So when Republicans say they love Israel, they mean the parts that aren't Jewish and socialist amirite?
By current American standards, he isn't no -- but in almost every other country in the world he would be.
Considering his major policy achievements are straight out of the 1996 Bob Dole platform, I think it's fair to say yes.
Obama is to the right of the last Democratic administration (Bill Clinton) on taxes, spending, health care, guns, privacy, ss/medicare, trade, etc. The only major issues Obama is to the left on are the environment and on gay marriage, where the entire country has moved much further left. The idea that Obama is NOT centrist is pure propaganda created by the right just lurching far right. Many of Obama's major achievements were mainstream Republican ideas 10-20 years ago.
Absolutely a moderate. The only reason he'd be considered otherwise is because the american right as lurched so far to the right in the last fifteen years, everything else seems left. In the rest of the world, and America pre-2000, Obama is middle of the road.
Well that's fair. Most other countries are REALLY far to the left, but I think one has to stay within their own country for context. Sure Obama would be a moderate in Germany, maybe even a right leaning moderate, but in America he's pretty far from center to the left.
From the bastion of libtard propaganda: The American Conservative Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. here's the proof
Just repeating it over and over doesn't make it true. Name all the major issues where he's to the left of past Democrats.
Mr. Sanders has not called for the nationalization of any industries so why would people fear him as socialist? He's actually just a centrist reformer of corporatism and oligarchy. It's almost funny in a nation that reveres FDR and TR. I can post the Democratic Socialist tenets again if you want.
He's referred to himself as a Socialist in the past...probably why they think that. I know there is a desire to label anyone on the left that isn't a total radical a "centrist" and going by that Bernie would probably be just "left leaning", but that's not reality. That's essentially propaganda to try and make left of center ideas seem like they are mainstream.
I don't see the big deal in him admitting he's a socialist. America is kind of a socialist country anyway. We are obviously just in denial about it, like most big issues in this country.
The idea of collective social justice was mainstream up until the Rove/Norquist/Oligarch propaganda attack took over the airwaves. As stated above you only have to go as far back as Nixon to see that. Maybe you have to be older to remember, if you've completely grown up in a Limbaugh/FAUX world you have a skewed reality.
The problem is 60 years of deliberate negative press about the word. It was done to define the enemy in the Cold War and the actual definitions of the terms socialism and communism were lost in the public mind. You've never ever seen Bernie advocate the nationalization of any industry or centrally planning any level of the economy, the real definition of socialism. Socialist Democrat, though containing a reference to serving society in general, is not socialism. 14 things Bernie Sanders has said about socialism http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/14-things-bernie-sanders-has-said-about-socialism-120265 Sanders, 73, has been preaching socialism for nearly half a century, and he cites Eugene Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, as his hero. But he hasn’t always embraced the label. “I myself don’t use the word socialism,” he said in 1976 in the Vermont Cynic, a student publication at the University of Vermont, “because people have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech.” Even when Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981, “Bernie never mentioned the word ‘socialist’ in his campaign,” according to Greg Guma, a longtime Sanders watcher and the author of “The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution.”
Technically, a single payer health system is nationalizing the health insurance industry, which I'm totally for.
I agree, It took me three months to get my first appointment at the VA. The emergency room was worthless. Bad doctors and all. If it were like this for the entire country it would be a disaster. It's been three years and the VA still hasn't gotten themselves together, though it has gotten better.
You're right but I think the meaning of socialism has changed. The people who oppose the new meaning of socialism are usually partisan hypocrites.
The VA is different from what our version of "nationalized health care". VA Hospitals are government run. Sanders' "single payer health care" still has the doctors and hospitals run by the private sector - the payment mechanism would just be centralized. Payments/billing is actually one of the most inefficient elements of the current system, so you'd actually have an improvement there. The government and doctors/hospitals already have the infrastructure in Medicare/Medicaid. The real issue is simply whether the lower payments would result in worse care over time and how much fraud there might be (Medicare fraud is a very real problem). But implementation should be really simple and would actually initially save time/money in the private sector by eliminating all the current billing nonsense.
If I could just disagree with you on one point, the real definition of socialism isn't the central planning and nationalization of industry, it is community ownership of industry. Central planning and nationalization is the Marxist-Leninist method of community ownership, but there are other models. For instance, there is the Communalist method currently being applied in northern Syria or the libertarian socialist method currently being applied in the Zapatista territory in Chiapas, Mexico. In these, small autonomous and democratic communities directly control the resources of the community (with worker cooperatives controlling the workplaces), and there is no powerful and authoritarian central state to nationalize and centrally plan the economy -- but you still have community ownership instead of private ownership (i.e. socialism). You are right about Sanders though -- he isn't a socialist, just a social democrat. This is why I always refer to him as a "self-avowed socialist".
