As much as I think Paul is a complete wingnut, he’s fairly accurate here. I don’t know that I would use the term corporatist, because they implies the corporations will have some control or input. I’d call him a fascist. Much like the fascists of yore, he is willing to let pet corporations use the government against competitors to make big profits as long as they did his bidding and support his party.
Obama really hasn’t nationalized much (GM is about it). In most cases he had just handed over things to corporations which he likes (or rather are willing to bribe him or his friends). He also gave handouts to those favored corporations. However those corporations clearly do his bidding.
For example, Obamacare was about coopting companies to do his healthcare mandate rather than government outright taking over health care. A socialist would have just done the outright takeover. Mind you he likely just looks at this as an intermediate step, but still for the moment he is no overt socialist.
There are clips of him saying that he supported a single payer system. He said he wanted to redistribute the wealth.
Other than the fact that Fascists are just a breed of socialists, I still have to disagree with the corporatist title. It implies, as Mussolini said when he first used that term, a partnership with corporations to centralize the State. There are tens of thousands of corporations in this country. Yes, Obama has used some, like GE to help centralize his power, but he has destroyed far more corporations than he has used. You probably can count on one hand the number of corporations he uses but it would take a book to count the number of corporations he has destroyed.
Ron Paul is relying on the traditional definition of "socialism:" state or government or public ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of goods. And he's right.
In recent years, though, most socialist parties have retreated from that position, so just what "socialism" means has gotten foggy and unclear. If a politician advocates something close to what Britain's or Australia's Labour Party or France's or Germany's Socialist or Social Democratic Parties advocate, in some people's eyes that makes him or her a socialist, even though in classic terms that wouldn't be true.
That means that there really isn't a hard line any more between what is and what isn't socialist or socialism. Whatever his weak points and shortcomings, though, Ron Paul is about as far from socialist as politicians usually get.
Ron Paul is relying on the traditional definition of "socialism:" state or government or public ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of goods. And he's right.
In recent years, though, most socialist parties have retreated from that position, so just what "socialism" means has gotten foggy and unclear. If a politician advocates something close to what Britain's or Australia's Labour Party or France's or Germany's Socialist or Social Democratic Parties advocate, in some people's eyes that makes him or her a socialist, even though in classic terms that wouldn't be true.
That means that there really isn't a hard line any more between what is and what isn't socialist or socialism. Whatever his weak points and shortcomings, though, Ron Paul is about as far from socialist as politicians usually get.