REDISTRIBUTION of WEALTH and Centralized Planning of Society is Often BIBLICAL, i.e. NOT NECESSARILY SOCIALIST only
By Kevin Stoda
There has been a lot of misguided anti-socialist mudslinging in terms of progressive taxation and government role in our lives lately.
McCain has called Democratic voters and Obama socialist in nature--as though socialism is anti-Christian or anti-American.
I know Socialism and Obama is no Socialist. Many other political economists around the U.S. and the world certainly agree.
Publisher Richard MacArthur of Harpers magazine states, "You could make the argument that Barack Obama always puts Wall Street first."-
Moreover, on the charge that Obama is socialist, MacArthur chuckles, "Barack Obama is a socialist like Harper's Magazine is a media conglomerate. It's the most preposterous charge I've heard in a pretty crazy campaign. When they keep saying that Barack Obama puts socialism ahead of entrepreneurship, I keep thinking of the vast amount of money he's been collecting from Wall Street for his campaign. His number one bundler is Goldman Sachs, which is--has given him up to this point I think about $740,000. The New York Times, just the other day, has revealed that there's a new way the two campaigns have come up with to get cash out of Wall Street, and this is Democrats and Republicans alike, with these joint campaign committees. Twelve Goldman Sachs employees were revealed in this latest report to have given more than $25,000 apiece to Obama's campaign."-
Obama, according to the Harper's editor McArthur, "This [current Obama tax proposal] is a very modest, very, you might even say, timid response to what's, in the last fifteen years, been a redistribution of wealth from the bottom up to the top. What is the mortgage crisis, except Wall Street picking on people who don't know better, who are not very well educated about the finance market, and really robbing them, taking the money up to the top? That's redistribution of wealth, upwards."-
DOES AMERICA NEED AND CONDONE MORE TIMIDITY?
MacArthur explains that the two top parties are nowhere near discussing basic socialist (or even right-wing) tenants of state overall intervention in the economy.
Since the current housing market and banking recessions are the worst in nearly a century, progressives are needed in Washington at a massive level.
McArthur explained in his recent Democracy Now interview, that historically "since 1912, when we instituted an income tax, when the top--remember, the top rate in 1964, the last time we had this kind of crazy debate between the Goldwater Republicans and Lyndon Johnson, the top marginal rate was 91 percent. Barack Obama is only proposing to raise or restore the top marginal rate from the current 35 percent to 39.6 percent, which is what it was under the Clinton administration."-
MacArthur states that we Americans need a coherent planning mechanism--not a Soviet Union style plan.
He explains, "[T]here are a lot of things we could do, short of outright government takeover or outright socialism or communism, that could improve the situation."-
In Harper's magazine's November publication, a large number of economists weigh in on a variety of topics related to the economy and what the role of government should be. These include former Nobel Prize laureate, Joseph Stieglitz, who says "a simple regulation requiring mortgage originators to put their own money at risk in each transaction--say, 20 percent of the loan amount--would curb some of the abusive practices that have taken place."-
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