What socialism isn't

I meant to post this sooner. Harold Meyerson's op-ed, even though it's in the WaPo is so good it's worth breaking my no link rule to post it. Meyerson is a self-proclaimed socialist and points out for all the fearmongering about socialism on one side, and selling out to corporatism on the other that our President really kind of falls in the middle. He says in part:

If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism. His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don't accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe's. In fact, over the past quarter-century, Europe's capitalism became less regulated and more like ours, one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else. [...]

Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market -- judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

This strikes me as a correct assessment of Obama's approach. He's never going to take down the corporatocracy but neither do I see him as mindlessly supporting the status quo. I suspect that if he's successful, what emerges from his agenda will look very much like this.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]