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Steven Strauss, Opinion columnist Published 3:15 a.m. ET Dec. 18, 2020 | Updated 2:04 p.m. ET Dec. 19, 2020

Republicans attack Democrats as socialists, but the policies they support show they're the true socialists. Progressives should hold them accountable.

With Senate control on the line in two Georgia runoff elections next month, Republicans are claiming that President-elect Joe Biden and the Democrats are socialists. Thats their shorthand for government interference in the economy, corruption, failure to enforce the law, incompetence, and subsidizing people who should support themselves.

Let me suggest four areas where the incoming Biden administration, allied with serious conservatives, can fight socialism while upholding progressive values.

Eliminate farm subsidies and farm support programs (which will cost $46 billion this year up from $22 billion last year and will account for about 40% of this years farm income) that interfere with agricultural markets. As Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute noted: Agriculture is no riskier than other industries and does not need an array of federal subsidies. Also from the Cato Institute: About 97%of all farm households are wealthier than the median U.S. household. Farm income was 52%higher than median U.S. household income.

I know of no progressive organization that supports these farm subsidy programs. However, Americas farmers are different from other Americans. They are 95% white and do one thing the majority of Americans refuse to do: Farmers overwhelmingly vote Republican (President Donald Trump may have gotten as much as 85% of the farm votethis year).

Eliminate the money-losing socialist National Flood Insurance Program. From the point of view of progressives (who believe climate change is a real and pressing concern), NFIP makes no sense. It encourages living in flood-prone areas (where progressives believe flooding will get worse due to climate change) by offering subsidized federal flood insurance.As the General Accounting Office noted: NFIP premiums do not reflect the full risk of loss, which increases the Federal fiscal exposure created by the program, obscures that exposure from Congress and taxpayers

In 2017, Congress wrote off $16 billion in losses from this program. But by March 2020, it had already accumulated another $20 billion in losses. About 60% of NFIP policies were issued in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, which all voted for Trump this year.

U.S. Capitol building on March 25, 2020, in Washington, D.C.(Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

Invest $10 billion per year to fund IRS tax enforcement, targeted at the very wealthythose making over $1 million a year. According to a recent estimate by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, University of Pennsylvania law professorNatasha Sarin and former IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti, this investment would yield about $100 billion a year in extra Federal tax revenues.

Sen. Sherrod Brown: Corporations exploit workers even amid COVID. They don't deserve to run the economy.

If youre a conservative who thinks defunding police enforcement is a bad idea,you shouldthink the same aboutthe recent defunding of IRS tax enforcement (by cutting the IRS budget).The IRS budget shrank 20% in real terms from 2010 to 2019,while in the same period the U.S. economy grew about 25%. The result is that the number of audits of Americans making over $1 million per year declined by about 75%.At the same time, the IRS was pressured to focus its scarce resources on auditing low income Americans. Notably, the main driver of thisIRS defunding is the GOP.

Make states routinely subsidized by the rest of the countryget their act together. Most American states are roughly in balance between what their residents pay into the federal government and what they receive back.A few states (mainly Democratic) are maker states (among them Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York) that pay vastly more to the federal government than they receive.

Then there are states that get back a lot more than their residents pay in taxes. These taker states are mainly low-income states in the southeast, most of them dominated by Republicans. Given our progressive tax system and safety net, federal money tends to automatically flow to these states.

If youre a conservative, transferring money from makers to takers is generally frowned on.If youre a progressive, it makes sense to ask some hard questions about whats going on with these taker states. Because, despite all the money these states receive, they dont do a good job for their citizens.

Mississippi illustrates just how bad this situation is.Annually, Mississippi receives $19 billion more from the federal government than it pays into the system.Despite this support, Mississippi has the highest homicide rate, highest infant mortality ratesand lowest median household income of any American state.

No socialist nightmare: Georgia, if youre listening, ignore conservatives peddling socialist Senate hallucinations

It's time the leaders in these poorly run states make changes toimprovethe lives of their citizens hopefully while reducing their hefty dole from the rest of the country. If they are unwilling to reform, maybe federal money and programs should be cut off.

Some of what Im proposing will require legislation, and the devils in the details. But if youre an ideological conservative, you should be willing to work with the Biden administration to implement some or all of these proposals.

If youre a hypocritical member of the GOP (that is, you want to keep using federal tax dollars to buy the farm vote for Republican candidates), and-or a Trumpist, you probably loathe everything Ive proposed.But its time for the incoming Biden administration to pull back the curtain on which is the trueparty of socialism in America.

Steven Strauss is a lecturer and visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairsand a member of USA TODAYs Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @Steven_Strauss

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Who are you calling a socialist? Republicans are the real party of socialism in America - USA TODAY

Let Me Tell You Why Youre Wrong Podcast

In Episode 148 of the Let Me Tell You Why Youre Wrong Podcast, Dave & Jessica cover a myriad of topics, including your opportunity to blow up a building named after Trump, the Supreme Courts latest ruling on private Christian schools, and the narrative that Joe Biden is a fiscal conservative.Plus, the quest to make sure the path to socialism never runs through the state of Georgia and commentary about how poorly Republicans sue the government.

Listen on Libsyn:

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This podcast drops every Monday.Subscribe to the LMTYWYW YouTube Channel Follow LMTYWYW on Facebook

*Opinions expressed on the show reflect the views of the commentators and any guests, not those of AllOnGeorgia. Show published on AllOnGeorgia with express permission from commentators.

Jessica Szilagyi is a Statewide Contributor for AllOnGeorgia.com. She focuses primarily on state and local politics as well as issues in law enforcement. She has a background in Political Science with a focus in local government and has a Master of Public Administration from the University of Georgia. Jessica is a Like It Or Not contributor for Fox5 in Atlanta and has two blogs of her own: The Perspicacious Conservative and Hair Blowers to Lawn Mowers. Connect with Jessica.

David Roberts is a native of South Florida who moved to Georgia in his teens. He joined The Army at 18 as a Psychological Operations specialist and served six years in that role. Since leaving active duty, he served in both Reserve and Guard components. After The Army, Dave went to work for Wachovia and SouthTrust banks serving as a business banker and Assistant Vice President. After a few mergers, he went to work with his brother, Rob, who taught him the HVAC trade. Several years of learning under his older brother and Dave was ready to go out on his own. In 2016, he started DR COOL Heating and Air in Dallas, GA. Being a prominent business owner in Paulding County has afforded him the privilege of serving his community and allowed him to become involved in politics. Calling himself a Republitarian, Dave was invited to host The Let Me Tell You Why Youre Wrong Podcast in 2018.

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Ep. 148: Implosions, Lockdowns, and the Path to Socialism - All On Georgia

Sometimes you really cant make it up. I found out that the Labour party had administratively suspended me yesterday on walking through the door after volunteering for a few hours at the Walton Vale community hub. The food co-op provides local people in our ward of Warbreck, north Liverpool, with 15 worth of shopping for their 3.50 membership.

It felt like a punch in the guts. Was this the way a democratic socialist party treated its grassroots members in Labours safest seat of Liverpool Walton? Ive voted Labour my whole life, but like hundreds of thousands of socialists, I finally joined the party when Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

For the first time in decades, a political party was offering a genuine alternative to a status quo that has left so many in poverty, without a steady job or secure housing. We had a leadership that stood on picket lines with NHS and transport workers, a leader whose first visit was to the refugee camp in Calais.

Instead of trying to play safe in the pursuit of some unspecified middle ground that seemed to be forever shifting, the party was standing on a socially transformative platform.

Id campaigned on issues such as food poverty, poor housing, trade union rights, libraries, and solidarity with refugees for years, working closely with campaigners and trade unions to fight those battles that only working-class communities have to fight. And Ive been lucky to continue this work alongside hundreds of my fellow Labour Party members in Walton some of the finest, most resilient people I have ever known.

We have fought to keep fire stations open, we have supported public sector workers resisting cuts, and weve mobilized to chase fascists out of our city. We have distributed thousands of leaflets outside our football grounds opposing the evil of racism. We have worked in food banks and street teams supporting homeless people. We even recognized our socialist traditions by holding a 600-strong march to the grave of socialist writer Robert Tressell, as well as hosting annual Eric Heffer memorial lectures.

We may be in the safest Labour seat in the country, but we are not complacent. We organize in our wards and we fan out across the North West at election time in marginal seats. We dont just hold meetings or hand out leaflets. We get stuck in and campaign on the issues that matter most to our community. We do this off our own backs, with very little support from party staff, because we care, and because we believe this country needs to change.

I think this is the Labour Party at its best. Its socialism in action and if we worked this way everywhere maybe the Red Wall would not have turned blue. But right now, too many members are experiencing the Labour Party at its worst. Across the country, ordinary members and socialists are being unjustly suspended by Labour Party staff simply for standing up for the democratic rights of local parties to organize and debate freely, or for expressing a view over former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyns shabby treatment at the hands of the new leadership.

So, when I found out that I had been suspended by the Labour Party, with no evidence, it didnt demoralize me. It stiffened my resolve. I am determined to see members suspended for showing solidarity returned to the party. Its not pleasant to feel like youre being driven out of a party you have given so much to. And its easy to want to give up. But I will not give up and I urge every suspended member and everyone who supports them to stay, organize and fight.

Theres too much at stake to leave this fight behind and let the Tories off the hook. I am organizing with other wrongly suspended members, and with the thousands of socialists who oppose the crackdown on principled, socialist Labour Party members. And I want to say, firmly and politely: Mr David Evans, you will not drive socialists out of the Labour Party. Were here to stay.

Read this article:
Socialists Will Not Be Driven Out of the Labour Party - Jacobin magazine

In Australia, the Great Depression was a time of bitter class struggle that radicalized every section of society. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was no exception, as rank-and-file members of the New South Wales (NSW) branch established the Socialization Units, working-class organizations whose stated purpose was to prepare for a takeover of industry under workers control.

Members of the Socialization Units claimed that they were merely carrying out Labors program, which calls for the democratic socialization of industry, production, distribution and exchange. Yet, as labor historian Nick Martin observed, the Socialization Units came up against the party machine and therefore constituted one of the great rank-and-file revolts inside an established social-democratic party.

Jack Langs NSW state government formed the backdrop of the Socialization Units. Premier from 192527 and 193132, Lang was a reformer who rose to prominence after opposing the pro-conscription wing of his party during World War I.

Lang had his own political shortcomings, but his rebellion was made possible by widespread working-class radicalization, both inside and outside the ALP. In turn, his premiership accelerated a leftward shift in the Labor Party. At the head of this stood the Socialization Units.

Left-wing grassroots ALP members and junior union officials first established the Socialization Units in 1930, in an attempt to battle Lang and the party machine. In the words of A. W. Thompson, ALP branch president and organizer for the milk employees union, their purpose was to devise ways and means to propagate the socialization of industry.

Drawing in and educating Labors mass base, the Socialization Units rejected a purely parliamentary road to socialism. Instead, they proposed to elect an ALP government that would nationalize industry. Subsequently, the units would push further, democratizing workplaces and paving the way for a socialist society.

Prior to the emergence of a formalized faction system in the ALP in the 1970s, the units also functioned as a socialist bloc within the NSW ALPs rank-and-file membership. In place of Labors distant and utopian commitment to socialism as a light on the hill, they advocated a rather more immediate slogan: socialism in our time.

The units operated in working-class areas of NSW, primarily in Sydney, where they won a mass audience. They mainly campaigned by hosting widely attended public meetings and by organizing militants to knock on doors in working-class suburbs surrounding the city while selling copies of the units newspaper Socialisation Call.

Interestingly, a Labor Propaganda Army had been established two years previously, also supported by branch-based agitational units. It was a precedent and a substrate for this style of bottom-up organizing. Thanks to their emphasis on grassroots activism, the Socialization Units quickly built a mass base, inspiring an influx of young workers to join the ALP.

At their height, the units organized thirty socialist education classes, teaching history and economics. They also maintained a theater group, and even a socialist orchestra. This allowed the NSW ALP to relate to a broader social radicalization while strengthening its own organization.

The Socialization Units demonstrate the power of independent socialist education, communication, and cultural production, especially when such initiatives are embedded deeply in working-class communities. By establishing the Labor Education League, the units both pioneered large-scale socialist education and took steps toward forming a labor college.

There are echoes of our own time in a context where the mass media was hostile to workers interests, while university education was inaccessible to many and often ideologically compromised for those who could afford it. The efforts of the 1930s offer a strong template for how to build class consciousness from below under such challenging conditions.

When the 1931 NSW Labor conference took place, the units had grown rapidly so that they came close to securing majority support. Delegates loyal to the units were able to push through a provocative motion insisting that the ALP commit itself to the socialization of Australian industry within three years.

Such militancy revealed a willingness to confront the ALPs top-down, conservative leadership structures. It makes for a stark contrast with todays highly bureaucratized Socialist Left faction inside the ALP, renowned for collaborating with the Labor Right.

The NSW Labor leadership did not approve. The Socialization Units were soon locked into a bitter rivalry with Jack Langs Inner Group, an alliance of union officials also known as the Trades Hall Reds. Although the Inner Group often supported militancy, they regarded the Socialization Units as a direct political rival and a threat to their hegemony over the labor movement.

Clarrie Martin, a Labor parliamentarian who helped establish the units, was frustrated by the conflict. Following a poor election result, he criticized Lang at a meeting of the units:

My experience in parliament has consolidated my socialist beliefs and made me realize more fully than ever [the] need for spreading socialist thought in my opinion Lang, though a good fighter, knew very little about socialism.

Crucially, the units did not involve themselves directly in unions, isolating themselves from many politically active unionists. Although they did later turn toward organized labor, by that time it was too late.

This gave the Inner Group a free hand to use the political resources of the party machine to attack the Socialization Units, outvoting them with sizeable union-based voting blocs at ALP conferences, and publishing hit pieces in the widely circulated official party newspaper, Labor Daily. This magnified a built-in weakness of the Socialization Units. Their attempt to democratize the Labor Party relied on using party resources. When the party machine turned on the units, this made them vulnerable.

Perhaps the most dramatic phase of this rank-and-file revolt was its rapid disorganization and demise, led by Jack Lang himself, who passed a motion at the NSW ALPs 1933 conference, severing the Socialization Units from the party. Just two years after their breakthrough victory at the 1931 ALP state conference, the units found themselves isolated.

Aside from the ALP, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was the largest socialist organization in Depression-era Australia. By this stage, however, the party had a leadership that was firmly loyal to Moscow. In accord with the so-called Third Period line the label for a strategic orientation promoted by the Comintern to communist parties worldwide the CPA took a wildly sectarian attitude to the Socialization Units, denouncing them as social fascists.

This formulation stemmed from the USSRs official analysis of social-democratic parties, which argued that they stood in the way of social revolution and paved the way for fascism. According to this view, communists should shun any proposal for fighting unity with social-democratic or labor parties.

As a result, the CPA did not distinguish between rank-and-file workers within the ALP and the partys officialdom. This was a crude caricature obstructing a more concrete critique of the failures and contradictions of post-WWI social-democracy and the trade union bureaucracy.

The CPAs sectarianism was not universal, however. Some individuals and small socialist groups did join the Socialization Units, seeing a potential to drive them in a more radical direction while building up the ranks of non-ALP socialists.

For their part, the Socialization Units had a mixed analysis of the ALP. The notion that socialism might be introduced over the space of three years following a conference resolution seems remarkably naive today. But this reflected the enthusiasm of the socialists who built the units, as well as their failure to foresee the extent of ruling-class resistance, or the role that the ALP itself would play.

Their lack of self-sufficient organization also meant that this revolt from below was vulnerable to attack from above, by party and union elites like Lang, who wished to maintain a firm grip on the movement.

The early 1930s were a time of deep economic crisis. In this environment, a rough-hewn class struggle ideology was attractive to the various fractious left forces, both inside and outside Labor. Going to the working class was the order of the day. Yet socialists differed on how this should be done.

The rise and fall of the Socialization Units speaks directly to this question. Their history stands as a caution against the danger of adopting a self-defeating, ultra-sectarian stance, as the CPA did. And it also warns us against the inherent vulnerability of organizational or political dependence on parties like the ALP.

Although his commitment to socialism was largely verbal, Langs strategy also failed disastrously. He earned the ire of the ruling class when, in 1931, he rejected the Melbourne Agreement which committed Australias states to austerity in order to satisfy their debt to British banks. Lang even withdrew funds from NSWs state bank accounts and hid them at Sydneys Trades Hall, the state headquarters of the union movement.

The result was a constitutional crisis and a historic rupture within the ALP. Much to the delight of the bosses, the pro-austerity Labor prime minister James Scullin went ahead and expelled the entire NSW branch. Shortly after, Langs rebellion was scuttled in 1932 when NSW governor Sir Philip Game dismissed his government.

As defeat for the units drew near, Clarrie Martin gave the following warning:

If the reactionary elements succeed in liquidating the socialization movement it will be to declare that the Labor Party is not a socialist party; that it is content with the policy and legislation of anemic liberalism.

Those Martin branded as anemic liberals showed themselves unable or unwilling to resist the overthrow of their very own government. In a different, more combative scenario, a socialist Labor leader might have called on the Socialization Units to defend a reforming government against a ruling-class coup.

This, in turn, might have helped to overcome the limits of their strategy, transforming their educational and cultural work into industrial and political muscle. It might have taken longer than three years. But if the Socialization Units had anticipated and overcome the contradictions of social democracy, the worker militants who built them may yet have seen socialism in theirlifetimes.

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How Australian Workers Prepared to Socialize Industry During the Great Depression - Jacobin magazine

For many of us last months election was bittersweet, thankful that Joe Biden won the race, but disappointed that more than 70 million people chose Donald Trump. I dont quite understand how Christians could vote for a man who is a perpetual liar who brags about grabbing women. His own niece, in her book Too Much and Never Enough, describes him as an immoral, unabashed crook.

It may be that he got so many votes because the GOP scared people with all their ads warning of socialism. Sadly, the general public doesnt seem to understand the word socialism. We have lots of socialism in our society already, and socialistic programs I dare say we would not want to do without. Our public schools, police and fire departments are socialistic; when the county snow plow clears our roads, thats socialistic. And of course many of us receive a Social Security check every month, and we certainly wouldnt want to part with our socialistic Medicare.

View original post here:
Letter: Americans depend on examples of socialism in government - telegraphherald.com