The not terribly perceptive ultra-left at The Guardian is getting a bad feeling.

With Donald Trump and this election, it feels ominously like 2016 all over again

We could so easily step into another Electoral College victory for a populist authoritarian clown who loses the popular vote.

This writer is full of foreboding and doubts about Biden's stay-mum strategy, but had Biden spoken up much earlier and attacked the rioters from the start and equally hammered the leftism this writer so loves, where would the support of the Bernie Bros and racist/racial leftists have gone?

He doesn't see that it isn't Trump's entirely fictitious political genius that has made a second term increasingly likely.

Nor some lack of political wit on Biden's part.

He doesn't know to ask himself these questions.

Are the Democrats going to be sunk because their party so heavily depends on ultras whom they cannot get to the polls without embracing or appearing to embrace positions feared and loathed even by most Democrats, let alone the rest of America?

Or is that dependence merely a self-destructive delusion or poor strategic choice from which Democrats may yet hope to recover?

Though not before this election has run its course.

Perhaps losing twice in a row to a naked emperor with nothing at all to commend him but the deplorable talents of a clown might teach them that lesson.

A Democratic turf war is raging — even as progressives try to elect Biden

Is Biden Ceding the Law-and-Order Issue?

"Brutus is an honorable man."

Ari Velshi insists he is "a capitalist" - meaning he favors capitalism over alternatives - even as he vigorously attacks capitalism in America with a fury to make any Marxist proud.

Speaking of capitalism the way Mark Antony speaks of Brutus.

Forcing people to do what their religion forbids

Nobody wants to be an absolutist about it, but such coercion can certainly be overdone.

Forcing medical professionals or institutions to perform procedures that violate conscience is overdoing it.

And in that regard abortion is not the only issue.

Another Catholic Hospital Sued for Refusing Transgender Hysterectomy

How much worse would things get in this regard if we had outright socialized medicine like the NHS of the Brits?

A lot worse.

Even handing over the entire health insurance market to a single federal government run insurer would significantly diminish this liberty.

And would subject provision of medical services to rationing on the basis of invidious comparisons of the worth of individual lives, and subject R&D to state-sponsored judgments of value, morality, and justice.

I am a Democrat and a progressive, but not an anti-capitalist and not at all a PC authoritarian.

Put it on a postcard and mail it to the geezers who stare all day at Fox News

Trump Takes Social Security Hostage In His Latest Coronavirus Stimulus Demand

Btw, I am a Democrat and not a socialist.

Chris Matthews spoke for me when he spoke out against Democrats bragging stupidly about being socialists and the idea of a Democratic candidate who had even that same week cosied up to Castro.

And given the truth about their attitude towards journos and the press his charge socialists back in the later days of the cold war would have shot people like him in Central Park if they had ever taken over America was right on target.

He wasn't talking about Michael Harrington. He was talking about Angela Davis or, in earlier days, Gus Hall.

Watching Bernie clips on You Tube

AOC in Iowa, campaigning for Bernie, is urging an agenda of the working class and working class power.

Socialism is the opium of lots of people, but anybody who has the balls to campaign for working people (Bernie, AOC, etc.) rather than "the middle class" has my attention.

The agenda is what it is, a modest dose of social democracy that is of immense value to tens of millions of ordinary Americans that will cost the plutes of America much more than they ever thought they would have to pay for social peace.

They are the authoritarian, almost fascist plutes.

And they pretend to be terrified by the socialism of AOC, Bernie, and an entire wing of the Democratic Party when they are merely enraged by it.

The threat is not AOC, Bernie, or their "socialism".

The threat is the billionaires who might rather sink the republic than see such advances for the working people of America, with its consequences for everybody above them in the social scale.

Bullshit and camouflage

Gene Debs was exactly the kind of socialist who knew exactly what he was about, public ownership of all or nearly all means of production, the very opposite of the capitalist market system of private ownership of all or nearly all means of production.

Bernie and many others have been lying about what socialism is, not about their campaign agendas but their background ideology and aims.

Like this guy.

Millennials support socialism because they want to make America great — but for everyone

The truth is all this talk of socialism is not doing the Democrats much good and is for sure doing them harm, playing straight into Republicans' scare propaganda.

They have since the Great Depression campaigned against progressive innovations as socialism, communism, and Marxism and campaigned against advocates or defenders of them as socialists, communists, and Marxists.

They even did that to Obama.

With them, it's always time for a new red scare.

Trump and his minions have already started on this, most conspicuously at his most recent state of the union address.

There is no significant upside and too much downside to embracing even the word "socialism" when socialism is not on the Democrats' agenda and their misuse of the word to describe what is on it only validates Republican propaganda that does the same.

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.

The thug in the White House

We have known since the 2016 campaign he approves of the third degree, police brutality, torture, and war crimes like murdering the families of terrorists.

His voters like him because they share those attitudes.

Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher

Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.

Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.

Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.

Plutes gonna plute.

An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.

And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.

They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.

Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.

And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.

Might be a good idea, like trust busting.

Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.

And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.

Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.

Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.

All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.

They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.

Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.

But this is not.

There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.

Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.

Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.

It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.

Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.

The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.

That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.

Nobody saw it coming in Russia, either.

Remember this?

When it comes - and it will come because, barring technological overthrow and ignoring the entirely reactionary (and doomed) interruption of Islamism, Fukuyama was right - the collapse of the red regime in China will come as a surprise.

Tom Sauer, in particular, does not see it coming, even now.

Xi Jinping Will Have His Way With Hong Kong.

And yet, the Hong Kong demonstrations are proof of the inner rot.

No man knows the day or the hour.

But the faith of the demonstrators is right.

It will come.

So The Times is too conservative?

People say that a lot at Dem sites where both "socialism" and socialism are popular, and capitalism is not.

In recent weeks, The Times' front page has been relentlessly hammering Trump, the GOP, the USA, white men, and white people in general for racism, sexism, homophobia, and other sins too numerous and too diverse for me to recall them all right now, featuring multiple attacks above the fold (online edition, of course) every single day.

At least half the links and stories above the fold, and often more than that, are such attacks, nearly all of which at least include if they are not limited to the charge of racism.

But the ever more conspicuous Zinnite influence on The Times, actually more strident some days than The Guardian, shows increasingly in anti-capitalism, too.

As in this story, in which hammering the US for racism and slavery (ended by white people at the cost of some 700,000 dead, 154 years ago) provides a natural segue into hammering the US for capitalism.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

And yet, in this editorial - from the board, the publisher, and the editor, however, and in no way representing the newsroom or op-ed section - we see a defense of the Hong Kong rebels and a clear loathing of the red dictatorship of Beijing.

Hong Kong’s Challenge to Xi Jinping’s Iron Rule

All the same, most of the news stories concerning the situation have been sympathetic to the protesters and their aims.

The Youth of Hong Kong want a Bourgeois Revolution

While in America the ignorant young boobs, the kind who used to (still?) wear Che tee shirts, say they want socialism.

"Democratic socialism" is an oxymoron and the only really existing socialism that ever happened in the modern world was the ghastly horror of Communism.

But anyway.

In Hong Kong, It’s Now a Revolution

Hong Kong separatism apart, it's a rerun of the revolt in Tiananmen Square, decades ago.

No doubt it will share the fate of that revolt, too.

Hong Kong : Pékin lance une mise en garde sans précédent aux manifestants

“Nous devons mettre en garde avec fermeté les groupes violents et ceux qui les manipulent : à trop jouer avec le feu, vous finirez par en payer le prix. 

"Tous les participants auront à répondre de leurs actes en justice. 

"Ce message s’adresse à tous les fauteurs de troubles : ne prenez pas notre modération pour du laxisme, ne sous-estimez pas la détermination du gouvernement central à maintenir la stabilité [de Hong Kong].” 

C’est par ce message sans ambiguïté que Yang Guang, du Bureau des affaires de Macao et de Hong Kong, a mis en garde, ce mardi 6 août, les manifestants hongkongais, rapporte le South China Morning Post.

Pékin peut-il s’engager à ne pas recourir à l’armée pour trouver une issue à la crise actuelle à Hong Kong ? 

À la question, le porte-parole s’est contenté d’une réponse sibylline : 

“Mes réponses ont été préparées, mais je tiens à souligner une fois encore que le gouvernement central est attaché à la prospérité et à la stabilité de Hong Kong. 

"Nous ne laisserons impuni aucun acte qui s’en prendrait au principe ‘Un pays, deux systèmes’.”

With boring predictability . . . .

. . . . the Dem blogs this morning are crowing a big victory for their long-established favorites, the beloved leftists, over the klutzy, hated DINOs on the stage, heretofore known as "moderates", "centrists", or . . . "Democrats".

As for Chuck Todd "using Republican framing" isn't that what he's supposed to do?

Or did you think he was supposed to lob softballs right into the zone all night?

Oddly, the Times' headline - not so much, the story - is the least left-spinning of those in Dem media I have seen, today.

Sanders and Warren Battle Accusations of ‘Fairy Tale’ Promises as Intraparty Rift Flares

There was former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who accused Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren of making “fairy tale” promises; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who lamented liberal “wish-list economics”; and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, imploring the left not to overreach and “FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”

Arguing in somewhat subtler terms was Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who declined multiple chances to lash her liberal rivals by name but questioned the viability of their progressive stances on health care and education.

“I have bold ideas,” Ms. Klobuchar said, “but they are grounded in reality.”

With Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren refusing to yield an inch, the debate laid bare the stark choice before Democratic primary voters: whether to embrace an agenda of transformational economic change in an effort to motivate young and nonwhite voters, or to proceed more cautiously by embracing more incremental appeals that could win over moderates.

Or, here's a radical thought, the Dem voters could support candidates whose advertised agendas comport with their (the voters') own politics rather than so obviously playing bare-naked horse-race politics, treating agendas and aspirations as of no intrinsic importance, at all.

Though of course each group insisted a candidate (and party) with their type of agenda would do better in the general against the Duce (and the GOP on the whole).

<snip>

The most protracted exchanges of the night, and by far the most substantive ones, concerned Mr. Sanders’s signature proposal to replace private health insurance with a single-payer system of the kind employed in Canada and a number of European countries. 

Mr. Delaney and the other moderates attacked the proposal from the first minutes of the debate, calling it a politically toxic idea that would void the health care plans of union members and of employees of private businesses.

“We don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal,” Mr. Delaney said.

Mr. Sanders defended his plan ferociously, with periodic help from Ms. Warren. 

He cast Mr. Delaney and other Democratic doubters as champions of an indefensible system, and argued that opponents of the single-payer format tended to brand it with traits — like costliness and unpredictability — that the American health care system already possesses.

“The answer,” Mr. Sanders said, “is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies and the insurance companies, move to ‘Medicare for all.’”

Spoken like "profit" is a dirty word, in the manner of a true socialist in the real sense of the word, entailing and usually motivated by anti-capitalism.

Visceral, in Sanders' case.

Both he and Ms. Warren depicted skeptics of single-payer health care as being in league with the G.O.P.: Mr. Sanders accused a CNN moderator, Jake Tapper, of using a “Republican talking point” when raising questions about his plan, and noted that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program.” 

In a similar complaint, Ms. Warren urged Democrats to “stop using Republican talking points” on the issue.

. . . .

The harshest counterattack on the moderates, however, may not have come from Mr. Sanders or Ms. Warren.

“I wonder why you’re Democrats,” said Marianne Williamson, the author and spiritualist. “You think there’s something wrong about using the instruments of government to help people.”

. . . .

The same center-versus-left divide evident on health care was also on display as the candidates clashed over trade and immigration, and whether some of the proposals offered by the liberal candidates would represent a boon to Mr. Trump.

“We got a hundred thousand people showing up at the border right now,” said Mr. Bullock. “If we decriminalize entry, if we give health care to everyone, we’ll have multiples of that.”

Turning to Ms. Warren, he accused her of “playing into Donald Trump’s hands” for wanting to make illegal immigration a civil penalty and seeking to provide federal benefits to undocumented migrants.

Ms. Warren fired back that “seeking refuge, seeking asylum” is “not a crime.”

A similar crossfire unfolded on trade, as Mr. Hickenlooper and Mr. Delaney accused Ms. Warren of pursuing a trade agenda closer to Mr. Trump’s than to that of the last Democratic president, Barack Obama. 

Ms. Warren’s agenda, Mr. Delaney said, “would isolate America’s economy around the world.”

. . . .

The evening seemed to expose the rifts in the party that might ultimately define the Democratic race once the party’s primary field narrows, and Mr. Biden comes face to face in future debates with Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren.

. . . .

Ms. Warren ignored a question about her boasts that she’s a proud capitalist — a barely-veiled contrast with Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist — and used the prompt instead to talk of her battles with Wall Street. 

Mr. Sanders even praised his colleague at one point, echoing her tough talk on corporate America.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “is absolutely right.”

Of wolves in sheep's clothing, one thinks, thinking about her protestations of non-socialism, of commitment to capitalism.

What we are looking at is a small group of fierce anti-capitalists who really are socialists in their hearts masquerading as capitalism-preferring and -loyal progressives, vs a coterie of actual progressives whom they are trying to portray as Republican bare-knuckle reactionaries.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Marooned Together on Fantasy Island

Of course, Bernie and Pocahontas are perfectly right that those candidates who belabored their agendas as fantasies oppose them, and would react with horror if they turned out not to be so fantastic, after all.

And the same is generally true, I suppose, in the commentariat.

But I am not at all sure about Frank Bruni.

Clear and true vs fuzzy, murky, and wrong

Fuzzy, murky, and wrong:

Five myths about socialism

Clear and true:

What Americans Must Know About Socialism

Dickens v. the rabble

In the later chapters of Barnaby Rudge, D repeatedly portrays the rioters as violent, murderous criminals bent more on limitless destruction and anarchy than any real political goal.

Their actions repeatedly stem from hatred of the authorities and the haves - however little or much they have - , and it is these latter, persons with property, who have his undivided and wholly unabashed sympathy and loyalty.

Along with defenders of property, order, and authority.

Dickens a socialist?

Not on your life.

Which is not at all to deny his endless, heartfelt, and sincere sympathy for the deserving poor or his support for both private charity and state action aimed at relief within the context of a wholly undisturbed capitalism.

Who was it, which converted red, wrote that the entire red plague of the 20th Century was based on blind hatred of the bourgeoisie?

Oh, yes.

Francois Furet.

Though he was certainly not alone in that.

Of course, that plague was over by 1990.

A whole generation of adults was born and came to maturity after that.

Bernie's attack on "oligarchy"

He attacks capitalism while evading the question what is the socialism he actually favors over capitalism.

Just as he did during the campaign of 2016.

Bernie Sanders defines his vision for democratic socialism in the United States

When we talk about oligarchy, let us be clear about what we mean. 

Right now, in the United States of America, three families control more wealth than the bottom half of our country, some 160 million Americans. 

The top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 92% and 49% of all new income generated today goes to the top 1%. 

In fact, income and wealth inequality today in the United States is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

He says he is going to tell us what he means by "oligarchy" and then he does not.

To claim this word means anything else than what it actually means is just lying.

noun, plural ol·i·gar·chies.

1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class orclique; government by the few.
2. a state or organization so ruled.
3. the persons or class so ruling.

Taken literally, every government in the world today is an oligarchy, including any republic, no matter how benign.

But historically the word has usually been understood to mean government by a minority not itself subject to any legal, constitutional, or political control.

In short, absolute or despotic government by a few.

And that is not what Bernie is ranting about and we in America do not live under any such government.

He is ranting about capitalism.

He begins by reciting statistics about income and wealth inequality, both of which are inescapable under capitalism and have never been actually escaped under socialism.

"Wealth inequality" as he uses it is another label for private ownership of the means of production, the defining feature that differentiates capitalism from socialism.

He continues, quoting more statistics, many truly disturbing, in a like tone of furious rage.

And when we talk about oligarchy, it is not just that the very rich are getting much richer. 

It is that tens of millions of working-class people, in the wealthiest country on earth, are suffering under incredible economic hardship, desperately trying to survive.

Today, nearly 40 million Americans live in poverty and tonight, 500,000 people will be sleeping out on the streets. 

About half of the country lives paycheck to paycheck as tens of millions of our people are an accident, a divorce, a sickness or a layoff away from economic devastation.

While many public schools throughout the country lack the resources to adequately educate our young people, we are the most heavily incarcerated nation on earth.

After decades of policies that have encouraged and subsidized unbridled corporate greed, we now have an economy that is fundamentally broken and grotesquely unfair.

Ignoring history, pretending somehow we should have expected quite the opposite, he complains.

Globally, the situation is even more shocking with most of the world’s wealth concentrated among a very few, while billions of people have almost nothing. 

Today, the world’s richest 26 billionaires now own as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet – half of the world’s population.

Only after this savage denunciation of the object of his lifelong hatred does he address politics.

Across the globe, the [fictitious - PV] movement toward oligarchy runs parallel to the growth of authoritarian regimes – like Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohamed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary among others.

These leaders meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism. 

They redirect popular anger about inequality and declining economic conditions into violent rage against minorities — whether they are immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or the LGBT community. 

And to suppress dissent, they are cracking down on democracy and human rights.

He continues with a by now commonplace and absurdly hyperbolic comparison of our own time to the 1930s.

This authoritarian playbook is not new. 

The challenge we confront today as a nation, and as a world, is in many ways not different from the one we faced a little less than a century ago, during and after the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Then, as now, deeply-rooted and seemingly intractable economic and social disparities led to the rise of right-wing nationalist forces all over the world.

He extends the comparison over several paragraphs and then returns to the demons of the present, according to him.

Today, America and the world are once again moving towards authoritarianism — and the same right-wing forces of oligarchy, corporatism, nationalism, racism and xenophobia are on the march, pushing us to make the apocalyptically wrong choice that Europe made in the last century.

Today, we now see a handful of billionaires with unprecedented wealth and power.

We see huge private monopolies — operating outside of any real democratic oversight and often subsidized by taxpayers – with the power to control almost every aspect of our lives.

They are the profit-taking gatekeepers of our health care, our technology, our finance system, our food supply and almost all of the other basic necessities of life. 

They are Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and giant agri-businesses.

They are the entities with unlimited wealth who surround our nation’s capitol with thousands of well-paid lobbyists, who to a significant degree write the laws that we live under.

Today, we have a demagogue in the White House who, for cheap political gain, is attempting to deflect the attention of the American people away from the real crises that we face and, instead, is doing what demagogues always do — and that is divide people up and legislate hatred. 

This is a president who supports brutal family separations, border walls, Muslim bans, anti-LGBT policies, deportations and voter suppression.

It is my very strong belief that the United States must reject that path of hatred and divisiveness — and instead find the moral conviction to choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love.

It is the path that I call democratic socialism.

And yet what he calls for is far from that, and this champion of Eugene Debs knows that very well.

So why does he call it that?

God knows.

But the fix he calls for is not far from what the first Roosevelt, TR, himself urged in 1912.

Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.

This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.

In order to accomplish that goal, it means committing ourselves to protecting political rights, to protecting civil rights – and to protect economic rights of all people in this country.

As FDR stated in his 1944 State of the Union address: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Today, our Bill of Rights guarantees the American people a number of important constitutionally protected political rights. 

And while we understand that these rights have not always been respected and we have so much more work to do, we are proud that our constitution guarantees freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, a free press and other rights because we understand that we can never have true American freedom unless we are free from authoritarian tyranny.

Now, we must take the next step forward and guarantee every man, woman and child in our country basic economic rights – the right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.

We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

That is what I mean by democratic socialism.

Still, this is true and fair enough.

Let me be clear. I do understand that I and other progressives will face massive attacks from those who attempt to use the word “socialism” as a slur. 

But I should also tell you that I have faced and overcome these attacks for decades — and I am not the only one.

Let us remember that in 1932, Republican President Herbert Hoover claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was, “a disguise for the totalitarian state.”

In 1936 former Democratic New York Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith said in a speech about FDR’s New Deal policies, “Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side.”

When President Harry Truman proposed a national health care program, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan as their pitchman.

The AMA called the legislation that stemmed from his proposal “socialized medicine” claiming that White House staff were, “followers of the Moscow party line.”

In 1960, Ronald Reagan in a letter to Richard Nixon wrote the following about John F. Kennedy: “Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx.”

In the 1990s, then Congressman Newt Gingrich claimed President Bill Clinton’s health care plan was “centralized bureaucratic socialism.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has claimed that the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was “a step towards socialism.”

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner claimed the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill and the budget proposed by President Barack Obama were “all one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment.”

In this regard, President Harry Truman was right when he said that: “Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years…

"Socialism is what they called Social Security. 

"Socialism is what they called farm price supports. 

"Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. 

"Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

If you are the Trump family, you got $885 million worth of tax breaks and subsidies for your family’s housing empire that is built on racial discrimination.

When Trump screams socialism, all of his hypocrisy will not be lost on the American people. Americans will know that he is attacking all that we take for granted: from Social Security to Medicare to veterans health care to roads and bridges to public schools to national parks to clean water and clean air.

When Trump attacks socialism, I am reminded of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and me. 

He believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

I believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country.

And then he adopts a line taken by liberals at least since Dewey regarding "true freedom".

(Google "persuasive definition" and "No true Scotsman")

What I believe is that the American people deserve freedom – true freedom. 

Freedom is an often used word but it’s time we took a hard look at what that word actually means.

Ask yourself: what does it actually mean to be free?

Are you truly free if you are unable to go to a doctor when you are sick, or face financial bankruptcy when you leave the hospital?

Are you truly free if you cannot afford the prescription drug you need to stay alive?

Are you truly free when you spend half of your limited income on housing, and are forced to borrow money from a payday lender at 200% interest rates.

Are you truly free if you are 70 years old and forced to work because you lack a pension or enough money to retire?

Are you truly free if you are unable to go to attend college or a trade school because your family lacks the income?

Are you truly free if you are forced to work 60 or 80 hours a week because you can’t find a job that pays a living wage?

Are you truly free if you are a mother or father with a new born baby but you are forced to go back to work immediately after the birth because you lack paid family leave?

Are you truly free if you are a small business owner or family farmer who is driven out by the monopolistic practices of big business?

Are you truly free if you are a veteran, who put your life on the line to defend this country, and now sleep out on the streets?

To me, the answer to those questions, in the wealthiest nation on earth, is no, you are not free.

. . . .

In 1944, FDR proposed an economic bill of rights but died a year later and was never able to fulfil that vision. Our job, 75 years later, is to complete what Roosevelt started.

That is why today, I am proposing a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.

A Bill of Rights that establishes once and for all that every American, regardless of his or her income in entitled to:

• The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
• The right to quality health care
• The right to a complete education
• The right to affordable housing
• The right to a clean environment
• The right to a secure retirement

Over the course of this election my campaign has been releasing — and will continue to release — detailed proposals addressing each of these yet to be realized economic rights.

We will also address the attacks that are being launched each day against the civil rights and civil liberties of our people.

And then the cat is out of the bag for all this oligarchy stuff.

At the end of the day, the one percent may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just the one percent. 

When the 99 percent stand together, we can transform society.

These are my values, and that is why I call myself a democratic socialist.

At its core is a deep and abiding faith in the American people to peacefully and democratically enact the transformative change that will create shared prosperity, social equality and true freedom for all.

He's doing it again

Evasively and contemptuously disguising a lifelong hatred of capitalism so intense he spent the Cold War making excuses for and defending communist regimes because they expropriated the expropriators in the name of the working masses, instituting socialism - yes, that means public ownership of the means of production - by revolution and by force.

Better that than not at all, eh?

And all the while grudgingly admitting the crimes of red totalitarian dictatorship, usually insisting on mixing in condemnations of America and capitalism in the same paragraph, if not in the same sentence.

It is no accident that his political hero is not and never was the social democrat Clement Attlee, but the socialist Eugene Debs who came to admire Bolshevik Russia.

Not to mention Castro, Che, the Sandinistas, and a host of others.

Bernie Sanders to Deliver Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy

I really despise this cowardly fraud - specifically for his cowardly fraudulence.

And I have no doubt AOC and the other soi-disant democratic socialists of the Democratic Party feel pretty much the same way as he does.

I have met many people who have called themselves "democratic socialists" in my years, and every one of them hated capitalism and, during the Cold War, defended communist regimes against US opposition.

Harrington, a sincere democratic socialist who was also sincere in his hatred of communism and support for American opposition to them during those years, was a rare exception and, anyway, I never personally met him.

The politics of HBO's "Chernobyl"

The Daily Caller, behind an absurd demand for subscription, is claiming liberals hate the series while conservatives love it.

The show damns socialism, they say, and not without reason, though the point is disputed just what it damns, and so the left hate it and the right love it.

And yet Vox has published a string of well-deserved positive reviews.

The Guardian, too, loved it by the end, as have lots of other people on the left.

Indeed, so far as I know, nobody outside the post-Soviet, post-socialist Russian state, Putin's Russian nationalist state, has published a review of the series that was negative in net.

Though some on the right have taken occasion to crow, and on the left to deflect.

The HBO series was actually very popular and highly regarded among Russians, but the Putinists are reacting out of stupid offended nationalism, much like the Japanese denying comfort women were slaves, denying the atrocity of Nanking, denying any number of war crimes, and even insisting on celebrating hanged war criminals at patriotic Shinto monuments.

Much like our Southerners and their GOP enablers, celebrating people who fought a war to destroy the Union, to kill the idea that "all men are created equal", to deepen and perpetuate racism in order to commit the South to African slavery forever.

That is to say, the only known folks to damn the series have done so out of the sort of idiot right wing nationalism that mimics the crime-family moms who aid and abet their criminal children, denying they are criminals or excusing their crimes when denial is impossible, because and only because "blood is thicker than water".

The truth is the exact opposite of what the Daily Caller has claimed.

The Russian state, btw, is retaliating with a ludicrous series blaming the CIA for the disaster.

As for the discrepancies between actual history and the events in the series, everybody knows about them because the people who made the series have been yakking about them from the first moments, again and again insisting the series is not and dramatically could not be an entirely accurate rehearsal of who did what, and pointing specifically toward the very same departures from fact to which Russians out to defend the Reds have pointed with an absurd filip of "gotcha".

Not every Russian, not even every Russian personally involved, sees it that way, however.

And this Post story should rebut the lies of surviving Soviet officials whitewashing their and their party's role.

And it is worth remembering that Putin and many others in today's Russian society were themselves officials of the Soviet state.

Even today, many of them, starting with the Big Man, are far from pleased to hear criticism of the Soviet state, feeling correctly they are all of them in varying degrees personally implicated in its crimes and disasters.

What there is and what there isn't

There is democratic capitalism (capitalism under representative government, actually), as urged and celebrated by Barack Obama.

There is despotic, tyrannical socialism as urged and celebrated by Lenin and his followers.

There is not and never has been or will be democratic socialism.

Socialism under representative government.

That is a political myth.

Unrepentent to this day

‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’:

Bernie Sanders on US anti-Communism in Latin America.

In a nutshell, where stood many Democrats.

We had no real stake in Vietnam.

The dominoes were never going to fall all the way to California.

But Latin America is a lot closer, and I personally remember being taught as a student to shelter under the desk during the Cuban missile crisis.

I found it shocking and offensive that Democrats were so indulgent toward outright Communists in Chile, in Nicaragua, and elsewhere in the region.

A Cuban province on the mainland

Cuba Has Hijacked Venezuela

Is Cuba the only country in the world that, besides being run by a Communist family dictatorship, has a fairly heavily top down socialized economy?

Well, there's North Korea.

To be fair, the two countries appear to be at opposite poles of the "better or worse" spectrum among actually existing socialist states, the Cuban economy being far kinder to ordinary people, the Cuban state being far less geared to war, and the Cuban government being considerably less savage toward its own people.

On the other hand, the Bolivarian Revolution is turning Venezuela into a Cuban branch office, and it's not going all that well for the Venezuelans.