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Chuck Woolery, the well-coiffed former Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection host, has recently complained that his right-wing views have prevented him from finding work in Hollywood. His foray, via Twitter, into the complex relationship between the European Jewish diaspora, German philosophy and the rise of socialism in 20th century Russia is unlikely to have Burbank's best producers rushing to their phones.

Woolery is no neophyte to the profitable business of attacking and riling liberals and Democrats, oftenwith lines that could have been borrowed from Rush Limbaugh. For example, when tellingFOXBusiness earlier in May thathis politics stopped him getting work, he addedhisobservation the left is really operating on all German ideas instead of American ideas. While this could be a reference to the moral philosophy of Enlightenment-era Immanuel Kant, it far more likely an allusion to Adolf Hitler.

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Woolery has also made known his suspicionof Islam, tweeting last week in response to the suicide bombing in Manchester, England:

While he may no longer be a television mainstay, Woolery is the host of a short podcast, Blunt Force Truth, in which he uses his once-ubiquitous baritone to harangue the rights favorite targets: liberal nitwits, socialist Europe andthe Arab World. One recent segment, for example, involved a tortured joke about liberals and rectal cranial infusion, whatever that is. The New York Times, in a measuredassessment, called him a firebrand who takes particular delight in fricasseeing liberal celebrities.

It is unclear why Woolery chose Memorial Day to expound on his theories about Judaism and socialism. Those theories, such as they are, are neither new nor correct. Karl Marx, the principal author of The Communist Manifesto, wasJewish, but his forebears religion played no known role in the formation of his world-changing theories ofhistory, social organizationand the interactions between capital and labor.

In 1942, the historian Solomon F. Bloom wrote that Antisemitic enemies of Marxism have naturally made the most of the Jewish origin and ancestry of its principal leader in order to confound at one blow both Judaism and socialism. It looks as if Woolery borrowed from this very playbook.

As for Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, his own Jewish background is even more tenuous. While he did have Jewish roots, these were distant and not at all known by his Bolshevik compatriots or his Soviet subjects.

But in broadly blaming Jews for the debacle that was Soviet Communism, Woolery has an unlikely ally: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the famous 1962 chronicle of the gulags. In 2003, Solzhenitsynan ethnic Russian who tended towardSlavophiliapublished Two Hundred Years Together. The opaque title was a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population, as The Guardian explained. The book caused a furor for seeming blaming some of the worst depredations of Soviet rule on Jews while downplaying the abuses Jews faced, especially under Stalin.

In defending the book, Solzhenitsyn said, I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back.

A review of Solzhenitsyn's book on the website of white nationalist David Duke praises the author, a grand old man, for revealing the awe-inspiring extent of the Jewish domination of the Soviet Union during its first two decades of existence.

Reactions to Woolerys tweet were, for the most part,critical:

Woolery tried to explainhimself later in the afternoon:

Woolery might be heartened to know that he has support on Gab, a social network that has recently gained favor with the extreme right. One user called him Chuck No More Jewish Tomfoolery Woolery," while another suggested the Holocaust was a hoax.

A screenshot from the social network Gab. Gab

How this will affect Woolery's triumphant return to Hollywood is unknown.

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Game Show Host Chuck Woolery Accused of Anti-Semitism After Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin Comments on Twitter - Newsweek

With a significant worker co-op sector, the state's dependence on enterprises will no longer mean a dependence on a small minority: shareholders and boards of directors who control capitalist enterprises. Instead it will mean, at least in part, the state's dependence on masses of workers who democratically control worker co-ops. (Photo: Susannah Kay / The New York Times)

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Capitalism as a system is now increasingly challenged. Critics proliferate and steadily deepen their opposition (alongside, of course, the persistence of capitalism's defenders). Yet capitalism's traditional "other" -- namely, socialism -- has also been widely devalued. It has lost its position as the goal (however variously interpreted) for anti-capitalist social movements. When not simply ignored, socialism (and even more its derivative "communism") is often treated as utterly pass. When taken seriously, it is mostly a vague rhetorical gesture expressing criticism of the capitalist status quo, not advocacy of a concrete alternative. Socialist parties now mainly support capitalism but with a human face -- i.e. with the social supports and safety nets that their "conservative" counterparts disdain.

Sometimes the advocacy of socialism expresses a systemic rejection of, or opposition to, capitalism. But even then, the current use of the term "socialism" lacks a clear, concrete definition of what genuinely new economic system it entails. What exactly differentiates it from and renders it superior both to capitalism and to what "old" socialism used to mean?

To enrich and strengthen anti-capitalism by giving it such a new, definitive goal, we need to revision socialism. On the one hand that means shedding accumulated historical baggage that now undermines and prevents socialism from being a prominent goal of social change. On the other hand, a revised socialism requires new content that can inspire and motivate. That is now available. Old socialism's drawn-out demise since the 1970s helped give birth to a new 21st century socialism whose basic contours we can now contrast with old socialism.

The old socialism that evolved across the 19th and 20th centuries eventually settled its many, rich debates by largely agreeing on two basic ways to distinguish itself from capitalism. Capitalism entailed 1.) private enterprises to produce goods and services and 2.) markets as the means to distribute resources and products among enterprises and individuals (workers and consumers). In contrast, socialism entailed government-owned-and-operated enterprises and government central planning as the distribution system. Both devotees of capitalism and socialism accepted this set of differentiating definitions.

Debates and struggles over capitalism versus socialism then swirled around the relative virtues and flaws of private versus state enterprises and of markets versus planning. The practice of socialism combined criticism of private enterprise and markets with celebration of state enterprise and central planning. Once socialists had captured state power in the USSR, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and elsewhere, the demands of managing actual economies tilted socialism's focus ever further toward state enterprises and central planning mechanisms. In perfectly parallel fashion, attacks upon socialism from devotees of capitalism stressed the failures and excesses of state enterprises and planning.

Many of those debates and struggles seemed to be resolved by the collapse of the USSR in 1989 and subsequent changes in Eastern Europe, the PRC and elsewhere. History, the devotees of capitalism crowed, had "proven" the non-viability of socialism, the superiority of capitalism. They rarely grasped that what had failed was one version of socialism, an early experiment in what it might mean to construct a system beyond capitalism. Their eagerness to claim that "socialism/communism had failed" conveniently forgot the many similarly "failed" efforts, centuries earlier, to construct capitalism out of a declining European feudalism. Only after many such failures did changed social conditions enable a general system change to modern capitalism. Why would the same not apply to socialism qua successor to capitalism?

A major task for socialists has been honestly to admit and contend with the limits and failures of the old 19th and 20th century socialism: chiefly, excesses of over-concentrated state power and inadequately transformed production systems. Old socialism's achievements -- especially rapid industrial development and the remarkable provision of social safety nets -- might be preserved and built upon if its limits and failures were also recognized and overcome.

One emerging and promising new socialism for the 21st century focuses on worker co-ops. Socialism becomes the campaign to establish and build a sizable worker co-op sector within contemporary capitalism. In worker co-op enterprises, all workers are equal members of a democratically run production operation. They debate and decide what, how and where to produce and how to utilize the net revenues. Worker co-op enterprises exist alongside traditional capitalist enterprises. They are eligible for and must obtain tax considerations, subsidies and state supports comparable to what capitalist enterprises received throughout capitalism's history. Indeed, in their initial, emergent phase, worker co-ops deserve extra government support so that the worker co-op sector quickly achieves a significant role in the economy. Until that role is established, people will remain unable to evaluate, compare and weigh in on what mix of capitalist and worker co-op enterprises they wish for their society.

The worker co-op sector of an economy will have to decide what mix of market and planning mechanisms to utilize for the distribution of its resources and products (much as capitalist enterprises always did). The relationships -- both competitive and cooperative -- between the two sectors of each economy (capitalist and worker co-op) will have to be determined by negotiations between them. The third member of those negotiations will be the populace as a whole weighing in on what kind of economic system it wants as the partner for its political system.

With a significant worker co-op sector, the state's dependence on enterprises will no longer mean a dependence on a small minority: shareholders and boards of directors who control capitalist enterprises. Instead it will mean, at least in part, the state's dependence on masses of workers who democratically control worker co-ops. Under such a system, the prospects for genuine (as opposed to merely formal) political democracy are much enhanced over their sorry state today.

Mass working class support made 19th and 20th century socialism -- with its programs of revolutionary or evolutionary/parliamentary seizures of state power -- historically important. We cannot now expect to mobilize again any equivalent support for a revival of the old socialism. That is because of its limits and failures and also because of the massive, sustained campaigns against it by capitalism's supporters. However, a new socialism built upon the best achievements of the old plus a new focus on the democratic transformation of the workplace can mobilize mass support now. It is already doing so.

A new socialism for the 21st century would address as well all those in the population who are not in the workforce because of family, age, education, illness, disability or other comparable causes. Systematic supports for them -- qua relatives, friends and neighbors of workforce members -- are as central to a new and better society as is the democratization of the workplace. Indeed, the latter and the former can and would be mutually supportive.

Old socialist parties are mostly fading or imploding, yet at the same time capitalism's deepening difficulties, especially since the global crash of 2008, are everywhere increasing mass opposition to capitalism. What that opposition needs is a new socialism with attractive, basic transformative goals. What is not wanted is social change that gives power to some far-away government apparatus. The point is rather and finally to transfer power into the hands of the change-making workers themselves. Power here refers to more than politics. It refers to the social power at the economic base of society, in the workplaces producing the goods and services upon which social life depends.

The French Revolution's slogan -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- was linked to its economic project of displacing feudalism in favor of capitalism. While its economic project succeeded, it failed to realize that slogan. It turned out, as Marx noted, that capitalism's class division (between employer and employee) blocked that realization. Overcoming such class divisions -- something a worker co-op can do -- is required to take the next great historical step toward liberty, equality and fraternity.

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The New Socialism: Moving Beyond Concentrated State Power - Truth-Out

In a McCarthyitescreedthat appeared in the pages of National Review last March,theCEO of the Christian Legal Society, David Nammo, ominously warned the conservative publicationsreadership about the growingpopularity of socialism, and how this apparent shift in opinionis threatening Americas future. Recent polls, Nammo pointsout, have indicatedthat an increasing number of Americans nearly four in 10, according to one survey have come to prefer socialism over capitalism.

The clearest signof this shift, of course, was the surprisingly successful presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who currently ranks as the most popular politician in America. Nammo correctly observesthat Sanders popularityis not the cause of this movement in public opinion but rather an indicator of it, but then goes on to provide his ownpredictable, eye-roll-inducing theory:

It is obvious where such thinking abounds and continues to spread: in our colleges and universities. The ideologies of professors and educators have proven stronger than facts A generation has been taught a lie, and they now believe it.

Thosepinko professors are at it yet again, corrupting our youth!This theory is not too dissimilarfromtheCultural Marxism conspiracy theorypeddled in alt-right circles, which propoundsthat a group of relatively obscure 20th century intellectuals from the Frankfurt School, beginning with Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, developeda secret plot to undermine Western civilization by spreading political correctness and anti-American prejudice in academia. Intellectuals and college professors oftenmake perfect scapegoats in the conservative movement, which has always been deeplyanti-intellectual; it isstandard right-wing rhetoric to blamehigher education for thesocialist specter haunting their dreams.

Many Americans,continues Nammowith amelodramatic intensity, have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and the disasters witnessed in the crumbling economies and failed polities of Communist and socialist countries in the 1990s Americans who believe in limited government, welfare reform, and states rights should look over their shoulder and realize that a dangerous ideology is gaining ground.

Of course, this dangerous ideologydoes not advocate anything resembling the totalitarian doctrines of 20th century communism. If anything, democratic socialism an anti-authoritarian philosophythat promotespolitical and economic democracy is the antithesisof Soviet-style communism,a left-wing authoritarianism that replaced one ruling elite (the capitalist or landowning class) with another (Communist Party bureaucrats). Alas, intellectual honesty is not typically associatedwith anti-socialist diatribes found in a magazinewhose senior editoris the author of a book titled Liberal Fascism.

Nevertheless, while Nammostheory of why socialism is on the rise may be way off the mark, there is no doubt that socialism is on the rise in America and that staunch conservatives like him have every right to be concerned.

In a Huffington Post articlelastweek, for example, Eliot Nelson reported that socialism has become increasingly popular especially among millennials since the Sanders campaign last year. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a minor presence on the American left for several decades its roots go back to the old Socialist Party of America, once led byEugene Debs and Norman Thomas has experienceda rapidmembership growthin 2017. DSA openly uses the big, bad, scary s-word that countless Republican consultants have used to smear Democrats over the years, writes Nelson. And despite decades of efforts to stigmatize it, socialism is kind of in right now.

Nelson reports that the DSA has seen its membership grow from about 8,500 on Election Day to 21,000 at the start of May, and they are getting upwards of 10 requests a week to help open new chapters. Like the Sanders campaign, the DSA receivesits strongest support from tech-savvy young people, who are most likely to embrace the socialist label.

A conservative like Nammo would obviously take this to mean that our colleges and universities are indoctrinating the impressionable youth with socialist dogma, but there is a much more sensible and persuasiveexplanation for thissocialist appeal. (Incidentally, conservatives always seem to overlook the influence of business and economics departments in American universities, which overwhelmingly lean to the right.) It goes something like this: Millennials are drawn tosocialism because they have been royally screwed by the capitalist economy and the corporate state.

Consider a few facts: Young people have the highest student loan debt in history;they face increasingly bleak job prospectsfor the future (according to various studies, up to 50 percent of American jobs are at high risk for automation over the next two decades including some white-collar jobs); they will likely be the firstgeneration to beworse off than their parents;they grew up during the Great Recession and live in a time of surgingeconomic inequality; and the future of their planet is threatened by ecological disaster. In other words, capitalism doesnt seem to be panning outfor the younger generations.

Of course, working-class and middle-class people of all ages have suffered over the past few decades. Wages have stagnated for the majority of workers (even as productivity rises)and many middle-class jobs have been outsourced or automated all while the richest people in our society have grown ever richer and CEO salaries haveskyrocketed.

The appeal of socialism is not limited to young people or liberal Democrats. Indeed, while only a minority of Americans albeit a pretty sizable minority claim to prefer socialism over capitalism, a majority support policies that the writers at National Review woulddoubtlessconsider socialist. Universal or single-payer health care, for instance, is now supported by about 60 percent of Americans, according to polling including a substantial number of Republicans. In early April, an Economist/YouGov poll showed that 60 percent of respondents supported a Medicare for allsystem, including 43 percent of people who identified as conservative and 40 percent of Trump voters, notes Theo Anderson in In These Times. The energy behind single payer is partly a result of the GOPs success in pointing out the flaws in Obamacare, then failing to offer a workable alternative.

This brings us to the S-word itself. Like most political buzzwords be it fascism, freedom, democracy or patriotism socialism has come to have many different meaningsdepending on the speaker. For Bernie Sanders and other democratic socialists, it denotes democracyand economic justice; for a Fox News commentator, it meanswhatever he or she damn well wants it to mean (one day it stands for totalitarianism and tyranny, the next day it means Keynesian economics, and the day after that its just a meaningless pejorative unthinkingly hurledat opponents).

But if we are discussing the American activists and politicians who actually identify associalist or democratic socialist mostprominentlySanders, but also Seattle politician KshamaSavantandcard-carrying DSA members, for example then the rise of socialism in America is more of a return to New Deal-style social democracy than anything else. Though the media regards Sanders as somethingof aradical, he is not much further to the left (economically, at least) than one of Americas most celebrated presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As the Vermont senator sarcasticallytold audiences on the campaign trail last year, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower under whose administration the top marginal income-tax rate was above 90 percent was arguably more of a socialist than he is.

The DSA, which is committed to worker ownership of capital and the means of production largely meaning the establishment of worker-owned cooperative businesses, not the expropriation of private property is undeniably further to the left than New Deal liberals. But it could hardly be called a politically extreme or revolutionary group.

It is hardly factual, then, to say that adangerous new ideologyis gaining ground in America unless one is describing the rise of the alt-right and white supremacy.Rather, a long-established political traditionisreturning to prominence after many decades in the wilderness, in response to an unsustainable economic system that has generated vast inequality and injustice. Young people are at the forefront of this movement notbecause they have been brainwashed by bearded commie professors, but because they are the ones who have to live in thefuture that is threatened by capitalism today.

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It's not just Bernie: Socialism is back, and right-wingers have good ... - Salon

The Lancet is a renowned medical journal headquartered in England. The current issue includes an article on Venezuela, titled Data reveal state of Venezuelan health system. The data in question come from the Venezuelan government, after two years in which it released no reports. No doubt the picture the government paints is, if anything, optimistic. Still, the facts are grim:

Maternal and infant mortality have skyrocketed in Venezuela in the past 2 years, and diphtheria and malaria, diseases that were once controlled, are on the rise according to data released by the countrys Ministry of Health. The epidemiological data show that maternal mortality rose by about 9% between 2014 and 2015, then jumped by nearly 66% by the end of 2016-with 756 deaths. Infant mortality rose by about 30% between 2015 and 2016-11,466 deaths in 2016-according to government figures.

The country is on its eighth health minister since 2013. I dont think personnel is the issue.

Its very sad. We dont even have an aspirin tablet in stock, said Ivn Machado, chief of cardiology at University Hospital of Caracas. The Venezuelan Institute of Palliative care published a letter on May 11 that reported the country had run out of all classes of analgesics, and doctors are incapable of alleviating pain for patients. Doctors took to the streets on May 17 to protest the shortages.

The situation in hospitals is bleak:

Doctors describe hospitals without functioning equipment, basic medicines, or even running water, and laboratories without reagents. *** The University Hospitals cardiology unit, which usually does 100 catheterisations and 30 open heart surgeries per month, has done only 30 catheterisations and 20 open heart surgeries so far this year, Machado said. Several operating rooms are out of service and vital equipment is idle for lack of replacement parts.

Venezuela is perhaps the most resource-rich country in the world, but this is what its hospitals look like under socialism

Young doctors are leaving Venezuela in droves, seeking better opportunities elsewhere:

Venezuela is haemorrhaging doctors, especially young ones. Thousands of doctors are thought to have left the country, leaving the system short-staffed. By the time his medical students reach their fourth year, Castro said, 60% of the class will have emigrated.

Their devotion to the state is apparently insufficient.

The Lancet refers to Venezuelas political and economic crisis, but never mentions the key word, socialism. This is the point I want to make: neither Venezuelan reformers nor the Lancet seem to understand the role of socialism in the collapse of Venezuelas health care system, along with the rest of its economy:

Durn and others are calling for a health emergency to be declared in the country, which is wracked by a political and economic crisis. This would allow the import of medicines, while pharmaceutical plants, which have been idle for years, can begin producing again. International organisations, however, say they cannot act without the governments approval. So far, the regime of president Nicols Maduro has been silent.

Health shouldnt be politicised, Durn said. Health has nothing to do with ideology. Health is a right.

But in a socialist country, everything is politicized. Thats the point of socialismwhere everything is controlled by the government, everything is politicized.

Mr. Duran is correct in this respect: in Venezuela, health is a right, as provided by Article 83 of the Constitution:

Article 83: Health is a fundamental social right and the responsibility of the State, which shall guarantee it as part of the right to life.

A socialist government can guarantee health, but a socialist economy cant perform competently enough to supply hospitals with running water, let alone the tools needed for sophisticated medical care. The reality is, if you want your people to die miserably, you should socialize your health care system.

Pretty much everyone understands that socialism is a lousy way to produce cars, television sets, cell phones, and so on. Yet for some reason, there are lots of people who think health care should be socialized because it is fair. That is the position of pretty much the entire Democratic Party. If you think it is fair for children to die at birth or from malnutrition, diphtheria, malaria and the like, and for hospitals to shut down for lack of working equipment, then, yes, socialism is the system for you. (It isnt entirely fair, of course, because those who run the socialist system generally become billionaires while others starve.)

Venezuelas experience shows that socialism is just as disastrous for health care as it is for every other industry, regardless of what the government purports to guarantee. Why on Earth would any American want to copy the Venezuelan example by bringing socialism (single payer) to the United States health care system?

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What Venezuela's Medical Crisis Tells Us About Socialism - Power Line (blog)

For the first time this election, some in the business community are starting to panic. The polls have tightened, and business folk who had been focusing on bashing the Tories for their interventionist and socialist-light policies are starting to fear that maybe, just maybe they may be about to be hit by the real thing.

Even though the Tories are still doing well, with levels of support last enjoyed in the early to mid-1980s, thats a lot less than was the case just two weeks ago. Labour, meanwhile has shot up and is now doing far better than Ed Miliband. As a result, the gap is much narrower and on one reading of the data the Tories could actually lose some seats. The Tories are still likely to win comfortably, but the polls have proved astonishingly volatile, and have swerved drastically after the Labour and Tory manifestos were released. The former went down relatively well among...

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Businesses should fear Corbyn's socialism - it would devastate the UK's competitiveness - Telegraph.co.uk