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On January 3, 2020, in its first edition of the new year, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement titled The decade of socialist revolution begins. With a speed and to a degree that not even the WSWS could have predicted, the statements title has been vindicated. We are coming to the end of the most significant year of the still young twenty-first century. The Pandemic of 2020 will prove to be as great a historical turning point for this century as the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was for the twentieth. The First World War exposed in all their brutality the contradictions of the capitalist system and triggered the eruption of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheavals that defined the twentieth century.

The Pandemic of 2020 has revealed before the entire world the irreconcilable economic, social and moral chasm that divides the capitalist drive for profit from the most essential needs of the overwhelming majority of mankind. Since the beginning of the year, more than 1.5 million people have died after being infected with COVID-19.

Within the United States, the death toll has now passed 300,000. In the center of world capitalism, approximately 3,000 people are dying every day. The intensive care units of hospitals are being overwhelmed with patients, and in many parts of the country there is a real danger that fragile health care systems will break down beneath the strain.

Vaccines are now being produced and distributed that will protect those who are inoculated against infection. However, this protracted process will require months before it has any significant impact upon the rate of death. It is now predicted that within the United States at least another quarter million people will die of COVID-19 between now and April 1. But absolutely no serious emergency measures are being proposed to stop the spread of the pandemic.

The government, the corporations, the pandemic profiteers of Wall Street, and the Democrats and Republicansmaintaining their policy of malign neglectstill refuse to take the measures that are necessary to save livesthe shutdown of all non-essential workplaces, the closure of schools, and emergency financial aid to all working people and small businesses whose income has been impacted by the pandemicbecause the capitalist system prioritizes profits over lives. The financial and corporate oligarchs, whose vast fortunes have grown massively due to the rise of share values, oppose all life-saving policies that would impact negatively on the stock market, corporate profits and, above all, their personal wealth.

And while the pandemic has exacted its terrible toll, American democracy is breaking down beneath the pressure and strains created by massive social inequality. With substantial support within the corporate-financial oligarchy, Donald Trump has utilized the presidency to suppress the Bill of Rights and set up a fascistic dictatorship.

During this year of unprecedented social and political crisis, the World Socialist Web Site has demonstrated its critical and indispensable role in providing the working class with unequaled coverage of global events. But it not only reports on events; it analyzes them and explains their significance. The WSWS provides a perspective and a program of action.

There is not a single publication in the world that can compare its coverage of the pandemic to that of the World Socialist Web Site. Its first substantial report on the outbreak of the pandemic was posted on January 24, 2020.

On January 25, it warned, The Coronavirus emergency places in focus a health crisis which is the expression of the failure of the capitalist system to provide solutions to the most basic needs of the population.

The Trump administration and the media have claimed, in justification of their failure to respond quickly and effectively to the pandemic, that the scope and lethality of the pandemic could not have been foreseen.

But this outrageous lie is exposed by the numerous warnings and calls for emergency action posted on the World Socialist Web Site in the earliest days of the crisis:

On March 6, 2020when the total number of deaths in the entire United States was only 15the WSWS already recognized both the disastrous potential of the pandemic and the criminal inadequacy of the governments response. We wrote:

The indifference of the Trump administration to the health of the population is no better, and perhaps worse, than the attitude of the pharaohs to their slaves. The media has spent far more time bemoaning the fall in share values on Wall Street than the loss of human life.

On March 13, 2020when the total number of deaths in the US due to COVID-19 was just 47the WSWS posted a statement, titled Capitalism is at war with society, in which we warned: The coronavirus pandemic is developing into a social, economic and political crisis on a scale that is without precedent.

On March 17, 2020when the total number of deaths in the United States had just passed 100the WSWS published a Program of Action for the Working Class issued by the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party, which stated:

For the past two months, all of the White Houses actions in response to the pandemic have been aimed solely at propping up the financial markets.

An enormous amount of time has been lost, but the impact and extent of the pandemic depends on urgent responses that can be taken now.

The essential principle that must guide the response to the crisis is that the needs of working people must take absolute and unconditional priority over all considerations of corporate profit and private wealth. It is not a matter of what the ruling class claims it can afford, but what the masses need.

These statements, and dozens more that have been posted in the course of the past year, demonstrate a level of social and political insight that is not to be found in any other publication. They testify to the extraordinary power of the Marxist method that is employed by the World Socialist Web Site. If the warnings of the WSWS had been heeded, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. But far from heeding our warnings, the corporate media continued to censor the World Socialist Web Site.

The response of the WSWS to the political crisis in the United States has been no less perspicacious than its coverage of the pandemic. In the beginning of June 2020, the WSWS correctly assessed the significance of Trumps threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and his mobilization of military police to violently suppress citizens protests. In a statement posted June 4, 2020, the World Socialist Web Site declared:

The White House is now the political nerve center of a conspiracy to establish a military dictatorship, overthrow the Constitution, abolish democratic rights and violently suppress the protests against police brutality that have swept across the United States.

And, further, in a warning that appears, in light of subsequent events, extraordinarily prescient: Nothing could be more dangerous than to think that the crisis has passed. It has, rather, just begun.

The pandemic is not only a tragedy. It is a warning. The subordination of the planet to the pursuit of profit and personal wealth leads to fascism and the ultimate cataclysm of nuclear war. But a mood of resistance is developing throughout the world. The criminal response of the ruling elites to the global pandemic is evoking ever greater anger within the international working class. The year 2021 will be marked by the intensification of political crisis and the escalation of class struggle.

Every great historical crisis tests political movements and their programs. The World Socialist Web Site, the voice of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality parties throughout the world, can justifiably state that it met the many challenges of 2020.

The correctness and clarity of its political analysis and program, combined with its growing involvement in the daily struggles of the working class, has leddespite the persistent efforts of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to suppress access to the WSWSto a substantial growth in the readership of the World Socialist Web Site. There has been an enthusiastic response to the October 2 relaunch of the WSWS.

In 2019, the WSWS recorded 17 million page views. In 2020with nearly two weeks remaining until the turn of the new yearthe WSWS has recorded 21.7 million page views, an increase of 28 percent.

The total number of readers of the WSWS increased by 41.7 percent. We are especially gratified by the substantial growth recorded by the WSWS throughout the world. In Britain, the readership of the site has more than doubled. In Australia, there has been a 93 percent increase in readership. In India, a 67 percent increase. In Sri Lanka, a 235 percent increase. In Brazil, a 103 percent increase. In Turkey, the number of WSWS users has increased 152 percent.

The growth of our readership and the total number of page views is a significant achievement of which the editorial board and our many comrades throughout the world who write for and contribute to the production and posting of the site can be justifiably proud.

But we also recognize that the increase in readership reflects a growing militancy in the working class, which, in turn, will confront the World Socialist Web Site with new and even more daunting political, technological and organizational challenges.

The WSWS is determined to meet these challenges. But we need your support. As the production, technological maintenance, and global coverage of the WSWS grow more complex, the scale of the financial resources required to sustain and develop the site grows as well.

That is why I am asking you, on behalf of the editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, to make the largest donation possible to the 2021 New Years fund. This fund drive, which begins today, will continue until February 15, 2021. You can make your donation now or make a pledge payable by February 15.

The money we receive will be used to enlarge our staff, expand the range of our coverage and to keep pace with the rapidly developing technology of the internet.

You can also contribute to the success of the fund drive and the growth of the readership of the web site by circulating this video and material posted on the WSWS to your friends and co-workers. We do not expect that the corporate media platforms will give up their efforts to censor and suppress access to the WSWS. But your efforts to win new readers to the site can counteract these measures.

And, finally, as you make your financial contribution to the World Socialist Web Site, I urge you to take the most important step of all. Apply for membership in the Socialist Equality Party. Take up the fight for the unity of the international working class and a world without inequality, political oppression and war. Join the struggle for socialism in 2021.

Your support is essential to help build a revolutionary leadership of the working class in 2021!

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The World Socialist Web Site and the crises of 2020 - WSWS

I READ with both interest and not an inconsiderable rancour the article by Kevin McKenna (The fight against neo-liberalism starts as soon as we leave the UK, December 16).

I really did not understand his thinking and what audience he was aiming at. Let me try!

Was this an attack on the SNP? Was it a call to the Socialist faithful? Was it a recruitment drive for the Labour party, but not Sir Keir Starmers Labour party? Was he recruiting for the SSP? He certainly rather vividly made clear where he was coming from, no ifs no buts.

Perhaps Kevin McKenna shows his true politics like never before. To suggest the SNP is a party run by big business and has a neoliberal philosophy at its roots is just not true. It is a left-of-centre social democratic party and its policies are there for all to see. For 13 years the bulk of Scottish voters have supported these policies while out-and-out socialist policies have withered on the vine in Scotland, as has the Labour party both in Scotland and the UK. Far-left socialism has been all but forgotten.

READ MORE:Kevin McKenna: SNP neo-liberalism must be fought, but we cannot while in the UK

He waxes lyrically about Jeremy Corbyn, suggesting his failure to introduce radical socialism was the result of dark political forces undermining his vision. The rise and fall of Corbynism which, lets face it, was spectacular was more to do with the public. Many Labour supporters, after close scrutiny of not only the man himself but his vision of a socialist UK, found him wanting and delivered their verdict through the ballot box. The red wall in the North collapsed. How does Kevin Mckenna explain this?

There is no question that as he describes his personal journey to Yes this journey has also been mine and that of many others who lived through those difficult times and continue to do so. I do not, however, understand why he needs a stiff drink every time he votes for the independence-supporting SNP. This is very condescending and perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek. Either way I am sure the SNP are happy to get the vote. I am sure he is not the only person who bites their lip before putting an X in the box for the SNP. Lets face it, if we are going to win independence we are going to have to attract many reluctant Labour voters who are clearly looking to a post-independence Labour party to emerge on the spectrum of Scottish politics.

What saddened me the most was his rather vicious unfounded attack on the SNP and the suggestion that the SNP were in the pay of big business and that SNP policies failed to be radical enough as a consequence. The facts clearly show otherwise. He reverts once again in to the world of fantasy with his vision of an independent socialist republic. Independent and republic I accept; socialist is just a pipe dream.

Finally, I am not a sleep walking SNP loyalist but a hardworking activist foot soldier. Kevin, please stop the divisive sniping and name-calling and keep your political powder dry until after we are independent.

Dan WoodKirriemuir

TODAY'S piece by Kevin McKenna was another tour de force. I find myself agreeing with Kevin on all of what was said in his article, particularly when he pointed out how the party has permitted a large number of fakes and opportunists to hitch their careers and finances to the only political show in town.

Absolutely correct these carpet-baggers have hitched their star to the SNP juggernaut, not in the hope of regaining our countrys independence or to make the lives of Scotlands people better, but quite simply to feather their own nests.

The party was, and in some respects still is, at a crossroads, but the first steps have been taken to make the party accountable to the members.

Its been a while coming!

Cameron M FraserBannockburn

Original post:
Kevin McKenna's Scottish socialist republic is nothing but a pipe dream - The National

Last months election was a mixed bag. Yes, Joe Biden got 12 million more votes than Hillary Clinton did. But Donald Trump added 9.5 million votes of his own. More than half of those new Trump voters 4.6 million of them came because he increased his share of nonwhite voters from 21 percent to 25 percent.

In some respects, these results are not entirely surprising. Trumps better performance with nonwhite voters is due largely, though not exclusively, to higher support in Latino communities ranging from southern Florida, to Texass Rio Grande Valley, to the dense former mill towns of New England. Latinos are not a unified voting bloc, and prior Republicans outperformed expectations the last Republican to perform similarly to Trump was George W. Bush in 2004.

Since most Latinos still voted for Joe Biden, some, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conclude that Democratic strategists are using Latino voters as scapegoats for Bidens narrower than expected victory. This deflects attention from the Democratic Partys more disappointing, and significant, loss with rural white voters.

Nevertheless, Trumps performance with nonwhite voters deserves consideration because of what it says about the present and future of the Democratic Party. It may represent more of a trend than a blip. George W. Bush actively courted Latinos emphasizing, for example, Latino members of his own extended family, which make his gains less surprising than Trumps, who launched his campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as bad hombres, rapists, and murderers.

And even if the 2020 results turn out to be more of a blip than a trend, they are a blip that has already been politicized by self-described moderates within the Democratic Party, who seek to use them to attack left-wing candidates. You have probably already heard the claim that Latinos are turned off by socialism and progressive policies, and that they identify more with gritty self-starters than with the recipients of social programs.

Its a narrative that should be questioned, especially when considering how previous generations of voters were won to the Democratic coalition. Democrats did not incorporate constituencies like Southern and Eastern Europeans and African Americans by messaging alone. They used an organizational strategy that relied on local proxies such as labor unions, political machines, churches, and other grassroots organizations. And this, in combination with victories like Social Security and the Civil Rights Act, which created meaningful economic and social uplift, won the loyalty of voters for generations. Today, many of those capable of acting as Democratic proxies within communities of color are democratic socialists and other left-of-center activists.

Some within the Democratic Party claim that Trump won support by exploiting fears of socialism and the specters of antifa and Black Lives Matter. Trump is not the first Republican to use such a strategy. Republicans called FDR a Bolshevik. The American Medical Association stoked Americans fears of socialized medicine to defeat Harry Trumans universal health care plan in 1947. Martin Luther King Jr was called a communist. Barack Obama was, according to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a socialist who pals around with terrorists.

Republicans mounted the same attack on Biden, who has a long, virtually unblemished record of standing at the right end of the Democratic Party, and who explicitly denounced Medicare for All and proclaimed that his primary victory over Bernie Sanders was proof that the party was not socialist. But some Beltway insiders nevertheless claim that the mere presence of left-of-center politics dooms Democrats, particularly among nonwhite voters who supposedly have an innate distaste for socialism. Meanwhile, democratic socialists point to Bernie Sanderss success among Latino voters to claim that socialism is popular among Latino voters; perhaps Biden hurt himself by not embracing more egalitarian economic ideas.

Both sides of this debate overestimate the degree to which most voters, including nonwhite voters, have fixed positions on socialism. Like other Americans, Latino voters have made no gains in real income since the mid-twentieth century and have seen a decline of household wealth relative to white households. There is a widespread feeling in many Latino communities that the system is not working fairly, a view shared by many other Americans.

However, as academic studies of political preferences show, only a tiny minority of voters, whether white or nonwhite, translate such sentiments into abstract political categories like socialism or capitalism. Most people instead use their intuitions about which side will hear, see, and fight for people like themselves an intuition that could be born of a candidates support for specific policies, but also their messaging, outreach, or the views of ones peers.

This election, along with years of polling results, further shows an enormous disconnect between the cultural meaning that voters attach to progressivism or socialism and their views on left policies themselves. One data point is exit polls, which suggest that programs like Medicare for All are supported by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans. Police reform, likewise, is popular as long as it does not mean abolishing all police. Another piece of evidence emerges from direct referenda, as in Florida, where a $15 an hour minimum wage passed 60 to 40 percent even though Trump beat Biden.

Conversely, voters in dark blue California and Illinois rejected progressive referenda that called for higher taxes on the rich and economic justice for gig workers further evidence of the disconnect between cultural progressivism and tangible progressive policy. Democratic governors Gavin Newsom of California and J. B. Pritzker of Illinois (himself a billionaire) turned out not to be credible advocates for the tax propositions in their state. Like most mainstream Democratic politicians, they had past records of serving the rich, cutting social programs, and undermining workers. As a result, they lacked the credibility that consistent and committed socialists like Bernie Sanders have when they make promises.

What is certain is that voters like socialism once they get it. Universal or near-universal social programs like public K12 education, Social Security, and Medicare were controversial when they were proposed and the latter two were roundly decried as socialism but they are now popular even among Republicans. Republicans succeed in demonizing means-tested programs like Medicaid and food stamps, which mainstream Democratic consider more pragmatic, because these pit the needs of poor Americans against those who earn too much to qualify for benefits. This allows Republicans to stoke racial resentment, even though a plurality of those who benefit from such programs are white. The same attacks on Social Security and Medicare fall flat, because these are widely utilized and popular among Americans of all walks of life.

Mainstream Democrats say that the party will never win elections and enact social programs by running on economic redistribution especially among Latinos who supposedly identify with entrepreneurs. Naturally, some Latinos do, but recent electoral history debunks this as a wholesale explanation. Of recent elections, Obamas 2012 contest with Mitt Romney hinged most on this issue. Romney famously quipped that 47 percent of Americans were dependent on state entitlements and would never vote for him, and demonized Obamas supposed plan to punish wealth creators. Obama, whose policy record was decidedly mixed, nevertheless pushed back, needling Romney for his lavish lifestyle, ties to Wall Street, and what Obama described as a plan to Make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. You can . . . lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and still make money.

Obama not only beat Romney but earned a higher percentage of the Latino vote than any Democrat in the last twenty-five years: 73 percent.

By contrast, Trump is a skilled chameleon. He used socialism as a scare word, but he leaned less heavily on Republican economic orthodoxy in his messaging: he proclaimed his support for Social Security, Medicare, and a higher minimum wage, and he promised, even if he never delivered it, a massive infrastructure program and health care legislation. It strains credulity that he exceeded expectations against Clinton and Biden, who ran screaming for the political center, because nonwhite Americans developed a sudden aversion to economic redistribution and universal social programs.

And so, we must look for answers elsewhere in the organizational weaknesses of the Democratic Party.

In the franchise-like organizational structure of American political parties, down-ballot candidates serve as proxy ambassadors for the marquee presidential race. Presidential campaigns are ephemeral by definition, and they rely on local candidates and organizations like unions or advocacy networks to identify new voters and sell them on the partys presidential nominee.

And throughout the country, down-ballot candidates in communities of color increasingly run and win to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. Many nonwhite legislators entered politics through the Bernie Sanders campaign or progressive organizations like the Working Families Party, and they generally garnered more votes than the Biden/Harris ticket in 2020.

One of this articles authors, for example, ran successfully for state senate and outperformed Biden on a platform of a $15 minimum wage, raising taxes on the highest earning households, increasing public education funding, legalizing marijuana, and implementing Green New Deal reforms. As in other parts of the nation, progressive Democrats generally underperformed the Biden/Harris ticket only in wealthy, largely white, and suburban districts.

Grassroots proxies are especially important to Democratic efforts to attract new voters in Latino communities. Online voter databases are the backbone of most campaigns, and candidates use them to target voters in their respective districts through door-knocking visits, emails, phone calls, and text messages. But these databases also lead campaigns to focus on high propensity voters super voters. This systematically excludes young and newly registered voters.

In Latino communities, where young people, the elderly, and recently naturalized immigrants are a higher portion of the electorate, voters can easily fall through the cracks.

In Central Falls, Rhode Island, for example, where one of the authors of this essay was recently elected, Trump garnered 456 new voters between 2016 and 2020. But there were 1,179 voters who didnt vote in 2016 or 2018. About 250 of these were new voters who recently turned eighteen, and the rest either immigrated or migrated to the state or chose to vote again after sitting out the last two elections. Thats nearly 1,200 voters almost a quarter of all voters in Central Falls who would have received virtually no outreach from either party.

We do not think that Trumps improvement in 2020 is due entirely to new nonwhite voters. There are lots of indications that, as elsewhere in the United States, Trump performed better by turning out more white votes in Central Falls. But it is likely that Trump also won over some new Latino voters, and that situation makes the Democratic Party vulnerable.

In Texass Rio Grande Valley, for example, Democrats ran no coordinated campaign, while Republicans did and ate into the Democratic margin through sustained engagement with groups like law and border enforcement agents, Latino evangelicals, business owners, and young people disillusioned with chronic underinvestment in the region.

Whether this trend continues depends on the Democratic Partys ability to coordinate with down-ballot candidates. The relationship can range from tightly coordinated campaigns to loose alliances built mostly on party affiliation. In the coordinated scenario, local candidates speak on behalf of the presidential candidate and build buy-in from their adherents. When there isnt a tight relationship between the national party candidate and local proxy ambassadors, the latter can ignore the presidential candidate and spend more time emphasizing their own messaging.

The contrast between 2016 and 2020 in Central Falls illustrates this. In 2016, the popular mayor running for reelection worked hard on behalf of the Clinton campaign. He opened an office across from City Hall plastered with his signs right alongside Clinton signs. Secretary Clinton had paid the city a visit during her 2008 bid for office, and many restaurants still had Clintons picture up on their wall. Her popularity in the city was so high that she won the Democratic primary in Central Falls even though Bernie Sanders won Rhode Island as a whole.

In 2020, the coordination consisted entirely of an email to local candidates asking if they needed more lawn signs for their constituents. This year, there were noticeably fewer Biden-Harris signs across Central Falls than there were Clinton-Kaine signs in 2016. There was generally less enthusiasm, and the only invitation to be part of the presidential campaign came in the form of a phone bank volunteering effort to make calls to voters in other states.

Considering the election in this light, we see that it makes more sense to focus on party strategy, or the lack thereof, than to blame voters. In places like Georgia and Arizona, where the State Democratic party had a strategy for registering, activating, and messaging voters, we saw large levels of support for Biden. In places like Central Falls, where there was no discernible coordinated voter outreach effort, random variation and entropy may account for movers and the choices of recently registered voters.

If they want to win the support of new as well as established voters, mainstream Democrats need to make peace with the left wing of the party. Activists have shown they are open to alliances of convenience with mainstream Democrats, but outright hostility is sure to demobilize them. Attacks on socialism or police reform efforts are especially counterproductive, because these are some of the key issues that bring newly elected candidates into politics to begin with. Such attacks do little to win voters, while needlessly throwing sand into the gears of the Democratic Partys already feeble electoral machine.

Despite these organizational shortcomings, not all is lost. Yet if there is a way forward, it will not be found by shifting election data to assemble coalitions of voters seen through narrow identities. Rather, we should do what has worked historically to forge solid electoral coalitions: a combination of messaging and ambitious social and civil policies that, though initially controversial, make a meaningful change in peoples lives.

Those ambitious universal programs and economic redistribution, far more than rhetorical moderation and identity-based pandering, are the best bet for winning over workers of all races for generations to come.

Original post:
Neoliberalism Is Driving Away Working-Class Voters of Color. They Need to Be Won Back. - Jacobin magazine

During this election, I have heard a lot of talk from people saying they do not want to live under socialism. Thesepeople equate socialism with communism. While communism is an extreme form of socialism, they are not the same thing.

Well, guess what, people? We already do and have since 1933, with FDRs New Deal.

In 1929, as you know, we saw the financial collapse known as the Great Depression. A lot of people were out of work, some 25%. Many, many people stood in soup lines. Communism, at this time, held out a promise of better economic times for many people, and many Americans were attracted to its promises. FDR saw this, and knew communism would gain a foothold here, if the government did nothing to help alleviate the suffering of the people. So he came up with the New Deal, which consisted of public works programs, financial reforms and regulations. It included the Civil Conservation Corps, Civil Works Administration, Farm Security Administration, National Industrial Recovery Act and the Social Security Administration.

These programs helped to pull us out of the Great Depression. And who paid for it? He applied special taxes on the very wealthiest and corporations. And the wealthy, have ever since, been fighting it and waging a war of misinformation in order to do away with things like Social Security, and Medicare.

Nowadays we also have other programs to help the needy, like SNAP, unemployment compensation, housing assistance and child care assistance.

Now I have heard many people complain about their tax dollars going to help these lazy people. They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

What happens when you have no boots? Think of it like this; our tax dollars are going into a common fund, like insurance, because no one can say for sure they will never need assistance at some point. I have seen people who have worked for20 years or more, and then their job is eliminated. I have seen a married couple, where the husband contracted cancer, and at some point, his insurance company dropped him, then he died for lack of insurance for treatment, and the wife ended up losing the house and living in her car. This should never happen in this country.

Also, many people think socialism means that the state controls the means of production. This is Marxism! Karl Marx wrote about economic problems in his day, and this was one of his solutions. Today we have a different solution, called social democracy.

Noone is talking about the government controlling the means of production. Social democracy, is all in favor of private ownership of businesses, of free enterprise and honest elections. Social democracy tries to live up to the ideals listed in the Preamble to the Constitution, which is an outline of the mission of the government, and states that one of its goals is to provide for the welfare of its citizens.

All of our European allies are socialistic, to varying degrees. The people of the Scandinavian countries are listed as some of the happiest on earth.

We have been taught a bad trait in this country. To punch down. To hold back people we think are inferior. This is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Islam and most religions on earth. They teach to help the poor.

Oh, and by the way, remember thatCOVID-19stimulus earlier this year? That was socialism at work, not capitalism.

Kerry Eikenskold

Inyokern, Calif.

(former Ashtabula County resident)

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Let's talk about socialism: It's already here | Letters To The Editor - The Star Beacon

I was quite surprised at the large number of readers who chose to respond to my commentary last month on the subject of socialism. All but a few were quite laudatory.

One negative response, however, has prompted the need for a correction and clarification.

Although Robert Stepp and I probably will disagree on many issues, he observed that I was confusing social programs with socialism. And he is correct.

The dictionary definition of socialism states that it is a political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production and workers self-management of enterprises.

With that definition in mind, I must report that I dont know of anyone who really wants socialism. In addition, I must admit that I, too, think true socialism is a bad system particularly because it involves society or government ownership of production. Production is best provided by capitalism.

But we definitely do need government-operated social programs to provide various needed social services.

For instance, friend Jerry Martin asked:

Would you rather have only private military? Would you rather have only privately owned roads? Would you rather have only privately controlled police? Court systems? No more social security? No more Medicare or Medicaid?

But on the need for both capitalism and social programs, Lynn Ely wrote:

Excellent summation on how both socialism and capitalism benefit us in different ways. Its not an either/or. Its an and. As a healthcare professional, I have wanted to see the US embrace a universal health care system like every other industrial nation in the world has. I am dumbfounded as to why the American people think that the for profit model serves us better.

Richard Stormsgaard, in a polite response, also called attention to the problem caused by referring to socialism rather than social programs. He wrote:

No wonder there is so much confusion about socialism, and it benefits the far right and the far left, and is a threat to the rest of us.

But it was particularly satisfying to me to have Dr. Jeff Kane comment because of how much I have been enjoy reading his columns. He wrote:

Your points are especially applicable to healthcare financing. Today a quarter to a third of our healthcare dollars go to insurance intermediaries. These corporations have nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare. They only handle the money that flows between us and providers, taking a large cut in the process.

Were paying much more than necessary largely because opponents of the single-payer plan call it socialist to scare the electorate. But its not, since care is entirely private and the government handles the money with no profit motive.

Dr. Kane added that the administrative costs of Medicare average only 4 to 5% compared to 25 to 33% for other healthcare systems.

Another respondent, who used a pseudonym rather than his or her name, wrote:

The term Socialism is a dogwhistle used to phreak out Republicans and scare them. This applies especially to older voters who lived through the Red Scare during the Cold War years. In their minds the S word is equivalent to the C word, Communism and the chants of Better dead than Red. It is the epitome of negative campaigning.

Then I received Patricia Sharps message, thanking me for explaining how capitalism functions best in tandem with socialism.

Then she added the historic remarks by President Harry Truman in Syracuse, N.Y., on Oct. 10, 1952. He said:

Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

Socialism is what they called public power. 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.

When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan Down With Socialism on the banner of his great crusade, that is really not what he means at all.

What he really means is Down with Progress down with Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, and down with Harry Trumans fair Deal. Thats all he means.

So isnt it time for us to stop quibbling over the two labels and realize that we definitely need various social services in an otherwise generally capitalistic society?

Darrell Berkheimer, who lives in Grass Valley, is a frequent contributor to The Union. He has seven books available through Amazon. His sixth, Essays from The Golden Throne, includes 60 columns published by The Union, plus a dozen western travel and photo essays. Contact him at mtmrnut@yahoo.com.

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Darrell Berkheimer: Confusing social programs with socialism - The Union of Grass Valley