The Obama Record: GOP White House contenders think the president is taking the country down the path to "European socialism." They're wrong. It could be something much more radical.
Eight years ago, virtually out of nowhere, Barack Obama burst onto the national political scene. Few knew this young politician from Chicago, who was trained as a community organizer and civil-rights lawyer.
Fewer still knew of his carefully calculated plans for using the democratic process to gain power and bring about "social change" on a large scale.
But gain it he did. And now — after his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his 2008 presidential triumph — we've had a chance to see how that "change" looks. Obama has unleashed a juggernaut of legislation and regulations on industry that rival the New Deal in scope.
From the moment he stepped into office, Obama has used his power to redistribute capital and bring corporate America under state control. Among other things, he has:
Forced all large banks, including healthy ones, to take federal bailout money while forcing them to pass stress tests before they can get out from under state control.
Forced banks to renegotiate private mortgage contracts to forgive principal payments for customers while ordering the banks to liberalize their lending practices and even open branches in blighted and unprofitable areas outside their service area.
Signed sweeping regulations that give the state new authority to control the entire financial sector — from banks to hedge funds to insurance companies to even car dealers.
(The Dodd-Frank Act gives Obama unprecedented powers to monitor and redirect the capital flow of all financial firms, as well as adjust their capital requirements and even shut them down and restructure them.)
Renegotiated the terms of Detroit creditor contracts so autoworkers get preferential treatment at the expense of shareholders while preserving the high union cost structure that bankrupted GM and Chrysler.
("I owe those unions," Obama has said. "When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I got into politics to fight for these folks.")
Centralized control of the health care industry through 2,730 pages of new mandates that bring insurance companies and drugmakers under the supervision of the state and force the wealthy to subsidize the uninsured at a starting cost of $1.6 trillion.
Transferred an additional $1 trillion in private taxpayer wealth to welfare programs and public works projects, which have increased dependency on the state to record levels.
All of these measures put more power in the hands of the state and, in the case of health care, exert more control over the individual lives of Americans. As such, few are popular.
So how did Obama do it? Or more to the point, how did he get away with doing it?
By making capitalists the enemy of the people. By using media propaganda to convince enough people who lost their jobs or homes in the financial crisis that they were victims of Wall Street "exploitation."
And by fomenting class envy between "the 99%" of Americans he imagines as "struggling" and a nebulous 1% overclass of "millionaires and billionaires" and "fat cat bankers" he demonizes as "greedy."
"We can either settle for a country where a few people are doing very well and everybody else is having to just struggle to get by, or we can build an economy where everybody gets a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share," Obama said Feb. 21 from the White House.
"That's the economy that I want," he added. "Those who don't want it will be forced to pay their fair share."
History provides a harsh reminder of how such class warfare ends if carried out to its extreme.
Less than a century ago, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia portrayed a life-or-death "class struggle" between capitalists and workers. The Bolsheviks were inspired by Karl Marx, another trained lawyer who never spent a day in the private sector. They followed his 1848 blueprint for worker revolution, "The Communist Manifesto."
Marx argued that capitalism splits industrial society into two hostile camps: the "bourgeois" — whom he described as anyone employing a worker, owning a business or making money from investments — and the "proletariat" that he figured made up the other 90% of society. He claimed that the wealth controlled by the top 10% "exists solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of those (other) nine-tenths."
In other words, profits produced by merchants, entrepreneurs and investors don't really belong to them. Marx believed they were stolen from workers and that workers would one day rise up and, justifiably, "wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois."
Turning the tables, the working class would then become the ruling class — though Marx believed this would happen in stages.
Socialism was the first or "lower" phase of communist society, he envisioned, where democracy and vestiges of capitalism are still present but only as a means to an end.
The final or "higher" phase of communism abandons state capitalism altogether and runs a centrally planned economy under a new constitution.
"Only then," Marx proclaimed, "can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Marx argued the dreams of the "individual" should be sacrificed for the "collective."
"Individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations." (Actually it wasn't Marx who said that — it was Obama, in a little-noticed 1995 interview he conducted with a liberal Chicago journal.)
Marx also called for abolishing the traditions, institutions and religions of the old order, arguing that the masses couldn't fully serve "the State" if they still clung to religion. (Again, hearing any echoes?)
The Bolsheviks struck in 1917. Their leader, V.I. Lenin, immediately declared war on banks, scapegoating "vile" and "greedy" bankers and merchants for all the problems of the underclass. His battle cry, as he seized banks and shops, was "Loot the looters!"
For the revolution to succeed, Lenin said he had to first control capital. And if he controlled banks, he could more easily control the industries they financed.
Nationalizing medicine was also key. If the communists controlled health care, Lenin said, they could own and control families — from cradle to grave.
Lenin's other main target was the education system. If the Reds socialized schooling, from kindergarten to college, they could brainwash the masses into serving the state instead of their own "selfish" interests.
By 1920, Lenin had established "free" universal health care (excluding the "deprived class" of merchants) and "free" higher education for all (except for the sons and daughters of merchants, who were blocked from college).
He also had succeeded in nationalizing all commercial banks as well as transportation.
How did the new ruling class finance (at least in the initial stages, before the USSR went bankrupt) its "fairer" economy? By soaking the rich with punitive taxes, redistributing their wealth and shaking down bankers. Sound familiar?
Such battle lines have, tragically, been redrawn in America, the same capitalist nation that defeated Soviet communism only two decades ago.
On one side are the people who create wealth. On the other are those who loot it.
This election, the most critical in American history, will decide who wins.
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