EDITORIAL
---- What's wrong with "socialism"?
Our American friends are certainly now on the road to a healing presidential term. The Republicans may rant about individual counts, but we can also be certain that they are busy studying their playbook, "How to Sabotage a Democrat President". The next four years are their target, not the last two weeks.
One issue that dogged the entire process was the popularity, among Democrats, of two candidates who openly claimed to be Democratic Socialists. It's astounding in itself, that “socialists” could ever mount effective campaigns in the USA, where money is what does the talking, and money seems to talk only a corporate agenda.
From the start of the campaigning, the Democrats' "socialist problem" was pointed out by every commentator: 'while a socialist might be popular with the youth wing of the Democrats, no one believed the voting population would support a socialist'.
Commentators saw only the most middle candidate having any chance at all against Trump. But these pollsters, and analysts who rely on polls, ended up mis-calling the final election incredibly -- at one point they were predicting the complete rout of the GOP. According to them, voters would toss the Republican Senate leadership, and give the entire ship to Biden and his cautious warriors. The opposite happened -- yet these same analysts were busy making more predictions the next day. In general, they are predicting that socialism will not work ... anywhere.
What made Sanders and Warren “socialists” was their support of social services -- Canada’s public health-care system and our distaste for charter (private) schools. An efficient post office, a regulated banking environment, maybe even our limping social safety net are all threats to the old Cold-War warriors and their wealthy backers. Even libraries.
What else is so threatening from socialists? A special tax on the super-super wealthy? A more equitable corporate tax rate? More funding for environmental protection? For green-industry conversion? Real support for public broadcasting, the arts, and cultural industries?
All this is hardly Soviet or Chinese “socialism”. It is reform from reformers, not revolutionaries. So why is the American public seen to be hostile to reformers?
Because, to speak simply, most Americans believe what they're told, if they are told it long enough. And they are told by the corporate media (and by social media’s million troll-farms) that reformers are mostly Leninists-in-waiting. That's what we hear in Canada, too. Same-sourced news?
Isn't one take-away from this election that we ought to look more closely at the intimate relationship between our media and the corporate world? Postmedia, owning most of Canada's largest newspapers, is owned by NYC investors -- and social media is the private domain of a couple of mega-corporations. This isn't a free press. From here most discussion heads downhill, but to discuss public information campaigns, especially elections, without weighing media bias, is as bad as any authoritarian regime's over-reach, socialist or corporatist.
