Aw, c’mon, donny boy. You wouldn’t know a socialist if one grabbed by the p*sssy and kissed you on the lips. But you handed a good laugh to several categories of people when you tried to instill fear of “the socialist nightmare” during a speech in Maryland this past weekend.
The first of these categories is real socialists. People who want the government to own and control everything. Their laughter has a kind of face-of-a-clown vibe. They know their dream of a peoples’ utopia has no chance of success here.
The second category: Anyone whose net worth is over a couple of million dollars. They are laughing because they operate under the cover of your fear and will be better able to hide the dirty doings while your followers (it’s still followers, plural, right?) will dither and palpitate and pay even less attention to the obvious pickpocketing they endure.
The guy in the picture above is Daniel DeLeon, a founder of the Socialist Labor Party, college professor (Columbia) and union organizer. He also was the last true American socialist and he’s been dead since 1914.
The best known American Socialist, Norman Thomas, was a third carbon copy of De Leon. He ran for President a bunch of times. He got ten votes in each election.
The party? It’s five old guys who moved from New York to the west coast when they finally realized no one else was in that thought balloon with them.
DeLeon’s Big Idea was creation of a universal industrial union. Every worker. Every job. That wasn’t likely in the early 20th century and it’s even less likely now.
That’s kind of hard to work. It would mean, for example, that when the steelworkers went on strike, so might the entire worldwide staff of Starbucks, Exxon and Microsoft.
If you think the most recent government shutdown was bad, just think of what it would be like if the repair folks at the natural gas company struck because of those Starbucks workers.
This is not an argument to disband unions. If anything, it’s a call to strengthen them so that when the Steelworkers strike, their needs can be met and you can still get a gas leak fixed before your house blows up.
Is Medicare “socialism?” Some lumps masquerading as humans thought so before they started using it. How about Social Security? Social security would be flush if congress didn’t keep siphoning so much off the top to pay for their bloated staffs and bloated projects. C’mon, boys and girls, take your money from your real bosses on K street.
SHRAPNEL:
--We note with sadness the passing of Ogden Reid, former editor/owner of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper and former congressman. Reid was 93 and the kind of Republican who believed in the founding principles of his party, unlike the shrill knee jerk trump worshiping collection of walking dead it has become. He ran a great paper and he was the kind of Republican many a Democrat could embrace and vote for, the kind we could use a few hundred more of today.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Comments?: wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2019
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