John McCain has invested much of his campaign rhetoric on the claim that Barack Obama, by virtue of his policies on taxes and health care, is “trying to re-distribute wealth,” as McCain hopes thereby to capitalize on the tendency of people to want to decide for “themselves” how to spend their money, not put it in the hands of “government.” Since the public associates wealth re-distribution with socialism, it is easy enough to put the kiss of death of that philosophy on an opponent who breathes a word about any interference in the “free market” in determining income.
As it happens, Obama is not a wealth re-distributor, at least of the kind suggested by McCain, the Robin Hood stealing from the wealthy to fund the poor. True enough, he does propose middle class tax cuts as opposed to those for the very wealthy, but his real political agenda, if not his campaign rhetoric, is to promote the re-distribution of income in the reverse Robin Hoodism of taking from the poor to provide for the wealthy. He has vividly shown his colors in that regard by his not only supporting but very actively lobbying for the bailout legislation that passed Congress. As Michael Hudson and Glen Ford, among many others have noted, the bailout has promoted the protection of the incomes of the most powerful and wealthy among Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, which has the “distinction” both of furnishing a former CEO as the current Secretary of Treasury and being the largest contributor to Obama’s presidential campaign. The practical result of the bailout is likely to be to further the already-strong wave of commercial consolidations, as large banks will use some of their bailout funds to help finance their vulture-like purchase of other firms that are going into bankruptcy. The consequence of this process can only be the re-distribution of financial power from many small firms to those of an ever-diminishing number of ever-larger ones. This is anything but socialism; however it is reminiscent of Marx’ analysis of capitalism in its dying days as suffering from the instability resulting from capitalism’s law of capital accumulation. (The big ones eat the little ones and get bigger.)
While this McCain and Republican characterization of Obama as a wealth re-distributing socialist is totally false, it does serve well enough the political interest of both the McCain and Obama campaigns. It does so for the GOP by helping to mobilize the government-hating “libertarian” wing of the Republican Party which threatens in this election to desert to the Bob Barr campaign. But it does even more for the Obama campaign because it takes from the mouth of the enemy the false image of himself as a “progressive” and more precisely a “populist” whose concern is for “the people” and not “the corporation.” It conveys onto his image a mantle of “soft” socialism which doesn’t really drive many people from his support (who’s afraid of a “socialist” for god’s sake?)…but provides perhaps just the right CYA for progressives who really do believe in economic justice, the reduction of inequalities of wealth among those of different ethnicities, genders and occupations. Never mind that, when push comes to shove, Obama can be counted on to fall in line with the wealthy on such issues as a bankruptcy bill (written by credit card companies, voted for by Obama) and the recent bailout. He gets to have his cake and to eat it: he attracts the support of the “little guy” while he pulls in the cash from his wealthy corporate sponsors. When Thomas Franks wrote “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” he wondered at the ability of Republicans to pose as “Joe the Plumber” type populists all the while they were using their votes to enact policies opposed to the economic interests of middle class people in middle America. Well, the DLC has finally learned to play this game in a way to rival the virtuosity exercise of that art on which the GOP has had a near-monopoly. With the Obama candidacy we seem to have a “Kansas-ization” of the whole country, as people of modest means have rushed to support the candidacy of a tool of wealthy interests. So the country may well go from red to blue this year, but this will be a cosmetic change that won’t change a whit the overall drift toward an ever-more economically polarized society.
Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist
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