By Dave Lindorff
Listening to President Trump, you’d think the socialist barbarians were at the gates of America preparing to over-run the US with a Soviet-style state-run economy where every car would be the same make and color, everyone would be wearing Mao suits and freedom and social mobility, those great mythical assets that we supposedly have in unique abundance here in the land of the free and home of the brave, would vanish.
Socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want the US to be like Venezuela, Trump warns in his whiney little voice. Speaking to an audience of wealthy Venezuelan self-exiles in Florida, he said, “The socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they have had a chance to rule…This will never happen to us.”
In most parts of the world, Trump’s over-the-top and wildly ignorant denunciation of socialism would be greeted with uproarious laughter, as would his cartoonish characterization of Venezuela’s current crisis (which is really the result mainly of the collapse in oil prices and economic sanctions by the US). But there’s little amusement here in America, where socialism is, for many, still a dirty word, akin to Stalinism.
That’s because almost uniquely in the world, Americans have been insulated and cut off from information about how in many very democratic nations, especially in Europe, socialist-influenced policies and programs, like free college education, generous unemployment benefits, highly progressive tax rates, retirement schemes that actually allow people to retire without falling into poverty, state-funded health systems that guarantee quality care to everyone, labor laws that guarantee generous vacations to all workers, and publicly funded, modern mass transit systems that make it so families don’t need to pay for and drive two cars can exist and thrive in societies that are often freer and that boast more social mobility than the US.
That’s why we can have people like Marc A. Thiessen, a right-wing columnist at the Washington Post, get away with publishing an inanity the syndicated column he wrote last week headlined, “Why economic illiteracy is dangerous.” In it, he condemns AOC for her “dangerous economic illiteracy” in “celebrating the tanking of a deal negotiated by her fellow Democrats” that would have brought HQ2, a second headquarters for giant e-retailer Amazon to New York City, allegedly producing “25,000-40,000 new jobs.” In so doing, he displayed both his own ignorance of economics and taxes, and also a sterling example of the kind of pro-capitalist propaganda that passes for intelligent journalism in the US…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/columnist-thiessen-calling-aoc-economically-illiterate-displays-own-economic-ignorance/