Archive for the ‘Socialism’ Category

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism – Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data – Forbes

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data
Forbes
It's not unusual for people to be a bit more reticent about information that reflects badly upon them than they are about stuff that makes them look good. But we do still normally expect governments to keep pumping out the usual economic data. The US ...

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Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data - Forbes

Fox News Digital Short Shows Socialist Venezuela in Midst of Chaos – Washington Free Beacon

BY: Jack Heretik March 22, 2017 9:17 am

Adigital short called "Democrats Love Socialism" by Ami Horowitz of Fox News was released on March 15 and highlights the struggles of citizens in socialist Venezuela, includingmass hunger and a high murder rate. Horowitz contrasts this struggle to Americans at the beginning of the short, who tell Horowitz there is nothing wrong with socialism.

In Venezuela, Horowitz walked with a man who was looking for acat or a dog to eat,and talked to people who claimedthey have to wait all day in a line to get just a small amountof food or milk. One woman said that she sometimes shakes at night due to hunger and passes out.

"Before all these problems started we were middle class, but now we are lower class," one Venezuelan woman said.

The Venezuelans Horowitz interviewed also discussedthe high crime rateandfrequent murders.

Horowitz said Venezuela has three times the amount of murder inthe United States, despite being less than one tenth of America's population. And although Venezuela bears strict gun laws, its capital city of Caracas has more death than Baghdad.

Venezuelanstold Horowitz about losing loved ones inshootings that are ignored by the police. The documentary has ascene where a man was just shot in a busy street, buta police officer casually walks by.

Horowitz then asked Venezuelans if socialism works, and what they think of the Americans who want it applied to the U.S.

"No, because if it really worked we wouldn't be in chaos and hunger," one man said.

"No, it doesn't work here," another man said. "It's all a lie they tell us."

"I would tell the Americans not to commit to that madness because that is all a lie," a woman said. "They lied to us. We don't have anything to eat. Crime has taken over."

Somepeople Horowitz spoke to said that those who advocate for socialism in the United States should go to Venezuelaand experience it first.

Horowitz closed the video by showing a woman preaching about socialism in the United States.

"They are one of the most productive, their people are the happiest, they have the least amount of crime, violence," the woman said. "There's nothing wrong with it in my eyes."

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Fox News Digital Short Shows Socialist Venezuela in Midst of Chaos - Washington Free Beacon

SOCIALISM: THE POWER OF A WORD | The Huffington Post – Huffington Post

Im no historian, but I do have a laymans take on how we arrived at our current national nightmare. Its just one, personal approach, and its conditioned in part by my having grown up in England since before World War II, and during the war and the post-war period, and particularly by what I know of my earliest years. I was born in the northern coal-mining town of Newcastle-on-Tyne, where my father was the incumbent priest of a slum parish. Poverty and hunger were the norm, and my father, unsurprisingly, was an ardent socialistand I inherited his political beliefs.

You can imagine, then, how surprised I was, with this background, to discover when I first arrived on this side of the pond, that socialism was a word so vile that it could not be uttered in polite society. I exaggerate only a little. I did not know much of American history, but was vaguely aware of the social achievements of FDR and the subsequent Communist scare of the 1950s. When I become a citizen in 1972, I was still required to swear, under oath, that I was not then and had never been a member of the Communist Party. I thought the exercise a little absurd, but went ahead and dutifully swore, thankful that at least I had not been asked if I was a socialist. (To be quite honest, I still have difficulty with the notion of swearing allegiance to a country or its flag, but thats another essay.)

As I was growing up, then, the words conservative and socialist had rather different connotations than they do here in the US. In broad terms, the Conservative Party represented the interests of wealth and social privilege; the Socialist, or Labour Party stood for the working class, the poor, and the underprivileged. I had never questioned my allegiance to the latter.

Since my arrival in the United States, even the (formerly) less charged term liberal has come to share in the disrepute of socialism. By those on the right, it is most often uttered with angry contempt for those leaning more to the left. And, in a curious andto my mindunfortunate reversal, those with the most at stake in the social contract have been co-opted, no matter their own interest, into the conservative camp. Political ideology failed, in the form of McCarthyism; but corporate interests have proved successful in deluding the working classes and the poor into the belief that socialismor liberalismis anathema. The word itself summons nothing but fear and loathing. The means to achieve this end has been a continuous stream of simplistic slogans fed out by those in power in the form of barely disguised propagandafacile platitudes about such things as individual freedom, big government and the tiresome familiarity of anti-tax rhetoric, repeated so often and in so many ways that they have come to be accepted as irrefutable truth.

So it is that here, in this wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we have sacrificed all sense of social responsibility on the altar of delusory individual rights. We have been persuaded to submit to the axiom that government is the great Satan, and that we can dispense with its servicesmost notably those that provide for others than ourselves. The rabid opposition to universal health care, readily disparaged as socialized medicine, is a case in point. Every other country at our stage of economic development has found a way, at considerably less expense than ours, to assure the protection of its citizens from the personal, financial and emotional ravages of sickness, injury and old age. Only here in America, it seems, do people clamor angrily against even the relatively meager coverage (for themselves!) achieved under Obamacare. Only here in America do the insurance companies and drug manufacturers wield sufficient power to prevail against all common sense and human compassion in their advancement of a for-profit system that functions not for the health of citizens but exclusively for corporate benefit.

Its not only health care, of course. The fear of socialism prevails in every aspect of our lives. Its rooted deeply in our system of justice, which benefits wealth and privilege to the detriment of the poor and powerless. It is a malignant force in the perpetuation of racial prejudice. It disempowers our government from sensible regulationwhether of financial markets, banks, air and water pollution, even guns It is particularly pernicious in delaying the increasingly urgent need to manage and protect our threatened resources and our natural environment. And so on.

Some form of socialism is the accepted norm these days in European nations, where it partners in various ways with free-market capitalism without apparent detriment to the economic well-being of actual peopleeven the very wealthy. It thrives, indeed, in our own country, in multiple unacknowledged ways. The so-called entitlements that constitute our indispensible social safety net go unrecognized as socialist programs by many who depend on them: Get your government hands off my Medicare! Yet even these are now under attack by the right-wing, supposedly conservative politicians who are in ascendancythose same politicians who have been elected, and are passionately supported by those who deplore big government and rail against taxation.

The great question remains unanswered: if the primary and avowed purpose of the current administration is the deconstruction of the underpinnings of a civilized society, and if they are successful in this attack, what will happen to those who were duped into unwittingly supporting them in this endeavor? When will our new would-be emperor be exposed as a man of unmitigated ignorance and greed? What innocent child is going to point to his parade and say: But, Ma, he has no clothes.

It seems to me that first were going to have to recognize some rights beyond our own, to accept a common responsibility for our fellow human beings. We need to educate our young people in a serious way about the history and the true meaning of socialism; and to become, in our personal and political lives, just a little bit more socialist ourselves. In the real sense of that much-maligned, much-despised, much-mistrusted word.

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SOCIALISM: THE POWER OF A WORD | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post

Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism – Venezuela’s Happiness Falls Most Globally – Forbes


Los Angeles Times
Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela's Happiness Falls Most Globally
Forbes
The World Happiness Report 2017 is now out and I have to admit to always liking this report for it's written by my old professor, Richard Layard. Yes he, along with others, is responsible for all the things I get wrong about economics. The things I get ...
World Happiness Report 2017World Happiness Report
Gallup World PollGallup.com

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Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela's Happiness Falls Most Globally - Forbes

Party for Socialism and Liberation hosts forum, addresses liberation movements – Daily Free Press (subscription)

A panel discussion was held Friday evening by the Party for Socialism and Liberation to discuss the issues of socialism, womens liberation and Palestinian liberation. PHOTO BY ALEX NOVAKOVIC/ DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

Approximately 30 people attended a forum hosted by the Greater Boston branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation on Friday evening to discuss womens liberation and the Palestinian occupation.

The forum featured a panel with various speakers from PSLBoston, and included a discussion section at which point audience members were able to join in and contribute to the conversation.

Nino Brown, PSLBostons branch organizer, said to The Daily Free Press before the forum that the issues of socialism, womens liberation and Palestinian liberation are linked.

Palestine is occupied by a settler colonial parasite, the State of Israel, unjustly and illegally, Brown said. With colonialism, you subjugate an entire people, and that includes women. Womens liberation is part and parcel of the struggle for socialism, there will be no lasting socialism without womens liberation.

This idea echoes in PSLBostons slogan, No socialism, no liberation. No liberation, no socialism.

While liberation might be a national struggle, the PSL promotes the idea that there must be liberation everywhere for there to be true liberation anywhere, according to Brown.

[Liberation is] a national struggle, which means its going to take everyone within that formation to defeat what is oppressing them, Brown said. Our goal is the ending of exploitation and the ending of oppression, and that can only happen on an international scale.

Brown opened the forum by highlighting the differences between different types of feminism, focusing primarily on revolutionary Marxist feminism, which is what the PSL associates itself with. Brown focused on the need to approach liberation issues, including feminism, from a bottom-up perspective.

Middle class folks want a little reform, a little conciliation, Brown said. Working class folks cant afford capitulation anymore.

Brown also issued a call for people to join PSL so they can fight against corruption.

Hira Sulthana, a PSLBoston member, presented facts about the struggle between Israel and Palestine, and the role the United States and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee play in that struggle. She also discussed settler colonialism, neocolonialism and sublimated colonialism, which she saidare crucial to understanding Israeli oppression.

PSLBoston member Hersch Chaim followed up by presenting a promotional clip from AIPAC, explaining that watching the oppositions propaganda can be a valuable exercise.

Its clear that AIPACs central mission is to actively maintain and strengthen the two-party systems adherence to Israels control over Palestine, Chaim said in his speech.

PSLBoston member Kaleigh OKeefe spoke about the relationship between gender, sexism, the patriarchy and capitalism.

The oppression of women and gender non-conforming folks takes many forms, but all are fundamentally rooted in the system of capitalist imperialism, OKeefe said. Because patriarchy, capitalism and gender itself are part of the same process, it is impossible to get rid of one without the others.

Several people in attendance said they found the forum to be an educational experience and expressed their opinions on issues having to do with oppression.

Will LeBlanc, 68, of Waltham, said he found the AIPAC video to be particularly interesting.

Ive never seen that before, always gotten it from the opposition, LeBlanc said. Its basically the same thing. [AIPACs] selling their brand.

Natalia Meneses, 24, of East Boston, said she attended to learn more about Palestinian liberation because it has ties to the liberation of immigrants to the United States from south of the border.

[Capital and private interests] profit from detaining and imprisoning both immigrants and Palestinians, Meneses said.

Willie Burnley, 23, of Somerville, said he was concerned that while the goals of the PSL may be achieved one day, it might not be soon enough.

Historys very long, and within it people suffer for a very long time, Burnley said.

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Party for Socialism and Liberation hosts forum, addresses liberation movements - Daily Free Press (subscription)