First Dean Capone; followed by Bernie Sanders....
http://www.deancapone.com
Greg Pason is National Secretary of the Socialist Party USA. Greg is also a former Socialist Party candidate for Governor and U.S. Senate; former Co-Chair of the NJ Branch of the National Writers Union, former member of the Brandworkers International Board of Directors, former chair of the Coalition for Free and Open Election and ABC-No-Rio Collective member/volunteer.
http://vote-socialist.org/presidentialsearch2015.html
http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2015/02/greg-pason-socialists-and-the-living-wage-issue/
Excerpts from Greg Parson...you be the judge. Some sounds like familiar language to me:
The current left and progressive labor movement’s call for a $15 minimum wage poses the need for immediate improvements in compensation of the lowest-paid workers. But it falls short in some ways, and I believe democratic socialists can both strengthen the campaign and use the current focus on a $15 and hour minimum wage to put forward a democratic socialist vision.
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When we organize around wage and labor issues, we need to connect that work to a vision of the type of economy we are fighting for. The focus is not just to get a higher wage but also to challenge an economic model (i.e., capitalism) that takes power from the workers who provide the labor power and the communities affected by the decisions of business. We are clear in our principles that democratic socialism is not mass industrial plants run under a command economy. While that might be a type of “socialism” advocated by others, it is not a vision we share. We also need to be clear that democratic socialism is not welfare state capitalism, which allows capitalism to function but under stringent restrictive and directives.
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LeBron James Seems to Get it
A recent article in Salon magazine titled “A specter is haunting the NBA — the specter of socialism,” describes a demand by new NBA Union Executive Director Michele Roberts: that NBA revenue be roughly split between players and owners. Salon comments, “If the NBA currently operates according to a sort of Keynesian, redistributive model, Roberts has provoked an imagination of a socialistic league, a revolutionary model that is, strictly speaking, non-capitalist.” (It is socialistic in the broad sense of the term, not in the way the word “socialism” is used to describe welfare-state models. These are mostly capitalist economies with socialistic salves to grease the gears, smooth out cyclical troughs and ward off unrest.)
“Why don’t we have the owners play half the games?” challenged Roberts when asked about the revenue-split issue. A Marxist truism now becomes a joke when considered in the case of the NBA: it’s the workers who create the value, not the owners. No one wants to hear “And starting at power forward … Donaaaald Sterrrrrliiiing!”
Roberts drives the point home: “There would be no money if not for the players … There. Would. Be. No. Money.” Owners are expendable, she suggests: “Thirty more owners can come in, and nothing will change. These guys [the players] go? The game will change. So let’s stop pretending.”
It’s sad when Salon Magazine does a better job describing socialism than some labor organizations do. Even the NBAPA gets it: Owners are expendable.
Bernie Sanders:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/
The thing Bernie Sanders says about inequality that no other candidate will touch
There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.
“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.
“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said. “Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”
Sanders’s position inverts decades of orthodoxy among liberal and conservative candidates alike, by prizing redistribution above all else. It taps into the mounting frustration in America, particularly among more liberal voters, with the widening gap between the rich and everyone else.
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