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MSNBC Runs Segment on Venezuelan Crisis, Refuses to Mention Socialism NewsBusters (press release) (blog) On Monday morning, Hallie Jackson ran a segment on MSNBC Live devoted to investigating the ills of Venezuela amid growing tensions in the South American country. For the entirety of the segment, neither the host nor her guest even mentioned the ...

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MSNBC Runs Segment on Venezuelan Crisis, Refuses to Mention Socialism - NewsBusters (press release) (blog)

Switzerland's Roger Federer holds aloft the winner's trophy after beating Croatia's Marin Cilic in their men's singles final match, during the presentation on the last day of the 2017 Wimbledon Championships at The All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, southwest London. Roger Federer won 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.

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Garbine Muguruza of Spain celebrates victory with the trophy after the Ladies Singles final against Venus Williams of The United States on day twelve of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon.

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The hearse departs St Joseph's Church after the funeral service for six year old Sunderland FC fan, Bradley Lowery on in Hartlepool, England. Bradley was diagnosed with neuroblastoma aged only 18 months. Hundreds of people lined the streets to pay their respects to the Sunderland football supporter who lost his battle with cancer last Friday.

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The EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, receives an Arsenal football top from Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels

Olivier Hoslet/AP

A blue whale skeleton forms the main exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London. The 126-year-old skeleton, named 'Hope', replaces 'Dippy' the Diplodocus dinosaur as the museum's main exhibit

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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are welcomed to New Scotland Yard by Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick and Metropolitan Police Acting Commissioner, Craig Mackey

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Carlos Sainz of Spain and Scuderia Toro Rosso driving the Scuderia Toro Rosso STR8 during F1 Live London at Trafalgar Square in London

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Orange Order members march past Ardoyne shops on the Crumlin Road in Belfast as part of the 'Twelfth of July' celebrations. The controversial flashpoint has seen many outbreaks of serious public disorder in the past due to contentious parades

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Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May gets up from her seat to deliver a speech on modern working practices at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London

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Cunard cruise liner Queen Elizabeth makes her way into the mouth of the River Mersey on her way to Liverpool past Antony Gormley's art installation 'Another Place' at Crosby, north west England

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Two fisherman gather fishing pots from the North sea near Whitley Bay with storm clouds overhead as rain is expected across many parts of the UK.

PA

Supporters of Charlie Gard hold up placards outside the High Court in central London

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Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves after a visit to Borough Market with Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull (not pictured) in central London

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A Loyalist climbs the Conway street bonfire built in preparation for the 11th night bonfire on July 10, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Tradition holds that the bonfires commemorate the lighting of fires on the hills to help Williamite ships navigate through Belfast Lough at night when Protestant King William III and his forces landed at Carrickfergus to fight the Catholic Jacobites, supporters of the exiled Catholic King James II. The bonfires also mark the beginning of the annual 12th of July Orange parades.

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A firefighter walks towards the scene of a fire at Camden Market in north London

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Buttermere in the Lake District in Cumbria, as the Lake District has been designated as a World Heritage Site, Unesco has said

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Jeremy Corbyn leader of the Labour Party stands in the balcony of the County Hotel as colliery bands pass below during the 133rd Durham Miners Gala

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Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip John May arrive for a concert at the Elbphilharmonie concert hall during the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany

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Spectators react on Henman Hill (Murray Mount) as Britain's Andy Murray wins against Italy's Fabio Fognini on the big screen at The All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, southwest London

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Britain's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Brexit Minister) David Davis (R) meets Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney for talks at no 11, Downing Street

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Revellers brave the heat at Wimbledon

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Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking after being awarded an honorary degree at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh

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Spectators are led in on day three of the Wimbledon Championships at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

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Queen Elizabeth II talks with Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during an audience at the Palace of Holyroodhouse

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Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay, with his wife Kati Mackinlay, leave Westminster Magistrates' Court in London where he faced charges over his 2015 general election expenses

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Security staff with dogs before the start of play at Wimbledon

Reuters

Competitors take part in the first ever Ironman triathlon to be held in Scotland. Almost 2000 competitors took part in the grueling swim, cycle and road race which ended in Holyrood park. The swimming section was held at Preston Links in Prestonpans.

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People hold placards reading 'Wot A DisMay' and 'Not One Day More' as they take part in an anti-austerity demonstration outside Parliament in London, Britain. Tens of thousands of people took part in a demonstration against British Government and called to end austerity, further cuts and privatisation.

EPA

A screen displaying an image of Martyn Hett outside Stockport Town Hall as mourners arrive for his funeral on June 30, 2017 in Stockport, England. Twenty-nine year old Martyn Hett was one of 22 people who died in the suicide bombing at Manchester Arena after attending an Ariana Grande concert

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Campaigners from Avaaz dressed as British Prime Minister Theresa May and Australian media Mogul Rupert Murdoch pose during a photocall outside the Houses of Parliament on Campaigners from Avaaz dressed as British Prime Minister Theresa May and Australian media Mogul Rupert Murdoch pose during a photocall outside the Houses of Parliament on June 29, 2017 in London, England. Culture Secretary Karen Bradley announced that the Competitions and Markets Authority is to conduct a further six-month investigation into Murdochs proposed 11.7bn takeover of Sky.

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Workers using safety harnesses abseil off Bray Tower on the Chacots Estate in North London. The abseilers were taking measurements and taking notes as they scaled the building. The high-rise Tower blocks in Camden are still in the process of evacuation with some tenants refusing to leave after the cladding on the buildings was discovered to be similar to that found on the fire stricken Grenfell Tower

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Workmen start to remove cladding on Hornchurch Court, Hulme, Manchester as as Prime Minister Theresa May has said there must be a "major national investigation" into the use of potentially flammable cladding on high-rise towers across the country over a period of decades in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire

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A festival-goer sleeps outside their tent at the end of the Glastonbury Festival of Music and Performing Arts on Worthy Farm near the village of Pilton in Somerset, South West England

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Residents leave their home on the Taplow Block on the Chalcots Estate on June 26, 2017 in London, England. Residents of the Chalcots Estate have been urged to leave their homes due to fire safety fears in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Four of the five Chalcots Estate towers in Camden, North London, are being evacuated after they were found to have similar cladding to that on Grenfell, attributed to contributing to the rapid spread of the blaze last week that killed at least 79 people

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Police officers on Romford Road in Forest Gate, east London, as people protest over the death of Edir Frederico Da Costa, who died on June 21 six days after he was stopped in a car by Metropolitan Police officers in Woodcocks, Beckton, in Newham, east London

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Britain's opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn addresses revellers from the Pyramid Stage at Worthy Farm in Somerset during the Glastonbury Festival

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British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses a news conference at the EU summit in Brussels, Belgium, June 23, 2017

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Cosplay fans (L-R) George Massingham, Abbey Forbes and Karolina Goralik travel by tube dressed in Harry Potter themed costumes, after a visit to one the literary franchise's movie filming locations at Leadenhall Market in London, Britain

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Racegoers cheer on their horse on Ladies Day at the Royal Ascot horse racing meet, in Ascot, west of London

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A reveller walks among the tipi tents at the Glastonbury Festival of Music and Performing Arts on Worthy Farm near the village of Pilton in Somerset, South West England

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A police officer lays some flowers passed over by a member of the public, close to Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, after one man died and eight people were taken to hospital and a person arrested after a rental van struck pedestrian

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The Borough Market bell is seen in Borough Market in central London following its re-opening after the June 3 terror attack

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Two women embrace in Borough Market, which officially re-opens today following the recent attack, in central London

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Mayor of London Sadiq Khan attends the re-opening of Borough market in central London following the June 3 terror attack

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People walk through Borough Market in central London following its re-opening after the June 3 terror attack

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News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, with one of his daughters, visit Borough Market, which officially re-opened today following the recent attack

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A woman reacts in front of a wall of messages in Borough Market, which officially re-opened today following the recent attack, in central London

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Vivenne Westwood walks the runway at the Vivenne Westwood show during the London Fashion Week Men's June 2017 collections

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Millwall fan and London Bridge hero Roy Larner on 'Good Morning Britain'

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Richard Arnold, Roy Larner, Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on 'Good Morning Britain'

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Young people like me who question socialism are being silenced - The Independent

It was 1881, and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had a serious socialist problem. Hed passed the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, which banned Social Democratic meetings, associations and newspapers, but he couldnt remove the party outright from the Reichstag. The socialists still found favor with too many constituents.

The political climate of the era was a result of German unification, the period stretching across the 19th century and culminating in 1871, when 26 small states, principalities, duchies and territories formed the German Republic. But thanks to the German constitution, Bismarck didnt have to worry about pleasing the populace; his chancellorship was approved solely by Wilhelm I. But with the European economy in free fall, a nearly successful assassination attempt on the kaiser, and a short-lived but bloody socialist uprising in France, Bismarck was determined to undermine a party that he saw as a danger to the volatile new nation state. So the Iron Chancellor came up with a masterful plan: beat the socialists at their own game by offering health insurance to the working class.

That was a calculation, says historian Jonathan Steinberg, the author of Bismarck: A Life. It had nothing to do with social welfare. He just wanted some kind of bribery to get social democratic voters to abandon their party.

Bismarck didnt care what the programKrankenversicherungsgesetzwas called or how it was described, as long as citizens knew that the statehis statecoined the idea. Call it socialism or whatever you like, Bismarck said during the 1881 Reichstag public policy and budget debates. It is the same to me.

So in 1883, with the passage of the Health Insurance Law, Bismarck made Germany into a welfare stateall to stymie the socialists. The law was the first national system in the world, Steinberg says. Both employers and employees paid into insurance funds, and the German government verified workers enrollment by comparing employer records with fund membership lists, threatening employers of uninsured workers with fines.

Over the next several decades, the initial law would be expanded with accident insurance (1884), disability insurance (1889) and unemployment insurance (1927)and before long, the rest of Europe had taken note of Germanys program. (Great Britain, for example, went in a different direction; its health care laws stipulated treatment be financed by the government through taxes.)

Bismarcks insurance scheme wasnt an entirely original idea. European governments had implemented public health measures since the 14th century, when the Italian city-states took measures to control the spread of bubonic plague through quarantines. And community organized health insurance groupscalled mutual societies or sick fundsappeared around the same time in certain professions. Miners in Bohemia, for example, had Knappschaftskassen, whose members paid into a common pot. The money went towards hospitals and the care of widows and orphans of miners killed in work accidents. The idea only grew in popularity during the Industrial Revolution, which dramatically reshaped the workforce. By the time Bismarck got around to his proposal five centuries later, 25 to 30 percent of workers in northwest Europe had sickness funds.

Factory work harmed worker health. There was a demand for healthcare that they needed to finance, says John Murray, an economist at Rhodes College and the author of Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds. But a key part of the Industrial Revolution thats overlooked is that once workers got paid in cash once a week or every few weeks, they had cash that could be spent on what we would call health insurance.

In other words, the availability of currency in densely populated cities made it logistically much easier to organize sickness funds. Farmers and workers like domestic servants were often paid with the goods they produced or in room and board rather than with cash, which made paying into a sickness fund much more complicated.

Those hurdles in the way of universal coverage remained unsolved under Bismarcks law. Anyone who earned a living through in-kind compensation (like farmers) werent required to join the insurance groups. But as the population grew in cities, coverage boomed. In 1885, the enrollment was 4.3 million Germans; by 1913, that number had jumped to 13.6 million. And this came with a number of surprising repercussions.

In the 19th century, Germany had been one of Europes largest labor exporters, with more than 1 million leaving the country between 1851 and 1860 alone. Most made the U.S. their destination. At the time, the combined effects of industrialization and the war against France had heightened a new sensitivity to the consequences of migration, both in economic and military terms, writes economic historian David Khoudour-Castras. By providing workers with government-mandated health insurancesomething they couldnt find anywhere elseGermany made itself more appealing to its citizens. Emigration decreased dramatically in the years leading up to World War I, in part because workers could take sick days if they stayed in Germany.

Meanwhile, the United States only started organizing mutual funds in the 1870s, and workers compensation in industrial accidents was limited before World War I. It wasnt until the Social Security Act of 1935 that the federal government got involved in a meaningful way, and even then most health insurance was employment-based, not unlike the Bismarck system but without the government mandates. As Khoudour-Castras writes, The level of protection of American workers against the main threats was very low before the Great Depression and virtually nonexistent before World War I. By contrast, most German workers were covered by social insurance mechanisms by 1913.

As for the German economy, it did grow in the decades after Bismarcks law passed; whether that was a direct response to the increasing number of people covered by insurance is hard to say. Yes, there was a correlation, but its not clear to me whether the growth caused greater insurance coverage or the other way around, Murray says. He adds that part of the benefit to the economy and the government was that with insurance, workers who fell sick were less likely to fall into poverty and strain the governments poor law institutions.

But did Bismarcks new insurance actually improve worker health? According to economists Stefan Bauernschuster, Anastasia Driva and Erik Hornung, it did. Between 1884 and the end of the century, blue collar worker mortality rates fell 8.9 percent, they write in a recent study. Surprisingly, the insurance was able to reduce infectious disease mortality in the absence of effective medication for many of the prevailing infectious diseases.

The German model evolved over the 20th century, but remained effective and popular. When the system was exported to the Netherlands, Belgium and France during World War II, each of the countries kept the model, despite the fact that it was imposed under Nazi occupation.

All told, Bismarcks system was a massive successexcept in one respect. His goal to keep the Social Democratic Party out of power utterly failed. The vote for the Social Democratic Party went up and by 1912 they were the biggest party in the Reichstag, Steinberg says. Perhaps fortunately for Bismarck, he wasnt around to see their rise. He died in 1898 without another chance to remove the socialists from power.

That Bismarck was able to create the system at all is thanks to a series of unlikely events, Steinberg says. After all, Bismarck only remained in power long enough to establish the law because of the longevity of Wilhelm Iwho survived multiple assassination attempts and lived to be 90 in a period when the life expectancy was around 40. If the kaiser had died sooner, his heir wouldve immediately replaced Bismarck, probably with a less conservative chancellor, and who knows what wouldve happened with the healthcare law.

[The insurance law] was manipulative, clever, worked well, and left a great inheritance, Steinberg says. But I think Bismarck never cared much that he was the founder of the welfare state in Germany.

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Bismarck Tried to End Socialism's GripBy Offering Government Healthcare - Smithsonian

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Is It Possible to Meld the Best of Capitalism and Socialism? - teleSUR English

Supporters of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn at a campaign event. Labour pulled off a spectacular election turnaround largely thanks to social media. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

Socialism is stubborn. After decades of dormancy verging on death, it is rising again in the west. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn just led the Labour party to its largest increase in vote share since 1945 on the strength of its most radical manifesto in decades. In France, the leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon recently came within two percentage points of breaking into the second round of the presidential election. And in the US, the countrys most famous socialist Bernie Sanders is now its most popular politician.

The reasons for socialisms revival are obvious enough. Workers in the west have seen their living standards collapse over the past few decades. Young people in particular are being proletarianized in droves. They struggle to find decent work, or an affordable place to live, or a minimum degree of material security. Meanwhile, elites gobble up a growing share of societys wealth.

But grievances alone dont produce political movements. A pile of dry wood isnt enough to start a fire. It needs a spark or several.

For the resurgent left, an essential spark is social media. In fact, its one of the most crucial and least understood catalysts of contemporary socialism. Since the networked uprisings of 2011 the year of the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish indignados weve seen how social media can rapidly bring masses of people into the streets. But social media isnt just a tool for mobilizing people. Its also a tool for politicizing them.

Social media has supplied socialists with an invaluable asset: the building blocks of an alternative public sphere. The mainstream media tends to be hostile to the left: proximity to power often leads journalists to internalize the perspectives of societys most powerful people. The result is a public sphere that sets narrow parameters for permissible political discourse, and ignores or vilifies those who step outside of them. Thats why social media is indispensable: it provides a space for incubating new kinds of political thinking, and new forms of political identity, that would be inadmissible in more established channels.

Every movement needs a petri dish for developing the specific contagion with which it hopes to infect the body politic. The Reformation had the printing press. The French revolution had the coffeehouse. Todays new new left has Twitter and Facebook.

Last months election in the UK offered a stark illustration of this dynamic. Much of the British media attacked Corbyn relentlessly in the weeks leading up to the election. An analysis from Loughborough University found that Labour received the vast majority of the negative coverage, while a study from the London School of Economics concluded that Corbyn had been the victim of a process of vilification.

In another era, such an assault mightve proven fatal. Fortunately, social media gave Corbyns supporters a powerful weapon. Banished from the public sphere, they built one of their own. They didnt merely use social media judging by the number of tweets and Facebook engagements, they dominated it. Pro-Labour memes, slogans, videos and articles saturated online networks. Some were funny, such as a viral video of Corbyn extemporaneously eating a Pringle. Others were serious, drawing on independent leftwing outlets such as Novara Media to advance an analysis of austeritys corrosive effects on British society. Together they made millions of people feel connected to a common project. They made Corbynism feel like a community.

Crucially, this community didnt just exist online. Contrary to the old refrain about the internet not being real life, the digital ferment paid analog dividends. Young people the heaviest users of social media turned out in greater numbers than usual, and they voted overwhelmingly for Labour.

Whats so bracing about the British election is how many elite assumptions it overturned. These include the belief that social media is bad for democracy. The notion that Twitter and Facebook play a toxic role in our political life has become a pillar of elite opinion in the era of Brexit and Trump. Its a familiar argument: online platforms deepen polarization by enclosing us in echo chambers where were only exposed to views we already agree with. Partisanship flourishes. Compromise becomes impossible.

The French Revolution had the coffeehouse. Todays new new left has Twitter and Facebook

This analysis has some truth to it, but largely misses the mark. Theres no doubt that social media can be a cesspool. It can spread misinformation, abuse and all manner of extremist hatred. After all, social medias defining trait is its capacity to connect like-minded people. It follows that the communities it creates vary widely by the kind of people being connected.

But this aspect of social media is also what makes it useful for todays socialists. Bubbles can be beneficial. They can provide an emerging movement with a degree of unity, a sense of collective identity, that helps it cohere and consolidate itself in its fragile early phases.

Of course, movements cant stay bubbles if they want to win. They have to move from the margins to the mainstream. But social media is the soil where they can begin to take root, where they can cultivate a circle of allies and agitators who will carry their ideas out into the wider world. And this is good for democracy, because it enables genuinely popular political alternatives to emerge. It weakens the power of elites to police the limits of political possibility, and amplifies voices that could not otherwise make themselves heard.

Instead of sealing people off into echo chambers, social media can serve as a stepping stone for movements that aspire to achieve mass appeal. Just because social media helps midwife a movement doesnt mean that movement is fated to insularity. Labour began its campaign trailing the Tories by more than 20 points. In seven short weeks, the partys activists pulled off the most dramatic turnaround in modern British history. Powered in large part by social media, they closed the gap quickly enough to wipe out the Conservative majority. Labour now enjoys an eight-point lead in the polls a stunning reversal from a few months ago.

If polarization were as absolute as many mainstream observers believe, such an upset would be impossible. But political preferences are far more fluid than is often assumed. Many people are up for grabs, especially at a time when anti-establishment feeling is running high. As a result, social media doesnt necessarily strengthen existing partisan divisions. It can also scramble them, by surfacing new political possibilities. This is especially helpful in luring the large numbers of non-voters to the polls. Its no coincidence that the British election saw the highest turnout in 25 years.

The prospects for turnout-driven victories are even greater in the US, where political alienation is particularly pronounced. Only 55.7% of the voting-age population cast ballots in the last presidential election. Given these numbers, the model of an electorate split down the middle, locked into their irreconcilable Facebook feeds, is misleading. You cant have a country divided in half when half the country doesnt vote.

These are the people that the rising American left must win if it wants to replicate the success of its British comrades. Non-voters already form a natural constituency for progressive politics: they tend to be younger and poorer, and broadly support redistributive policies. But organizing this silent social-democratic majority will require more partisanship, not less.

Tepid centrism will not politicize people who believe that politics has nothing to offer them. Only a strongly defined alternative can. Social media offers a way to articulate that alternative, and to push it into public view. Tweets alone wont put socialists in power. But given the scale of the lefts ambition, and the obstacles arrayed against it, theyre not a bad place to start.

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How social media saved socialism - The Guardian