As a preview of life in a socialist America, Barack Obama’s half-hour Infomercial Wednesday evening wasn’t half bad. It had its pricey origins in a broken promise about practicing restraint with money. With a mood-molding musical soundtrack, it featured a peerless leader moving among the common folk. He listened to the sad stories of their gray and difficult lives in a land of scarcity. He did this in his shirt sleeves.
Speaking at times on the road, and at times from a fake Oval Office, he conjured for us all a country in which after long years of darkness, light will finally filter into our desperate lives. He will manage our collective wealth and opportunities so that no factories will close, no homes will be foreclosed, all medical bills will be paid, all refrigerators will be stocked with the best of snacks, the price of milk will never rise and the sun will never set on the radiant future. As president, he will tread the byways of the “Middle Class,” listening to the lamentations, cutting up the pie, dispensing the dole.
He will do this surrounded only by cheering crowds, grateful citizens and maybe a couple of adoring CEOs. Sometimes he will speak to small reverent groups, while they nod in silent agreement. Sometimes he will stand alone on a high pedestal and survey the cheering crowds. Sometimes he will need a stadium. He will explain to the common folk their own pension plans, and nod thoughtfully, in profile for the camera. He will bestow grace upon, and ration welfare to, those who stay humbly below his “Middle Class” income limits of $200,000 per year (or — we interrupt the Infomercial to ask – is the limit for eviction from the “Middle Class” $250,000? or $150,000? — depending on the day, and whether it’s Obama or Joe Biden speaking).
In Infomercial America, no one steps forward to challenge Obama. There are no awkward questions, and certainly no explanations, about sermons by Rev. Wright, book blurbs for Bill Ayers, real estate deals with Tony Rezko, toasts to Rashid Khalidi, ties to ACORN, confidential school records, or the whole medley of Marxist, radical, terrorist, God-damn-America mysteries that have dogged Obama’s campaign. There are no worries about how in truth Obama plans to assemble and dispense the endless largesse that will flow to the grateful and humble workers of his realm.
“Together we will change this country, and change the world,” proclaims Obama. But how? Dedicated to the proposition of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, Americans will rise in the morning, work happily in their ossified jobs, and wait gratefully for their government handouts? This country will see a new birth of the value theory of labor?
True, it’s expecting a lot to think that a candidate would spend $3 million to buy a half hour of primetime on seven networks and then use it present anything other than his idealized picture of himself. But if this is Obama’s ideal, if this is the change that’s coming, will Americans still be left with enough freedom-to-choose to change the channel?
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17 Comments
1. MarkJ:Gee, I think it’s about time to change the title of this picture to “Roses for Obama”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=1152160
I would watched Obama’s 30 minute exercise in AgitProp, but I didn’t particularly feel like vomiting all over my new oriental carpet. Frankly, I’m surprised Obama spent so much money on his informercial–he could have just hired some North Koreans. They’re real pros, they’re hard workers, and they’re dancing in the streets if they get minimum wage.
Oct 30, 2008 - 9:25 am 2. Steynian 277 « Free Canuckistan!:[...] ROSETT: “Previewing the Democratic People’s Republic of America” …. [...]
Oct 30, 2008 - 10:22 am 3. Life in Obama’s Socialist America « Truthseeker:[...] Claudia Rosett explains how Obama’s half-hour Infomercial Wednesday evening was really a preview of the Democratic People’s Republic of America: [...]
Oct 30, 2008 - 10:54 am 4. Professor Guvinoff:By some remarkable irony of our national calendar, the election takes place just around Halloween time, and this year, it feels closer than usual to me.
I’m afraid my hearing aid does not work very well. Here is what I was hearing while looking at the screen:
“My fellow Americans, we are the greatest nation on earth, and here I am, sincerely, asking you to help me change it”
How to you pop out of this kind of nightmare?
Oct 30, 2008 - 4:36 pm 5. MIke Reynolds:What about a special youth brigade to enforce the will of the Dear Leader? We could call it….the Greenshirts. (Nah. Too easy)
Oct 30, 2008 - 7:42 pm 6. Koblog:If Obama wins, I’ve got my bumper sticker ready to go:
Rev. Wright got his wish–
Oct 30, 2008 - 7:57 pm 7. Daedalus:God has damned America
The Rossette REport is interesting, but too tame for what will probably follow……..card check,……..reinstitute the fairness doctrine………income redistribution, and more taxes for all……..just to keep thing fair !!! Oh, and don’t forget the financial and military collapse of the former United States of America………
Oct 30, 2008 - 9:12 pm 8. Howard Veit:I love you Rossett but this time as smart as you are you miss just what Obama is always trying to do. He is a trained agent of the late Saul Alinsky’s community organizing, a process that goes like this:
The agitator’s job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the “realization” that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent “self-interest” in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.
In these methods, euphemistically labeled “community organizing,” Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere.
All his speeches follow this formula.
Oct 30, 2008 - 11:38 pm 9. Pesky Pundit:What part of “Barack Hussein Obama is essentially a communist” do people not understand? That having been said, I note that there Communist elitists and Democrat elitists are virtually indistinguishable.
Oct 31, 2008 - 4:44 am 10. Jude:These posts are great !!
Oct 31, 2008 - 4:59 am 11. Tailgunner:Progressive tax brackets are the equivalent of feminism’s ‘glass ceiling’; a perceived barrier to achievement which enforces
artificial class distinctions.
Once a person approaches this arbitrarily chosen income, he realizes that he will be working harder for less money. This
naturally depresses one’s initiative.
The income threshold for the ‘rich’ has already been reduced by Barack Obama and Joe Biden four times, even before the election, from $300,000 to $150,000. This threshold will continue to decline under Obama until it swallows the middle class.
It is natural for socialists to continually reduce the income threshold for the ‘rich’ as the ‘rich’ escape this system, and as others increasingly work only to maintain a living or work outside the tax system.
In many socialist states, rulers employ expropriation and naked force in an attempt to prevent this exodus of talent and capital.
When followed to its logical conclusion, socialism impoverishes all but a relative few elite, corrupt, well connected party officials.
Today, according to Joe Biden, you’re ‘rich’ if you earn over $150,000. Before socialism collapses completely the ‘rich’ will be those who eat three times a day while others eat once a day.
And Barack Obama will be there to ‘redistribute’ one of those meals and ’spread the wealth’.
Oct 31, 2008 - 7:59 am 12. David:Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as
communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that
has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the
more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary
adversaries?”
Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto.
“Socialism” intrudes on the 2008 elections
23 October 2008
For the past month, a long-demonized word has been increasingly injected into political discussion in the United States—socialism. The Treasury bailout of Wall Street was initially defeated in the House of Representatives, largely through the votes of the ultra-right faction of the Republican Party, which declared the massive government intervention into the financial markets to be … “socialism.”
This language was reflected in the media, with descriptions of the bailout, by both opponents and defenders, as “socialism for the rich,” or “Wall Street socialism.” ABC News commentator Sam Donaldson declared, “Socialism has now washed over free-market capitalism.” The Washington Post’s financial columnist, Steven Pearlstein, commented sarcastically, “A little bit of well-timed, well-crafted socialism is just the thing to save capitalism from itself.”
Over the past week, denunciations of socialism have become a staple of the presidential campaign, with Republican John McCain engaging in right-wing diatribes against the Democratic frontrunner, Barack Obama, claiming that his support for modest tax increases on the wealthy is an example of “class warfare.”
In the minds of the McCain campaign strategists, this may be nothing more than the thousand and first instance of McCarthy-style red-baiting, a staple of the Republican right for more than half a century. But there are deeper factors at work.
The financial crisis which has swept the globe over the past month, centered in the US banking system, has dealt an enormous blow to the official ideology of the American ruling class, which more than any other has elevated worship of the “free market” to the status of a state religion.
The Bush administration and the Federal Reserve, with the backing of the Democratic-controlled Congress, have mounted an unprecedented series of government interventions into the financial markets–the $700 billion bailout of mortgage-backed securities, a $250 billion government purchase of shares in private banks, sweeping federal guarantees of commercial paper, interbank loans and money-market mutual funds—pledging trillions of dollars.
Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed chief Ben Bernanke and other spokesmen have acknowledged that the financial markets have failed, and warned that without this government intervention the United States would plunge into a deep recession, and the rest of the world with it. They admit that the profit system faces its greatest crisis since the 1930s.
The federal bailout of Wall Street—despite the hysteria of the House Republicans—has nothing to do with socialism. The measures could be more correctly characterized, not as nationalization of the banks, but as privatization of the US Treasury, turning over its vast resources to billionaires and speculators.
The charges of “socialism” demonstrate the degree to which the eruption of financial crisis has confused and frightened the political representatives of the ruling elite. They recognize that the near-breakdown of the credit markets has discredited the capitalist system in the eyes of the working people, the vast majority of the population, and they react nervously to anything that might provide an opening for the expression of anti-capitalist sentiment.
This political disorientation underlies the latest denunciations of Obama for his endorsement of marginally higher taxes on the rich to “spread the wealth around.” In his radio address Saturday, McCain quoted this comment and then declared that it “sounded a lot like socialism.” Obama has replied defensively, citing his support from paragons of big business like billionaire Warren Buffett, the richest man in America, former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, and a host of corporate chieftains.
Obama’s denial of any connection to socialism is the truest statement he has made in the course of the campaign. He is, like McCain, a defender of the profit system and, if anything, the preferred candidate of Wall Street and finance capital. According to a report Wednesday in the Washington Post, some three quarters of the record $600 million raised by the Obama campaign has come from the wealthy and corporate interests.
It is remarkable that a presidential candidate should stand so brazenly in favor of maintaining the vastly unequal distribution of wealth in America—a country characterized by growing poverty, enormous unmet social needs, declining wages, and rising unemployment. It is equally noteworthy that Obama has sought to dispute the charge that he favors any significant redistribution of the wealth, as though that were a political sin.
Since it has been given such a prominent place in political discourse over the past week, it is incumbent on the actual proponents of socialism, whose voice is the World Socialist Web Site, to address the question.
All the campaign talk and media chatter about “socialism” obscures the most fundamental issue: Socialism is not merely a set of technical measures involving state intervention into the economy. All capitalist nations engage in this to one degree or another, depending on circumstances. State ownership does not in any sense define a society as socialist, when the state itself is an organ of class rule controlled by the financial aristocracy.
Socialism means the reorganization of economic life under the democratic control of the actual producers, the working people whose labor creates all wealth. It can come about only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, led by a revolutionary party, which establishes a new and far more democratic form of state, a workers’ state, which exercises ownership and control over the means of production. Socialism cannot be engineered through backroom deals between Wall Street bankers and Washington politicians, or through the policies of any Democratic or Republican politician.
Some 160 years ago, Karl Marx wrote, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” He was describing the mood of fear and trepidation in the European ruling classes on the eve of the great revolutionary wave of 1848, even though the number of conscious revolutionary socialists was still a relative handful. If the specter of socialism today haunts the American ruling class, despite decades in which socialism has been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of slander and vilification, it is likewise because the profit system faces a new period of revolutionary upheaval.
Patrick Martin
Oct 31, 2008 - 5:55 pm 13. Pajamas Media » What If It Were More Than an Infomercial?:[...] you are reading this, you are not the target of Senator Obama’s 30-minute media buy. Which surely means, since I am writing, that neither am I the target. Good thing, too — I [...]
Nov 1, 2008 - 1:38 am 14. ehutch:havent you conservatives done enough damage to this country? why do you nominate candidates of average intelligence?? get an education and a clue.
Nov 1, 2008 - 5:48 am 15. Gusbenz:Ehutch: If getting an education means becoming a socialist ruffian, then I’ll pass.
Nov 1, 2008 - 11:48 am 16. venividivici:ehutch,
I have multiple master’s degrees and did 3 years of a Ph.D. before leaving academia and I support McCain. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Obama isn’t that smart personally, as is easily seen when he’s not using a teleprompter (I can say on a personal level that he certainly isn’t smarter than me and I’d tell him so to his face and prove it in debate a hundred times out of a hundred), and his policies are even dumber than he is. Of course, you would not be able to see that because you are probably dumber than Obama, who isn’t “dumb” per se, but he’s probably no higher than the 15th percentile of intelligence, which is pretty good, but not spectacular. The fact that he’s wasted his intelligence in supporting stupid policies is a testament to his poor character, however, and I do fault him for that. Surely he is capable of understanding the illogic behind things such as “spreading the wealth” and “sitting down without preconditions” with terrorists but he has either fooled himself into thinking that even with these ignorant positions everything will be OK or he is so cynical that he does not care that the logical outcomes of those positions is a weakened US economy and the empowerment of the worst scum of the earth terrorist-types. Maybe you think “intelligence” is some magical thing (perhaps because you have so little of it), but I can assure you it is not. I have plenty of intelligence, as measured by any objective standard that you would apply to Obama, i.e., I would easily outscore him on any standardized intelligence test, but when I was younger, I believed some of the same stupid things Obama believes, because I wasn’t using all of my intelligence to seek out alternative viewpoints. However, something didn’t sit right with me when I held those viewpoints, so I continued my search for the best viewpoints and found them in a place that is very different from where Obama “lives” intellectually. The optimal political arrangements in this world center around individual initiative, low taxes, robust and prudent regulations and use of the state to enforce contracts fairly. All the other stuff that Obama and his supporters want the political realm to do it is not suited to do and will fail. People are excited now, but when the actual bill comes due, they won’t be, only they won’t be free to choose to dismantle those failing institutions without a great deal of turmoil as the defenders of the future status quo use every tool at their disposal, including the state’s near-monopoly on violence, to suppress change. This will happen as surely as night follow day. I may or may not be around to see it, but every single piece of evidence available to me from history suggests that my conclusions are inevitably going to be proven correct.
Clearly, in light of all this, the only intelligent way to vote is to vote for McCain.
Nov 2, 2008 - 10:18 am 17. Voltimand:Yeah, well. Thanks “Patrick Martin” for telling the rest of us that you are the enemy. See you on the battlefield, wherever and whatever form it takes.
Nov 8, 2008 - 4:12 am