Posted on 11/03/2009 7:28:58 AM PST by La Lydia
The conservative wahoo suggests: Here are ... the defining characteristics of "Neo-socialism".
1. A belief in the concept that capitalism has failed, but can be resuscitated by a new partnership between government and business. This new partnership will be inherently more fair to more people.
2. A belief that competition isn't necessarily bad, and that government can and should be permitted to compete with private industry.
3. A belief that big government isn't necessarily bad; what is bad is BAD big government. Big, effective government is desirable.
4. A belief in the transcendent quality of the world community while de-valuing national interests. A sense of American relative and actual decline in the world, one that demands of us a more compliant approach to problem solving. A perception that American decline is not necessarily a bad thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at corner.nationalreview.com ...
Smiley face Fascism.
or, as the Czechs tried to call it in the spring of 1968, Socialism with a Human Face. (did not take long for their supposed allies on the left to decide they did not like the sound of that and to smash it)
yes, just the other (this is true) i went to the store and picked up a loaf of artisanal bread named “Neo-Tuscan Loaf”
Tuscans of the future? Embedded with black olives, no doubt.
Fascism is a leftwing phenomenon and it bothers me that the propagandists have painted it as rightwing. It just isn't. If we see Obama as a neo-socialist, we can also see him as a fascist.
big good/efficient government is humanly IMPOSSIBLE, because no single mind, or small group of individuals can possibly know what millions of people want at any given second that changes constantly
RE :”2. A belief that competition isn’t necessarily bad, and that government can and should be permitted to compete with private industry.”
They don’t believe that. The ‘single payer’ progressives just use ‘compete’ as a talking point. Look at Ed Schulz and Katrina vanden Heuvel. They all want the government to crush the busineses, but they can make it look natural.
Big government is inherently destructive of society. The old adage of “he who governs least, governs best” is still the best principle to follow. Our Founding Fathers understood from first hand experience about the dangers of a big, centralized, government, and they tried to insure that such a condition could never exist in the United States of America. I think it was Franklin that said, “We have given them a republic. Let us see if they can keep it.” At this point in history, I am not certain that we can keep what we have been given.
beats me.........lol
Ah, but that is your worldview and logical conclusions based on the truth that man is inherently flawed and limited.
If your ideology was based on the myth that man is infinitely improveable (through evolution) and “basically good”, the logical conclusion is that those who are most elite need to be given enough power to impose their vision on the rest of us.
Why not a Neo-fascist, fascism without the death camps...yet.
In Dr. Larry Bates’ book “The Economic Disorder” he points out that all governments are based on capitalism and spend money on capital projects, but, he also makes the point that
it can either be by choice of a few people in government, i.e socialism, or, free market, i.e freedom of choice by the individuals of how your money spent. This also includes ones personal choice when it comes to health care, smoking, etc.
Maybe its time to query the left publicly of why they want to take away “choice” which they have so preached in other areas.
Neo-socialist: Someone incapable of noticing the number of failures when socialism has been tried [i.e, all of them]; and someone unconcerned with the millions of corpses that have always resulted from socialist experiments [i.e, all of them].
No, wait, that's Einstein's definition of insanity.
Therefore one can justifiably describe Jonah's four points as being identically equal to an agenda for for what one might call "neo-fascism."
Or, if I remember my symbolic logic correctly, neo-socialism = = = neo-fascism.
Just another tree in the forest
Every generation invents some new terms for unchanged old things, as if by doing so it discovers a new concept.
It was a combination of propaganda and poor logical abilities of political "scientists." They are trained to think of the parties' relative position, and they arranged the German parties, from left to right, as Communists, Socialists, and Nazis.
The problem was, of course, that all three parties were quite left when compared to Germany at other times or the rest of Western Europe at that time.
But that is beyond the pay grade of a typical political "scientist." Successive generations of students were taught accordingly.
The only reason that fascism and communism were at odds with one another is that they were competing for the same adherents - those who believe in collectivism.
Socialists and commies and Islamic devils hold the vast majority of the world's premier energy supply, and we have to have it in order to keep the engine of Capitalism running. To put it another way, the democrats do not comprehend that Russian and Saudi controlled enegery supplies can easily turn the tap off to America because they already have dictatorial control over their populace so they can absorb their economic decline, domestically, while increasing their international power.
I suppose, if the democrap socialist party continues transmogrifying America, they imagine we will become like those enslaved nations. But the democrats are too stupid to realize those other nations want US dead, not competititon for resources. And current directions the democrat party is taking US formulate vulnerabilities not easily or rapidly reversed, so the deadly enemies have us with necks laid bare due to demcorat policies enacted on US.
The National Socialists of Germany were clearly socialists. Everybody knew that. Mussolini was clearly a Collectivist -- he talked about it all the time. Harnessing the power of the Workers to overcome to entrenched power of the bourgeoisie was a big part of Fascism.
And the Leftists in the USSR liked what they saw.
And the Leftists in the UK liked what they saw.
And the Leftists in the USA liked what they saw.
And then the war came. And the Fascists lost. And people found incontrovertible evidence that the Fascists had constructed factories of death, and murdered millions of people.
And all of a sudden, every Left Leaning thinker on the planet started calling the Nazis a bunch of rightwing nutcases.
Simple as that.
Stalin's people came up on top, and they labled their defeated opponents as "rightwing" just as a way to distance themselves from a bunch of losers. There was never any rightwing ideology on the Fascists side.
Liberals live on the fantasy that fascism comes with the boots of a stormtrooper. Those boots do come but they follow the faces of smiling chidren and acedemic and sporting excellence.
Neo-socialism is the soft communism of the democratic process. It is the working philosophy of the NeoComs. It is the pot of water coming to a boil.
Death camps are more a result of totalitarianism. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, Mao did it, Castro did it, etc.
Fascism itself is more the economic theory of government control of businesses.
In Defense of Capitalism
Excerpted from his 1996 Book “Why the Left is Not Right” (Linked below) | by Dr. Ronald H. Nash bttt
Posted on Monday, February 28, 2005 12:12:18 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1352736/posts
Capitalism is not economic anarchy. When properly defined, it recognizes several necessary conditions for the kinds of voluntary relationships it supports.
One of these is the existence of inherent human rights, such as the right to make decisions, the right to be free, the right to hold property, and the right to exchange peacefully what one owns for something else.
Capitalism also presupposes a system of morality. Under capitalism, there are definite limits, moral and otherwise, to the ways in which people can exchange.
Capitalism should be viewed as a system of voluntary relationships within a framework of laws that protect people’s rights against force, fraud, theft, and violations of contracts. “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not lie” are part of the underlying moral constraints of the system. After all, economic exchanges can hardly be voluntary if one participant is coerced, deceived, defrauded, or robbed.
Deviations from the market ideal usually occur because of defects in human nature. Human beings naturally crave security and guaranteed success, values not found readily in a free market. Genuine competition always carries with it the possibility of failure and loss. Consequently, the human desire for security leads people to avoid competition whenever possible, encourages them to operate outside the market, and induces them to subvert the market process through behavior that is often questionable and dishonest.
This quest for guaranteed success often leads people to seek special favors from powerful members of government through such means as regulations and restrictions on free exchange.
One of the more effective ways of mitigating the effects of human sin in society is dispersing and decentralizing power. The combination of a free market economy and limited constitutional government is the most effective means yet devised to impede the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small number of people.
The Religious Left should be aware that their opposition to amassing wealth and power is far more likely to bear fruit with a conservative understanding of economics and government than with the big-government approach of political liberalism.
Every person’s ultimate protection against coercion requires control over some private spheres of life where he or she can be free.
Private ownership of property is an important buffer against the exorbitant consolidation of power by government.
Liberal critics also contend that capitalism encourages the development of monopolies. The real source of monopolies, however, is not the free market but governmental intervention with the market.
The only monopolies that have ever attained lasting immunity from competition did so by governmental fiat, regulation, or support of some other kind.
Governments create monopolies by granting one organization the exclusive privilege of doing business or by establishing de facto monopolies through regulatory agencies whose alleged purpose is the enforcement of competition but whose real effect is the limitation of competition.
Economic interventionism and socialism are the real sources of monopolies.
This is illustrated, for example, in the success of the American robber barons of the nineteenth century. Without government aid such as subsidies, the robber barons would never have succeeded.
Liberals blame capitalism for every evil in contemporary society, including its greed, materialism, selfishness, the prevalence of fraudulent behavior, the debasement of society’s tastes, the pollution of the environment, the alienation and despair within society, and vast disparities of wealth. Even racism and sexism are treated as effects of capitalism.
Many of the objections to a market system result from a simple but fallacious two-step operation.
First, some undesirable feature is noted in a society that is allegedly capitalistic; then it is simply asserted that capitalism is the cause of this problem.
Logic texts call this the Fallacy of False Cause.
Mere coincidence does not prove causal connection. Moreover, this belief ignores the fact that these same features exist in interventionist and socialist societies.
The Issue of Greed
Liberal critics of capitalism often attack it for encouraging greed. The truth, however, is that the mechanism of the market actually neutralizes greed as it forces people to find ways of serving the needs of those with whom they wish to exchange.
As long as our rights are protected (a basic precondition of market exchanges), the greed of others cannot harm us.
As long as greedy people are prohibited from introducing force, fraud, and theft into the exchange process and as long as these persons cannot secure special privileges from the state under interventionist or socialist arrangements, their greed must be channeled into the discovery of products or services for which people are willing to trade.
Every person in a market economy has to be other-directed. The market is one area of life where concern for the other person is required.
The market, therefore, does not pander to greed. Rather, it is a mechanism that allows natural human desires to be satisfied in nonviolent ways.
Does Capitalism Exploit People?
Capitalism is also attacked on the ground that it leads to situations in which some people (the “exploiters”) win at the expense of other people (the “losers”).
A fancier way to put this is to say that market exchanges are examples of what is called a zero-sum game, namely, an exchange where only one participant can win. If one person (or group) wins, then the other must lose. Baseball and basketball are two examples of zero-sum games. If A wins, then B must lose.
The error here consists in thinking that market exchanges are a zero-sum game. On the contrary, market exchanges illustrate what is called a positive-sum game, that is, one in which both players may win.
We must reject the myth that economic exchanges necessarily benefit only one party at the expense of the other. In voluntary economic exchanges, both parties may leave the exchange in better economic shape than would otherwise have been the case.
To repeat the message of the peaceful means of exchange, “If you do something good for me, then I will do something good for you.” If both parties did not believe they gained through the trade, if each did not see the exchange as beneficial, they would not continue to take part in it.
Most religious critics of capitalism focus their attacks on what they take to be its moral shortcomings.
In truth, the moral objections to capitalism turn out to be a sorry collection of claims that reflect, more than anything else, serious confusions about the real nature of a market system.
When capitalism is put to the moral test, it beats its competition easily.
Among all of our economic options, Arthur Shenfield writes:
“Only capitalism operates on the basis of respect for free, independent, responsible persons. All other systems in varying degrees treat men as less than this. Socialist systems above all treat men as pawns to be moved about by the authorities, or as children to be given what the rulers decide is good for them, or as serfs or slaves. The rulers begin by boasting about their compassion, which in any case is fraudulent, but after a time they drop this pretense which they find unnecessary for the maintenance of power. In all things they act on the presumption that they know best. Therefore they and their systems are morally stunted. Only the free system, the much assailed capitalism, is morally mature.”
The alternative to free exchange is coercion and violence. Capitalism is a mechanism that allows natural human desires to be satisfied in a nonviolent way.
Little can be done to prevent people from wanting to be rich, Shenfield says. That’s the way things often are in a fallen world. But what capitalism does is channel that desire into peaceful means that benefit many besides those who wish to improve their own situation in life.
“The alternative to serving other men’s wants,” Shenfield concludes, “is seizing power of them, as it always has been. Hence it is not surprising that wherever the enemies of capitalism have prevailed, the result has been not only the debasement of consumption standards for the masses but also their reduction to serfdom by the new privileged class of Socialist rulers.”
Once people realize that few things in life are free, that most things carry a price tag, and that therefore we have to work for most of the things we want, we are in a position to learn a vital truth about life. Capitalism helps teach this truth.
But under socialism, Arthur Shefield warns, “Everything still has a cost, but everyone is tempted, even urged to behave as if there is no cost or as if the cost will be borne by somebody else. This is one of the most corrosive effects of collectivism upon the moral character of people.”
And so, we see, capitalism is not merely the more effective economic system; it is also morally superior. When capitalism, the system of free economic exchange, is described fairly, it comes closer to matching the demands of the biblical ethic than does either socialism or interventionism.
These are the real reasons why Ron Sider and his friends in the Religious Left should have abandoned the statist economic policies they promoted in the past.
These are also the reasons why they should now end their advocacy of economic interventionism, which only encourages the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Christians who are sincere about wanting to help the poor should support the market system described in this chapter.”
This article is an excerpt from a chapter of Dr. Nash’s book, Why the Left Is Not Right.
Amazon: “Why the Left is Not Right - The Religious Left -Who they Are and What They Believe” Ronald H. Nash, PhD
I don’t think there is any difference between the ideology or goals of the new and old socialists.
The only difference is in marketing... putting a face on the plans so the people will swallow it.
Just a transitional move.
Example: Get voters to buy “public option” by arguing it provides “competition” (totally ridiculous). Craft public option in such a way that it destroys insurance leading to single payer in a few years. Socialist result accomplished.
From 2004:
How Socialist Unions Rule the Democratic Party
FrontPage Magazine ^ | July 14, 2004 | Lowell Ponte
Posted on 07/14/2004 12:01:55 PM EDT by Remember_Salamis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1171240/posts
How Socialist Unions Rule the Democratic Party By Lowell Ponte FrontPageMagazine.com | July 14, 2004
A SINGLE LABOR UNION HAS COMMITTED $65 MILLION to defeating President George W. Bush this November, reported the July 12 BusinessWeek Magazine.
This biggest union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which by year’s end will have 1.8 million members, at its June convention in San Francisco agreed to spend $40 million for more than 2,000 organizers to work full-time against President Bush in 17 key battleground states. It also plans to supply 50,000 “volunteers” from its members just prior to and on election day. And SEIU will spend an additional $25 million on voter registration, “education” and getting out the vote.
Why is SEIU so bent on defeating President Bush? Let us count the ways:
SEIU is one of America’s two biggest government unions, the other being AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The nightmare for such unions is not a weak economy, as it would be for private sector workers. Government workers get their money not from a free marketplace, but from coerced taxes. And many SEIU workers not employed directly by government are hospital and nursing home staffers paid indirectly by government dollars for Medicare, Medicaid and welfare patients. For this reason the government unions are the party of American socialism.
Public Enemy Number One for these socialist vanguards are Republicans who want to reduce the size and spending of government, and to contract out millions of existing government tasks to money-saving, non-unionized private companies. The wealth, power and future of these unions depend on replacing a Republican President with Democratic advocates of government expansion like the team of Kerry and Edwards.
“Public sector workers want government to grow first, and the overall health of the economy isn’t as relevant to them,” as pollster Scott Rasmussen explained in the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, the blue collar union workers, the SEIU ostensibly represents, pay far more in taxes than they receive via government checks.
Democrats created the laws that have allowed unions to impose themselves on unwilling workers, get away with using violence and threats of violence to enforce their power, and extract involuntary “dues” from worker paychecks. In order to keep buying this privileged power from government, Unions kick back many millions of dollars in extorted dues to Democrat lawmakers, governors and Presidents.
The result is a money-laundering operation in which leftwing politicians appropriate money for themselves, using friendly labor unions as the middle-men intermediaries who expropriate it from workers. Nearly 40 percent of union workers today are registered Republicans, but a sizeable chunk of their wages is taken and used to elect Democrats.
This union money is the mother’s milk of the Democratic Party. If these millions in union campaign contributions vanished tomorrow, most Democratic officeholders would be bankrupt overnight, and the Democratic Party would immediately shrink to permanent minority status. Click here to see what SEIU as just one union among many dozens acknowledges in Federal Election Commission reports in the current election cycle that it does to bankroll Democratic members of Congress.
Direct contributions to Democratic candidates is merely the tip of the iceberg however. A much larger and indeterminate contribution takes the form of money funneled through party and other organizations, the supply of ground troops to man telephone banks, door-to-door campaigning, or get-out-the-vote efforts on election day that if paid for would be worth many millions of dollars. In Michigan, the UAW got the auto companies to make election day a holiday so that union workers could get paid by their companies for campaigning against Republicans. This amounts to an illegal corporate contribution to political campaigns, but no law enforcement official has seen fit to issue any subpoenas.
The current president of the SEIU is Andrew Stern, a former New Leftist came out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an anti-Vietnam War activist. One of the eulogies given at a Democratic Socialists of America memorial after the death of DSA co-founder Michael Harrington gave tribute to “the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU….” Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy which was formed by SDS radicals Heather and Paul Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement.
Paul Booth who was National Secretary of SDS is now the assistant to Gerald McEntee, a member of Al Gore’s kitchen cabinet in the 2000 campaign and the president of the other powerful government union, AFCSME. Stern and Booth became the first unionists affiliated with the AFL-CIO to go to the Peoples Republic of China under the auspices of the Chinese government controlled unions. The AFL-CIO has a position of no contacts with such unions. Heather is the guiding force of the radical organization ACORN and was a legislative aide to Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum before he retired. So successful has the Booths Academy been that its work is now carried out by Union Summer, a program entirely financed by the AFL-CIO to train radicalcollege students to become union organizers. Union Summer is run by the son of Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin nephew of Democratic Sentator Carl Levin, so incestuous is the Union-Democratic nexus.
Andrew Stern’s rise to the presidency of SEIU was paved when as director of organizing under John Sweeney when he was president of SEIU. Stern advanced to the presidency when Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America became the President of the AFL-CIO. In 1996, Stern told his members that he expected “every leader at every level of this union – from the international president to the rank-and-file member – to devote five working days this year to political action.” (Reported by Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray report in their new book Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics (New York: Crown Forum, 2004). Stern’s order is tantamount to a labor levy worth between $500 and $1,000 that each SEIU member is expected to donate to the Democratic Party.
In addition to SEIU’s commitment of $65 million to defeat President Bush, the AFL-CIO has already allocated $44 million for the same political purpose – which makes $109 million from just two labor organizations out of the many dozens that fund political activities. A quarter of all the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Boston will belong to the two largest Teacher Unions, one of which by itself, the National Education Association, has 2.7 million members and far more money than SEIU.
The money doesn’t all go one way, however. From 1996 through 1999 the Clinton Administration gave more than $1 million in tax dollars to the SEIU as grants, largely from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Money being fungible, one could reasonably assume that some taxpayer dollars have filtered back to the partisan coffers of Democratic political candidates such as Al Gore in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004.
No wonder the unions want to provide as little financial disclosure as possible – and are eager to remove President Bush for attempting to shine light on how they use members’ dues money. Such disclosure was supposed to be required as of 2004, but another Democrat-appointed Federal judge blocked implementation of the LM-2 Financial Disclosure Forms for unions until after this year’s elections, after which a new Democratic President Kerry elected with union money might be able to rescind all disclosure requirements for unions.
SEIU began as a Chicago-based janitors’ union. It was Stern, using New Left tactics of the 1960s with Sweeney’s approval, who shut down parts of Los Angeles with a “Justice for Janitors” strike that blocked not just one company but city streets as well. These workers, at Stern’s direction, wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in the clenched fist that symbolizes Marxism.
“We’re going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America,” Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his convention address last month.
But Stern’s ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss Andy Stern. Stern’s current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether.
SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call the “death of a thousand cuts.” Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.
The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted NO to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker’s neck – and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.
“He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks,” Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined “Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union” after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. “They politicize the union’s staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union’s business…. ‘It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,’ said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help.” (Stern sounds remarkably like King George III explaining why the colonists should have no right to vote in the American colonies.)
“Some SEIU staff say straight up, ‘This isn’t a workers’ organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn’t be an organization,’” wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the leftist magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of another leftist magazine The Nation.
In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members.. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as “Union Democracy.”
SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin:
“The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland’s Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. ‘Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,’ observes one labor official.
“The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU’s boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation,” wrote Kotkin. “No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now ‘in complete accord’ with the AFL-CIO’s program. ‘The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,’ wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention.
“That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists,” continued Kotkin. “particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. ‘All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,’ complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. ‘It’s like the 1930s all over again.’”
Some SEIU activists boast that they are the “new CIO,” referring to the radical, class warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented AFL to create the AFL-CIO in 1955.
Such leftwing ideology was on display last month in San Francisco as the SEIU convention moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members’ dues to Democrat Howard Dean’s quixotic, losing anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.)
This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU’s allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows.
But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers, who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: import poor immigrants, who with proper union brainwashing can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population.
As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com last March 2, SEIU’s Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the leftwing Democratic Party auxiliary Americans Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros.
As Kotkin quoted, you might think that this is the year 2004 – but in the New Labor movement, minds have regressed to the 1930s and are again hypnotized by and enamored with totalitarian statism, ideological hatred for American capitalism, and socialist utopian fantasies that history for the rest of us has utterly discredited.
As happens with individual human beings, perhaps with the labor movement growing old and feeble, as it nears death senility has taken it into a second childhood of Marxist reveries and memories. The bad news is that this dying, senile movement is still able to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and use that money to elect leftwing Democrat politicians. By doing so in 2004, organized labor could shorten the liberties and life of the United States.
The National Journal reported, e.g., that SEIU’s Stern played a big role in persuading the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent to pick as his running mate Senator John Edwards.
A fourth reason the SEIU in particular, and organized labor in general, is desperate to defeat President Bush this November is its own survival. Half a century ago nearly half of private sector workers were union members. Today that proportion has plummeted to one American private sector worker in 12 – according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics (DLS), only 8.2 percent of private sector workers.
(One reason for this decline that organized labor, of course, refuses to admit is that unionized companies, forced to pay wages imposed in violation of the law of supply and demand, became uncompetitive in the global marketplace and have been going out of business. This is why “union alley,” the political-economic disaster zone analogous to tornado alley from Illinois to Pennsylvania, is known as the Rust Belt.)
This is why AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s battle cry has been that unions must either “Grow or Die!”
(This, ironically, is the same dilemma that Lenin ascribed to capitalism, a need for constant growth that inevitably leads to imperialism, capitalism’s “final stage”…so by Lenin’s logic we apparently are now witnessing Organized Labor’s final, imperialistic stage, its desperate dying grab for absolute power.)
Today more Americans are employed by government than work in manufacturing – actually making things. And today, according to DLS, 37.2 percent of public sector (i.e. government) employees are unionized. This is virtually the only sector of society where unions have been growing.
And this is precisely the niche in which SEIU and AFSCME dwell, the two unions that in 2002 gave more soft-money political campaign contributions than any others. Both these unions have a vested interest in helping Democratic politicians who will block efforts to reduce government and to lower taxes. They urgently need, for their own selfish reasons, to elect politicians who will press to make government ever-bigger so that it can produce more and more union-dues-paying jobs for welfare workers, socialized medicine healthcare workers, Medicare nursing home workers and the like.
To make such expansion possible, SEIU’s President Stern recently joined what some labor activists call “the gang of five” – he and his fellow Presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (with a history linked to organized crime); the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) (also with a history linked to organized crime); the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters – to create the “New Unity Partnership.” (HERE and UNITE also formally merged in July 2004 to form the new mega-union UNITE HERE with approximately 840,000 members.)
Stern argued in his convention speech last month that the AFL-CIO’s “loose trade association of 65 disparate unions” is too weak to carry the labor movement successfully into the future. To revitalize Labor, he has proposed consolidation of these 65 into no more than 15, and perhaps as few as five, giant unions with enough money, power and political clout to intimidate companies, industries, politicians, even entire countries as unions like SEIU and its New Unity Partnership become the international union equivalent of multinational corporations.
Stern’s ballyhooed vision for “New Labor” is really a century old, akin to the goal of the International Workers of the World (IWW) “Wobblies” to create “One Big Union” for all workers so powerful that it could impose socialist-anarchist government, confiscate all private companies, redistribute all private wealth, and end war by having the world’s workers refuse to fight. The IWW refused to avoid strikes during World War I, opposed the war, came to be widely perceived as unpatriotic and anti-American, and this led to the extinction of this early dinosaur version of the labor movement.
These are the same old leftward reptilian footprints, right down to last month’s SEIU withdraw-the-troops resolution, that Stern today is following. Because of their strangehold on the Democratic Party, this is an ominous portent of politics to come.
None of your observations are in contradiction with what I said earlier, however. The point was that political science defines right and left as relative notions, not absolute (the term, as you probably know, was first introduced during the French Revolution). It is therefore appropriate, even mandatory to ask, relative to what? The confusion arises because this question is never asked; this is supposed to be understood. And it is understood incorrectly.
Please consider an analogy. You are given a population of numbers: 10,12 and 1,000,000. One could say without much ambiguity that the last one is large: it is large in comparison to the rest and it is large in comparison to most numbers we encounter in everyday life. Number 10 may be similarly deemed small.
Suppose next that the population is 1,000,000; 1,000,010 and 1,000,020. By everyday standards, all numbers are "large." If one is interested, as are political scientists only in the relative position within the population, the first numbers will be deemed small, as it is in fact the smallest in that population. And herein lies miscommunication: if understood in the narrow sense, the characterization of 1,000,000 as small is correct; but perceived by a layman it misrepresents the number.
You probably see the analogy. In the 1930s Germany, "all numbers" were large --- all parties were quite left --- as in the second example. The smallest (Nazis) could be called small (right) relative to others (Communists in particular). That is what a political science observer means when (s)he says that. But people hearing that understand this in everyday terms and conclude, incorrectly, that Nazis were right-wing. That was the point I have made: in addition to outright leftist propaganda, the misconception arises even among unbiased people because of the ambiguity of the words "left" and "right."
Good points.
Yes it is but it's the predominantly held view of "the masses".
When I try to explain to people that Obama is a fascist they look at me and say "Aw come on, that's ridiculous, there are no death camps in America".
If I really wanted to be provacitive I could retort with "As soon as we get Obamacare, there will be death camps. They'll be called Hospitals".
Good post (30). I can’t wait to finish it.
Thank you!
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