19 February 2019

Going-to-Bat With Seattle Times Columnist Jon Talton Again!

Jon Talton
No doubt about it: when your MesaZona blogger likes a professional colleague he really unabashedly likes someone named Jon Talton. Talton has the advantage of living in both progressive Seattle and conservative Phoenix. How he manages to straddle both ends of the political spectrum at the same time is enough reason to respect his published points-of-view.
His latest - published today - on SOCIALISM deserves public attention, especially when The Donald hit on it last night . . . A bad word? NO.
Socialism is gaining in popularity, and today’s capitalism is to blame
by Special to The Seattle Times     
 in The Seattle Times  
The Democratic Party has moved left, with some proudly embracing "socialist" as part of their political identity.
But most of their ideas are hardly out of Karl Marx's playbook.
A specter is haunting America — the specter of socialism.
Ask the president.
In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump said, “Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
A Gallup poll this past August found that Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism (by 57 percent to 47 percent). The favorable views are especially high among younger respondents.
New York’s popular Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t shy from the label “Democratic socialist.” Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who just announced his presidential bid, describes himself the same way.
The Democratic Party is undeniably moving left. For many, this is a reaction to Trump. Others see no future in middle-of-the-road politics after the defeat of Hillary Clinton (even though she won the popular vote).
But what do we mean when we say “socialism”? 
  • In general, these democratic socialists admire the northern European model where people pay high taxes and get major government services, while capitalism thrives.
  • Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the richest paid 91 percent. (For that and other sins such as keeping Social Security, the Republican former five-star general and liberator of Western Europe was branded a “communist” by the right-wing John Birch Society.)
  • Medicare-for-all, another policy being floated by Democratic presidential candidates, traces its origins to such commies as Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon.
When Republicans say socialism, it’s a scare word used to suggest the gub’ment is coming for your SUV as well as your guns.
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann said of Democrats’ environmental agenda,
“They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America.”
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. . . This opening for the S word didn’t travel the Atlantic from such hellholes as Stockholm or Copenhagen.
Rather, it’s the natural backlash against big changes in American capitalism.
Checks and balances such as antitrust enforcement, regulation of major industries, progressive taxation and unions have been gutted since the 1980s.What for most of the republic’s history was corruption is now business as usual.
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