Leading Democratic Candidates for the Presidency Have Taken a Surprising New Turn

[T.Ruth2power]

Leading Democrats: “Expropriate the Expropriators”
by Paul Street
November 10, 2007


“Let’s Get Real”

“Listen,” Hillary Clinton told a stunned collection of reporters yesterday in Des Moines, Iowa. “If the Republicans and the right wing noise-machine are going to just constantly call us socialists, let’s show them what the word means. And let’s quit running from who we actually are. I’ve been doing it for too long. It’s time to say what we really think. No more hiding behind reformist bourgeois labels and agendas. Listen up Fox News, because you’re going to love this. We’re Marxist-Lenninists, and we always have been. Deal with it.”




Wearing a red bandana and a Che Guevera T-Shirt autographed by Hugo Chavez, Clinton introduced her “fellow-travelers on the road to American and world socialism.” Her new “comrades” and fellow Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama (sporting a new black beret and dashiki), John Edwards (wearing a vintage Soviet Red Army jacket purchased from a Russian clothier), Bill Richardson (dressed as Fidel Castro and sporting a Cuban cigar), Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd joined her on the stage of a high school auditorium to unveil a new 10-point plan “to overthrow private ownership in the means of production and distribution” and to establish “workers’ control.”



Edwards quoted Marx and Engels with approval: “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already abolished for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

“Working with Capitalist Scumbags”



Clinton confessed that a desire to “hide my Marxism” led her to undermine universal health care by advancing an incomprehensible, neoliberal and corporate-friendly health-care friendly health care reform package during the early 1990s. “‘Managed competition,’ we called it – what a terrible and reactionary joke! Our slogan should have been “All Power to the Big Six Insurance Companies!’”

Fear of “being outed as a radical socialist” has induced Clinton to oppose elementary increases in the taxation of privileged households’ exorbitant incomes to bolster the funding of Social Security and to hire Mark Penn as her main political advisor. Penn runs a corporate public relations firm that specialize in spin for union-busters, Shell Oil, and big tobacco companies.

“It makes it tougher for your guys to detect my Marxism,” Hillary told reporters, “when I’m working with capitalist scumbags like Penn.”

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14243