of racial identity as superstructure?
Being a little bit Marxist is like being a little bit pregnant: You either are or you aren’t. And Obama, according to Marx himself, wouldn’t fit the bill. So do the people who have suffered under Communist regimes a favor, don’t insult them and their ordeals by likening some watered-down pro-labor platforms to Marxism. It belittles their experiences.
LikeLike
Yes, because state-mandated production and advances in science necessary to make such endeavors truely profitable have always been a success, except when they weren’t. I don’t suppose that you could cite maybe three examples of such successes for us?
As for the rest of your psuedo-intellectual chin stroking, the fact that you have taken the time to identify and catalog various classes, subclasses and varieties of political and economic theory indicates to me that you are one of the people who talk about such things to other people who would be very impressed by the depth and bredth of your knowledge, and never give a single thought to your lack of courage to step out and take the risks involved with building a business, watching it grow, and employing others, while providing goods and services to society as a whole. Those of us with small businesses know what economic and tax theories will benefit our businesses and employees. We don’t need you to tell us, especially when you are getting it wrong.
LikeLike
Since when does embracing policies that stop the redistribution of wealth upwards make one a communist?
Depends on the policy. Policies which directly intervene to extract money from one individual to benefit others are communist.
LikeLike
“Policies which directly intervene to extract money from one individual to benefit others are communist.”
Well, not according to Marx, but, we’ll let that go. He’s dead. But, according to your definition, both parties are communist, because both intervene to extract money from one to benefit others. It just depends on who’s benefiting.
Let me try to explain, using an oversimplified model.
Let’s pretend that the War in Iraq, which we all agree deserves funding, costs: $1000
And 4 people live in the US.
Then, if everyone were to pay for the war equally, each person would pay $250 in taxes.
But, it doesn’t work that way because Joe the CEO is part of a company which receives a tax break because folks in Congress have decided that his business is important. So, Joe the CEO doesn’t have to pay.
This means the remaining Joe Six Packs get to pay $333.33 for the war. The first $250 of which would be paid outright to the Fed. The rest would be paid in higher sales or property taxes. Or in increased prices as the dollar weakens under the strain of the deficit.
Thus, Joe Six Pack ends up with a higher tax burden, which benefits Joe CEO. This is redistribution.
On the flip side, Obama wants redistribution too. He would make Joe CEO pay $400 for the war, so that the Joe Six Packs would pay $200 a piece. This would give Joe CEO the higher tax burden. And this is redistribution.
Either way, both parties play it; it just depends on who you want saddled with the taxes.
LikeLike
You missed the “direct” part of the statement. Entirely. And you obviously don’t understand taxes. At all.
But I will agree that the Republicans have a miserable performance record on failing to control spending. It’s just not as miserable as the Democrats’.
LikeLike
I addition to this Who’s Who of Commie Scum, I’d add this quote:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2008/02/obama-i-chose-friends-carefully-marxist.html
Although perhaps it’s not just to attribute Obama’s writing to Obama considering the rotten stench of Bill Ayers surrounding “Dreams From My Father.”
LikeLike
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
I used that in this post.
LikeLike
Actually, ‘Provocateur,’ I’m not into the state micro managing businesses.
I’d like to see government help local workers and community groups take over shutdown mills, and help them raise the capital, and help with infrastructure to get them up and running. They can do it through local credit unions. The workers would be owners and compete in the market like anyone else. The product? wind turbines and wave generators for alternate energy, as well as recycling plants.
There’s no good reason venture capital doesn’t do it. They could, but they don’t. Not because they wouldn’t make profits, either. They just wouldn’t make superprofits offshore or in the casino derivatives markets.
Worker-owners wouldn’t have that problem. All they have to do is make a quality product, with happy customers, pay themselves, put aside some for upgrading, and break even.
The best example, and a very successful one, are the Mondragon Coops in Spain–it took them much longer, though, since they had little government help.. They’re very cutting edge. Look them up.
LikeLike
If only it were that simple. But it’s not nearly that simple. Those worker-owners are going to be a might unhappy when their livelihood tanks after a couple of years. Mismanagement, lack of controls, lack of technical expertise, lack of sales and marketing, etc. will kill them even if competition doesn’t. Their only alternative is to hire all those people, who are highly skilled and mobile, so they don’t have to assume the risks of a worker-owned startup unless they’re paid at market prices.
So the worker-owners are soon going to be back where they started: either working for the man or unemployed.
Q. Why don’t venture capitalists invest in your alternative energy schemes?
A. Because they require a return on their money of 30%/year within 3 – 5 years. Getting approval for a wind turbine site can take years all by itself. Not to mention that they’ve been burned before: when gas prices went up in the 70’s, they invested; then gas prices dropped, making alternate energy companies worthless.
LikeLike
Pingback: Obama’s Energy Plan « Nice Deb
carldavidson, nice posts. Anticommunist, paradoxically yours were pretty good too–they were at least informed. If we’re talking about alternative, cooperative economic models, this should also be pointed out:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0706bowmanstone.html
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4016
these are interesting too:
http://libcom.org/library/commodity-fetishism-fredy-perlman
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm
LikeLike
And on the topic of the original post, I wonder if anyone here even knows how to define capitalism? It isn’t defined by the existence of trade, or of entrepreneurship, or of people trying to better their own personal lots in life. It isn’t even defined by the existence of capital (wealth used to create more wealth): merchant capital existed for hundreds and hundreds of years before capitalism really began. In those pre-capitalist times, you used your money to make more money by dealing in commodities–buy low, transport to another market, sell high–NOT by hiring wage laborers in order to *produce* commodities. Capitalism is marked by the penetration of capital into the realm of manufacturing–of commodity production. Does anyone here have any quotes by Obama about how he wants to eliminate the existence of wage labor as the basis of our economy? Quotes about how he advocates equal access to the means of production? About how he advocates people receiving the full value of their labor, and exercising democratic control over their workplaces?
I thought not. So, let’s carry on, but more intelligently this time.
LikeLike
Capitalism- Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. Under capitalism the state is separated from economics (production and trade), just like the state is separated from religion. Capitalism is the system of of laissez faire. It is the system of political freedom. – Capitalism.
Marxism- Marxism holds that class struggle is the central element of social change in Western society. Since the tension between social classes is deemed to be the cause of political unrest, Marxism attempts to solve this problem by establishing public ownership as its dominant feature. While there are many theoretical and practical differences among the various forms of Marxism, most forms of Marxism share these principles:
* an attention to the material conditions of people’s lives and social relations among people
* a belief that people’s consciousness of the conditions of their lives reflects these material conditions and relations
* an understanding of class in terms of differing relations of production and as a particular position within such relations
* an understanding of material conditions and social relations as historically malleable
* a view of history according to which class struggle, the evolving conflict between classes with opposing interests, structures each historical period and drives historical change
* a sympathy for the working class or proletariat
* and a belief that the ultimate interests of workers best match those of humanity in general – Marxism
Substitute “race” with “class”, and that fits Obama to a tee.
LikeLike