Grassroots Socialism Comes to Virginia
By D.J. Spiker | Monday, August 22nd, 2011 | Policy, PoliticsTonight the Virginian-Pilot reported on two door-to-door workers who are canvassing Norfolk. Such a thing is hardly news with primary elections on Tuesday, but it’s reporting for Monday, so whatever. Reading the article, it’s clear the bias coming from these ‘voter-organizers’.
The group is called Virginia New Majority. Pilot sums up their stance.
On its website, the group says it “organizes Virginians to win social and economic justice for all… We bring together immigrants, African-Americans, women, youth, and working-class Virginians to build a progressive movement…” On the site, it endorses a slate of Democratic candidates in upcoming races.
But I went to their website, and more importantly their blog myself. There, the train runs off the tracks and the rampant propaganda and outlandish things come to light. The group calls for a Third Reconstruction and endorsing a slate of Democrats:
They are all committed to creating a state government whose values, laws and policies best represent our changing demographics and our progressive aspirations. Each candidate further understands that our government is responsible for ensuring economic and social equality for all Virginians.
Their goals…
While some of my best friends are businesses, let’s imagine a different Virginia. If we were a ‘women friendly’ state for example, would we build more childcare centers? Would we better light our streets and sidewalks? Would we have clinics and Medicare and Medicaid for all women?
What if we were a ‘worker friendly’ state? What would we do different? Maybe we actually staff a state Labor Department to make sure that workers are paid what they are due. Maybe we’d make it easier for workers to form a union? Maybe we’d tax wealthy corporations and wealthy people so that everybody has a roof over their head and food in their belly.
Socialism at it’s finest.
VNM’s Executive Director recently also tried rewriting history, claiming that Nat Turner was only fighting for his ‘liberty’:
Yet, it was also here in Tidewater that Nat Turner and dozens of others rose up in rebellion as they sought their liberty.
This same Nat Turner who killed dozens of men, women and children? Who organized a campaign of violence throughout the Eastern Shore with the simple goal of, as Turner described it before his execution, to spread “terror and alarm” in white residents.
Good of the Pilot to bring this to light. Otherwise the crackpots would have never got their day.
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Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...entrenched on the right as a member of the Establishment, proudly tattooed member of the Republican Party, bartender by trade serving both sides the libations needed to continue the debate and discourse. College student, ten years late, majoring in Public Policy and Administration with an eye to serving the conservative and Republican movement in the public or private sector. ducit amor patriae You can find D.J.on facebook, Twitter, or contact via email at gosport.conservative@gmail.com. You can find D.J.on facebook, Twitter, or contact via email at gosport.conservative@gmail.com.
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7 Responses to "Grassroots Socialism Comes to Virginia"
Cue the propriety of violence against oppressors vis a vis Nat Turner debate in 3… 2… 1…
It’s not these two Marxists who worry me.
Uh..D.J….dust off your history books. Nat Turner’s rebellion was in Southampton County, southwest of here, not on the Eastern Shore.
Goodness gracious, somebody had several extra lumps of crazy in their tea this morning and then added neither lemon nor milk but a generous pour of sloppy.
First, let’s be real clear about a simple fact that seems to elude far too many today. It is a right of the jokers to the right to disagree with decisions about the allocation of resources made by the democratically elected Representatives, Senators and President constitutionally empowered to do so. It also is their right to scream their unhappiness loudly to whichever Murdoch-employed minion is tasked with the hour’s assault on the legacy of Murrow and Cronkite. Finally, these unhappy folks are free to ignore economics, political economy and political science and bluster over-heatedly that whichever decision has ginned up the frothing wackiness of the week is not a legislative policy difference to be debated rationally but is SOCIALISM, SOCIALISM, SOCIALISM!!!
There is, however, in the world of reality, a difficulty with these stridently expressed rants. (Really it’s a single rant universally applied to whatever has caused Beck to cry or Limbaugh to bloviate at air time). The word as defined, the theory or dogma of socialism, simply has nothing to do with whatever the complaint is. If you don’t know what socialism is, there’s actually a pretty good definition on the Wikipedia. As a blanket condemnation of the first serious governmental attempts since 1993 to address some of our domestic challenges, however, the term is being so factually mangled; that if old Norman Thomas wasn’t dead he’d probably be spinning is his grave.
Three examples:
With the U.S. and the world economies in a barrel headed over Niagara Falls a dose of Franklin Roosevelt New Deal activism was implemented to cushion the blow. We still had to endure the awful drop, but at least we weren’t sucked under never to surface again. Respected economists and financial wise men such as Warren Buffet had been scared sh*tless of a global depression. That, thankfully, did not occur. The Grover Norquist school of management (a unique business model in which revenues are actually gifts and which has never managed an enterprise accountable to market forces, customers or voters) preferred a fourth round of the previous administration’s first time in history wartime tax cuts. Economics shows, however, any impact of tax reductions would have been far too slow for those of us in the barrel going over the falls. It was perfectly, economically rational for Grover, however, as the kind of people who lose a job or face foreclosure are simply not the quality of persons who give him his income.
The rate of inflation in the health care sector has long been recognized as threatening to become the “Thing” that ate the economy as well as state and federal budgets. For many decades, financial analyses and comparisons with successful health care sectors in other nations have shown that we grossly overpay for access to quality care. So after debates, discussion and failed proposals dating back to the 1940’s, ObamaCare was adopted. With its intellectual grounding in the free market-based reforms most famously implemented by Mitt Romney (who may not be a Rick Perry or a Michele Bachmann but is indisputably no Joe Hill), ObamaCare is a pale shadow of the health care reform proposed by Harry Truman and a more conservative package than Richard Nixon supported. Thankfully, of course, the previous administration with majorities in both houses of Congress had already addressed part of the problem. A huge governmental, prescription drug entitlement was imposed on that segment of Americans who already must live with the nightmare of national health insurance but vote at an unusually high percentage. Wisely, the agency that would essentially be paying for these mountains of medications was prohibited from using its purchasing power to seek discounts based on bulk buying. Certainly though, this legislation was a far more innovative public policy solution than ObamaCare; conspicuously absent from the prescription drug benefit legislation was any attempt to pay for it.
Apparently, some portion of the approximately $40 billion in wealth of the Right-Wing Political Consultants’ Full Employment Agency, also known as the Koch brothers, has come from sales of formaldehyde (Another, more foundational part came much earlier from their father’s sale of oil refining technology to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Ironically, Bolshevik Uncle Joe also saw lots of people he’d taken a dislike to as Socialists and, boy, did he hate them.). It seems we now know that formaldehyde is a carcinogen. Despite the tobacco companies’ heartwarming response to the earlier discovery that cigarettes were carcinogenic, others have suggested that there may be a valid case for federal regulation in instances where the manufacturer of a product imposes costs on third parties unaffiliated with its production. An Environmental Protection Agency attempting to deal with a cancer causing agent and, uh, protect the environment, imagine that? To its credit the previous administration had the well-respected, moderate conservative former Republican Governor of New Jersey as its E.P.A. Administrator . . .for its first two years. She actually gave weight to scientific data in the agency’s decision-making process, call her crazy.
Now, some may have phrased certain sentences differently in the paragraphs above about:
– the economic maelstrom the previous administration left to the world;
– the decision after at least 60 years of talk to begin to fix an inefficient and exorbitantly expensive health care sector,; and
– whether scientific data should be given weight to analyze activity that may bring profit to one group but impose costs on others.
That is part of the long tradition of American political debate and the historical ebb and flow of political parties’ fortunes that tends to bring things back to the sensible center.
None of it has a damned thing to do with socialism.
And neither do a few idealistic young people going door-to-door in Tidewater suggesting that some portions of the state budget might be allocated differently . . . a little bit less here, a little bit more there. [Plus, it’s sloppy and disingenuous to use blog postings on any organization’s web site to attempt to characterize the organization. I am the proof of that particular pudding, right here].
Finally, it apparently not having been incendiary enough to drop the socialism bomb, Mr. Spiker rings the fire bell in the night. None of us know much about Nat Turner. It strains credulity that his lawyer’s records present an unbiased account given the hysteria the rebellion engendered and the economic and social banishment the lawyer would have faced for any perception of even hinting that his client was anything other than a mad, cold-blooded butcher. No journalist or historian within 500 miles had any interest in attempting to understand what it meant to live at a time when corporations weren’t people and neither were some people. Perhaps you say another !9th century frican American might have produced a written record with a more nuanced perspective. But then you remember that, at the time, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write.
What little I do know comes from my late friend Bill Styron’s meticulously researched, brilliant novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. As great novels do, it expresses the complexity of the human condition. Bill presents his creation of what might have happened when a flawed, perhaps unstable man facing life as a piece of chattel snapped and committed gross cruelties.
He also presents the better documented panic, perhaps due to an innate sense of the depravity of the institution, of that segment of the population that held all the cards. The slave owners controlled every lever of authority except that mystifying, puzzling, sometimes courageous, sometimes criminal power that can emanate from a single human mind. With swift and rabid violence, they sought to obliterate the fact of the rebellion, all who had anything to do with it and the evidence of their sole but significant vulnerability.
At the end of the day, all I can really do is to cogitate about how I might react watching time and time again as someone sold members of my family. I have to say that I hope I would at least consider rebellion.
And, by the way, that doesn’t have a damned thing to do with socialism either.
Holy Creeping Communism, Batman! This is almost as bad as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Charlottesville, which is operating openly in Shaun Kenny’s back yard.
http://www.revolutionarycommunistparty.org/tag/virginia/
If the most sincere form of flattery is imitation, then the most grievous insult must be parody.
J Severt, you’ve presented us with another opus in the cacophony of revisionist history punctuated with a couple nuggets of truth, some faux erudite wording and some shady conspiracy theories that make you appear almost, but not quite credible. Your obfuscations of fact by swerving in an out of any sort of coherent thought process using obtuse references that don’t connect to a relevant theme suggest that you probably should audit a creative writing course at a local community college where you can learn to string some of your prattle together so there is a beginning, middle and an end with some substance in between. As far as Socialism is concerned, talk to Ben Loyola for a few minutes and ask him about why his family escaped from Cuba, why he doesn’t want to return, what he is seeing that scares him about the current state of our country and economy, and why he doesn’t believe in whatever you believe… whatever that may be.
Darn these folks trying to bring Christian values to Virginia.
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