The Tea Party was raked over the coals for calling Obama a socialist, but we were right all along. At least now that the elections are over, Democrats are beginning to admit it openly. As the "best radio talk show host in Colorado", with a regular morning show on 760 AM, David Sirota is part of the public face of the left. He is the equivalent of the right's Mike Rosen. And he admits we live in a socialist society.
This Reagan-inspired paradox of cheering anti-socialist platitudes while supporting socialism in practice was the tale of Super Bowl XLV. The game began with a jubilant Reagan biopic that approvingly flaunted his red-baiting past, including his 1964 warning about America "tak(ing) the first step into a thousand years of darkness." The game ended with victory for professional sports' only publicly owned nonprofit organization, the Green Bay Packers — a team whose quasi-socialist structure allows Wisconsin's proletariat to own the means of football production.
Green Bay's win, though, doesn't tell the Super Bowl's entire socialist tale. The game was held in one of the NFL's government-funded stadiums. Additionally, training for many Super Bowl players was subsidized by taxpayers when those players honed their skills at public high schools and universities.
Meanwhile, fans arrived at the event on public roads, the contest was broadcast on public airwaves, and the Navy spent $450,000 of public monies flying jets over the game in order to stage a momentary TV image.
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Yes, even though we clearly embrace socialism in everything from professional sports to telecommunications, the politicians and corporations who frame our public dialogue have long stifled honest discussions of our socialist reality because they know such discussions would show that America primarily champions a particular form of socialism — a corporate socialism leveraging public resources for private profit.
Like the few municipal services that still remain in today's era of Reaganomics, the publicly owned Green Bay Packers are a rare exception to this norm. That's why the story of the team's organizational structure is suppressed — because it shows the most important question facing our nation isn't about accepting or rejecting socialism. We've already accepted it. Instead, the real question is about what specific type of socialism we want: the current kind that works only for those in the luxury box, or the kind that starts working for the rest of us?
I actually happen to agree with Sirota's analysis of our society. Obama has been foremost in facilitating this leveraging of public resources for private profit. Companies like GE, GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc. are government run entities, benefiting from bailouts and tax subsidies (with huge government strings attached) at the expense of the rest of us. This has had a detrimental effect on the economy, as those small businesses which account for 70% of all jobs are forced out of business, unable to compete with the tax dollars behind the big guys.
Politicians and corporations have most definitely stifled honest discussions of our socialist reality. Ahem! Particularly those who have bashed the Tea Party for speaking the truth. Sirota attempts to make his article palatable to the left by adding the word "corporate" to socialism, but that is redundant. Socialism is by definition government ownership of corporations. It matters very little who is technically calling the shots, the President or a CEO, when government and corporations are synonymous.
Tea Partiers and the left are actually protesting the same thing - a small number of powerful people fleecing the rest of us. Where we disagree with Sirota is that instead of fatally deciding "which kind of socialism" we want, the Tea Party wants to cut out the cancer of socialism entirely!
The left calls for more government, because they view big business and "the rich" as the ones exploiting the people. The establishment right calls for more business, because they view government as the entity exploiting the people. In reality, government and corporations have become the same thing. The Tea Party calls for less government, and argues against "crony capitalism", which is the right's term for "corporate socialism". We need less big business, less big government, more small business, and more local control of government. We need free markets and federalism.
Maybe Reagan was a bit too much of a socialist. Perhaps we should elect somebody who will cut government spending and regulation more than he did.
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