'We are All Socialists Now?' (Paul Street, ZNet)

[inna]

Why Did Newsweek Say “We are All Socialists Now?”

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20779

March 05, 2009
By Paul Street

Two weeks ago, the leading corporate weekly U.S. magazine Newsweek published a cover story bearing the remarkable title "We are All Socialists Now." The article was largely about the Obama administration's economic recovery and bailout plan though it noted that "the U.S. government has already - under a conservative Republican administration - effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries."

As this suggests, Newsweek equated "socialism" with just about any significant state intervention in economic life. To support this provocative thesis, the magazine pointed to the "growing role of government in the economy," indicating that "we are headed in a more European direction. A decade ago," Newsweek correspondents John Meacham and Even Thomas wrote, " U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone...In 2010, U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French." (J. Meacham and E. Thomas, "We are All Socialists Now," Newsweek, February 16, 2009).


BASIC DELETIONS AND CONFUSIONS

There were four key things missing from this remarkable Newsweek report:

~snip~

4. Any reasonable understanding of the fact that capitalism and capitalists have long relied on state protection, subsidy, and regulation - that supposedly "free market" capitalism has always been state capitalism. The profits system and its giant Frankenstein creation The Corporation would have collapsed - indeed they would not have gotten off the ground - without repeated and ongoing government interventions on behalf of concentrated wealth. For what its worth, my copy of Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary says that "capitalism" in "its latter phase" has "been generally characterized" by "increased government controls" (along with "a tendency toward concentration of wealth" and "the growth of great corporations"). The notion that we are no longer ruled by capitalism when government is heavily involved in economic life is simply wrong.


WHY THE BIZARRE CLAIM?

Newsweek's claim that "we are all socialists now" is transparently false and should reasonably strike many as bizarre. The interesting question (to me anyway) is why on Earth they would advance it.

~snip~

"Toxic Populist" Radical Potential

But I think there might be something deeper going on. Pretty much by definition, corporate media (of which Newsweek is an integral part of course) hates and fears popular democracy and the prospect of radical change from the bottom up. Dominant U.S. media's owners, managers and top operatives have long and quite naturally (given their elevated wealth, income, and privilege) thought that real socialism - democratic workers control for social use combined with a rejection of harsh socioeconomic disparities and of the culture of class rule - would be a terrible thing. And they and their capitalist advertisers and other elite class brethren have increasingly solid reasons to fear popular movement toward such radical change in the wake of the long, polarizing, and arch-plutocratic Bush-Cheney nightmare and in the deepening trough of an epic capitalist "Great Recession." Even before the current economic crisis kicked in, after all, most Americans supported a broad range of left-leaning, objectively social-democratic policies. Thus, for example:
...
* 64 percent of Americans said they would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens (CNN Opinion Research Poll, May 2007).

* 69 percent of Americans thought it was the responsibility of the federal government to provide health coverage of all its citizens (Gallup Poll, 2006).

~snip~


a lot more at the source: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20779