If we’re going to have social ownership of the banks, then let’s demand social control of them too!
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Flash: Photo Proves Obama Consorts with Marxists!
A blog called Gateway Pundit is breathlessly claiming to have "discovered" photo evidence of Obama's secret Marxist background. The document, a photo showing a young legislative candidate Obama and four other Chicago local candidates for office endorsed by the Chicago New Party is headlined: "Great... We're two shakes of a lamb's tail from having a former(?) Marxist as president."
Only problem is, the New Party was an affiliate of the Democratic Socialists of America, probably the most mildly socialist and clearly non-Marxist of left parties in the US. Founded by a group of anti-Communist leftists associated with former Socialist Party leader Michael Harrington, the DSA, originally known as the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, modelled itself on the social democratic parties of Western Europe, notably the German Social Democratic Party of Prime Minister Willi Brandt and the British Labour Party.
So tame are the DSA's policies, which included actively supporting all Democratic presidential candidates, that it was hard to tell if the organization was socialist at all. Indeed, when the DSA hosted an international meeting of the leaders of the Second International in Washington shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, it appeared that leaders who attended, like Spanish Socialist Party leader Filippe Gonzalez, German SDP leader Brandt and certainly British Labourite Tony Benn were far to the left of most of the DSA members present.
If that's the best Obama's right-wing critics can come up with (and they don't have him even as a New Party member, just as an endorsed candidate of the New Party), they have a lot more work to do to show he's a closet socialist, much less a closet "Marxist."
By the way, how is it that the right is claiming Obama is a Marxist and a Muslim jihadi? Have they checked out what the Muslim governments have done and are doing to the Marxists in their midsts? It's probably easier to survive as a Christian or an apostate in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan or Iraq than as a Marxist.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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