Ann Wagner @AnnLWagner
Socialism has been tried and failed. It does NOT work. 11:39 AM · Apr 27, 2021
There was much hilarity in the responses:
Can you even define socialism and which aspects of our government already fall under this definition?
Seems to be working for Walmart and Amazon.
I’ll let my grandma know that you’re coming for her social security
Grandma already knows.
Socialism: It seems to work pretty well for rich people in this country.
In case you haven’t noticed, Ann, unbridled capitalism has crushed the lives of the poor.
Sedition has also been tried, and it’s also failed.
You’re thinking of trickle down economics.
Your point being . . .
I’m going to assume you can’t define socialism
This tweet is absolutely meaningless.
Seriously, Wagner needs a new communications person. Her tweets are getting more and more pathetic.
There’s that.
Socialism is not one thing. It is not a monolith that needs to be demonized. You live in a society. We all do. That is what We means. And, btw, I know you know this, but we have a bunch of great socialist programs that are working just fine in this country. Disingenuous twit.
Yesterday, from Representative Vicky Hartzler (r):
Rep. Vicky Hartzler @RepHartzler
Pelosi’s one-size-fits-all approach to tackle prescription drug prices doesn’t address the root causes. Her drug price plan is filled with socialist price controls that stifles research and innovation.
…Federally funded studies contributed to the science that underlies every one of the 210 new drugs approved between 2010 and 2016…
Pharmaceutical corporations need to stop free-riding on publicly-funded research
By Jason Cone, opinion contributor — 03/03/18 01:00 PM EST
…Pharmaceutical companies have perpetuated a myth that high prices are necessary in order to compensate for the risks and investments they undertake when developing drugs. And governments like the U.S. — the biggest funder of global health research and development (R&D) — have let them…
Or did Representative Hartzler (r) really mean “stifles exorbitant profits and CEO compensation”?
Meanwhile, there was much hilarity in some of the comments to Representative Hartzler’s (r) Pharma Tweet:
Girl, you’ve taken $1.1M+ in farm subsidies.
Tell me about how you hate socialized programs again.
So Hartzler loves socialism…as long as she’s getting the benefits personally. Screw poor, sick, and hungry kids, though, eh?
Wrong, her [Pelosi] drug price plan protects the American consumers!!!
#UnAmerican #CorruptGOP
You aren’t trying. You aren’t working together. She could come out tomorrow and support a GOP plan and you’d still call it socialist. Piss off. This is 100% fixable and your fault for doing nothing.
Granting @HHSGov limited authority to negotiate prices on 250 *branded* prescription drugs that lack generic or biosimilar competitors & represent the greatest cost to Medicare, with a cap at 120% of market price in 6 other countries…Is “Socialism”?
Republicans haven’t done sh*t except try to take healthcare AWAY.
Your prez is trying to repeal what little we have left. Who believes anything republicans say anymore?
Hey the GOP has done absolutely nothing yet, so I’m sure after this really informed tweet you will get right back to doing nothing!
Republicans had the majority in the House for 10 years, and the only thing that happened were attempts to repeal the ACA 60 some odd times. Discuss actual policy specifics and details on alternatives, and we can talk.
You do not seem to be representing anyone but the GOP brand, GOP buzz words and your own self interests. Healthcare, insurance and prescription drug costs are unaffordable for your constituents. Not for you or Congress though. How about a Town Hall on the topic?
Open public town hall? Not gonna happen.
Good grief; is there anybody out there who buys this garbage rhetoric? Capitalism is not doing sick people any favors. Time to try something new.
Tweet out your plan that’s better in detail. I will be waiting.
We see what you did there. Tweet/detail.
It seems like the new buzz word for the republicans is “socialist”
Hey, we already said that…
Big Pharma has been paying the GOP for years to not allow Medicare to negotiate prices. I remember watching debate on the House floor in 2003 when the Medicare reform bill was passed. The Democrats wanted to include limits to rising Rx prices. The GOP would not allow it.
#socialist says what?
You mean greed, right!
You can do better? You have done NOTHING for YEARS!!!
So what is your plan because this is a serious issue and it seems like Pelosi actually wants to deal with it?
Socialist farm subsidies and bailout money is good but socialist approaches to help people get affordable prescription drugs are bad. You’re a bigly hypocrite!
You mean socialist, like the massive farm subsidies you collect?
Republicans only criticize but NEVER come up with feasible ideas for healthcare & drug costs! You are not helping the matter. If u have criticism then u better come back with a viable solution. Ur the problem!
What is your plan Vicky? That’s right, more of the same, the GOP plan of working Americans getting screwed to make the rich even richer.
Socialist? You clearly don’t understand the meaning of the word. I am beginning to doubt your abilities.
Nice cut and paste Vicky. Follow the line and deflect.
I’m promiscuous – when it comes to what I read, that is. While I’m working my way through newspapers, blogs, etc. I come across occasional nuggets, often buried in larger articles, that, while they don’t deserve to be treated in depth, are still intriguing and bring up a point worth noting. A few examples from the week that has just passed:
The New York Timesreports that Socialist French President François Hollande has decided to step down. His approval ratings are so low that his candidacy was likely to sink his entire party. Of interest to American Democrats who think that it’s smart to toe the center to center-right line, what brought Hollande down was the “ideological fuzziness” that led him to put financial and business interests before the interests of the folks who elected him. According to the Times, he “campaigned as an old-fashioned Socialist, with threats against finance. Once in office, he quickly veered to giving tax breaks to companies.” It didn’t help that he was squishy even after he changed his focus; he even backed off his business friendly labor “reforms.” Remember this the next time you hear a squish like Claire McCaskill cautioning us about principled socialists like Bernie Sanders who are “too liberal.”
A Reuters story reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted automakers who want Donald Trump to repeal Obama administration vehicle efficiency rules. They whined that the rules not only impose costs, but are “out of step with consumer preferences.” Well golly gee. Let’s poison our children with pollution while we destroy the climate, but for God’s sake, don’t let us defy consumer preferences – much less make the jokers pay a little more if they insist on driving climate-destroying, energy hogs everywhere they go. Do these captains of industry know what the word “fatuous” means? And does any one think “fatuous” should drive energy policy?
And speaking of energy hogs, stop and think about what cheap gas has done for us. Business Insiderreports that SUV’s and pickups are “crushing” the auto market, observing that there “will be a temptation with results like this for automakers to go back to the future and neglect small cars”because “Americans like big cars.”
And lest you believe that this re-emergent preference for automotive tanks is anything more than the marriage of misguided conspicuous consumption and cheap fuel, just consider that the largest share of the SUV market is for “luxury” SUVs that are mostly used in town and surburban driving. They aren’t working or rough-country vehicles. Even Jeep is planning to produce a luxury model.
And finally, there’s always the things that I don’t see while I’m reading around, but they’re still there in the background even if they are not always easily perceived – kind of like the Gestalt concept of the shifting figure where the black ground shows two candlesticks while the white ground shows two faces in profile. Today’s winner is a headline message that I haven’t seen, but which was there just the same:
Carrier sends 1,300 jobs to Mexico; disregards Donald Trump’s pre-election tantrums and gets a tax giveaway for doing it.
Yesterday Michael Bersin pointed out that DINO Senator Claire McCaskill is so eager to make nice with Hillary Clinton that she’s decided to engage in a little red-baiting when it comes to the surprisingly popular Clinton primary challenger, Bernie Sanders. Seems McCaskill wants to remind us all that Sanders is – oh, the horror – a socialist! (I distinctly remember that when McCaskill first ran for the Senate she had the gall to talk about her progressive values. Well, we live and learn.) When asked to identify three specifically socialist policies advocated by Sanders, she reportedly hemmed and hawed, and finally came up with the following:
a) that Sanders wants to expand entitlements; b) that he supports universal health-care, and c) that he is unsound on The Debt.
Remember this next time McCaskill wants your support. These are the ideas that she thinks disqualifies Bernie Sanders. Too bad that they are also held by a majority of her fellow Democrats. When she joins with Republicans to cut Social Security benefits because of The Debt, don’t say you weren’t warned.
But to get back to that socialist shtick, it might prove useful to take a look at the Legatum Institute’s annual Prosperity Index which measures national prosperity. According to Business Insider, “the Prosperity Index measures countries based on 89 different economic analysis variables that measure success in industry, education, health, freedom, opportunity, and social capital.” The United States ranks at #10 on the index after the following countries:
#1 Norway
#2 Swizerland
#3 New Zealand
#4 Denmark
#5 Canada
#6 Sweden
#7 Australia
#8 Finland
#9 Netherlands
Notice something? Almost all of these countries could be characterized by the prevalence of overtly socialist or social welfare policies. Nor are the very prosperous Scandinavian countries in this list adverse to high, progressive taxation. Just the type of taxation that might do something about the growing inequality in the U.S. And let us enhance Social Security benefits. And educate our children. And fix our failing infrastructure. And deliver healthcare for all. And lots, lots more. We could have Happy days again.
Paying attention Senator McCaskill? Tell us again why we should be worried by Bernie Sanders? Especially since it’s likely that Hillary Clinton will know how to evaluate what the enthusiastic response to what Bernie has to say means for the direction she needs to take. Or so all of us who aren’t Democratic Senators from Missouri can only hope.
Lest you swoon at the possibility that Obama might turn out to be a socialist, let me just point out that any candidate with Robert Rubin of Citigroup as an advisor on economic matters is not a socialist. But even if Obama were such a scurrilous animal, so what?
A letter writer in the Tuesday Post-Dispatch puts the accusation in perspective:
Newspeak was made an art form by Newt Gingrich. Examples are “Clean Air Initiative,” “No Child Left Behind” and the “Contract with America.” A recent and disturbing twisting of the language to make a boogeyman of a political opponent is the word “socialist.”
All these anti-socialists do not like the roads they drive on. They don’t want policemen, firemen, Social Security, unemployment benefits or Medicare. These are all social programs run by the government.
“Socialist” is a code word for “communist.” But the truth is that the Bush government has brought the American people closer to socialism than most are aware. This administration outsourced the Veterans Administration, the penal system and the war. Now it is buying Wall Street and banks. When the government and corporations become one, that is national socialism, or corporatism.
Whoops. I did a Gingrich. I changed the meaning of a word. Corporatism sounds better than fascism.
So. No fainting required. Better a socialist than a fascist, n’est-ce pas?
M. W. Guzy, of the St. Louis Beacon agrees:
I am a socialist and have unwittingly been so most of my adult life. You see, I spent 21 years as an officer on the St. Louis Police Department and now work for the City Sheriff’s Office. Though most cops would bristle at the label, we’re all socialist to the core.
At the cop shop, salaries and benefits are standardized, seniority is rewarded through a graduated pay scale, health insurance is provided for by law and a fixed-benefit pension plan is in place. When City Hall gives the department a raise, green rookies and the chief of police get the same percentage. The chief, incidentally, makes only about 2 times the base salary of a veteran patrol officer.
Guzy exttrapolates from that:
Looking at the work force from this perspective, you find a lot of socialism out there. Fire-fighters, emergency medical technicians, public school teachers, judges, members of the armed forces and postal workers all work in professions where financial risk is virtually nonexistent and reward is guaranteed. In the current economic climate, these people share one commonality — they have jobs. The pay may not be great, but it’s steady.
But then he takes his argument one step further:
And now, a new hotbed of socialism has been unearthed in the most unlikely of places: Wall Street. Recent events have revealed that bastion of free market enterprise to be an elaborate scheme of privatized profit and socialized loss. When times are good, the cats get fat. But when reckless speculation runs the fiscal ship into the ice berg of reality, “we the people” get to pay for the lifeboats. The AIG bail-out is a case in point.
Q: Since most delinquent borrowers can pay at least a portion of their mortgage payment, wouldn’t it have been cheaper, and more effective, for the government to simply lend distressed homeowners the difference between what they can pay and what they owe on a month-by-month basis? That way, the debtors could keep their houses and with their mortgages now current, the securities based on them would again have value, thus eliminating the need to cash in the swaps.
A: No way. Bailing out lenders is patriotic. Bailing out borrowers would be socialism.
