I don't know if you noticed, but our fiscal ideology in this country has had characteristics of a cult belief system for decades, if not since the country was formed over two hundred years ago.
We have plenty of propaganda about how everyone can get ahead in our system; however, in practice it's not true; instead what we have is a system that "socializes the risks and privatizes the profits," as some critics like Noam Chomsky say, which is why the establishment tries to portray them as "radicals," hoping no one will notice that they're right.
Implementation of our fiscal policy has been accompanied by massive amounts of propaganda dating back at least to the McCarthy era or decades earlier, often with intimidation and control of the media by only those supporting Capitalism or whichever version of it we've been practicing at any given time. If you go into the history of it, as reported by more reliable historians like Howard Zinn, not by corporate propagandists, it's clear that we once had far more support for Socialism than we do now. A major part of the reason for that is consolidated control of the media over the past several decades, beginning with Reagan and concentrating it in six oligarchs under Clinton.
They now rely on the most fundamental principles of propaganda repeating the same ideologies over and over again so that it seems like it's beyond reproach.
Even the basic definition of Capitalism: "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market." Goods aren't secured openly on a free market at all; this might have applied in a simpler economic system when it came to some types of good, but now we have an oligarchy system where a small number of corporations control the entire economic system and they often have interlocking boards of directors or common investors enabling them to rig the entire economic system.
The debate between fiscal ideologies has concentrated over whether or not government or the private sector controls the economy, as if the private sector applies to us all and we all have equal opportunities to advance in business, which isn't true at all. When they refer to the "private sector" they mean large corporations controlled by a small percentage of the public; even though both workers and consumers contribute to business with them they have little or no control over decisions on how to run them.
But the current privatization movement is even worse, trying to hand all power over to corporations without any accountability to the public.
There should be no doubt that many things can't be done well by the private sector when they're more concerned about profits and the best interests of shareholders than the best interests of the public, especially when an oligarchy system enables them to collude to avoid competition, often using wink and nod tactics. Furthermore there are also many industries that competition never works to begin with.
Utilities are one obvious example that we used to understand. When they expanded to rural areas the government subsidized them to give them an incentive to invest, since they couldn't get a return otherwise; this guaranteeing them a profit; however, in return they had to agree to reasonable regulation, including price controls that prevented them from gouging consumers.
The "free market" never has worked for utilities, nor can it ever work since it's only practical for one utility company to spend money on infrastructure to run wires for electricity, cable or telephone. This was widely understood when they created it, then it was just propaganda and ideology designed to scam people when they broke up monopolies pretending they can compete, which is what helped bring about the massive Enron scandals and rolling blackouts.
This is just one of many examples to show that we don't have a "free market" at all; and even when it comes to items that could work well in the free market like clothes we still have an oligarchy system. Naomi Klein pointed out in "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" that many allegedly competing brands have often been caught using the same sweat shops to manufacture their goods in countries that have the worst labor laws enabling them to rely on virtual slavery. As I pointed out previously in Meet The American Oligarchs! the largest corporations have been consolidating for decades with little or no enforcement of the antitrust laws that are needed to maintain a "free market."
Even Dwayne Andreas a former Archer Daniels Midland executive admitted it when he was caught saying "The competitor is our friend, and the customer is our enemy," and "There isn't one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians," which was confirmed by research by good reporters like Naomi Klein and occasionally even the mainstream media, although they routinely spin it to try to confuse the public. They even argued that one of the reasons that Trump shouldn't enforce antitrust laws against the AT&T and Time Warner merger, is because they haven’t been enforcing antitrust laws for decades, as if this was a justification, implying the only problem is alleged retaliation against CNN for their criticism of Trump.
As I said our fiscal ideology, and those we're supposed to hate all have the characteristics of a cult, and there appear to be at least three perceived definitions for any given fiscal belief systems, one provided by the supporters of Capitalism or Socialism, the other provided by those opposing one of these system, and a third, or often a fourth and fifth, provided by governments that actually implement them.
Bernie Sanders tweeted a video of Ali Velshi explaining why health care doesn't work in the free market to Jim Jordan as one example of how, even now there are some establishment pundits that support restrictions to extreme versions of Capitalism and recognize its limitation. However I wouldn't be surprised if this was a recent conversion, because there's a massive effort to switch from our current system to a Single Payer system from the grassroots that recognize how much fraud is involved in this system.
An article first published at Big Corporation USA.blogspot about eight years ago went into more detail describing what he says are 75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America 07/05/2011, although I'm not sure I agree with all his points, but many of them are much better than what you'll see in the mainstream media. One of the program he cites as improving our lives is the military, which would be every good at improving our lives by protecting us from foreign threats if it was actually doing what they say it's doing. But we’re constantly being lied to by our leaders.Bernie Sanders tweeted a video of Ali Velshi explaining why health care doesn't work in the free market to Jim Jordan as one example of how, even now there are some establishment pundits that support restrictions to extreme versions of Capitalism and recognize its limitation. However I wouldn't be surprised if this was a recent conversion, because there's a massive effort to switch from our current system to a Single Payer system from the grassroots that recognize how much fraud is involved in this system.
An article first published at Big Corporation USA.blogspot about eight years ago went into more detail describing what he says are 75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America 07/05/2011, although I'm not sure I agree with all his points, but many of them are much better than what you'll see in the mainstream media. One of the program he cites as improving our lives is the military, which would be every good at improving our lives by protecting us from foreign threats if it was actually doing what they say it's doing. But we’re constantly being lied to by our leaders.
The weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war in Iraq didn’t exist; Vietnam was never threatening us, all they wanted to do was choose their own leaders; and our government has been supporting coups for decades in one country after another, including many older ones that they now admit to although they rarely remind us of them like the coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, decades ago, and more recent ones like the one in Honduras that they’re still trying to spin.
I explained more about how they use consolidated control of the media to provide obsession coverage for the lies leading us into war in the previous article “Meet the American Oligarchs,” which also explains how we now have only six corporations controlling over ninety percent of the media and they use this control to ensure that only candidates they support can get the media coverage to develop name recognition needed to win ensuring that the mainstream media now has veto power over which candidates we consider.
The Big Corporations article also explains how many basic functions of our society are run by the government and can’t be handled well by the private sector, including roads, bridges, the Post Office, police and fire departments and many more. It also includes farm subsidies, which it says is necessary to keep them growing food, although it doesn’t cover the full details. In many cases it has provided subsidies, not to grow food but to stop growing it, so they don’t create enormous surpluses.
To understand this you have to understand what happened during World War I followed by the Great Depression and World War II. During World War I the government guaranteed minimum payments for wheat so they could sell them to Britain or provide them free to be paid for later, to win the war. This was done with support of Herbert Hoover as the head of Woodrow Wilson's Food Administration. This lead to a massive increase in production. After the war ended and the great depression made things worse, farms went into debt and to get out of it they tried to grow more food to sell, driving prices down below their costs to make things even worse. Although Herbert Hoover was willing to support minimum prices for food to ship to Europe to support the war effort he wasn't willing to do the same to feed the desperate in this country, after they went along with economic policies that led to the Great Depression.
This is one of many examples during the great depression where the so-called “free market” clearly failed and proved that it required some regulation, which is when they introduced subsidies, at the time that went to small farmers. Supporting the extreme version of "Capitalism" supported by both political parties, although the Democrats occasionally do a better job pretending to regulate it, ignores an enormous amount of history showing that without some reasonable regulation the "free market" doesn't work and has clearly turned into an oligarchy market.
When Roosevelt first implemented his farm subsidies they were designed to bail out working class farmers that were betrayed by economic planers that encouraged them to follow policies that led to their economic problems. While he was in office, there were some efforts by the wealthy to roll back some of his changed; and, after a few of them began succeeding, they cut back on some of the reforms, and things got worse again, spurring them to resume the reforms, or at least try. It wasn't all perfect of course, but he tried different things and stuck with the things that were working.
This is the way Democratic-Socialism is supposed to work.
After the initial reforms, with subsidies that were designed to help family farmers and working class they gradually shifted the policies over the decades, so that they wound up going to large corporations consolidating one industry after another, until Dwayne Andreas accurately said, "The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." We now ship subsidized cotton half way around the world so oligarchies can take advantage of sweat-shop labor, and use lack of employment here to drive down wages, then ship the clothes made with that cotton back through complicated distribution systems sold to big-box stores that divide up the market.
What we have now isn't remotely Democratic, with a fraction of one percent controlling over ninety percent of the media so they can ensure that only candidates they support get the name recognition they need to win; instead it's a plutocracy and oligarchy! In addition to farm subsidies that are now going to massive corporations, instead of the small farmers they were initially intended to protect there are a complicated system of other subsidies for many corporations, and they're rigging the tax system so they often don't even have to pay any taxes, while making enormous profits.
Then while they benefit from all these subsidies they have the gall to refer to earned benefits like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment benefits, which are all paid for with payroll taxes as "entitlements," the real entitlements are the corporate subsidies!
Another major problem with a political system that is primarily concerned with fiscal ideology is that social issues routinely take a back seat to profits. they often try to claim that looking to maximize profits for large corporations is the best way to address social problems which isn't even close to the truth, including when it comes to educating the public or reducing crime, especially violence.
One of the most obvious examples should be private prisons which have turned into a disaster. This should be incredibly obvious, since a private prison's goal is to maximize profits, and to do this they need to continue expanding when ever possible. In the justice system, the goal is supposed to be to rehabilitate people so they don't re-offend, which would lead to reduced profits for the private prison industry, so they don't even want to successfully rehabilitate! I went into this more in Crime and war profiteering are excellent for the GDP based economy!! which also points out how corporations increase profits by selling security systems, replacing merchandise that is stolen or destroyed as a result of crime and much more.
If the goal is to improve the quality of life for all then simply increasing profits for corporations or growing the GDP, even when it means increasing epidemic levels of fraud or crime isn't the most effective way to do it, yet that's what our economic system does!
Another major example is the entire insurance industry, not just for health care. Our current system literally gives people an incentive to commit property crime or kill each other for insurance and many people do just that as I pointed out in Insurance Executives Profit By Inciting Murder Occasionally Paying Killers and For-Profit Insurance is Government Authorized Crime Syndicate. They claim they're improving service by "competing" or being more "innovative," but insurance is pooled risk, which means that we all put in a modest amount of money into the pool that can be used when one person faces a catastrophe then that person takes out money in the form of a claim; however there are always bureaucratic expenses, which need to be minimized in order to provide everyone with maximum efficiency and give them the best for their money.
But it's impossible to change basic math; and, when they compete, they do so by spending an enormous amount of money on advertising providing deceptive information to convince people they're getting a good deal even when they're not. add to that large profits, CEO salaries and many other expenses that aren't reduced by competition, all taken out of the money collected for premiums and instead of minimizing waste they're maximizing it. Then, in order to protect their profits they have to deny an enormous number of claims, which means that if you Google any major disaster from a year or more, you'll find the insurance companies are being sued, and their legal expenses are enormous!
Where do you think their legal expenses come from?
They come from premiums which they collect from consumers, then in many cases, instead of using that money to pay claims they use it for lawyers to deny them!
And since the insurance industry provides a massive incentive to commit property crime, murder or other kinds of insurance fraud the government has to spend an enormous amount of money on prisons and court costs, while investors make a fortune and policy holders rarely, if ever get what they paid for! This is made even worse thanks to proprietary information laws that make a large portion of their activities secret, so we can't study it and find out how to reduce epidemic levels of fraud.
A single payer system or state safety net with full disclosure laws to minimize fraud can help reduce this, like many European countries already have.
Another of the most effective ways to reduce violence, improve quality of life, and economic opportunities is quality education, which has been a disaster in the private sector, or at least the privatization efforts that have taken place over the last several decades, most notably by increasing reliance on Charter Schools and "School choice." Diane Ravitch has gone into this much more in her Blogposts and books explaining that the modern reform movement has been taken over by corporate interests controlled by billionaires, economists, propagandists and other fiscal ideologists, including many that have been involved in epidemic levels of fraud like Michael Milken who went to jail for two years as the "junk bond king" in the eighties.
Teachers and social advocates have been marginalized in the political debate forced to fight back at local levels while the media and entire political establishment from both political parties. Now the Democrats are outraged that Betsy Devos is pushing massive cuts to public school spending and increasing funds to Charter Schools despite an enormous amount of evidence that they're much less effective and often involved in an enormous amount of fraud. However, even though they weren't quite as obvious they were relentlessly pushing Charter Schools themselves for decades, even long after the evidence to show how bad they were was overwhelming, and only began to change after an enormous amount of grassroots pressure from the local level, despite the fact that the mainstream media did little or nothing to report on how bad it was working.
When Michelle Rhee pushed through disastrous Charter School programs in Washington DC and New Orleans among many other places, leading to cheating scandals, and many other problems and they began fighting back in many of these places the reporting on the problems was kept to a minimum, at least in traditional media, so she was able to go to Tennessee and push the same failed programs; but, fortunately the grassroots and alternative media were able to warn people at the local level and she faced resistance there as well.
Betsy Devos was also criticized for calling for larger class sizes; but, Obama's Secretary of Education wasn't much better, according to Arne Duncan Keeps Trying To Explain Education 12/28/2018 "Duncan is also fond of the notion that class size doesn't matter as much as teacher quality, as if teacher quality isn't affected by class size. A paragraph later Duncan reasserts the importance of the "building meaningful relationships" with students, but he has never seemed to consider how much harder that is to do in a classroom full of thirty or forty or fifty students."
Duncan was also a major supporter of Charter Schools, even after evidence indicated they were failing an apparently saw Hurricane Katrina as a good opportunity to transform their schools into Charters, which he did, but they didn't prove to be successful, as Diane Ravitch points out in many articles.
Cities with the most Charter Schools have also proven to be more violent than those without as many Charter schools as I pointed out in Is Push For Charter Schools Increasing Murder Rates? According to The Poorest, Most Charter-Rich Cities in the U.S. 04/17/2014 the sixteen cities with the most Charter Schools, in addition to being among the poorest cities, all are above average for murder rates (murder rates listed in the first article, not the second); nine of them are between four and ten times the national average murder rates; and the two with the lowest rates are still twenty percent above average.
These cities may also be more violent because poverty correlates with high rates of violence as well; however, adding Charter Schools clearly hasn't made things any better, especially since they have a record of epidemic levels of fraud, often depriving schools of the funds they need to function properly.
Like prisons, or health care and many other industries it should be obvious that the for profit motive doesn't help improve the quality of services, especially in industries where consumers can't benefit from competition or receive accurate information to make their decisions. Despite claims that are repeated over and over again, parents don't always have the choice to put their students in the best schools since there are often long waiting lists, which enables the schools to choose their students instead of the other way around. Diane Ravitch has pointed out that the few Charters that are the most successful are often doing so well because they can choose their own students and often pick the ones from the wealthiest families, increasing education inequality, instead of decreasing it.
No matter what the industry is should be obvious that the more money they pay in enormous CEO salaries or return to investors the less they have to carry out basic functions to serve consumers or students, especially if they're not countable to the public, which privatization of these industries limits.
The function of our current economic system isn't to serve the best interests of the vast majority of the public; instead it's to serve the best interests of the wealthy that control powerful corporations including the media, which limits who you hear from only covering politicians that support their agenda. Bernie Sanders made this point at the town hall Monday when he said:
This claim was reinforced by many sources including Time Magazine almost five years ago when they reported U.S. Health Care Ranked Worst in the Developed World 06/17/2014 Yet the political establishment often continues to argue that other countries are worse, generally without even checking the facts. Both Mich McConnell and John Boehner claimed that the US Has "Best Health System" in the world which many pundits including Samuel Metz from Common Dreams said "Is a Sick Joke" about six years ago. They've tried to avoid obviously flawed claims like that since then but they also avoid discussing the systems in many other countries so they can avoid discussing them at all, since it would remind many people that many countries, often with a combination of Socialism and Capitalism do a much better job serving their public's interests than the United States!
The reason they get away with this is that the media is controlled by six oligarchies and they simply refuse to cover many issues that don't serve their own financial interests. They've been using this consolidated control of the mainstream media to create an enormous number of stereotypes, like that all socialist countries are like the Soviet Union or Venezuela, which Bernie Sanders also corrected when an audience member said, "Hi, Senator Sanders. So my father's family left Soviet Russia in 1979 fleeing from some of the very same socialist policies that you seem eager to implement in this country. So my question is, how do you rectify your notion of democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?" and he replied:
The Los Angeles Times corrected this stereotype as well almost a year ago in Democratic socialism has succeeded in many more places than it has failed 08/01/2018 which says "Why do people so often cite the failures of democratic socialism by cherry picking their examples? Why not cite Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, Norway, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands — all countries that have successfully achieved a balance between capitalism and socialism?" But the vast majority of the public get their news from television which often doesn't report this kind of fact checking, instead repeating the same propaganda over and over again like the Russia conspiracy theory obsession.
You never hear them say on the mass media that "If we had provided fair coverage to all candidates instead of obsession coverage for a small percentage of those running based on how much money they collect from corporations or how effective they were at providing entertaining demagoguery then there's little or no chance that two people under FBI investigation would get the nominations, virtually guaranteeing there might be justification to impeach them even before we know which one wins."
Or at least I don't remember them ever saying that, if I'm mistaken please let me know.
The morning after this town hall and previous ones Social media was full of Bernie supporters claiming that they rig questions to demonize him, and there's a significant amount of evidence to indicate they're either right or very close to the truth. Tuesday morning, instead of focusing on how he corrected two of these very common misconceptions the media was providing an enormous amount of coverage appealing to people emotions to deny the "Boston Marathon bomber" the right to vote. The person who asked this question also asked "those convicted of sexual assault should have the opportunity to vote for politicians who could have a direct impact on women's rights?"
Bernie stood up for the rights to vote anyway, but many are trying to demonize him for it, without reviewing all the facts, at least not in the mainstream media. For one thing as much as most people hate the Boston Bombers, they were acting as retaliation for bombings of Muslim people around the world and they were almost certainly raised in abusive environments, as most if not all mass murderers were. The vast majority of felons that are being denied the right to vote haven't been convicted of violent offenses, and may also have come from troubled backgrounds. And these tactics are being used primarily to deprive minorities and poor people of the right to vote, which enables wealthy people to continue rigging the economic system in their own favor.
The people that are being denied the right to vote may be less likely to support policies or politicians that make these problems worse. It's not the Democrats that most Felons allegedly are inclined to support that are trying to reduce the rights of victims or sexual assault, including the right to have an abortion in case of pregnancy caused by rape, it's the Republicans!
Once we start taking away rights to vote, where do we stop? Bernie was right on this, and although in the short term I'm not sure everyone will recognize it, especially with demagogues demonizing him, I have little doubt that if people check facts carefully they'll recognize this.
Our extreme version of Socialized-Capitalism isn't designed to benefit all people, it's designed to enrich the wealthy regardless of what it does to the rest of society, whether it means depriving millions of health care, education, driving up prison populations, often with non-violent offenders, but also with people that became more violent as a result of lack of educational or economic opportunities, often combined with abusive environments that might have been prevented with efforts to educate at risk parents, or epidemic levels of destruction of the environment in areas where poor people live.
The countries that are doing the most to save our environment from climate change or other forms of destruction are all partly, if not entirely Socialists.
Most of the ones that are doing the most destruction are Capitalist, and if they have democratic institutions they're not functioning very well if at all.
Democratic Socialism would enable us to sort out which policies are most effective in which situations, not obsessively sticking to a dysfunctional ideology controlled by the wealthy for the short term benefit of the wealthy. Allowing the destruction of the environment may have worked out well for the wealthy since they only allow it in other people's back yards, but if it escalates too much they won't be able to prevent it from destroying their own backyard indefinitely, which might explain why some capitalists like Ali Velshi are now supporting policies that have a fairer balance.
Democratic-Socialist countries in Europe have much lower rates of violence than we do, they've been found to be better countries to raise children, and are happier, than the United states, they have better health care, child care, education, less income inequality, much lower prison populations and much more.
You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that we're being misled by our politicians and the media, or even Jon Stewart!
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein May 1949 reposted 05/01/2009
For additional information or sources see the following:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) Presidential Candidate in a Town Hall Discussion. 04/22/2019 "The function of the current health care system is not to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way. The function of the current system is to make billions of dollars in profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies." ..... "Is it your assumption that I supported or believe in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union? I don't and never have. And I opposed it."
CNN transcripts including additional town halls
Oligarchy: "government by the few"
Plutocracy: "government by the wealthy"
List of countries by intentional homicide rate Czech Republic, Northern Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, four still allowing corporal punishment, the following thirteen banning it, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Austria, Malta, Greece. 17 below 1; 16 between 1 and 2; 8 between 2 and 5; Lithuania 5.25; Ukraine 6.34; Russia 10.82
List of states prohibiting all corporal punishment of children, including in the home.
Socialism
Communism
75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America 03/29/2012
How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms 03/09/2019
Countries that help working class students get into university have happier citizens 04/04/2019
These Are the World’s Happiest (and Most Miserable) Countries 03/20/2019 1. Finland, 2.Denmark, 3.Norway 4.Iceland, 5.Netherlands, ..... 19. USA,
These are the 20 happiest countries 03/20/2019
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Norway
4. Iceland
5. Netherlands
6. Switzerland
7. Sweden
8. New Zealand
9. Canada
10. Austria
11. Australia
12. Costa Rica
13. Israel
14. Luxembourg
15. United Kingdom
16. Ireland
17. Germany
18. Belgium
19. United States
20. Czech Republic (includes a link, which Bloomberg withheld)
Best Countries for Raising Kids 03/08/2019 Best countries to raise kids (US News & World Report, 2019)
1. Sweden
2. Denmark
3. Norway
4. Canada
5. Finland
6. Netherlands
7. Switzerland
8. Australia
9. New Zealand
10. Belgium
----
20. United States
Universal healthcare and paid maternity leave makes a difference.
Bernie Sanders: As long as private health insurance companies are allowed to make as much money as they want, our health care system will not work. We need Medicare for All. 04/1/2019 Canadian MSNBC pundit, and capitalist, explains why they have Single Payer.
Raghuram Rajan says capitalism is 'under serious threat' 03/12/2019
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