Showing posts with label democratic socialist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democratic socialist. Show all posts

Monday, July 1, 2019

School Scope: The Debates: On Busing, Capitalism, and Socialism


Submitted to The WAVE for publication, July 5, 2019


School Scope:  The Debates: On Busing, Capitalism, and Socialism
By Norm Scott

The initial debates, while shallow in terms of drilling down, touched on a number of essential issues, at times raising more questions than answers. Headlines stressed the Biden/Harris confrontation on race and busing. I remember the contentious battles over busing back in the 60s and 70s and the consequential racial divides. Biden, as he often does, danced and obfuscated a bit by saying he opposed forced busing imposed by the federal government and we should leave it to the local communities. Harris pushed back about local communities run by people who are anti-segregation. We know there is a history of federal involvement in forcing integration in the schools from both parties – you know, when the Republicans were still a rational party – Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and Kennedy to Alabama and Mississippi.

I found Harris’ raising the issue, while legitimate, somewhat artificial – especially when those tee-shirts of her as a little girl started appearing the next morning. I would like to have all candidates raise their hands if they support busing as a solution to segregation today. I wonder if Harris would have raised her hand. When Bernie was asked specifically about the issue on Sunday, he gave a rational response that we rarely see from politicians: Is it a good idea to put kids on buses takes them out of their neighborhood for up to an hour ride each way? It is a surface tool that should ideally only be used when absolutely necessary. Real solutions call for housing and economic reforms. By the way, look at the streets on school days and count the buses.

The debate also focused open attacks on Bernie for being a socialist, with loaded questions from the NBC panel  - the right always points to them as liberals but they are as opposed to socialist oriented ideas as is the right. Hickenlooper who apparently sees Bernie’s ideas as a real threat, never missed an opportunity to attack Bernie indirectly by talking about socialism. (The July 1 New Yorker has an article: John Hickenlooper’s War on Socialism.)

 I was disappointed in some of Bernie’s responses which were stock and repetitive, but he did hammer the point that many of our problems are due to outrageous profits on health care. Yes, he said we would raise taxes but at the same time cut the costs of health care which is also a tax of sorts. Get rid of insurance companies and the cost of their profit disappears. He pointed to our high costs compared to universal health care nations with much lower costs (see Germany).

Bernie’s policies align with social democratic parties in capitalist Europe, many of whom have run the governments at times. Not to be confused with Democratic Socialists (DSA) who are closer to traditional anti-capitalist ideologies. DSA is a broad socialist tent and the majority seem to believe that socialism can be achieved by democratic means. But there are also people who do not support liberal democratic norms, like a multi-party system. Confusion around these terms should be cleaned up

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, a voice representing a vision of left-leaning economic analysis, was often ignored – until the 2008 crash and the crisis it created within capitalism and its structure. He has a new book, People, Power, And Profits which makes a case not for socialism but for progressive capitalism, sort of where Elizabeth Warren is coming from. He argues that we don’t have really free markets, a faux bedrock of capitalism, but an economic system concentrated in the hands of the few who in turn exercise control over the political system, thus leading to an increasing economic gap which has spurred populism on the right and the left. I know revolutionary socialists who believe in overthrowing capitalism who are cheered by this news since they feel it is pretty much what Marx predicted would happen. What he didn’t predict was that the right populists could defeat the left, as it did in Germany under Hitler.

A closing note on free markets. Trump Dept of Ed. appointee Betsy DeVos’s has rolled back Obama-era regulations, intended to protect students against predatory for-profit colleges, which trap students into high debt they can never repay, guaranteed by the federal government which funnels money into their hands. People who ask when Bernie of Warren talk about free college how are we paying for it don’t ask the same question about those tax payer funded profits.

Norm blogs for no profit at ednotesonline.com.

Comment from a parent activist:
A good article on busing by Matthew Delmont. 
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/kamala-harris-and-busing-debate/593047/

"Buses had long been used in the South—as well as in New York, Boston, and many other northern cities—to maintain segregation. This form of transportation was not controversial for white parents. Put more starkly, school buses were fine for the majority of white families; busing was not."

Plenty of parents are willing to make their kids travel out of their neighborhood to attend G&T programs.  
 
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Sunday, June 23, 2019

Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy - How they differ - NY Times

...if you ask five self-described democratic socialists what the term means, you’re likely to get five different answers... no federal official or Democratic candidate advocates communism.

At the other end is social democracy, which is common in Europe. It preserves capitalism, but with stricter regulations and government programs to distribute resources more evenly.
Ultimately, though, Sweden isn’t what democratic socialists like Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine, a quarterly socialist journal, are looking for. “We come from the same tradition,” he said of democratic socialists and social democrats. But generally, he added, social democrats see a role for private capital in their ideal system, and democratic socialists do not.
.....NYTimes
These exceprts are from a June 12, 2019 NY Times article on socialism that tried to sort out the various aspects - I thought it was one of the better pieces and included talking to the leader of Jacobin and the leader of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), people who do not get quoted in the mainstream press. I've tried to write about the same subject but often get it muddled -- even my wife, who occasionally reads my columns in The Wave commented how much clearer this NYT piece was than mine.

I heard last week on NPR attempts to define differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - she supports capitalism and the market based system but wants it tightly controlled - she would say that our current system is a distortion of capitalism. Bernie is an an avowed socialist - but what brand?

The NY Times has done some hits on his history trying to pin him to support for socialist regimes in the past that were not democratic socialists.

Mayor and 'Foreign Minister': How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold ...


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/bernie-sanders-burlington-mayor.html
Jun 12, 2019 - 1:49Sanders Presents Vision of Democratic Socialism in Speech.
What the article below does is try to articulate the differences between social democrats (regulated capitalism and markets and democratic socialists (capitalism nyet.) I joined DSA without understanding this --- DSA is a broad-based open tent for socialists of every brand but after a few meetings it seems clear to me that social democrats who believe in regulated capitalism don't really fit in. There are no debates over this in DSA -- the assumption is that you are there because you believe in socialism where the means of production are not in private hands. They call themselves "democratic" socialists because they think this can be brought about by democratic means and governance under socialism will be democratic. I have my doubts.

My experience in MORE has taught me a lot about the left and socialism. MORE has fundamentally become an arm of the DSA NYC labor branch. As for bringing about change through democratic means, the DSA people in MORE, many of whom are aligned with the ISO faction, gave us a very bad example -- they couldn't bring about change in a tiny irrelevant caucus with less than 20 active people without tossing out democracy. DSA as a whole is really trying to do things democratically, but that is as long as people are on the same page - roughly -- just wait until the spitting and splitting begins. I'm still a member but not active.

What Is Democratic Socialism? Whose Version Are We Talking About?


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/us/politics/democratic-socialism-facts-history.html