Serious American Thinking Clarifies U.S. Socialism

Jeremy Scahill talks with Ralph Nader

Providing for the health and welfare of People and Society know-it-all's set up, “stereotype,” and demonized as “socialism”

“They want to continue dialing for corporate dollars…,” Nader says.

“They want to continue (the Barack) Obama (campaign finance) record-setting fundraising from Wall Street, which in 2008 exceeded his Republican opponents” — getting “more money from Wall Street than (former Senator) John McCain.”

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ocialism… —?

Nader lays it out:

• It means full health insurance.

• It means a living wage. It means retirement security.

• It means protecting people from serious erosion of rights of workers.

• It means the ability to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and reflect majority desires in the retail trades like Walmart to join unions and so on.

The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (June 23) or Taft–Hartley Act was enacted in the early Cold War period and through the years has “allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning union shops.” This federal law amended the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which had guaranteed “the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as strikes.”

The Taft–Hartley Act restricts activities and power of labor unions such as “jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops.” Under the federal law it also prohibits “monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns” and requires union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government.”

National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 or the Wagner Act (though excluding application to workers such as supervisors, agricultural employees, domestic workers, government employees, and independent contractors)

• Sought to correct the ‘inequality of bargaining power’ between employers and employees by promoting collective bargaining between trade unions and employers.

• Established the National Labor Relations Board to prosecute violations of labor law and to oversee the process by which employees decide whether to be represented by a labor organization.

• Established various rules concerning collective bargaining and defined a series of banned unfair labor practices, including interference with the formation or organization of labor unions by employers.

Then 1935 Act had been written by Senator Robert F. Wagner (New York), passed by the 74th United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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ader continued his dissertation on “socialism.” 

It means

• The United States Post Office

• Public drinking water departments all over the country

• Public libraries

• Public electric utilities: 1,000+ around the country including Jacksonville, Florida.

• The Tennessee Valley Authority

TWA

Its service area covering most of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small slices of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933-) was the first large and remains the largest regional planning agency of the federal government. TWA “is a federally owned corporation created by congressional charter (May 18, 1933) to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression.”  The brainchild of U.S. Senator George W. Norris (Nebraska), TVA was also envisioned as “a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to more quickly modernize the region’s economy and society.”

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ader resumes with an elucidation of

Trump era, Democratic / Republican

Corporate Socialism

It means

• Seizing (U.S.) tax money and bailing out the crooks in Wall Street (2008 trillions of dollars) Shoveling out (American workers’) hard earned dollars to company subsidies, handouts, giveaways, etc.

• Taking money away (from people, public health and welfare) by giving it to tax breaks for the rich and powerful, creating huge deficits …to be paid by future generations

• Trillion and a half dollars in tax cuts for the rich and powerful — including the Trump family tax cuts— robbed from rebuilding America.

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ot unrelated

Last year, Michael Berkowitz came upon another straw man or red herring (socialist menace everywhere) offense rising from the right lane of the campaign trail. He reports  

 “Donald Trump has a movie … called ‘Fight On’ … about the specter haunting America— ‘…socialism.’

“Although too late for the Academy Awards, the right-wing Republicans unveiled this film hoping it will be a big winner for them in the coming national elections.”

The exhibition, a brilliantly “creative new art” form being “pioneered by the right wing… was the centerpiece” of 2019’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Thought the piece is in the documentary form — “… almost the entire narrative is composed of untruths and distortions.” The display, he concludes, “is one of the foremost examples of ‘fake-umentary.’”

Sources

Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill interview with Ralph Nader “It’s Armageddon Time for the Democratic Party: As Trump basks in his ‘acquittal’ in the Senate, the DNC is acting shady in managing the Democratic primaries” February 12, 2020 https://theintercept.com/2020/02/12/its-armageddon-time-for-the-democratic-party/

Ralph Nader: “…Democrats cannot defeat Donald Trump by themselves because they don’t use all the arguments and all the issues. … (And) It’s very hard to get through to any of these people. They think they know it all….”

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_of_1935

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Wagner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Norris

People’s World “‘Fight On’: Anti-socialist hysteria motivates conservative propaganda flick”

March 12, 2019 by Michael Berkowitz: “socialist menace is everywhere you turn, at least according to the right-wing ideologues at CPAC”

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/fight-on-anti-socialist-hysteria-motivates-conservative-propaganda-flick/

Michael Berkowitz’s byline brief says he “has worked on various political and social movements beginning with Civil Rights Movement in the South during the 1960s.”

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