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are we so scared to call it what it is? why are we playing hard to get? they want a war ...and we have taken some strange vow of silence on the subject.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/24264-austerity-immiseration-capitalism-what-can-we-learn-from-venezuelan-socialism

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[-] 5 points by shadz66 (19985) 10 years ago

''In the United States, the situation is spectacularly grim.The US economy has not managed to climb back from its pre-recession level of unemployment. Far from it. Nearly 14 million Americans currently are jobless and things look to be getting worse before they get better (assuming they do get better), in what is increasingly becoming an era of downward mobility for 99 percent of Americans and a new "Gilded Age" for the 1% who constitute the financial aristocracy. There is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work. Those finding jobs are finding pretty lousy jobs, often part-time and with fewer and fewer benefits. But it is appreciably different for those at the top. The richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007. You would think that this would have driven most people in US cities into the streets howling like a naked Allen Ginsberg with his angel-headed hipsters. But it did not (although it certainly contributed to the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement). In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom 80 percent, collectively, held just 12.8 percent.

''The unprecedented combination of mass unemployment, falling wages and an influx of free money from the Federal Reserve has led to a record-setting surge in corporate profits. Corporations are flush with capital, but are just sitting on it, preferring at this time not to invest their vast windfalls in jobs. Instead of investing in production, major corporations, whose coffers are overflowing and whose stocks are hitting record levels, are paying out dividends and inflating their own stock values (Damon, 2013). CEOs are cashing in on stocks that are soaring in value with the rising market, with a growing number of CEOs reaping individual profits of $50 million or more.

''The whole physiognomy of capitalism has changed, with finance capital requiring a parallel accumulation of political power, with financiers married to an unchecked political oligarchy spawning highly parasitic financialized forms of capitalism such as asset-stripping. The vampire of capitalism has grown a second set of fangs. The long shadow of Nosferatu falls across a systematic ongoing attack on the living standards of the vast majority of the population.

''All this begs the question: "Is there a viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism?" In 1998, President Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in Venezuela by a landslide. At first, Chávez expressed an interest in Tony Blair's "Third Way," only to regret this soon after. As he put it in Time magazine in 2006: "I naively took as a reference point Tony Blair's proposal for a 'third way' between capitalism and socialism - capitalism with a human face" (Pabian, 2008). Following his first election victory, Chávez's views dramatically changed. Maria Paez Victor (2009) concisely summarizes Chávez's impact :

''Immediately the elites and middle classes opposed him as an upstart, an Indian who does not know his place, a Black who is a disgrace to the position. Hugo Chávez established a new Constitution that re-set the rules of a government that had been putty in the hands of the elites. Ratified in overwhelming numbers, the Constitution gave indigenous peoples, for the first time, the constitutional right to their language, religion, culture and lands. It established Human Rights, civil and social, like the right to food, a clean environment, education, jobs, and health care, binding the government to provide them. It declared the country a participatory democracy with direct input of people into political decision making through their communal councils and it asserted government control of oil revenues : Oil belongs to the people.''

''New modes of organization are called for. The political imagination must be reconfigured to the challenges of the present. However, we must recover from our past what that past regarded as utopian and thus was rejected by our predecessors and offer new forms of rebellion that can better ensure that such knowledge will re-impact the present more effectively.''

The above is excerpted, with my emphasis and drastically abridged from your excellent, very thought provoking but rather long (lol) link, elf. Thanx and in compliment, I append :

''A Socialism for the 21st Century'', by Prof. Richard D. Wolff : http://truth-out.org/news/item/16797-a-socialism-for-the-21st-century .

''Venezuela, the United States, and Obama'', by Paul Street : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37884.htm ;
''Venezuela Shows That Protest Can Be A Defence Of Privilege'', by Seamus Milne : http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/09/venezuela-protest-defence-privilege-maduro-elites ;
''The truth about Venezuela: a revolt of the well-off, not a 'terror campaign'!'', by Mark Weisbrot : http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/venezuela-revolt-truth-not-terror-campaign ;
''Socialism’s Critics Look at Venezuela & Say, ‘We Told You So’. But They're Wrong'', by Owen Jones : http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/owen-jones-socialisms-critics-look-at-venezuela-and-say-we-told-you-so-but-they-are-wrong-9155295.html &
"The Question of Socialism (And Beyond!) Is About To Open Up In These United States", by Gar Alperovitz : http://truth-out.org/news/item/15680-the-question-of-socialism-and-beyond-is-about-to-open-up-in-these-united-states .

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