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Paul Elisha: Socialist!

The ultra-Right Wing Rat-Pack, who masquerade as role models for an America, they say was founded by an elite corps of individualists, to glorify Christian ideals of morality and promote Capitalist ideas for profitable corporate conquest, has revived an old bugaboo to bamboozle the American electorate into acceptance of their unseemly and unjustified efforts to force it into eternal captivity.  They’ve re-raised the specter of ‘Socialism’!  In the face of truly dire threats like air and water pollution, climate change and global warming, plus mounting numbers of dead and wounded victims of the unchecked and irresponsible sale and use of guns and ammunition, these imperturbable profiteers have resurrected the baseless badge of ‘Socialist’ to pin on any who dare to bare their truly self-serving shenanigans.  From the outset of its pretentious inaugural, as the savior of a special way of life for a special class of societal scions, dedicated to preservation of social separation (the elitist upper-crust – from the ordinary ‘others’) corporate potentates have used every ruse to elaborate the pronounced difference between Capitalists as the creators and dispensers of earnings opportunity and eventual wealth… and those who serve them as the eventual receivers of residual benefits, thus justifying the levying of taxes on their receipt.  In defense of this Capitalist canard, corporate captains have employed legions of legal virtuosi, whose sole goal is to rationalize and define this assertion as fact.  Behind this licit disguise, they have devised and practiced the most flagrant forms of corporate welfare imaginable.  Anything else to the contrary, they have branded as “SOCIALIST!”

Leave it to history to unmask this gigantic corporate concoction for the flagrant lie it cloaks.  Where-else but in Schenectady, New York, home of the world’s largest and wealthiest Corporate empire… and perhaps, this nation’s most adroit and successful evader of corporate tax levies, would one find the most successful rebuttal?   In 1910, 24000 people worked for GE’s American Locomotive Company.  From 1909 to 1916, the City Government of Schenectady, New York was headed by a Socialist Mayor (George R. Lunn).  In fact, the entire city government was run by a Socialist administration.  During a strike by workers of the Gilbert and Phoenix Mills in nearby Little Falls, Mayor Lunn went to support the striking workers and was arrested by the local chief of police.

Obviously, none of this deterred G.E. from becoming the largest and most successful corporate empire in the world, still headquartered in Schenectady, New York. And while levying many acts of local financial benefit, it is still a most successful escapee from run-of-the-mill corporate tax levies by the federal government.  In nearby Vermont, the voters of a major city elected a Socialist Mayor, Bernard Sanders, who now represents that state in the U.S. Senate as an Independent-Socialist Senator, respected by his fellow Senators and happily accepted by its Democrat-caucus.

There is something much worse for this nation than the ‘Socialism’ with which a small but truly dangerous minority of self-appointed monitors and political manipulators attempt to frighten and silence those with the Constitutionally protected power of the people, to determine what kind of government they desire and how it should represent their needs and opinions.  It’s the power of a moneyed elite Capitalist-corporate dictatorship, to subjugate and silence Congressional colleagues; deter them from working together to solve the nation’s most pressing problems.

It’s time we all re-discovered the language of congenial discourse before the unseemly silence of unchecked, egocentric Capitalist coinage consigns our once proudly productive compatible process to the dust-heap of history.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not reflect the views of this station or its management.