Friday, December 27, 2013

Obama the Communist?

I keep seeing people accusing Barack Obama of being a Communist. It mostly seems to come from southern conservatives. I knew the education system in the South lags behind most of the nation, but I never realized how backward they are. Don’t they teach the difference between Communism and Capitalism down there?

When the financial crash hit the country just as Obama was elected president, George W. Bush spent billions of government dollars to bail out the banks and financial institutions. Barack Obama kept the same financial advisors and continued the exact same policies. Rich bankers and brokers were donated all the money they wanted with no strings attached. Ben Bernanke kept his job at the Treasury, and Goldman Sachs people continued to make policy for the nation. There was no break in the capitalist policies from one administration to the next.

Any self respecting red-blooded Communist would have nationalized the banks, made the bankers involved kneel down beside a ditch somewhere and shot them in the back of the head.

When the auto companies were going under, Obama negotiated a deal where the company executives got bailout money to keep the companies afloat, most got to keep their position with all their salary, retirement and bonuses, not to mention their golden parachutes. Workers out on the assembly line were forced to take cuts in benefits and pay, at least those who weren’t laid off.

Under a Communist, those executives would have been sent out to Kansas to hoe weeds between the cornrows as reeducation. Anybody who objected would have been made to kneel beside a ditch and been shot in the head.

Millions of families lost their homes during the crisis in foreclosure and eviction. Obama did not make the banks renegotiate the mortgages or offer any relief to homeowners.

A real Communist would have made the lenders wear a sign around their neck saying “Enemy of the People” then stood them up against a wall somewhere and shot them. Then the government would have taken ownership of the houses and rented them back to the families. (Honest, under Communism there is no private property allowed.)

Some people think Obama’s Affordable Care Act is Communism. Not even close. Obamacare makes buying health insurance from privately owned, for-profit companies mandatory. The government has created a free marketplace where people can browse through a myriad of plans to buy insurance from Aetna, Blue Cross, Humana, and other private insurance companies.

A real live red-blooded Communist would have nationalized all hospitals and clinics, put the doctors, nurses and technicians on government salary and offered all citizens free healthcare. Anybody who complained would have been sent to the Northern Gulag in Outer Alaska to work in the mines for twenty years or so.

The only policy of Obama’s that could be considered communistic is the surveillance state that the government set up after 9/11/2001 as an anti terrorist program. But that same policy is a hallmark of Fascist countries also, not just Communist countries.

If Obama is anything, he is a front man for Wall Street banksters. They love him at the New York Stock Exchange and Dow Jones. Investors and speculators have never had it better, even as the middle class fades away and the ranks of the poverty stricken explode.

If you label Obama as Communist, you are displaying your ignorance or your duplicity, unless you can point to a specific action he has taken that is communistic.

Don Rogers
12/27/2013