Democratic Socialism Can Reverse the Oligarchical Direction of the U.S.

While I do not support Luigi Mangione’s alleged means of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, I fully back his goal of highlighting the greed, insensitivity, and inhumanity of large corporations and the increasing power of the oligarchs who control the country. He has touched the raw nerve of the vast majority of U.S. residents who consider the current economic system to be unfair and rigged against them.

While economic disparities plague all of the nations across the planet, nowhere among the richer nations in the world are these disparities more extreme than in the United States. The top 1% of the population has greater wealth — and with an average income of $1,316,985 — than the entire bottom 99% with an average income of $50,107. So, when is enough, enough?

When the compensation of corporate CEOs has risen an astounding 300 times more than a typical worker, when is enough, enough?

When corporate profits have reached unprecedented heights, though the wages and benefits of the vast majority of workers either stagnated or diminished when accounting for inflation, then when is enough, enough?

When a few individual families own 20, or 30, or 40, or more fast food franchises while paying their workers less than a living wage, as 26% of fast food employees are parents raising children, and 68% are the major wage earners for their families, and many of our people go hungry as Congress fights to eliminate the food stamp safety net, when is enough, enough?

When a McDonald’s employee must work the equivalent of 930 years to match the salary that the CEO makes in a single year, when is enough, enough?

When a family purchases two, or three, or four, or five, or even six homes that they occasionally visit depending on their current mood like the rest of us choose which pair of underwear to wear for the day, and many of our people, including youth, go homeless, when is enough, enough?

When our elected officials in Washington, DC respond merely to the demands of the upper income groups and discount lower socioeconomic income brackets, then when is enough, enough?

As the corporate sector increasingly dictates economic policy through the purchasing and ownership of politicians at the expense of the people of our country, a corporate culture that eliminates workers’ health care and collective bargaining rights, one that promotes and maintains workplace inequalities based on race, nationality, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, and disability, one that forecloses our homes through scurrilous business practices, and one that holds students hostage to loan structures that jeopardizes their futures, then when is enough, enough?

When the military industrial complex marches to the beat of industry, when an educational system based on standardization and allegiance to corporate needs, and a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout the society, then when is enough, enough?

When corporations grab government bailouts with impunity while doling out exorbitant bonuses for executives, and when these same executives pay lower tax rates than their secretaries, then when is enough, enough?

Even before the Cold War and the so-called “McCarthy Period” (named after Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy), individuals and groups on the political and theocratic Right have flung the term “Socialist” from their metaphoric sling shots into the faces of their political opponents to discredit their characters and dismiss their political ideas and policies, and to sway the electorate toward a Conservative agenda.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country….Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

In his second State of the Union Address in January 2019, Donald Trump set a major theme for his future Presidential bids by throwing to his base the red meat of Socialism characterizing it as an anti-American freedom-killing political philosophy.

This continued as evidenced by the political right wing and, in particular, the MAGA movement’s representation of Kamala Harris’s candidacy plus various other Democratic politicians as “socialist left-wing radicals.”

As destructive and as freedom-killing as the right would have us believe, according to the World English Dictionary Socialism involves “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” where each of us has a stake and advances in the success of our collective economy.

Maybe if more of us challenged the widening and inhumane inequities, where each of us understood that we all have a stake and advance in the success of our collective economy, then enough would definitely and finally be enough!

So, what are some strategies to narrow the gaps in wealth and income between the economic classes in the United States:

• a governmental single-payer quality universal health care system not tied to individuals’ employment, which includes safe and reasonably priced prescriptions and over-the-counter drug therapies.
• guaranteed protection and enhancement of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid safety nets that are not taxed.
• a system of parental leave, paid sick leave, tax credits and governmental supplements for quality child day care services, as well as universal Pre-K education for all young people.
• guaranteed equal pay for equal work between the sexes, and the raising of the minimum wage so workers can significantly raise their standard of living.
• further nationalization of our parks, forests, mountains, rivers, streams, shores, and off-shore waters, rather than allocating increased corporate mining, drilling, and timber rights.
• free and quality education, not only through grade 12, but throughout higher education and after for everyone who desires and works to achieve their fullest potential.
• government-sponsored programs that guarantee our seniors a retirement system that ensures a high quality of life free from economic burdens.
• guaranteed rights of workers in all industries to organize and to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.
• elimination of workplace and larger societal inequalities based on race, nationality, citizenship status, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, disability, socioeconomic standing, religion, and other social identities.
• guaranteed comfortable and secure place to live, and governmental policies that actually prevent a banking system that forecloses people’s homes through scurrilous business practices.
• severe restrictions on the political process to prevent mammoth contributions by individuals and corporations to buy and own politicians and to influence public policy, while locking out individuals and groups unable to amass large political funds.
• challenge to the military industrial complex that marches to the beat of industry, and a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout the society.
• true progressive tax structure where everyone pays their fair share, one that inhibits massive inequities in the overwhelming accumulation of wealth by the top income brackets.
• Most basically, effective restrictions on the so-called “free market” economic system that enables the creation and enhancement of mega monopolies, outsourcing of jobs, manufacture of defective products, and inhibition in the development of clean renewable energy technologies.

If the United States does not act to narrow the massive gaps in wealth and income between sectors of the population, I believe a class war – hopefully non-violent — is imminent in the United States until and unless we radically change direction.

Ironically, it will take a democratic Socialist revolution to prevent the current Capitalist system, lacking in oversight regulations, rife with corruption and influence peddling resulting in massive wealth and income inequities vastly favoring the super rich, from imploding onto itself.

It will take a democratic Socialist revolution to promote governmental sponsorship of previously private and semi-private sector institutions, such as insurance and retirement policy corporations and educational establishments.

It will take a democratic Socialist revolution to compel the United States to live up to its overriding promise that anyone can succeed depending on their motivation, merit, talent neither helped nor hindered by their socioeconomic birth ranking or their social identities.

It will take a democratic Socialist revolution to ensure a firm and strong safety net to catch everyone who has for any reason been unable to ascend.

No, democratic Socialism is not a magic panacea or some unattainable utopian vision from a futuristic film. Instead, democratic Socialism provides a concrete foundation of action for real life to lift our nation from the ever-widening social and economic abyss in which we find ourselves, an abyss that poses an existential crisis far greater than any threat from foreign military or cyber invasion.

Young people, especially those steeped in history – or possibly protected from its murky shadows – can educate their elders who grew up in earlier generations when “Socialist” was thrown as an evil and corrosive epithet.

The type of democratic Socialism proposed by, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders (and while not referring to herself as a “democratic Socialist,” Elizabeth Warren has articulated similar plans), is completely dissimilar from the crime and fraud-laded freedom killing National Socialism ruthlessly imposed by the German Nazis; from the governmental system inflicted within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); or the ruthless Socialism of Venezuela and the Communism of Mainland China and North Korea.

Rather, the democratic Socialism outlined by Bernie Sanders and the movement he has spawned resembles more the social and economic systems of the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

No country in the world today stands as a fully Socialist state, but rather, some of the most successful economies combine elements of Capitalism with Socialism to create greater degrees of equity and lesser disparities between the rich, the poor, and those on the continuum in between.

This year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conducted its “Better Life Index” to determine the “happiest countries in the world,” according to its residents. Based on an 11-measure survey assessing quality of life, including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance, and life satisfaction, all of the Scandinavian countries, plus Netherlands, Iceland, and Switzerland, Canada, plus Australia, and New Zealand reached the top 10 ranked countries.

Included in descending order are number one, Finland, followed by Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Netherlands, Canada, (which provides a single-payer health care system unlike its North American neighbor, the United States), New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia (which places severe restrictions on firearms ownership).

The United States did not make the cut in the top 10 but came in at 17 (down two places from the previous year). Therefore, we might do well to look to these countries for some of their Socialist policies that sustain high levels of quality-of-life issues for their residents.

Many on the political right have established the false binary of Capitalism on one side and Socialism/Communism on the other. But when we get beyond the fear and false generalizations and connections to tyrannical corrupt dictatorships, is Socialism really so “anti-American”?

It will take more, though, than a President to do this. It will take the Houses of Congress to propose and pass legislation and the courts to maintain policies and regulations making the Capitalist system more equitable and sustainable, and to conduct genuine oversight functions that prior Congresses relinquished.

Yes, it will take a democratic Socialist revolution to save Capitalism from itself!