by Madeleine KandoPeter Dreier has an article in the Huffington Post of September 5th, entitled ‘What Kind of Capitalism?’. What he says in this article is that there are two kinds of capitalism: the ‘no rules’ capitalism and ‘responsible’ capitalism.
If you ask me, he is giving new names to the concepts of ‘social democracy’ versus ‘liberal democracy’, even though the former seemingly points to an economic system and the latter to a political system.
America has always been a ‘liberal’ democracy. Many European countries are ‘social’ democracies. The difference is primarily in how much control the government has over excesses and inequality that capitalism inherently creates. Liberal Democracies are for less government and more individual rights, whereas Social Democracies subordinate individual freedoms to protect the rights of the group.
Even though some societies fluctuate back and forth between those two tendencies, America, right now, is moving ever more towards an extreme form of ‘liberal’ democracy. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class is shrinking.
Can you believe that the 400 richest billionaires have a combined net worth of approximately $1.6 trillion? That is more than the combined net worth of the 56 million American families at the bottom half of American society. I you took the income of just ONE of those billionaires you could feed 140,000 American families.
In the 1962 movie ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, a platoon leader played by Lawrence Harvey is captured by the Communists in China and undergoes a brainwashing treatment which turns him into an assassin who is supposed to kill the American Presidential candidate. He is has lost his will and he has been brainwashed in believing that the Communist cause is just.
The Republican Party is engaged in a similar tour de force: they are brainwashing Americans by creating a false reality all-around.
Let’s take their mantra of ‘Big Government – big spending’. They love to point to the huge budget deficit and blame it on the Obama administration. It is spending too much on social services, they say. They conveniently ignore the fact that this deficit is a result of the Bush administration’s tax cuts, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cost of trying to save us from an economic meltdown by bailing out banks, car manufacturers, etc.
Another good example of the Republicans’ knack for fabricating an alternate reality is their resistance tot he health care reform. The core of that plan is to reduce health care costs while providing coverage for everyone. So why are the Republicans so against it? Don’t they WANT to reduce the deficit?
According to Congressman Paul Ryan, one of the ‘Young Guns’ of the Republican party and the author of ‘Roadmap for America’s future’, the answer to our fiscal problems is to eliminate income taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest and abolish the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the alternative minimum tax. All these proposed tax cuts would benefit the rich, not the poor.
He wants to privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s his answer to the deficit: eliminate social programs and cut taxes for the rich.
He forgets to mention that cutting taxes would create a larger deficit. It would create a dog eat dog society where the rich are much much richer and the poor are poorer. This man keeps saying that America is a ‘culture of free enterprise’ and that we don’t want to become a European style ‘cradle to grave social democracy’, implying for some obscure reason that there is no free enterprise in a social democracy.
Just like in the movie ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, the Tea Partiers and Republicans are brainwashed by their leaders to do their dirty work. They are brainwashing their constituency into thinking that it is all the Government’s fault. Let’s just hope that they follow the movie's script by either committing suicide or come to their senses before they cause irreparable damage. leave comment here