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Frances Socialist Party has chosen leftist firebrand Benoit Hamon as its candidate for the countrys upcoming presidential election.

The primary run-off pitted Hamon against the pro-business, ex prime minister Manuel Valls.

Hamon, a former education minister, was the favourite to win.

Among other things, he wants to establish a universal income of 600 euros a month for all adults.

Polls suggest that, after an unpopular five-year term in office under current President Francois Hollande, the Socialists do not have much chance of winning the presidential election in the spring.

The party is trailing behind conservative Francois Fillon, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-lefts Jean-Luc Melenchon.

At 1.1 million, organsers say turnout for Sundays vote was up 22.8% on the first round a week ago.

Organiser Christophe Borgel says at least 1.3 million people had voted by 1700 CET in 75% of polling stations which had reported turnout figures.

That is compared with at least one million voters a the same time last week, confirming indications of stronger turnout from earlier in the day.

Borgel said like-for-like figures showed an increase of 22.8% in turnout.

Polling opened at 0900 CET in the runoff.

The two frontrunners are conservative Francois Fillon and far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Fillon, however, is currently embroiled in a scandal over his wife being employed as his parliamentary assistant.

An official inquiry has been opened into the claims.

He was due to be holding a rally on Sunday on the outskirts of Paris for his supporters.

Polls had shown Fillon beating Le Pen in a presidential run-off vote on May the 7th, with a comfortable two-thirds of the vote.

Ratings have since suggested his popularity has dipped slightly, although there have been no polls on voting intentions since the scandal broke.

Analysts say Hamons victory could help decide the fortune of other candidates, even if the Socialists have little chance of succeeding President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace.

Hamons victory could boost Emmanuel Macrons chances by pushing Valls centre-left supporters into the centrist former investment bankers arms.

Hamon, a former education minister, was kicked out of Valls government in 2014 for differences over economic policy.

Party members have told journalists, on condition of anonymity, that a win by Hamon would accelerate an influx of moderate Socialist lawmakers towards Macron.

Some are predicting the refusal of the most pro-business wing of the party to rally behind a more radical leftist could hasten the break-up of the Socialist Party.

It has been one of the main political forces in France for decades.

We now know these two different Lefts cannot govern together. It will be harder than ever to cohabit. This is why its true, we can say they have become irreconcilable, researcher Gerard Grunberg from Sciences-Po University in Paris told France Info radio.

He was Valls economy minister until he quit last year to launch his own party.

He has launched his own political movement, En Marche.

He has therefore spurned the Socialist primaries that Valls and Hamon are contesting.

The latest ones show him breathing down the necks of Fillon and Le Pen.

Continue reading here:
Benoit Hamon wins the fight for the soul of French Socialism - euronews

Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of betrayal of his socialist values for refusing to stand in the way of Brexit.

Almost 2,000 Labour activists signed an open letter published on Saturday night criticising Mr Corbyns stance on the triggering of Article 50.

The intervention appears to indicate a significant disillusionment among part of Mr Corbyns core support, with around half of the signatories understood to have previously backed him for leader.

Labour is enforcing a three-line whip against its MPs at the second reading of the Governments Article 50 bill, with a number of frontbenchers and whips stepping down so they can vote against it.

The party has put forward a number of amendments to the Bill and says it may not whip its MPs at future readings if they are not accepted. However, itsays it will not whip against triggering Article 50.

The stance appears to be calibrated to prevent the Conservatives from claiming that Labour is blocking the referendum result but also give its MPs in Remain-supporting areas flexibility to back their constituents.

The party faces a difficult balancing act over Brexit, with around two thirds of Labour voters having backed Remain but around two thirds of Labour constituencies having backed Leave.

Some MPs have already publicly refused to back Labours stance at the second reading: shadow education minister Tulip Siddiq and at least two whips, Thangam Debbonaire and Jeff Smith, have said they will not vote for the bill.

The letter, published by The Observer,says: We are the grassroots that you have always been keen to represent.

All of us share core Labour values of equality and opportunity for all, and we share a belief in fighting for social justice.

And while we may differ in our beliefs and feelings with regards to your leadership, we are nevertheless united in our belief that you and your leadership team have made the wrong call on the partys policy on Brexit.

It continues: You identify yourself as a democratic socialist. As the noun here is socialist, this means that a socialist is what you are first and foremost.

However, supporting Brexit is a betrayal of your socialist values, because you know that the people who will be hurt the most by it are the people you have spent your entire life seeking to represent and support.

View original post here:
Labour grassroots activists accuse Corbyn of 'betraying socialism' over Brexit stance - The Independent

Democrats and Republicans agree that a republic requires at least two strong political parties to provide checks and balances as provided by our U.S. Constitution.

In the 20th century, Saul Alinsky emerged as the strong operator of the international Socialist Party with a base located in Chicago. After examining the Communist Party in Chicago, Alinsky deemed them too soft to operate and he became a labor organizer. His organization later recruited Barack Obama.

In 1969, then-Hillary Rodham wrote a senior thesis about Alinsky, There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.

Alinsky never met Obama, but the Washington Post reported that Hillary kept her related connections while she was in the White House as first lady.

When the recent presidential election started looking tough enough to lose, the Socialist Party, headed by Bernie Sanders, put up a fight. However, the truths came out, and our country narrowly avoided being governed by proven socialists.

Thankfully, we still have our republic. And God Bless America.

Dick Bittman

Amarillo

Go here to read the rest:
Letter: Thankfully, America avoided socialism - Amarillo.com

Between the Great Lisbon Earthquake and the revolutionary year of 1848 the European chattering classes had three big ideas. One was very, very good. The other two were very, very bad. We're still paying.

The good one, flowing from the pens of such members of the clerisy as Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and above all the Blessed Adam Smith, is what Smith described in 1776 as the shocking idea of "allowing every man [or woman, dear] to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice."

Admittedly, true liberalism took a long time. "All men are created equal" was penned by a man who kept in slavery most of his own children by Sally Hemings, not to mention Sally herself. Even his co-author Ben Franklin once owned slaves. In 1775, the English literary man Samuel Johnson had ample reason to launch a sneer from London, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

But those liberal yelps re-echoed, and had force, amplified by the repeated embarrassment over two centuries of denying slaves, apprentices, women, immigrants, anarchists, socialists, communists, Okies, Nisei, blacks, Chicanos, gays, Vietnam protesters, criminal suspects, handicapped people, gender crossers, ex-cons, drug users, smokers, and citizens of the District of Columbia their own equality, liberty, and justice.

The fruits of the new liberalism, when it could make its way against the two bad ideas (wait for it), were stunning. Liberalism, uniquely in history, made masses of ordinary people bold, bold to try out their ideas for how to improve the world by testing them in the marketplace. Look around at the hundreds of betterments that resulted: from stock markets to ball bearings, from penicillin to plate glass.

The boldness of commoners pursuing their own interests resulted in a Great Enrichmenta rise in Europe and the Anglosphere of real, inflation-corrected incomes per head, from 1800 to the present, by a factor, conservatively measured, of about 30. That is, class, about 3,000 percent. The glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, Song China, and the Mughal Empire might have managed a 100 percent increase over a century or so, to something like $6 a daybut eventually they all fell back to the $3 a day typical since our species lived in caves.

And now, despite the best efforts of governments and international agencies to bungle the job, liberalism is spreading to the world, from Hong Kong to Botswana.

It's astonishingly good for the poor. Add up the fruits of illiberal government actionredistribution, licensing, tariffs, zoning, building permits, farm subsidies, restrictions on immigration, foreign aid, industrial policy, a third to half of income seized as taxes by the stateand all together, they might, if you suspend your economic disbelief, raise the income of the poorest folk by, say, 30 percent, one time only. Not the 3,000 percent attributable to liberalism, which continues to grow with no end in sight.

The two bad ideas of 17551848 were nationalism and socialism. If you like them, perhaps you will enjoy their combination, introduced in 1922 and still for sale in Europe and implied by Donald Trump's popularity: national socialism.

Nationalism, when first theorized in the early 19th century, was entwined with the Romantic movement, though of course in England it was already hundreds of years old. It inspired reactive nationalisms in France, Scotland, and eventually Ireland. In Italy, in the form of campanilismo, or pride in your city, it was older still. (Italians will reply when asked where they are from, even if speaking to foreigners, "Florence" or "Rome" or at the most "Sicily." Never "Italy.")

What is bad about nationalism, aside from its intrinsic collective coercion, is that it inspires conflict. The 800 U.S. military bases around the world keep the peace by waging endless war, bombing civilians to protect Americans from non-threats on the other side of the world. In July 2016, we of the Anglosphere "celebrated," if that is quite the word, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, a fruit of nationalism, which by its conclusion three and a half months later had cost the Allies and the Central Powers combined over a million casualties, most of them dismembered by artillery. Thank you for your service.

The other bad idea of the era was socialism, which can also be linked to Romanticism, and to a secularized Christianity, with its Sermon-on-the-Mount charity and an apocalyptic view of history. It's all of a piecefrom central planning in Venezuela to building permits in Chicago. A communist is a socialist in a hurry and a socialist is a regulator in a hurry and a regulator is a corrupt politician in a hurry.

What's bad about socialism, aside from its own intrinsic collective coercion, is that it leads to poverty. Even in its purest formswithin the confines of a sweet family, sayit kills initiative and encourages free riding. St. Paul, not famous for being a liberal, scolded the Thessalonians: "We gave this order: 'If anyone doesn't want to work, he shouldn't eat.' We hear that some of you are living in idleness. You are not busy workingyou are busy interfering in other people's lives!" Good for St. Paul.

The not-so-sweet forms of socialism, especially those paired with nationalism, are a lot worse. Thus North Korea, Cuba, and other workers' paradises. As the joke goes, "Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it's the other way around."

What to do? Revive liberalism, as the astonishing successes of China and India have. Take back the word from our friends on the American left. They can keep progressive, if they don't mind being associated with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, and its eugenic enthusiasms for forced sterilization and for using the minimum wage to drive immigrants, blacks, and women out of the labor force. And we should persuade our friends on the right to stop using the l word to attack people who do not belong to the country club.

Read Adam Smith, slowlynot just the prudential Wealth of Nations, but its temperate sister The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And return in spirit to the dawn of 1776, when the radical idea was not nationalism or socialism or national socialism, but "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty" that allows all men and women to pursue their interests in their own ways.

It was a strange but very, very good idea. Still is.

See the original post:
Nationalism and Socialism Are Very Bad Ideas - Reason.com - Reason

To the soon-to-be dismay of President Trump supporters, when the reality-TV-star-turned-most-powerful-man-on-the-planet said the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer, he was actually talking about his plutocrat pals.

Less than a week on the job, and Trumps already handing out candy to the wealthy. His tax cut planwhich is a version of George W. Bushs tax cuts on steroidsis now being shifted to the unpaid for category.

Thats right: Trumps team is mulling the notion of saying screw it, the tax cuts will pay for themselves through HUUUUUGE economic growth, so we dont have to offset them with additional revenue or spending cuts.

If you remember, this worked out very well under President George W. Bush, who implemented two unpaid for tax cuts skewed heavily toward wealthier Americans; two unpaid for wars; a new, unpaid for entitlement system (Medicare Part D); and other pearls of economic mastery that led to an unimpressive decade of job growth in the 2000s while keeping the level of income inequality trucking along unimpeded.

Its not just the fact that Trumps tax cuts for the wealthywhich nonpartisan tax analysts have said will add between 10 and 11 trillion dollars to the debt while giving the wealthiestamong us over $1 million in cuts this yearwill most likely be unpaid for.

Trump, working with his Ayn Rand-loving Speaker of The House Paul Ryan, will be giving out huge goodies through repealing Obamacare.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the 400 richestfamilies in America would get an average tax cut of $7 million per year while raising taxes on nearly 7 million low-to-moderate income Americans.

First, it would eliminate two Medicare taxes the additional Hospital Insurance tax and the Medicare tax on unearned income that both fall only on high-income filers, thereby cutting taxes substantially for those at the top.

-The top 400 highest-income taxpayers whose annual incomes average more than $300 million apiece each would receive an average annual tax cut of about $7 million, we estimate from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data.

-This groups tax cut would total about $2.8 billion a year.

-The roughly 160 million households with incomes below $200,000 would get nothing from the repeal of these two taxes.

Obamacares repeal will also raise taxes on working people through the removal of tax credits that helped low-income and minority people buy health insurance. For 2017, that tax credit is worth $4,800.

Im sure the millions of blue-collar working class Americans who were swept away by Trumps populist fire breathing will be swimming in a bed of Benjamins with policies like this!

Dont get me wrong: Obamacare is definitely not the ideal healthcare system. It has NOT significantly reduced the cost of healthcare or reined in the insurance companies from price gouging. Its also increased deductibles to frightening levels for a large swath of the country.

But, in the absence of a single-payer systemthe one the rest of the industrialized world uses to great effectits much better than the previous, your-shit-out-of-luck system that offered a death sentence to citizens with preexisting conditions.

Beyond Obamacare,the 45th president is reviving the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline: two oil pipelines that do NOT increase DOMESTIC energy or U.S. jobs but will certainly increase the already insanely large coffers of big oil executives and their shareholders.

Both pipelines will be used nearly exclusively for foreign exportsyou know, the kind of business that makes fat cat oil companies richer but doesnt lower the price of gasoline for the people who voted for Trump.

And, contrary to what the president says, these two pipeline will not create an explosion of jobs: pipelines create temporary jobs during construction, not permanent, good-paying jobs.

In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the local North Dakota economy was stimulated more by water protectors flooding in to fight the pipelineand spending money on supplies and other necessitiesthan jobs the pipeline created.

But, heres the best part of all of Trumps socialism for the rich: Republicans and establishment, corporate Democrats are shown to be the hypocrites they truly are.

These same folks who railed against Senator Bernie Sanders radical policies steeped in Democratic socialism have no problem with the redistribution of wealth to plutocrats and their campaign donors.

And make NO MISTAKE ABOUT ITthese polices are indeed redistribution. You think wealthy folks get tax breaks and nobody pays for it? Payment time comes when leaders like Trump run up the debt and deficit and then rail about the need to cut spending.

What will get cut in order to shrink the debt he exploded in order to pay his rich pals? Education, police, fire departments, research & development, funds for critical government departments like the EPA, welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Its called socialism for the plutocrats, where poor, low-income, and formerly middle class people pay for millionaire and billionaires to buy another yacht.

In reality, Trumps not making America great again, because its been super duper great for a long time for wealthy folks.

Instead, hes moonwalking America back again.

To the 1920s Gilded Age.

Jordan Chariton is a Politics Reporter for The Young Turks, covering the presidential campaign trail, where hes interviewing voters on both sides. Hes also a columnist for Mediaite and heres his latest column. Follow him @JordanChariton and watch videos at YouTube.com/tytpolitics.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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President Trump's Socialism For The Plutocrats Begins - Mediaite