How did "Socialism" get to be such a dirty word in the US?

[undeterred]

Aren't most modern democracies partly socialist?

[Goldmund]

1. Because the corporatocracy made it a dirty word.

[wtmusic]

10. Yeah, Stalin had nothing to do with it. n/t

[redqueen]

14. They used Stalin as a boogeyman, yes.

It was still the corporatocracy who designed and fueled the propoganda machine which is still paid to demonize all things socialist as evil and bad.

[wtmusic]

23. True

Good pt. :thumbsup:

[redqueen]

27. Love your graphic, btw...

I've been enjoying that immensely. :hi:

[lenidog]

16. Yes, it did not help Socialism cause when the Russia's official title

under Communism was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[InformedSource]

56. The Hitler Gang's government was National Socialism

[Goldmund]

24. Stalin had nothing to do with it,

other than to be used as the boogeyman. Stalin's atrocities have nothing to do with his socialism.

And have I said I love your sig???

[wtmusic]

31. No

but it feels the same way about you :loveya:

[Liberal Veteran]

2. An effect of the cold war and anti-soviet programming

That equated socialism with Soviet-style communism.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. That and they made it all about "stealing your hard-earned money"

They appeal to people's fears of financial insecurity that way.

Never mind that the whole point of socialism is to make sure everyone has the bare minimum to get by. :eyes:

[carnie_sf]

3. It started with

the red scare right after the Russian revolution.

[RBHam]

4. Propaganda

The Big Lie works

[mopinko]

8. milwaukee

did you know that milwaukee had a socialist party that ran the city for many years? during that time they were repeatedly voted the best run city in the country.
propaganda it is. fueled by corporate greed.

[lenidog]

20. But they were old school Socialists big difference in styles

Milwaukee ended up with a whole mess of German Socilists who fled Germany after the failed revoltions of 1848.

[mopinko]

25. different from what? nt

[undeterred]

6. Would you rather live in a fascist state or a socialist state?

I can't believe people fear socialism more than fascism when we are so clearly much closer to fascism now...

[ProfessorGAC]

17. Is Neither A Fair Option?

I think regulated capitalism is in the best interest of the greatest numbers of people in a society. Mind you, we have underregulated our system (or deregged it), but i think a properly designed capitalist system has the potential for floating the most boats.

BTW: Socialism is an economic construct. Fascism is a political structure. One could be living in a socialist/fascist state (although unlikely), but can't be in a communist/fascist state. Those are the polar opposites.
The Professor

[Tux]

30. I agree

A regulated captialist economic system is best as long as there are safeguards like Social Security/Medicare for the elderly, unemployment, some welfare (I prefer welfare mixed with automatic job hunting on the office's part so people can be independent of the system for their future), and perhaps universal health care. I didn't like the last one too much but seeing how the healthcare system is, we need a change.

[ProfessorGAC]

35. Some Tighter Controls Over Market Concentration, Too

Better for consumers, pushes innovation, stabilizes prices, offers greater choice, expands the job market, and encourages firms to flatten the compensation structure.

Nobody really benefits anymore that Wal-Mart is so big. Not even the working poor benefit any longer. If Wal-Mart were 60% of the current size, the prices would be exactly the same! And, they would have to be constantly pushing the system to enhance service and improve employee conditions to maintain their cost edge.

There is no reason to have allowed them to become this large. The only people benefitting beyond some point are the stockholders, but not all the stakeholders.
The Professor

[kenny blankenship]

47. You want "liberal" goals...

but those so called liberal goals are in conflict with classical individual-oriented liberalism. The needs of society to make a better, fairer or safer life for itself, can and often do clash with the goals of individuals and corporations (super-individuals) pursuing their individual economic interests. If you are based strictly on Anglo-American Liberal theory then you run into a brick wall: liberalism can only be used to justify maximizing the sphere of individual freedoms and liberties. It can't be used to justify modifying the behavior of economic actors, or for modifying the distribution of profits, or the possibly deleterious social outcomes of a country's set of productive enterprises.

What about the quality and kind of our life in common, though, what about pursuing a desirable overall shape, or a 'big-picture' for society as a whole? There is no way forward--under liberalism. People are set at liberty and whatever happens, happens--including whatever happens when a handful of economic players accumulate more economic and thus political power than the millions and millions of other contestants combined. Liberalism says individuals have an untrammeled right to do with their property and their productive energies whatever they see fit to do. Guiding society towards a fairer outcome is wrong under classical liberalism. Of course, that's a paradox because so much of what so many liberals want to do is "guiding" society into more beneficial forms or activities. Almost all of what they want to do, in fact falls under that kind of heading.

To achieve those kinds of goals you MUST be able to assert a social right, that is a democratic right over the shape of commerce (always conceived legally in our 18th century liberal system as an individual enterprise, not as a collective concern that involves the life of the surrounding society and thus obligates the enterprise to that society.) Even the right of corporations to their troublesome ways of doing business and their pricing powers is Constitutionally protected as an individual's right to his/her private property. It's not like an individual's inalienable right to his personal property, like his house, it is legally held to be the SAME as that personal property (without which your hold on life would become precarious). Since there is no theoretical grounds for allowing one to restrict the activities of corporations pursuing profits under liberalism, or to pursue schemes to redistribute some of their profits to the benefit of the society that hosts them, liberal political programs have long been been like a castle in the sky. There's nothing under these proposed towers and parapets, and when given the slightest push by conservatives and Neo-Fascists, they collapse into the abyss. Liberals have long tried to defend their structures as "tradition" or pragmatic solutions mothered by necessity. That's not good enough. As the last week has shown, the tradition we're defending is under attack in its very core. FDR and the New Deal are being demonized, LBJ and the Great Society having been already turned into some kind of child eating Stalinesque monster during the 1980s and 90s.

In other words, to achieve the goals of late 20th century and early 21st century "liberalism" in the realms of environmental protection, wages and class justice, consumer protection, and individual privacy whay you need are socialist principles of collective interest, both as a matter of practicality and as a matter of strict definition. When democratic majorities say so, the collective interest must trump the individual right to accumulate and dispose of private property at will without regard for the impact on the community surrounding the individual, the community which in fact has made this property possible. Private property is NOT unconditional, absolute and untrammeled. This doesn't mean private property is to be abolished--real Socialist parties of Europe abandoned ideas like that before the turn of the 19th century. Socialist parties of Europe today do not abolish private property or threaten to; they assert the right of the community to modify that right in the collective interest of having some standards. That is how you see universal healthcare as a right, spread across western europe while close to 50 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

The "S" word has been forbidden to us, however, by the most concerted and long-lived propagandizing in our country's history.

Hence, the irrelevance and paralysis of the Democratic Party over the last quarter century as an agent of liberal change.

Your tradition, your shield, is GONE. Now what will you defend liberal goals and Democratic constituencies with? How will you cease being an irrelevant JOKE? Time to get back to using your head, liberals. You have to finally be able to say WHY you are allowed why you MUST be allowed to transform society, to constrain business practices, to interject the power of the state between employers and employed.

[ProfessorGAC]

48. Whatever You Say

I have studied and written on economics and causative factors within social development apropos economic conditions since the early 80's. I think i know more about this stuff than you think i do.

Well regulated capitalism fits into the human condition better than the socialism does, if only for its forming to Maslovian principles.

The why is far simpler than you think. (Or are willing to believe.) The transformation to society in the age of regulation is manifest. Social ills went down (poverty, destitution, hunger) while the middle class became more comfortable. And yet, thousands or americans became multi-multi millionaires. The data makes it clear that the regulation of business has already been successful in floating all boats.

It's not that hard a sales pitch. The data is abundantly clear. Look it up sometime. Spend a little more time in research and little less pontificating and you'll see the truth.
The Professor

[kenny blankenship]

54. All beneficial regulation of capitalism

was done under the overt principle of pragmatism. Pragmatism means what though? It is necessary...
Pragmatism doesn't explain ANYTHING in the realm of rights. Individual rights you see tend to be accompanied by this little adjective, "inalienable". That means society, other individuals, can go to hell before an individual can be deprived of this right, whatever it is. It can't be challenged, or taken away or suspended unless the individual in question has done something of a criminal nature, or hewn to this country's enemies, or some other thing to alienate himself from his rights.

Unspoken behind the pragmatism of New Deal reforms though was always the assumption of a social right to shape society towards better ends. Sometimes this right was silently assumed, sometimes it was given voice directly or indirectly in political contests. This had to be! Because heretofore, it was known and established legally that no such right existed in America. Many of the things we esteem the New Deal for reforms of labor abuses, monopolistic abuses, etc, had been addressed by laws and those laws had been struck down by the SCOTUS on the dual basis that the laws were an uConstitutional infringement on individual liberty and property rights and no collective right existed to countervail individual rights. Rights were individual by nature according to our philosophical traditions, that is they existed only in individuals. This land was world reknowned as the home of unrestrained capitalist, by virtue of the inalienable right of private property, and indeed the very idea of restraint on commerce, or a modification of propertyright was "un-American", and held to be so (that is, unConstitutional) by the Supreme Court again and again between the late 19th century and FDR's New Deal. The Great Depression though changed this consensus with the most powerful kind of argument: capitalism had fallen and could not get up. The Lockean individualism of our founders was pitched (pragmatically) to the side of the road and new consensus emerged that America had to work for all Americans and that meant all Americans could get work. The old order resisted most notably through the courts, and by means more or less forceful they were swept to the side. America had seen the opposite case under Hoover and was ready to leave that world behind, no matter what the Constitution or statute law said or was held to say previously. It was a matter of survival.
But for whom? Individual property rights that existed in 1930 as absolutes were modified by the New Deal. They were trumped-- pragmatically when necessary--but... by what?
There can logically be only one answer: by a collective right to provide for the general welfare.

The Great Depression changed the culture and the national consensus, but it did not sufficiently change THE LAW (to reflect the new consensus) and change our official political philosophy. Laws were changed in little ways; more commonly the previously unconstitutional was held to be constitutional without much of an explanation why; and the big picture justification for transforming our national idea about the sanctity of property was allowed to go unspoken. It didn't rate even a new paragraph in the Constitution. The big amendment of the day simply repealed Prohibition, saying nothing about the new powers of government to intervene in the aggregate supply/demand equation, to set wages, to redistribute wealth and all the other socialist --yes, SOCIALIST-- things Mr. Roosevelt's administration got to doing. The change of consensus appears though in movies and cultural productions of the time--abundantly, if you bother to spend a little time in research. (If you do not, well you can never hope to understand what was in their heads and what they understood to be happening around them during that time, can you?) Officially and legally however, the New Dealers just pretended that things were the same as before. A continuum was projected, or papered over the top of, what was in fact a radical break for America, arguably larger and more significant than the change brought by the Civil War and the 14th Amendment. (After the Civil War people spoke of a New Republic acknowledging the failure and fiery death of the original one created by the Constitution of 1787. I score that new version of America as the Second Republic which would last until 1932.)

Well look what has happened Mr. Empiricist, as a result of that false sense of continuity--as a result of that failure to assert honestly the new justification for the new regulations. The self-described laissez-faire absolutists started pushing on the Liberal underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution and of Anglo-American law and all of your nicely regulated capitalism has come undone.
Now they regulate us instead!


The New Deal changed the culture and practice of the time but left the law alone, pretending all it wanted to do was already sanctioned by the Constitution. There's an idea that would have made the plantation owning founding fathers' heads explode! The conflict between the right of society to regulate capitalist enterprise and the radical-individualist assumptions of our Constitution and laws was never dragged out into the open, honestly addressed and resolved in favor of the new collective interest. That was thought too difficult, or perhaps the New Dealers assumed that Americans henceforth never want to risk going back to the 'bad old days'. Perhaps they thought they didn't have to take such measures because the majority would always remember what life was like before the New Deal and a winning political argument would make a winning legal argument unecessary. So the change they brought was never enshrined in overt principles and laws which justified their actions. And so it has become possible over time, by persistent rightwing appeals to the law and to this country's philosophical traditions, as embodied in laws and acts of the government, and in the thoughts of those who influenced our country's foundation, to CHANGE IT ALL BACK.
See?

Why did this happen? How could the rightwing succeed in this liquidation of the New Deal without fighting a bloody revolution? We can go on endlessly about the way the corporations have captured and rolled up all the mass media in this country, and how money influences who can even run for office, and all of that is valid enough but it doesn't begin to explain why the fight has been so one-sided. The success of the right in taking this country back to the pre New Deal arrangements of power is mainly due to the fact that what they confronted was not Constitutionally enshrined, instituted principles, but instead just a gaggle of gov't programs and policies, which could be isolated and pinned to the chests of isolatable Democratic Party constituencies. They have been able to pick these off one by one, working at undoing the New Deal as the people who remember the world before Roosevelt fall into silence and die off: they only have to overcome PEOPLE you see, not the country's Constitutionally enshrined legal principles. The New Dealers changed quite a lot about way the country worked and gave the Federal government a role utterly alien to anything the founders of this government certainly intended it to have but though they gave the country a "new birth in liberty" as it were they failed to memorialize this accomplishment. They Republicans can proceed program by program taking the Third Republic apart without being called down for "being in violation" of the spirit or letter of some Constitutional provision because the real impetus behind modifying the right to untrammeled accumulation (regulated capitalsim) was never acknowleged openly by the movement which did the modifying. They can claim to be RESTORING the purity of our original form of government, and dodge the question of why that form of government was abandoned in the first place.


FDR did socialist things. Justly he is accused of socialism, even though he is equally justly accused of thwarting socialism. However you want to score that, he and his movement did not leave behind indelible marks in the Constitution justifying and eternalizing what they did, acknowledging the distinction between them and what had always come before, and proclaiming as a national understanding that we would never go back to those antique, plantation society ways.

We are paying for that omission now.

Maybe while you're doing your research washing numbers through your head, you might devote some time to trying to figure out how we arrived dialectically in the unregulated, unrestricted mess we're now in. You might discover something about the downfall of the Democratic Party; its present political irrelevance will become more clear to you. I'm not saying the way up from irrelevance will become clear, but at least you will understand better what is fruitless and won't be of any help in the future. Pretending that the New Deal was provided for under the general welfare clause written by 18th century slaveholders won't help. Proceeding with a liberal set of goals without appreciating that they actually depend on quite radical changes to our notion of rights for their success is not going to be of help either. Democrats have tried to pretend they could do this--they're STILL at it in fact.

THIRTY YEARS OF POLITICAL FAILURE IS THE CONSEQUENCE. THIRTY YEARS OF GETTING YOUR ASSES KICKED BY REPUBLICANS IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF THIS SLEEP OF REASON.

[Nordic65]

58. That would be called a Social Democracy

..like "Old Europe"...

[redqueen]

46. Don't you think some things need to be socialist?

IMO there are some things which should not be left solely to capitalist forces... health care and education come to mind. I think having capitalist forms of these is fine, however I also think a socialized back up system is necessary for pretty much anything which can be considered a basic necessity.

[ProfessorGAC]

51. No, I Do Not

I think the most efficient mechanism is a controlled and regulated form of capital economy which encourages innovation, competition, and growth by meeting the Maslovian needs of the greatest numbers of people in the greatest way.

Social programs are fine by me. We still need safety nets and assure that basic needs are met for all. But, that's more a matter of social or political structures and not an economic ones. These needs can still be met within a capital system. Not that we're meeting those needs now, but i think rampant deregulation has precipitated much of the social darwinism we now experience.

I think the dangers of monopoly are realized at levels long before what we normally think of as a true, or pure, monopoly. But, proper regulation of size and scope of any single entity or industrial sector can hold back the negative monopolistic effects. Geez, we did it for 50 years over which the United States economy became THE dominant economic force in modern history. It's not like regulation doesn't work or holds back growth. In fact, in encourages innovation because new and better products or methods of manufacture are all that sets the great firms apart from the also rans when mergermania cannot be the savior by providing the phantom economies of scale. (Which evaporate beyond some critical mass.)

I wouldn't object to socialized medicine. I just don't think that's a panacea. In fact, such a move is just regulation to the ultimate degree. I think the level of regulation is somewhere between the paucity we have now and the totality that is socialization of an industrial sector.
The Professor

[PKG]

7. Two reasons

and

[The Straight Story]

9. power, imho

People see it as ceeding power to the government and giving them more control. They do not want to give up freedoms for security.

[entanglement]

11. Ever heard the old saying

"throw enough dirt and some of it's sure to stick"? That's exactly what conservatives / freeps have managed to achieve by constantly bashing socialism. Its so bad now that the word 'socialism' triggers a Pavlovian negative reaction, just like 'green', 'vegan' or 'nazi'

[catzies]

42. Two more words to add to your list (minor threadjack)

'Liberal' and 'feminist.'

My $0.02

[lenidog]

12. It started with the Red Scare in the 20s and heated up during the Cold

War. People were told that Socialism equaled Communism in the worst case scenario and in its best case Socialism was still a pale form of Communism and there fore un-American. Haven't you ever heard the term pinko Socialist or pinko Commie?

[Bouncy Ball]

13. What I think is funny is to point out our government programs

that are at least partially, if not fully, socialist in nature to right wingers.

Watch their heads explode.

[undeterred]

22. the things I like best about this country are all "socialist"

Hillary is often labelled a "socialist" because of the health care program she proposed, even though it was President Clinton's program.

[redqueen]

29. How stupid ARE these people?

That program ensured profits would continue to flow to corporations just the same as always.

These morans don't even know what socialist means, fer cryin out loud!

[lenidog]

28. The intresting thing is that FDR was by accident was instrumental in

more or less destroying the Socialist Party of the US in its original form. He got elected and launched the "New Deal" at the same time there was a schism forming in SPUSA between the far left of the party who wanted to support the Communists and make the party more communistic and the moderates who wanted to support FDR since it seemed he was advocating many of the things they wanted. At that time Eugene V Debs was dead and no one had the charisma to keep the party together so it split with the moderates joing the Dems and the left wingers joining the Communists.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

41. Agreed

State-highways, public schools, Social Security are all socialist in principle.

[Daphne08]

15. Hate-Speak on radio (Rush), Coulter, Hannity, et al

plus people equate Socialism with the old U.S.S.R. and with Stalin and Lenin.

They don't think of countries like Norway and Sweden.

[Bouncy Ball]

21. Exactly.

And partially socialist (has elements of it) governments such as Canada's government, the UK, etc.

[tinrobot]

18. Four letters - USSR / NAZI

USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
NAZI - National Socialist Party

Never mind the fact that niether of those were socialistic at all.

[Toucano]

19. Religion is manipulated to protect the status quo. n/t

[Brianboru]

26. We should tell them the Apostles were socialists

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. Acts 3:32-35

[maxsolomon]

32. started in the 19th century

vilification, distortion, fear mongering on the part of every facet of corporate power in america. press, government, law enforcement, religion. the usual suspects.

there actually was a time, in the era of eugene debs, before ww1, when socialism had a shot.

its been over 100 years of strident, unceasing propaganda. its gotten to the point where now, those who benefit the most from "SOCIALIST" programs like, say, the bonneville power administration or social security or farm subsidies or rural electrification or even gas taxes that pay for building rural roads, bitch the most about it.

bite the hand that feeds you indeed.

[sadiesworld]

33. Might start sounding a lot better soon.

[ComerPerro]

34. Cold war, and a strong effort by the right to tie the Nazis to socialism

[Lydia Leftcoast]

36. During the 1950s and 1960s, when news of Scandinavian-style

democratic socialism began appearing in the press, propagandists started telling the American public that Sweden had the highest suicide rate in the world (not true, and besides, Norway, which has a simliar social welfare system, has one of the world's lowest suicide rates), and that tax rates on the wealthy approached 100%, although they forgot to mention that those were marginal rates, not flat rates, so that no rich person had 100% of their money taken in taxes. The implication was supposed to be that socialism had made Scandinavians miserable.

Not as many people traveled in those days, and although my family visited Norway and Denmark in 1967 and found people living well and reasonably contentedly, there weren't enough travelers like us to make a dent in the popular perception.

The propagandists are still able to buffalo the public, because Americans do not travel as much as other nationalities do. You can hardly walk down a block in Asia without bumping into an Australian or European, and when one of my former teaching colleagues spent his sabbatical on a round-the-world backpacking trip with his wife, he came back to report that he had met lots of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Europeans, and even Israelis, but almost no other Americans.

Traveling around the world is considered a standard rite of passage in many countries today. When my colleague came back, he tried to talk up the idea among his students, but they explained that they had student loans to pay off.

This does not explain why they couldn't join the Peace Corps or take a six-week ESL teaching course and go teach English in a foreign country--or in several foreign countries in succession.

I don't know how we get past the mindset of "Why travel? We have everything we need right here."

I'm always dismayed to find affluent adults who have never left the U.S.

[maxsolomon]

37. why americans don't travel

fewest vacation hours of any industrialized nation.

i'd love to go overseas. i get 2 weeks a year. one week to visit the folks, one week to visit the in laws. end of vacation.

i get 3 weeks in a year, unless i go to another job before then.

[redqueen]

45. Not only least vacation hours...

many barely make enough to go on vacation here, let alone overseas.

[undeterred]

39. I don't think * ever went anywhere besides Mexico before he was president

It took a lot of tutoring to get him to learn all those furren countries and leaders.

[Lars39]

43. He spent at least one summer on a sheep farm in Scotland.

My pet theory is that he also spent time with the Saudi royals while growing up.

[undeterred]

52. George, its ok to hold hands with your cousin

[kenny blankenship]

57. Perhaps he learned the joys of wanking large-membered farm animals there?

[KansDem]

38. I often wondered if it hadn't been for slavery in the US...

we'd be a socialist country today, or at least on par with other socialist-leaning countries (ie, Canada, Sweden, etc). Considering that workers' rights and unionization grew into major movements during the last part of the 19th century and first part of the 20th century, corporatists, fearing loss of control and subsequent wealth, denounced "socialism" and created a fear of it among whites, especially poor whites. However, racism prevented a full-blown worker's rebellion in the US by providing a distraction for impoverished white workers, especially in the south. By constantly placing blame on recently-freed black Americans and subjecting them to hate and ridicule, poor white workers didn't lash out, in great numbers, at their true oppressors: the robber barons.

Now I'm an artist by training and not a social scientist or economist so I may be way off base here with regard to accepted principles regarding this subject.

[undeterred]

40. I've never heard that but it makes sense n/t

[LaPera]

44. The same way the word "liberal" did, Republicans elitist & wealthy

owners were deathly afraid of unions and people helping out their neighbors and fellow human beings...it would hurt their enormous profits...just like everything else with this corporate ownership throughout time, this was a planned agenda, with outright lies and distortions to make Americans believe socialism would enslave them...and it worked.

They pounded it down the people's throat..."Its every man for himself, don't help anyone out, they won't help you...just look out for number one".

We are simply the workers, working for peanuts and have no right to any share of the huge profits and wealth we workers produce...But, we workers must pay all the taxes...That's why the republican corporates hate socialism and adore fascism.

It's a government run by the corporations and the rich. the CEO's are rich and fat and couldn't be happier...and the want to remind you... "socialism is bad & evil."

[begin_within]

49. Because it's a threat to the ruling class, so they made it a dirty word

[Zorra]

50. Here it is, simply and exactly:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

[Kellanved]

55. as if Hitler did anything in a "Prussian" way

He used Prussian symbols, but Prussian ways? hardly.

[Dover]

53. When was the last time you saw a socialist-run corporation?

It is the corporate model of capitalism that shapes this country's ideological and economic basis now.
And there is no room for socialism in the capitalist corporate model structure. They are not democratic either. They require hierarchy, and there is no real mechanism for imput at the decision-making level by "the people".

In modern socialist theory, it is in the pursuit of the goal of creating a democratic classless society that has a responsible people and a sympathetic government that would form the backbone of an ideal welfare state.

Truth be told, socialism IS part of the corporate model. It works in reverse in this country. The corporations are the recipients of welfare......paid for by the People.

[undeterred]

59. the corporations are the people

we are just machinery