Editor,
On October 1, 2013 the United States government partially shut down. This was due to a budget dispute between the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, over the funding of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). What is often overlooked in this discussion is how the media and the propagandist dialectics of the GOP have molded this discussion.
There are two major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. First, there are the state-based insurance exchanges, where individuals and businesses can buy health insurance plans from corporations.
Second, there are the individual mandates which require individuals to buy health insurance by 2014. So why are the House Republicans and major media outlets portraying this law as socialism? Some have argued that the passing of any law to offset public disparity is socialistic all in itself.
However, obviously buying health insurance from major corporations has never been a part of the international socialist platform.
The actual socialist movement has advocated for decades a United Kingdom-style healthcare model here in the United States. This is where people’s taxes, progressive taxes, are taken out of paychecks and in return anyone can visit a hospital anytime, thus doing away with the despot health insurance industries.
Currently there are corporations interested in keeping power in the hands of the political and corporate-capitalistic classes.
Socialism threatened this power dynamic by offsetting corporate power and placing it into the hands of the overall populace.
Capitalism requires as much privatization as possible along with the requirement of rewarding corporations by means of subsidies and tax cuts.
Those rewards are often advocated by the Republican Party.
The so-called “left-leaning party” (the Democrats) agree with this current economic power concentration, espoused by corporations and Republicans. However they also think that working class people should have social safety nets such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
If you are in the elite class, this centrist view, portrayed by the Democratic Party, would be about as far left as you would want the country to go. The corporate media portrays then this moderate view as “socialist,” causing average Americans to think modernity is what socialism is and any further “left” would be extremist and nonsensical.
This is the current state of political affairs in the United States. We have a centrist president portrayed as a socialist, a president who defends health insurance companies, bails out corporations through stimulus packages and threatens war with bombs on other countries.
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And because he is portrayed as an extreme leftist, by the elitists and by Republicans, he has placed the actual American left in a precarious position in defending him and insurance companies due to their fear of a more reactionary GOP party and their draconian platforms. Does anyone on the left or anyone who is an actual socialist think that this is acceptable?
Congress has closed down the government over a law that appeases health insurance companies because the right-wing has painted it as socialism. If Obama fought for a single-payer system, like that of the UK, this fight may be worth having. Two sides of one business party (Democrats and Republicans) are disputing this falsified argument in Washington and working class Americans are suffering for it.
Jose L. Flores
UNM student
